Graphics Cards - Page 221

AMD really hit its stride throughout 2016, nailing software and driver releases - shifting from a company that was known for not-so-great drivers, to releasing solid drivers all year.

Today, the company has announced its new Crimson ReLive Edition drivers, a new initiative for 2017 - ready for the future of GPUs and games.

The new Crimson ReLive Edition drivers has a central theme of Features, Performance, and Stability - as well as the usual bug fixes, improvements, and more.

We have been sifting through many rumors and leaks on AMD's next graphics cards, something that needs to be cleared up. The latest rumor of the Vega 10 has me wondering if we're being thrown off track, and whether that's a good, or a bad thing.

Our friends over at VideoCardz have posted up what they are reporting as a new Device ID (687F:C1) alongside a benchmark of Ashes of the Singularity (which I hate using to judge performance, but that's just me). VideoCardz reports: "Judging from how AOTS benchmark recognizes dual-GPU graphics cards, the new card is most likely equipped with one processor. This device ID was not shown anywhere yet, so it's definitely something unreleased".

They added: "Whether that's a mobile prototype being tested in desktop platform, or full-fledged Vega 10 device, we don't know. If the rumors are true, this could be much awaited Radeon RX 490".

Leaked benchmark numbers on the purported Radeon Pro 490 have arrived, with keen eyed readers noting that I said Radeon Pro 490, and not Radeon RX 490. Here's what to expect with the next-gen Vega GPU architecture.

AMD's new Radeon Pro 490 is expected to be their 4K/VR focused graphics card, with rumors stating it'll arrive with 2 x Polaris 10 GPUs, or a new Vega 10 GPU. I doubt we'll see a Vega GPU powering the new Radeon Pro 490 graphics card, but a dual-GPU based on P10 GPUs would make sense, with 16GB of GDDR5 in total.

We should expect the Radeon RX/Pro 490 to arrive with 4608 stream processors (double the 2304 SPs on the Radeon RX 480) and reduced GPU clocks to around 1200MHz, down from 1266MHz on the RX 480. Since the TDP of the RX 480 was 150W, we should see AMD hitting 300W on the dual-GPU card.

AMD CEO Lisa Su was asked at the recent 20th Credit Suisse Annual Technology, Media & Telecom conference about the keys to growing and expanding their market share in the discrete GPU market.

Credit Suisse's semiconductor analyst John Pitzer asked: "How should we think about your share aspirations with Polaris now ramping, Vega next year? What do you think you can get your share back to within that market?" to which Su replied: "We have made very good progress I would say in the first couple of quarters this year in terms of graphics".

Su continued: "I think it's nice, when you look at graphics it's both in the consumer side on the channel as well as in the OEM business and on the professional graphics market. There's a large opportunity. I think we've gained a good amount of share over the last few quarters, we're going to continue and consistently drive [share growth]. We believe that there's no reason we can't be at 50/50 share overtime, but it will certainly take some time to get there. The key thing is enhancing our relationships with customers, because we believe that it's also important to have a very sticky business going forward."

AMD has been on the up and up this entire year, with the Radeon Technologies Group team reaching for the stars with its first new GPU architecture release under RTG: Polaris.

Polaris powered the Radeon RX 400 and Radeon Pro 400 series graphics cards, including the Radeon RX 480, RX 470, and RX 460. AMD aimed at the lower/mid-range markets where gamers are spending less than $300 on a graphics card, with around 80% of gamers falling into this category, concentrating on this market and owning it was an important first step for RTG.

But what about the high-end? The older Fiji-based Radeon R9 Fury X is an underwhelming card now with its limiting 4GB of VRAM, but impressive engineering work with the 4GB of HBM1 and the 28nm GPU on an interposer (the interposer sits under the GPU and HBM1, and is made like a chip as well). The work AMD did on the tiny Radeon R9 Nano at the time was just as great, my favorite card of the Fiji family.

We're swimming in a world with 14nm and 16nm products on the market, with AMD's new Radeon RX 400 series built on the 14nm FinFET process while NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 10 series and new Titan X are using the 16nm process - it's awesome. But, we're constantly looking to the future, right?

TSMC is said to be planning the production of 12nm technology, a new process technology that our friends at Fudzilla report will "enhance competition with 28nm and lower process nodes that have been adopted over the past few years". The new 12nm node will sit alongside the 16nm product portfolio, as a smaller option from TSMC that will better compete against Samsung and GlobalFoundries' offerings.

There are three different 16nm FinFET variations that TSMC makes, with high-performance options and ultra-low power uses where only 0.6v is used. 12nm should provide us with around 50% less power consumption, and 15% more power over current FinFET technologies, at least that's according to GlobalFoundries' recently-announced 12nm process utilizing Fully Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FD-SOI) planar technology.

