Graphics Cards - Page 230

We all know that AMD will be showing something Polaris-related at the Game Developers Conference next month, teasing they wanted to "spice things up", even more so that an AMD board with a "C91101" codename receiving the RRA's proof of certification.

What does the RRA certification mean? Well, all ASIC boards need to go through South Korea, just like the US - but, the RRA publishes its certifications in the public domain. A new board has been certified, and it belongs to AMD - with this board not popping up on the Zauba database, but it looks like a Polaris-based board. We already know that AMD will be launching its new Polaris-based products in mid-2016.

Lenovo unveiled their new Yoga convertibles at Mobile World Congress in the last 24 hours, with the new Yoga 510 and 710 models that can be configured with up to a Radeon R5 M430 and Radeon R7 M460.

It might not sound like much, but this is the first time we've seen AMD's not-yet-announced Radeon 400 series parts inside of a product, and this is just the beginning. There are no details other than the model 'R5 M430' and 'R7 M460' - but we do know each of them will include 2GB of VRAM.

We should expect the Radeon 400 series GPUs inside of Lenovo's latest Yoga 510 and 710 convertibles to be based on the Polaris architecture that AMD's Radeon Technologies Group unveiled late last year, but we'll confirm that 100% when we know.

AMD has been teasing its dual Fiji GPU for a while, but now we're seeing things become much more real as we get closer to the Game Developers Conference next month.

Well, Corporate Vice President of AMD and VR fan Roy Taylor posted a picture to his Facebook and Twitter accounts, teasing the new Tiki PCs built by Falcon Northwest. Inside, we have AMD's super-secret dual-GPU, the Radeon R9 Fury X2. Taylor teased: "Developers, we have something coming for you... :)". A picture, speaks a thousand words - of course.

Falcon Northwest collaborated with AMD on the new Tiki PCs, as they were the system builder of choice for the console-sized PC that sports an insanely powerful dual GPU. When should we see the Falcon Northwest Tiki PC powered by the Radeon R9 Fury X2? Well, we should see it next month at GDC.

NVIDIA said it teased its Pascal-based Drive PX 2 system at CES 2016 earlier this year, but we found out quickly after that it was just their Maxwell-based GPUs standing up for attention in the space of the Pascal GPUs. Well, now we're hearing that Volvo will be using NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 system in their self-driving cars, which will hit the road in 2017.

Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA said: "Volvo, well-known for its safety and reliability, will be the first to develop DRIVE PX 2, using it as the brain for its fleet of 100 self-driving cars to be publicly available next year in its hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden". Volvo will be using the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 for its self-driving capabilities, with NVIDIA providing both the hardware and software that will culminate in an array of cameras, lidar (light ray shooting radar), radar, and ultrasonic sensors.

All of this will create a 360-degree picture of everything going on around the vehicle. This will obviously require considerable horsepower, which is where the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 comes into play.

With the Game Developers Conference less than a month away, I've been wondering when the GPU hype train would begin from both AMD and NVIDIA regarding their next-gen GPU technology. Well, AMD just fired the first shots, with AMD Marketing Director Chris Hook taking to Twitter, teasing Polaris.

Hook tweeted to Raja Koduri, boss of AMD's newly-formed Radeon Technologies Group: "Someone told me GDC is looking kind of bland this year. I think we need some Capsaicin to spice things up a bit.....". We know that this is code for Polaris, with Koduri tweeting back to AnandTech's Ryan Smith, and Hook: "no worries Ryan - we will make it interesting for everyone".

Last year, NVIDIA unveiled its behemoth at GDC - with the GeForce GTX Titan X being revealed at the Game Developers Conference in March 2015. This year, we should expect both sides to be firing shots constantly - with NVIDIA poised to unveil its Pascal-based Titan X successor at GDC, or a few weeks later at its own GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

The mobile GPU isn't the simple architecture that it used to be. They're advanced pieces of technology that're capable of rendering a surprisingly amount graphics with the little power that they use. And mobile GPU's are only going to become more powerful and more frugal as the years go by. We can expect PS4 level graphics with the same, or less power consumption, by 2017, says ARM.

