Graphics Cards - Page 227

NVIDIA's GeForce cards are a dominant force on the latest Steam hardware survey, with 56.7% of gamers using a GeForce GPU of some kind. AMD has lost a little of its steam in the last 12 months, with 25% of gamers using Radeon.

You can see that in January 2015 that AMD had 28.9% of users, but has declined over the last 18 months down to 25%. I'm sure the numbers will increase for AMD, now that it's next-gen Radeon RX 480 is here. In that same amount of time, NVIDIA went from 51.6% to its new lead of 56.7% - all of those users buying GeForce 900 series cards, like the GTX 950 through to the GTX 980 Ti.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that we reported on the leaked photos of the SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 480 Nitro, but now we have some high-res shots of the RX 480 Nitro that look positively gorgeous. Our review on the reference AMD Radeon RX 480 is right here.

In the new photos we can see the beautiful detail that SAPPHIRE has used on the RX 480 Nitro, with a black and silver backplate - but also a button that reportedly switches the LED illumination from temperature to GPU load mode indicators. You should be able to turn it off completely, too.

SAPPHIRE's new Radeon RX 480 Nitro will have its Polaris 10 GPU running at between 1325 and 1350MHz, while it also rocks removable fans. Why would you want removable fans? Well, for cleaning - it makes total sense. Secondly, if one of the fans becomes faulty over your years with it, you can easily replace it instead of replacing the entire card.

The DX12 patch for Total War: WARHAMMER has been released, with Alien: Isolation developer Creative Assembly stating that the DX12 renderer is still in a beta stage.

Right now, there's no benefits for NVIDIA GeForce owners in DX12, as GeForce cards perform worse under the DX12 renderer. DSOGaming did some testing using the Extreme scenario, and the in-game benchmarking tool on their Intel Core i7-4930K, GeForce GTX 980 Ti system.

The GTX 980 Ti on DX11 in WARHAMMER forms at 96FPS while in DX12 we have 27% less performance, with just 70FPS average. We will be doing our own testing in Total War: WARHAMMER in the near future, testing out my entire suite of video cards.

AMD did wonders with its Radeon R9 Nano, a bite-sized video card that is mighty powerful, in a small package thanks to its HBM1 technology.

Well, now GIGABYTE has announced its new GeForce GTX 1070 Mini-ITX OC, which is a smaller version of the GTX 1070. The card has a factory overclock on its GPU, with 1531/1721MHz on the Gaming Mode and 1556/1746 in OC Mode. If you want the higher clock speeds offered by OC Mode, you'll need to download GIGABYTE's overclocking software to reach it.

GIGABYTE's GeForce GTX 1070 Mini-ITX OC features a custom PCB with 5+1-phase power delivery, 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, a 90mm cooler with a 3D active fan, one click Super Overclocking, and measures in at just 17cm (or 6.7 inches). An incredibly small, and incredibly fast video card. Be careful with its display output, as GIGABYTE has provided 1 x DP, 1 x HDMI and 2 x DVI ports - compared to the 3 x DP, 1 x HDMI and 1 x DVI on most GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards.

It has barely been 48 hours with AMD's new Radeon RX 480 on the market, and we're already hearing rumors that NVIDIA will launch its new GeForce GTX 1060... next week.

Reports are surfacing that the company will launch the GP106-based GeForce GTX 1060 with a 120W TDP, 1280 CUDA cores on 10 SMs, with 80 TMUs and 48 ROPs. There'll reportedly be 3GB and 6GB models on a 192-bit memory interface rocking GDDR5.

NVIDIA already has two 16nm FinFET-based cards on the market in the form of the GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070, but it will be hurting in the coming weeks in the mid-range market with AMD chewing up the $199-$239 market with its next-gen Radeon RX 480 video card. NVIDIA will need to maintain its market dominance in the mid-range, but it needs a new card to hit that market - so enter the GTX 1060.

AMD changed things up with its new Radeon RX series, moving away from the Radeon R7/R9 naming system - towards something that will hopefully stick this time. The new Radeon 400 series is split into two subseries; the RX 400 and 400.

