Graphics Cards - Page 234

AMD has released its new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3.1 hotfix drivers, which add Crossfire support to Need for Speed, and an updated CF profile for Hitman.

Not only that, but the 16.3.1 release also fixes issues with games running on Unreal Engine 4, as well as V-Sync no longer automatically being enabled when running DX12 applications. Frame rates are also no longer tied to the display's refresh rate with the 16.3.1 drivers.

Various other issues have also been resolved, including flicking issues for Crossfire users on The Division, and graphical corruption on characters death animations in Crossfire when running League of Legends.

With only weeks left until NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, where we'll be formally introduced to the Pascal architecture and everything that makes it tick. We've already been teased by the purported GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti and Titan X successor, but now we have some early performance numbers on the purported Pascal GPUs.

The performance numbers are coming from WCCFTech, who have spotted an unidentified NVIDIA video card with 7680MB (7.6GB) of RAM - 512MB less than 8GB, which should find itself onto the GP100-based GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (that's what we're going to call it for now, but I don't think NVIDIA will call the Pascal range by the GTX 1080 moniker).

Now, the performance numbers on 3DMark 11 were hitting 9038 - but an Intel Core i3-2100 processor was used - it lost out to various other video cards, but there were more details in the 3DMark results worth looking at. Firstly, the unidentified NVIDIA video card had 8GB of GDDR5 clocked at 8GHz - now this is noteworthy, as there are no video cards on the market with 8GB of RAM with performance close to the GTX 980 Ti.

As we get closer to NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference in early April, we're finding out more details on the next-gen Pascal architecture, and what cards will purportedly arrive under the new 16nm process. Now remember, these are just leaked specs on the purported cards - the specs could change, and so could the naming system NVIDIA uses on the next-gen cards.

According to the latest rumors, NVIDIA will launch the new cards under what we'll call them for now (I seriously don't think they'll be called this): GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti and the new Titan X successor. Starting with the GTX 1080, which will feature the GP104 core, we'll see 4096 CUDA cores (a 100% increase over the 2048 CUDA cores on the GM204-based GTX 980).

We are to expect a near doubling in texture units, ROPs, memory bandwidth and 6GB of GDDR5 (up from 4GB on the GTX 980). The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is even more powerful, with 5120 CUDA cores, 320 texture units, and 160ROPS - with another 28% in TFlops performance. The GTX 1080 Ti will also reportedly rock 8GB of GDDR5 (I think we'll see GDDR5X) and a 512-bit memory bus.

MSI has announced its new GeForce GTX 950 models won't require any additional PCIe power connectors, as they'll be powered by the PCIe port itself, consuming a maximum of 75W.

There are two new models from MSI: the MSI GeForce GTX 950 2GD5T OCV3 and the MSI GeForce GTX 950 2GD5T OCV2. Both feature the GM206 GPU, which rocks 768 stream processors, 48 texture units, 32 ROPS and a 128-bit memory interface with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. Both of the cards have their GPUs clocked at 1076MHz, but have boost clocks of 1253MHz.

The difference between the cards is their cooling, and how long they are. The 2GD5T OCV3 model sports a dual fan design and a longer PCB that MSI wants to see installed into a traditional desktop PC, while the shorter 2GD5T OCV2 models uses a single fan, and is destined for mini-ITX machines.

AMD was once a very prolific force in the mobile, handheld GPU world. And it seems that Raja Koduri, the head honcho in charge of the new Radeon Technologies Group, isn't necessarily ruling out the idea of returning to that field either.

AMD is already well positioned to create custom chips with their deal that they've brokered with Sony and Microsoft, not to mention Nintendo. And Raja himself is open to the idea of licesning their IP to be used in mobile products. They don't, however, want to actively build their own mobile devices based on their technology, but if someone else approached them with the idea to integrate either an APU outright or Polaris into their own design, it wouldn't at all be out of the question.

The idea is a natural one, given the potential power savings that the new Polaris architecture could introduce on all fronts. Already Polaris 11 (the smallest chip thus far) can play Star Wars Battlefront at 1080P with a steady 60FPS while only consuming around 35 watts for the GPU itself. So, then, it isn't a stretch to have their new architecture appear in lower-power APU's for, say, tablets, micro-consoles or even phones.

GDC 2016 - AMD unveiled its dual-GPU yesterday at its Capsaicin event, but now the company has revealed benchmark numbers on 3DMark Fire Strike from the Radeon Pro Duo.