Rendered with Imagination Technologies ray-tracing tech

Speaking at Casual Connect Europe in Amsterdam this week, the ecosystem director at ARM, Nizar Romdan had a few interesting things to say about the state of mobile GPU's. "Mobile hardware is already powerful," said Romdan. "If you take today's high-end smartphone or tablet, the performance is already better than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It's catching up quickly with Xbox One and PlayStation 4."

NVIDIA's Pascal is quite the elusive GPU, not even actually physically shown at CES this year despite silicon rumored to be in testing and quite ready. Performance can only be speculated, however a new academic paper seems to have information regarding the actual theoretical compute performance of the Pascal Flagship.

The paper itself is a treatise on the benefits of new memory technologies and their impact on the compute landscape. In one of the slides the author, Manuel Ujaldon, compares Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube (HBM), GDDR5, DDR3 and HBM technologies. Surprisingly, one of the slides seems to have the theoretical double and single precision performance numbers for the flagship Pascal GPU compared to other compute devices, Kepler, Fermi, Xeon Phi and even a Bulldozer based Opteron. The DP performance is even slightly more than the SP numbers for GK110, and only 2000 GFLOPS less than the Titan X's SP performance. On the single precision front, it's simply off the charts.

Looking at the sources confirms that this particular fellow of CUDA indeed talked with NVIDIA, so his numbers aren't necessarily completely made up, and are likely based off of low estimates gained from internal testing. Of course, these are theoretical numbers and don't always translate into how a particular GPU actually performs in real-world tasks, but that's a lot of compute power. Even more than AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X

ASUS has launched the Savage At Heart promotion, which gives away a free copy of Ubisoft's new Stone Age adventure Far Cry: Primal with the purchase of select qualifying video cards.

To get the bundle, you'll have to buy an ASUS-branded NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 390 video card or better from Feb. 15 to Feb. 30.

Code redemption starts on March 1st, and oddly enough there's no sign-up process on the mainsite, so I'm not exactly sure how users are supposed to send in their PPID and GPU serial numbers. To register for the promo, you'll have to make an ASUS account and go here to find the event and sign up for it. The promo isn't listed on the events page, so maybe give it a few days.

Deadpool is one of the best superhero movies of recent years, so if you haven't seen it - go see it, you'll love it. But the opening sequence is freakin' awesome, and it was done entirely in CG using NVIDIA GPUs.

Blur Studio, which was co-founded by Deadpool director Tim Miller, was behind the sequence. Blur Studio built the assets for the scene using Autodesk 3DS Max, with the rendering part of it going through Chaos Group's GPU renderer, V-Ray RT. V-Ray RT runs on NVIDIA GPUs and is up to 15x faster than rendering on a CPU, according to NVIDIA.

The company used HP Z840 workstations powered by NVIDIA Quadro M6000 GPU, with Kevin Margo from Blur Studios explaining: "The power of GPU rendering combined with the speed and real-time interactivity of the HP workstations equipped with M6000s allowed us to consider rendering things we wouldn't have been able to before. It made the process so much easier and more efficient".

NVIDIA has released its 361.91 WHQL-certified drivers, complete with optimizations for a handful of new and upcoming titles, bug fixes, and added or updated SLI profiles.

Street Fighter V is the big game to benefit from the optimizations, but the upcoming Arma 3 update, next weekend's Hitman beta, and the Chinese Monster Hunter Online beta receive love, too. As for SLI profiles, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Bless, Need for Speed, Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2, and XCOM 2 comprise the list of titles supported.

Download the drivers now through GeForce Experience. If you still haven't downloaded Experience, grab it here.

As the weeks fly past, we're getting closer and closer to the reveal of the next-gen GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD. Today, we have news that NVIDIA is currently testing four of its next-gen Pascal-based GPUs.