The Radeon RX parts will offer 1.5 TFLOPs or more of performance with at least 100GB/sec memory bandwidth - but for cards that don't have that type of speed, we can expect them to rock the Radeon 400 branding. AMD has also confirmed it will be using XX5 revisions, where we might see faster versions of the cards over time - especially as yields improve, leakage is minimized, or AMD wants to hit NVIDIA again with higher-clocked versions of their cards.

AMD says there are 9 tiers that are split into five groups, where Tier 6 (46X cards) might appear with both the RX 460 and non-RX 460. Tier 9 is the most exciting, where we can see higher than 256-bit memory bus with 4K gaming being the focus point here, which has me thinking - will the Radeon RX 490/495 be a Polaris-based design, or will AMD save this for the Vega architecture?

With the release of the new Radeon RX 480, AMD has released the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.6.2 drivers that include support for the new Polaris 10-based video card.

The new drivers also include a new Crossfire profile for World of Tanks, and so much more. Notably, we have support for AMD's new Radeon Wattman - which is the company's new utility within Radeon Software that provides users with more control than ever before over their GPU. One of the big things that I'm happy to see is that there's now a Crossfire toggle, which allows you to enable Crossfire support globally for all games, instead of picking and choosing the games you want Crossfire enabled for.

Here's a full list of what to expect:

AMD just debuted the first commercial for its "Radeon Rebellion" campaign, and just like Chris Hook and Raja Koduri promised during my interview with them, it takes quite a different tone than the standard video card ads we're used to.

Watch that again. Did you see any actual video cards? Any gameplay or screenshots? Any statistics or bullet points or specs? Nope. AMD is doubling down on the concept of change, of introducing premium VR for the other 99%, and bringing mainstream PC gamers affordable eyecandy. That's the promise of the RX 480, and indeed for AMD's entire Polaris lineup.

Stay tuned, gang. We'll have exhaustive coverage of the RX 480 very soon including standard benchmarks, VR impressions, and a full review.

What better way to celebrate AMD's launch of the Radeon RX 480 than give 14 of them away? That's what AMD are doing over at Reddit, with the giveaway kicking off on 6/29 at 11AM Eastern Time. The company will host a Radeon Technologies Group AMA and the giveaway on the /r/PCMasterRace subreddit.

AMD's Technical Marketing boss Robert Hallock will be handling questions, but the post on Reddit says "Zen and Vega are off the table for this one, but pretty much everything else related to AMD's GPU division is fair game". AMD says there are limits of one RX 480 per winner, with the giveaway locked to just a few countries: the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The AMA is obviously open to all, with the giveaway being the RX 480 8GB variant, versus the 4GB model.

Riding on the news of the Radeon RX 480, we now have some pricing information from TechPowerUp, who are reporting that the Radeon RX 470 will be priced at $149 - $50 cheaper than the RX 480 at $199.

The $149 version of the Radeon RX 470 will feature 4GB of RAM while the 8GB variant will cost $179, with the card featuring 2048 stream processors over 32 CUs, down from the 2304 stream processors on the RX 480. The Radeon RX 470 will have its 4GB or 8GB of RAM clocked at 7Gbps, with a reported 110W TDP, according to VideoCardz.

With AMD pricing the Radeon RX 480 4GB at $199, and this pricing on the Radeon RX 470, things could change in a big way for AMD. At just $149, there are going to be countless gamers that can afford a next-gen card that should be perfect for 1080p 60FPS gaming.

The news broke a few days ago that MSI and ASUS were shipping GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards with a modified BIOS, with higher-than-normal clock speeds on the GPU.

MSI have sent me an email explaining the GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G and GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G shipping with higher speeds out of the box for the press, versus a few extra MHz slower on the retail cards. MSI has said that the MSI Gaming App isn't used by most reviewers, which is true, so they ship their GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards with 'OC Mode' enabled by default to the press. The retail cards on the other hand, are shipped to consumers with 'Gaming Mode' by default, which is slightly slower than the clocks on the OC Mode.

MSI has responded with links to an updated vBIOS for their GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G, and their GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G - so that they'll both spool up to the 'OC Modes' which are 1607MHz Base, and 1797MHz on Boost compared to 1582MHz Base and 1771MHz on Boost with Gaming Mode.