The Radeon Pro Duo destroys the Radeon R9 295X2, AMD's previous dual-GPU champion based on the Hawaii architecture, as well as NVIDIA's only current GeForce GTX Titan Z - based on its older Kepler architecture. Keep in mind that NVIDIA never released a dual-GPU based on its Maxwell architecture, but we could see a dual-GPU based on its next-gen Pascal architecture in early April at GTC.

Back to the benchmarks, the Radeon Pro Duo beats the Titan Z and R9 295X2 in all resolutions - 1080p, 1440p and 4K. On the Standard preset, the Radeon Pro Duo beats the Titan Z by 134%. On the Extreme preset it's 148% faster, and on the Ultra preset it beats the Titan Z by 152%.

GDC 2016 - AMD has been hinting at their dual-GPU for the better half of a year, but today is the day that we've been introduced to their dual-GPU: the Radeon Pro Duo. Up until now, we thought it would be called the Radeon R9 Fury X2, as well as the tease of Gemini, but AMD landed on the name of Radeon Pro Duo.

AMD's new Radeon Pro Duo has 16TFlops of compute performance, compared to the 8.6TFlops on the Radeon R9 Fury X. The Radeon Pro Duo in AMD's words is "guaranteeing the highest level VR experience for developers who love to game", and is "the platform of choice for Crytek's VR First initiative - enabling today's and tomorrow's generation of VR content developers with the most powerful hardware".

The Radeon Pro Duo is watercooled, just like its single-GPU cousin, and with the price set at $1499 it won't be for casual or even most enthusiasts - this is a card for the die-hard enthusiasts who need 120FPS+ at 2560x1440 or 60FPS+ at 4K. Past that, it's a card built for VR and its 90FPS+ requirement, and developers are going to snap this up for game development thanks to its beefy horsepower.

GDC 2016 - Stardock has some exciting stuff on its hands with Ashes of the Singularity, a DirectX 12-powered game that has an awesome benchmark for mixing AMD and NVIDIA video cards - but it's limited to just one game, for now.

Stardock has teased that it's working on a software solution, something that's part of DirectX 12, that will let gamers use multi-GPU support on DX12 games. Outside of AotS, multi-GPU support through DX12 isn't really a thing, but it could very well be in the near future.

Brad Wardell, Stardock CEO, explained to VentureBeat: "One of the biggest problems with games is that a new video card comes out from AMD and NVIDIA, and they're like [expensive], and you have to make a call. I like my video card. I can play most games on it, and I don't want to spend $800 on some new video card. But imagine, instead, hey, they're having a sale [using my GTX 760 as an example]. Hey, they're having a sale on an AMD 290 for $75. Wouldn't it be cool to put this into your computer and double your performance. You keep this in there [the 760]. You put this in there [the 290], and your games are twice as fast without doing anything else".

GDC 2016 - NVIDIA has just announced its new GameWorks SDK 3.1, with three new technologies included in the release. This includes new techniques for shadows and lighting, as well as two new physical simulation algorithms, released in beta form.

Senior VP of Content and Technology with NVIDIA, Tony Tamasi, explains: "It's our passion for gaming that drives us to tackle the technical problems presented by real-time rendering and simulation. Our GameWorks technologies push the boundaries of what's possible in real-time, enabling developers to ship their games with state of the art special effects and simulations".

As for the three new technologies with GameWorks SDK 3.1, this is what we can expect:

GDC 2016 - Just as I'm getting ready to leave my Airbnb accommodation and pick up my GDC pass, and then later in the afternoon head to AMD's Capsaicin event - the company will reportedly be teasing its Polaris 10 GPU at the event, running on a SteamVR benchmark.

The company will be unveiling its new Radeon Pro Duo video card during the event, with it based on two Fiji GPUs offering 12TFlops of performance - making it the perfect card for VR and 4K gaming. AMD will be using the next-gen Polaris 10 GPU running on Valve's Aperture Science Robot Repair which will be powered by the HTC Vive Pre headset.

Polaris 10 looks like the same GPU showed off at CES 2016 and the RTG event in Sonoma in December, which will compete against the likes of GeForce GTX 950. The Polaris 10 will be an entry-level/mainstream part based on the 14nm FinFET process with GCN 4.0 enhancements. As for availability, it should launch in mid-2016 right around the time of Computex - so expect plenty of new entry-level/mainstream laptops to be powered by Polaris 10.