The four Pascal GPUs have reached the testing and validation phase, with the GPUs being sent from TSMC's fabrication plants to NVIDIA's testing facilities in India. The four boards include the '699' serial number which was spotted back in December, with these four cards having the following serial numbers:

699-2H403-0201-500

Micron has updated us on the status of GDDR5X, with the company receiving their first samples back from their fabrication plant, earlier than expected.

These samples are 100% operational at data rates passing 13Gbps, with the company still testing its GDDR5X production line, with GDDR5X samples being sent to partners in the spring (over the next few months). Right now, the 13Gbps-capable GDDR5X chips don't consume any more power than the current GDDR5 chips, so in certain scenarios, GDDR5X-based cards will actually use less power, when maximum VRAM bandwidth isn't required.

GDDR5 has an 8Gbps data rate, so the huge 13Gbps that GDDR5X has hit before it's even in volume production is a huge achievement by Micron. The company is hoping to reach 14Gbps, but hasn't said when this will happen. Micron explained on their blog: "Compared to GDDR5, these ultra-high data rates were achieved at an improved power consumption per transmitted bit due to VDD/VDDQ of 1.35V, while not gating maximum speed of the device. We also added features to improve system signal integrity: a new package with reduced ball pitch enables shorter PCB traces, which improves electrical performance".

While the Super Bowl 50 continues, we're seeing that AMD has been pushing its next-gen Polaris GPUs around - with a new Polaris-based flagship GPU, and the successor to the Fury X making an appearance.

The new C99 "FOC" (Full Operational Capacity) has been spotted on Zauba, with the C99 part being priced at $1700. This is an insane jump from the price of the previous Polaris-based C98 and C91/C92 chips. The C98 should be the successor to the R9 390 series, which will arrive as the new Polaris-based R9 490/490X. The C99 on the other hand could be the huge enthusiast Polaris, the successor to the Fury X, or some crazy dual-GPU beast.

The C98 board turned up on Zauba last month, and it holds a per unit value that is more than AMD's current Hawaii-based chips. The C91/C92 chips started shipping in January of last year, but the FOC designation was only attached in August 2015. The C91/C92 should be the lower-end Polaris-bases GPUs, which would most likely be the cards we were greeted to in Sonoma in December, and officially unveiled early January.

As promised, and a little quicker than expected perhaps, AMD's updated 16.1.1 driver has been released. This one includes all the fixes from yesterday, as well as a new one for flickering in Fallout 4, as seen post-version 1.3 and with Crossfire enabled.

If you missed the news yesterday, the driver includes Crossfire profiles for Rise of the Tomb Raider and Fallout 4, plus resolved issues for Radeon Settings and three high profile games (Battlefront, Assasin's Creed Syndicate, Battlefield Hardline). For all the details and the download, click here.

Now that Rise of the Tomb Raider is out, people are finding out just how useless their second GPUs are - except now, someone has found a fix for SLI users with multiple NVIDIA GeForce video cards.

3D Center's "Blaire" found some things to play around with in the NVIDIA Inspector Tool for SLI, which enables awesome SLI results. In order to do it, you'll need to search for Rise of the Tomb Raider's profile, and then change the SLI bits (DX11) to 0x080002F5. After that, click the magnifier icon that will reveal NVIDIA's Undefined options, and search for 0x00A0694B and change it to 0x00000001.

After you've done this, you've enabled full SLI support for Rise of the Tomb Raider, with DSO Gaming reporting that they've noticed 95% scaling on their GeForce GTX 690 - a damn good result for SLI scaling.

AMD was all systems go at VRLA last week, but during the VRLA Winter Expo keynote, the company teased its dual-GPU... the Radeon R9 Fury X2.

AMD's Roy Taylor said that the Radeon R9 Fury X2 has around 12 TFLOPS of SP, compared to the Radeon R9 295X2 which has 11.5 TFLOPS of SP compute performance. The big difference between the Fiji-based R9 Fury X2 and the Hawaii-based R9 295X2 is that the Fury X2 uses only 375W of power, compared to the R9 295X2 which would chew 500W. This means that the Fury X2 is around 40% more power efficient than the R9 295X2.