We're only a week away from the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 480, with its release on June 29, and now it's being reported that AMD has plenty of RX 480s on hand and that supply is "strong" on the first Polaris-based card to hit the market. NVIDIA recently dropped the price on its Maxwell-based range, including the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980 and even the GTX 970.

NVIDIA has hit a huge snag recently with their GeForce GTX 1070/1080, with global shortages and price hikes on their GP104-based offerings. With NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 is $850+ right now, and even $1999 on eBay at one point for EVGA's GeForce GTX 1080 FTW ACX 3.0 card, AMD could really hit NVIDIA where it hurts if they have a strong supply of their Radeon RX 480, and can keep at the $199 price.

There won't be partner cards at launch, with AMD being the only one selling them on June 29 - AIB partner cards with custom PCBs and coolers will arrive in July. SAPPHIRE, XFX, and many others have cards planned - with samples floating down here to my GPU labs in the coming weeks.

We know that AMD's Radeon RX 480 will be capable of 1.5GHz and more on manual overclocking, but now we have leaked shots from the production line, and shots of the cooler being removed.

The Radeon RX 480 features a single 75mm blower fan that directs air towards the aluminum fin heat sink, with a copper contact heat plate placed on top of the GPU die. This pushes the heat out of the back of the card, with AIB partner cards seeing open air solutions, with dual- and triple-fan cooling solutions.

AMD's reference design of the RX 480 doesn't feature backplate, but some of the AIB cards will use one - such as XFX and SAPPHIRE, both designing their own backplates for their custom RX 480s. XFX uses a backplate that covers the entire length of the rear of the card, while SAPPHIRE's take on the backplate covers just the PCB.

If you haven't heard, ASUS and MSI are involved in a heated battle with the companies reportedly sending out tweaked GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards to the press, with higher clocks than what are advertised on the box.

Well, EVGA has come out swinging with a new 'What You See Is What You Get' campaign and website, with the website stating: "EVGA was one of the first video card companies to offer overclocked video cards, and since day one EVGA always delivered the exact same products to reviewers as well as customers. EVGA does not "fake" reviews or send out products with "tweaked" clockspeeds to reviewers. With EVGA Superclocked, FTW and Classified video cards, what you see is what you get".

Our EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW ACX 3.0 card is here, and will be reviewed later this week - so I'm excited to see what the clock speeds are out of the box. It's great to see EVGA coming out and doing this, as it puts a huge flag in the ground for authenticity and transparency for the company - which is something great to see.

Computex 2016 - Finally, our last video on Computex 2016 now that I'm not so busy and running around doing 15 trillion things at once - is of NVIDIA's huge 'booth' at the Grand Hyatt during Computex.

The company was showcasing its next-gen, Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080 video cards, as well as it's huge push into VR. Not only that, but NVIDIA detailed Ansel with some truly beautiful pictures hanging on walls taken in-game, as well as huge VR Experience rooms where we got to play a bunch of games.

The energy in the room was intense, with gamers and everyone else enjoying themselves. What was your favorite part of the 10-minute video?

GIGABYTE has had some of the most impressive showings of GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards, especially with the super-fast GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming card, which has a manual OC of up to 2.3GHz on the GP104. Yeah, insane.

Well, now we have the GTX 1070 Windforce OC video card, as well as the GTX 1070 G1 Gaming card - both of which are on their way to my lab. The GTX 1070 Windforce OC features a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, with a dual-fan cooler with two 90mm fans that will keep the card nice and cool under those heavy gaming sessions.

GIGABYTE's GeForce GTX 1070 Windforce OC has a maximum Boost clock of 1582MHz in its OC mode, while the Gaming mode has the Boost hitting 1556MHz. There's the usual 8GB of GDDR5 clocked at 8GHz on the 256-bit memory bus, and the same 3 x DP1.4 ports, 1 x HDMI 2.0b and 1 x DVI.

An interesting tidbit has hit the internet, with Hardware.fr's Damien Triolet claiming that ASUS and MSI are sending GTX 1080s to the press with modified BIOSes. The modified BIOS is enabling more power on the review samples, which are provided boosted performance - and thus, better reviews.

The report claims that the optimized BIOSes are common in the industry, with manufacturers encouraging GPU reviewers to enable special overclocking presets before reviewing the cards, reports VideoCardz. Now, I've been reviewing GPUs for nearly two years with TweakTown, and I've never been approached once by a company asking to do this - so I don't know where that part of the claim is coming from.