GALAX has just announced their latest member of the Hall of Fame lineup, with the new GeForce GTX 980 Ti HOF GOC. The new GTX 980 Ti HOF GOC competes against the likes of EVGA's GTX 980 Ti Kingpin which has 14+3 phase power, and against MSI's GTX 980 Ti Lightning with a 12+3+1 power design.

GALAX has provided 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which can consume a total of 525W of power - for the serious enthusiasts and overclockers out there. The card features a dual-slot design, with two fans to keep it cool. It features a beautiful white theme, with the card being longer than usual cards - so it can handle the two large 10cm fans that keep the GM200 core and VRMs nice and cool.

The heat sink contains five heat pipes that keep the card cool, which are hidden under a new HOF-branded cooler shroud. The GALAX GeForce GTX 980 Ti HOF GOC has a GPU clock of 1203MHz, with a Boost Clock of 1304MHz, with the 6GB of GDDR5 RAM not overclocked at all.

When the rumors first started flying about NVIDIA's next-gen video cards, I was one of the first to say that the mid-range cards would not be using the super-fast HBM2 VRAM, but they would use GDDR5 (and it was later revealed, GDDR5X was on its way). Well now we're here again, with rumors on NVIDIA's purported GeForce GTX 1080.

The GeForce GTX 1080 will be built from the GP104 GPU that NVIDIA should unveil at its GPU Technology Conference in April, where it should rock 8GB of GDDR5X. The new GDDR5X standard is capable of 14Gbps of bandwidth, compared to just 10Gbps from the current GDDR5 technology. We should expect the GeForce GTX 1080 to be unveiled next month, with a shipping date of somewhere in May/June.

ASUS has just unveiled their new GeForce GTX 980 Ti STRIX Gaming Ice video card, something that is water cooled courtesy of a huge water block from Bitspower.

The new GeForce GTX 980 Ti STRIX Gaming Ice from ASUS features the usual GM200 GPU with 2816 CUDA cores, 176 TMUs and 96 ROPs - the GPU is clocked at 1216MHz with a Boost Clock of 1317MHz. There are two profiles on the card, with the gaming profile clocking the GTX 980 TI STRIX Gaming Ice at 1190MHz with the Boost hitting 1291MHz.

When the ASUS GeForce GTX 980 TI STRIX Gaming Ice is in its gaming mode, it will use slightly less power, but in OC mode it will suck down everything it can from the huge 14-phase PWM design. The power consumed by the card is courtesy of 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which will let the card consume as much power as it requires in OC mode. We have the usual 6GB of GDDR5 RAM which is clocked at 7.2GHz compared to the stock 7Ghz on most other brands. This provides the card with 345.6GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

We all want to be able to game on our laptops, even if we don't necessarily admit it readily. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to fire up one of our favorite games for a quick spin when we're bored in a hotel room. It's possible, and gaming laptops exist that are both powerful and also not that massive, but they too are still limited in their abilities. And mobile GPU's aren't exactly the most powerful chips even if they can provide a good framerate. You can upgrade them, but an MXM module is far more expensive than a typical GPU. It's a problem that really wasn't being asked, but the solution to that might

AMD is introducing their XConnect technology that allows any laptop with Thunderbolt 3 to be able to have a discrete GPU connected to it. And there's a huge market for thin and light laptops out there because they're far more convenient to lug around. External graphics is actually a sound idea, too. When traveling, the external enclosure can be completely separate and safely ensconced in another piece of luggage completely, setup only when you're at your destination or when you really absolutely must have that extra GPU power, and AMD is the first to bring you this power. Plug-and-play GPU's are finally here, and they don't require a reboot anymore.

And they've done this by partnering with Razer and Thunderbolt in order to do this. Their innovations in allowing for graphics information to be passed via this interface isn't a closed-source method, either. They're staying true to their GPUOpen initiative and pushing their innovations out to be available to everyone. That means that yes, NVIDIA, can make use of their plug and play GPU technology.

AMD has just released its new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3 drivers, which include a bunch of new features, optimizations and more. The new drivers from AMD also include support for Hitman, which launches on March 11.

The Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3 drivers include performance improvements and a Crossfire profile for Hitman, as well as an updated Crossfire profile for The Park. We also have performance improvements for Rise of the Tomb Raider (16% improvement on Fiji-based cards), Gears of War Ultimate Edition (which is up a huge 60% on Fiji hardware, and even 44% on R9 380 series cards).