Colorful has a second wave of GTX 10 series cards on its way, with the impressive new GTX 1080 KUDAN and now the GTX 1070 SNAKE X-Top, made specifically for League of Legends pro gaming team 'Snake'.

The new graphics card from Colorful has Snake's logo on it, teased on the out fans, and backplate. Colorful has used a fully custom design, triple-fan cooler, backplate, 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and a BIOS switch on the back of the card. GPU clocks are set at 1657/1860MHz for base and boost respectively, making it one of the fastest GTX 1070s on the market.

It looks like Colorful will be making just 200 of these cards, so they'll be an extremely limited edition run for fans of Snake, or custom graphics cards for specific markets. I think it looks slick as hell, and I want one.

Colorful has just brightened up my day with news of their new iGame GTX 1080 KUDAN, which features the same GP104 we've all come to know and love, but the GPU is clocked at up to 1.93GHz under Boost, which means we'll hit 2GHz without a problem with some overclocking.

The 8GB of GDDR5X sits at its default 10GHz frequency, but there's an overclocked BIOS that will allow for higher speeds which we all want. Colorful is doing something different here, with a 4-slot form factor - even though the card is a 3-slot design, the separate waterblock on the back takes up additional space, requiring 4 slots in your PC.

Colorful powers its new iGame GTX 1080 KUDAN with 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors, but the company has deployed a high-performance, custom PCB that provides higher overclocks and increased stability. It's an insane card, with an estimated price of somewhere between $800-$900 when it launches late-December or early-January 2017.

Following NVIDIA's earlier release of Watch Dogs 2-optimized drivers, AMD has released its own.

Apart from improving that game experience, these drivers -- numbered 16.11.5 -- include a CrossFire profile for Dishonored 2 in DirectX 11, and fix flickering in the Division and Battlefield 1 when using CrossFire.

Hit the source for the download and/or known issues list. Otherwise, boot Radeon Settings and grab the drivers. If you want to remain on the cautious side, use AMD Clean Uninstall Utility before installing 16.11.5 to ensure no issues arise from overwriting your old drivers.

NVIDIA has released its new 376.09 drivers, specifically aimed at optimizing three major titles.

The first is Watch Dogs 2, due out tomorrow. Word is both the game design and PC optimization are much improved over the first game, so you should probably give it a shot if you wrote it off after the last go round.

The other two are Capcom's comedy zombie smasher Dead Rising 4 (due out December 6), and Steep, Ubisoft's winter sports game (due out December 2). You hardly see any winter sports games, especially on PC, so that's definitely one to look forward to, especially with NVIDIA's optimizations.

Details on the HIS single-slot Radeon RX 460 Slim-iCooler OC 4GB graphics card have emerged, with the new card being a single-slot solution packing the Polaris architecture.

HIS will be the first AIB partner with a single-slot Radeon RX 460, with the card packing its upgraded iCooler. HIS has used a strong lion image on the card, which makes the single-slot card look awesome. The Slim-iCooler itself has a 0dB fan, with the 50mm fan spinning up only when the GPU hits 60C.

HIS has overclocked the GPU, with the Polaris 11 chip running at 1220MHz, while the 4GB of GDDR5 runs at 7Gbps.

A few weeks ago we looked at the mid-range market and DX12 performance with Battlefield 1, where we versed the AMD Radeon RX 480 against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - with AMD coming out on top.

We've done it again, this time with some higher-end graphics cards with the older HBM1-based Radeon R9 Fury X and the newer, 16nm-based GeForce GTX 1070 from NVIDIA. The results are impressive to say the least, but AMD loses in a big way in DX11 mode in Battlefield 1 - and completely, and utterly swings it around with DX12 leadership.

Do you want to see more GPU showdowns like this?

EVGA has been in the headlines over the last couple of weeks over their GeForce GTX 1080 FTW catching fire, and one user even caught it on video - but there were obviously questions surrounding this issue.

Our friends over at GamesNexus, and Steve with his glorious lock of unicorn-quality hair™ has investigated the EVGA VRM thermal issues, concluding that it's not the killer of the cards. GamersNexus did state that EVGA isn't shining perfectly here, adding that "Overlooking thermal pads was silly, if only because their performance is measurably worse in at least one aspect when compared to competition".

They spoke with EVGA, with the company saying they're getting about 200 DPPM (Defective Products Per Million), which means for every 1 million cards shipped to consumers, 200 are defective. GamersNexus are still strict on EVGA, wrapping up: "To restate: This isn't saying EVGA is in the right. The card could have been designed better, and there are still failures, it's just not the reason everyone seemed to think. Maybe bad caps, maybe the usual mix of workmanship / supply-side quality control, but not the VRM temperatures".

This time last year, NVIDIA had over 80% of the GPU market - but things have changed in the last 12 months. AMD launched their successful Radeon RX 400 series graphics cards, powered by Polaris - while NVIDIA launched an onslaught of GTX 10 series cards.