Hardware.fr's Damien Triolet adds that he asks manufacturers to provide retail BIOSes for his testing, with manufacturers not being too happy about having to provide the software. The two cards on the table in the middle of this debacle are the new MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G (with our review on that card here) and the ASUS GTX 1070 Strix. We tested the MSI card and our sample was being overclocked past a certain speed, but I underclocked it to its advertised Boost clocks for my testing. I presumed it was the EVGA Precision X software playing around with the clocks, but maybe MSI has sent an overclocked card - so I thought I'd do some digging on my own.

We've had a few of the custom GeForce GTX 1080 cards come through our labs so far, with our first review being the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G, and it being a totally silent GTX 1080 experience. Well, GIGABYTE is now teasing their upcoming GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming video card, which will be one of the fastest GTX 1080s released yet. GIGABYTE's new beast is teasing a huge GPU overclock, right up to 2.3GHz on the GPU... which is simply amazing.

GIGABYTE has used a totally custom PCB with Titan X style chokes and capacitors, with a dust/moisture/corrosion resistant PCB coating. The company has also used a 12+2 phase VRM that makes great use of GIGABYTE's Ultra Durable class components so that the card doesn't buckle under the pressure of the extreme overclocking. But we're not even at the best part yet.

GIGABYTE's new GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming has an AIO liquid cooler, which allows the GP104-powered GPU and its 2560 CUDA cores to be cranked all the way up to 1936MHz on Boost, out of the box. The 8GB of GDDR5X is cranked up from 10GHz to 10.4GHz, providing 333.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition memory bandwidth of 320GB/sec.

In the midst of NVIDIA experiencing stock shortages of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 in our exclusive story, news has just broken that AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 480 can hit 1.5GHz, and higher. The Radeon RX 480 is expected to fight directly against the HBM1-based Radeon R9 Nano, and the GTX 980 which just had a $25 price drop.

If we think about AMD hitting the $199 price point with the RX 480, and it being able to be toe-and-toe with the R9 Nano and GTX 980, we're looking at one of the best price/performance video cards ever released. Additionally, with some huge OC headroom included, it could be an even better card - especially if gamers can hit 1.5GHz+. The new Radeon RX 480 will supposedly reach 1.4GHz on its GPU easily, with 1.5GHz not far away and only a little additional tweaking required.

The RX 480 "Beast Mode" cards will include 6+8-pin PCIe power connectors for additional juice and overclocking headroom, and will be able to hit 1.5GHz right out of the box. We should expect the likes of SAPPHIRE, ASUS, MSI and the rest of the AIB partners to really hit these speeds. Considering the Radeon RX 480 only consumes 100W of power under gaming loads, and only hits 60C, we should be in for quite the surprise from AMD in a few weeks time.

NVIDIA is going on the offensive with its Maxwell-powered video cards, cutting the price of the GeForce GTX 970, GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti. Now that the GeForce 10 series is here, it only makes sense for NVIDIA to clear out the inventory of 900 series cards, and that's a big benefit to gamers, too. NVIDIA has dropped the price of the GTX 980 Ti by $125, the GTX 980 by $75 an the GTX 970 by $25 - all priced in USD.

I wrote an exclusive story yesterday that GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 stock will not improve until late-July or even early-August, and now that NVIDIA has dropped the price on the enthusiast level GTX 900 series cards, it begins to make even more sense. The GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards are also way above the $699 price of NVIDIA's own GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition, with the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW ACX 3.0 listed on Amazon for a wallet-busting $1999.

With these price drops, AMD aren't in trouble with their unreleased Radeon RX 480 just yet - as they're pricing that at a very lucrative $199... but it does put the pressure on slightly. AMD need to ensure their stock levels of the RX 480 are far higher than the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, but these new nodes aren't easy. AMD is using the 14nm FinFET process for its new Polaris-based Radeon RX series, while NVIDIA is tapping some of that 16nm FinFET for its Pascal-based GeForce 10 series. These recent price drops on the GTX 900 series however, are going to really spur some sales up, and hopefully keep consumers and gamers happy until the stock levels of the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 improve late next month.