The 16.3 release also has AMD providing full support for Vulkan's initial release, which supports compatible GPUs to make good use of a low-overhead API in supported games and applications. There are some new features with the 16.3 release, including per-game display scaling, support for two-display Eyefinity configurations, as well as the ability to disable some of the power efficiency optimizations through a 'Power Efficiency Toggle' on Radeon 300 and Fury X series GPUs.

As we inch closer to the Game Developers Conference next week, and NVIDIA's own GPU Technology Conference in the first week of April, we're hearing more on NVIDIA's next-gen Pascal-based video cards.

According to a listing on the Zauba database, there are four different variants that we could see shown off in the very near future. They're priced at $600, $700, $900 and $1100 - where I think the $900 and $1100 cards could be Pascal-based GeForce GTX Titan X successors. I think we'll see a consumer-orientated card with 16GB of HBM2, while there'll be a higher-end Titan X successor with 32GB of HBM2 - remember, that HBM2 provides up to 1024GB/sec of memory bandwidth, up from the 334GB/sec on the 384-bit memory bus on the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X.

NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang kicks off his opening keynote to GTC on April 5, where we should be introduced to a Pascal video card at the time. I can barely contain my excitement, as by then we'll be introduced to something "spicy" from AMD, and not even two weeks later NVIDIA will come out stomping with Pascal.

AMD will be teasing their next-gen Polaris architecture, the Radeon R9 Fury X2, and latest software improvements for Radeon video cards during the Game Developers Conference next week - but, there's a larger event that I feel AMD will be shining a spotlight on - its Capsaicin party, in San Fransisco on March 14, and we will be there - but now you can join us, through a live webcast!

AMD has announced that there will be a live webcast of the Capsaicin event, where the company will be showcasing the latest innovations from the Radeon Technologies Group. RTG Marketing Director Chris Hook posted on Twitter that they will be showing off some very hot and spicy new innovations during GDC 2016.

Last year, AMD announced their LiquidVR software program during GDC 2015, but this event is called "Capsaicin", which is a marquee developer and press event hosted by RTG's Senior VP and Chief Architect Raja Koduri. We will be there in person, bringing you everything live from the event.

Both sides of the video cards war will be using HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory) with the new super-fast HBM2 going into mass production later this year, kicking off with 4GB HBM2 dies in Q3 2016, followed up by 8GB HBM2 dies in Q4, reports Golem.de.

With AMD expected to unveil its new Polaris architecture in more detail at GDC next week, and NVIDIA following up with its reveal of Pascal at its own GPU Technology Conference in early April, the GPU scene is heating up. SK Hynix setting off its 4GB HBM2 die mass production in Q3 2016 signifies when the next-gen GPUs will launch, where I think we'll see a launch in June/July and availability in the months proceeding their launch.

The professional-orientated next-gen cards will require the 8GB HBM2 dies to get things kicked off in a higher fashion, as that's when we'll see 32GB of HBM2 on a video card - and by just typing that, there's feelings in my body that I've never felt before. 32GB of HBM2? Freakin' incredible, isn't it? We will be at both GDC and GTC, so expect some quick and plentiful coverage from both events in the coming weeks.

Users are reporting some strange issues when they try to install NVIDIA's latest WHQL drivers, version 364.47. When installing over a previous driver version you might experience a crash while trying to install them, resulting in a black screen. You won't be able to boot properly into Windows afterward, either.

Quickly after they were released several users took to the feedback thread to share their disdain for the new driver. Once installed, you'll have to boot into safe mode in order to uninstall the drivers. Once completely removed, however, they should reinstall without issue.

The new driver is supposed to bring performance improvements to Ashes of the Singularity, The Division, Hitman, Need for Speed and Rise of the Tomb Raider. It also adds support for the only Vulkan game available right now, The Talos Principle.

NVIDIA is reportedly preparing a big gaming notebook push for Computex 2016, which kicks off in June in Taipei. According to SweClockers, NVIDIA will be launching their new Pascal-based mobile GPU at the show, with a big focus on portable Pascal-powered gaming notebooks.

Computex 2016 starts on May 31, and runs through to June 4. We should expect NVIDIA to show something off during the show, with a bigger event to showcase Pascal sometime either slightly before Computex, or in the weeks after. NVIDIA focusing on the gaming notebook market makes sense, as they've made a huge dent in the market recently - as they noted a huge 34.2% increase in mobile GPU shipments in the last quarter.