During his speech, Taylor said: "Last time I was here I also promised you that we would make the world's most powerful small computer for developers. We promised you we would take two of our highest end GPUs and put it inside that tiny box and if you go downstairs we actually have a demonstration of a dual GPU, 12 TeraFlops, fastest GPU solution in the world, inside of Tiki. It's a feat of engineering we are delighted with".

PC port specialist Nixxes Software has posted a tech support guide to Rise of the Tomb Raider on the Steam forums, just a few hours ahead of the game's launch. In the process, they've made it known AMD will be releasing a 16.1.1 driver "shortly", which they (Nixxes) recommends installing for the game.

It's possible 16.1.1 will include optimizations specifically for the game as is usually the case for big launches; NVIDIA did just this yesterday.

Asked for comment, AMD said, "We're working towards a hotfix that will have improvements for TR, but it's a work in progress. We can't comment on the timing or the details, but we'll keep you posted!"

NVIDIA has just launched its new GeForce GT 710 video card, a cheap $40 GPU that the company claims can deliver "up to 10x the performance of integrated graphics", and gaming up to "80% faster" than traditional iGPUs.

While the GeForce GT 710 gets beaten by Intel HD 530 integrated graphics found in Skylake chips, the card is an excellent option for budget gamers who have older rigs and want a cheap DirectX 12 card. As far as specs go, NVIDIA's inexpensive card uses DDR3 memory on a 64-bit bus with 14.4GB/s bandwidth, has a base clock of 954 MHz with 192 CUDA cores, and a memory clock speed of 1.8 Gbps.

The GeForce 710 supports a host of features including G-Sync adaptive sync, multi-monitor support for up to 3 displays, 3D Vision, NVIDIA's PhysX tech, and is OpenGL 4.5 and DirectX 12-ready out of the box. The card has a maximum resolution of 2560x1600 via HDMI and 2048x1536 on VGA, and features 1x Dual-Link DVI-D port, 1x HDMI and 1x VGA. It requires a minimum 300W power supply to function.

If you have been reading our GPU-related content, you should know that we are set for the biggest year in GPU history this year, from both sides: AMD and NVIDIA.

Well, at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference in April, we should see NVIDIA unveil the biggest GPU they've ever made - the successor to the GeForce GTX Titan X. The next-gen card could be called the GTX Titan X2, which would pull some of the wind out of AMD's sails with the dual-GPU Radeon R9 Fury X2, and we should see it featuring HBM2 - scaling up to 16-32GB with 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth. Insanity.

Back in September, we exclusively said that NVIDIA would release both a HBM2 and GDDR5X range of cards - something that will kick off with the HBM2-based Titan X successor. Towards June, we should see NVIDIA unveil a new GP104-based GeForce GTX 980 successor, based on GDDR5X - which offers 448GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

The last time we physically saw the dual-GPU version of the Fury X was at the launch event itself in Sydney, Australia - where we had our hands-on that beautiful PCB. But, the Radeon R9 Fury X2 has shown up again, this time at VRLA.

The VRLA expo was an event for all things virtual reality, held in LA last week. During the event, some of the HTC Vive demos were powered using the Radeon R9 Fury X2. Thanks to Facebook, we noticed Antal Tungler, PR Manager for AMD and all-round cool guy, posted on his Twitter account. He said: "Prototype Tiki from @FalconNW powering #htcvive with dual Fiji @AMDRadeon at the #vrla".

Someone asked Tungler "When you say "Dual Fiji" do you mean 2x Fiji cards, or 2x Fiji GPUs on 1 card? ;)", to which he replied with "One card". So we know that it wasn't 2 x R9 Fury X cards in the machine, but a single, dual-GPU beast. But with Polaris around the corner, I have to ask the question: where does the R9 Fury X2 fit in? It would only have 4GB of HBM1 per GPU, which really isn't enough VRAM considering it will be $1000+. VR headsets are pushing 90FPS, and a high-resolution to boot. I guess we'll see in the coming months, maybe AMD will launch the Fury X2 in between now and the release of Polaris in June/July.