AMD was sitting with just 18.8% of the GPU market share last year, but now they've climbed up to 29.1% - while NVIDIA has fallen from 81.1%, down to 70.9%. GFXSpeak reported from Jon Peddie's data: "New market data from Jon Peddie Research shows that graphics add-in board (AIB) sales are on an upward trend. Shipments during the third quarter of 2016 (ending September 30) increased from the second quarter of 2016 by 38.2%; this is considerably above the ten-year average of 14.3%. On a year-over-year basis, JPR found total AIB shipments rose 9.2%. By comparison, total shipments of desktop PCs fell 17.1% in the same period".

There were also some quick highlights that are worth looking at:

It looks like AMD is preparing to launch a next-gen graphics card, where the company should unveil its new Vega architecture soon - it's looking like we can expect the Radeon RX 490 to be unveiled soon.

The new Radeon RX 490 will be AMD's new 4K-ready flagship graphics card that will fight against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, and hopefully at a lower price point. AMD has said that we aren't to expect a faster Polaris graphics card than the RX 480, so I don't see why they would announce an RX 490 when they should jump to the RX 590 with a card that can beat NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 (which will only be replaced with a GTX 1080 Ti soon enough).

But, there's some exciting things to expect, according to WCCFTech:

Just as I was laying down to hopefully fall asleep after a massive 18-hour work day, I read a story over at TechPowerUp sourced from German tech site Heise.de, that AMD Radeon graphics cards were limited in their HDR abilities... well, click bait can be bad sometimes, and we now know the truth.

The original story can be read here, which claimed that Radeon graphics cards were reducing the color depth to 8 bits per cell (16.7 million colors) or 32-bit, if the display was connected to HDMI 2.0, and not DisplayPort 1.2 - something that spiked my interest.

10 bits per cell (1.07 billion colors) is a much more desired height to reach for HDR TVs, but the original article made it out to seem like this was a limitation of AMD, and not that of HDMI 2.0 and its inherent limitations. Heise.de said that AMD GPUs reduce output sampling from the "desired Full YCrBr 4: 4: 4 color scanning to 4: 2: 2 or 4: 2: 0 (color-sub-sampling / chroma sub-sampling), when the display is connected over HDMI 2.0. The publication also suspects that the limitation is prevalent on all AMD 'Polaris' GPUs, including the ones that drive game consoles such as the PS4 Pro," reports TPU.

AMD has released their new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.11.4 drivers, a new set of drivers that add support for Civilization VI, and fix some problems with graphical corruption on the R9 Fury graphics cards in Titanfall 2. Grab them here.

Here's a full list of what the RSCE 16.11.4 includes and fixes:

Support For:

NVIDIA released their new GeForce 375.86 drivers, and as usual millions of gamers will manually update or have GeForce Experience update for them - but this time around, NVIDIA is seeing some pretty serious issues in their new Game Ready drivers.

NVIDIA has posted to their own forums advising GeForce owners of Pascal-based GeForce graphics cards in the GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 having issues with the new GeForce 375.86 drivers, where the memory speed is capped at 810MHz. NeoGAF forum users have posted t hat Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare are also experiencing issues with the new drivers.

We'd recommend not updating your GeForce graphics card (at least if you've got a GTX 10 series card) to the latest drivers just yet, and if GeForce Experience has automatically downloaded the drivers, don't install them.

NVIDIA has launched a massive offensive onto gamers with their GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards, while AMD has been hitting the lower/mainstream markets with their Radeon RX 400 series cards - so how are the numbers for Q3 2016? Really good, actually.

Jon Peddie Research has broken down the numbers, reporting that NVIDIA's market share increased 2.2% from the previous quarter, while AMD's overall market share dropped 0.6%. JPR notes: "NVIDIA did particularly well in Q3'16, fueled by their Pascal-based product line and the rash of new AAA graphics-demanding titles". JPR also noticed a 0.3% increase in year-to-year total GPU shipments of GPUs, while GPU shipments increased 20% from the previous quarter.

They also had some highlights that are worth noting:

We know it's coming, but we don't know when or what the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will end up as - but now we have a report that teases the GTX 1080 Ti with 10GB of RAM.

10GB of RAM you ask? Weird, isn't it? Not when you consider the GTX 1080 has 8GB of RAM, and the Titan X features 12GB of RAM - the GTX 1080 Ti will sit in the middle with 10GB of RAM, so that it doesn't take many customers away from Titan X, and it doesn't lure gamers into spending more on the GTX 1080 Ti over the GTX 1080.

We should expect the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti to use the GP102 GPU, the same used on the Titan X - but a 384-bit memory interface is interesting, and it's needed for multi-monitor and 4K gaming. We've done testing between the GTX 1080 and Titan X and that wider memory bus comes into play in a very, very big way.