Graphics Cards - Page 235

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 950 was already a pretty damn efficient video card, but with a more efficient GTX 950 rumored to be in the works, ASUS seems to be the first AIB partner with a super-efficient GTX 950.

ASUS has introduced a new GTX 950, which features the same GM206 core with 786 CUDA cores, 64 TMUs and 32 ROPs. This is an NVIDIA reference design card with 2GB of GDDR5 @ 6.6GHz on a 128-bit memory bus, but the GPU and Boost clocks have been changed. The reference GTX 950 from NVIDIA has a GPU clock of 1024MHz versus the 1051MHz on the ASUS GTX 950, while the Boost clock is the same 1188MHz on both variants.

The difference between NVIDIA's reference board and the new ASUS GTX 950 is that the former requires a 6-pin PCIe power connector and has a TDP of 90W while the new ASUS GTX 950 requires no PCIe power connector, and has a TDP of just 75W (the maximum power provided by the PCIe 3.0 x16 port). ASUS does splash in some overclocking profiles, with "OC Mode" and "Gaming Mode" on the new GTX 950 video card. Gaming Mode has a default GPU clock of 1026MHz and 1190MHz Boost while the OC Mode pushes it up to 1051MHz.

AMD's new Radeon Technologies Group will be hosting an AMA on Reddit, where the company will talk about its Fury X2, plans for VR, DirectX 12 and so much more.

In the AMD subreddit, it was teased: "The first reddit AMD Q&A/AMA is happening soon. Right here. The Q&A is open to all topics dealing with anything under the Radeon Technologies Group (the Radeon division of AMD). Some big secrets could be unveiled this Thursday, so bring your best questions! Likely topics of discussion will most likely include Vulkan, FreeSync, GPUOpen, Polaris, Fury X2, VR, DirectX 12, and anything else you're curious about. Don't ask about Zen. It's still a super secret".

The AMA will take place right here, today (March 3) at 10AM-5PM central time.

AMD is being very forward about teasing what Roy Taylor calls 'the world's best VR solution' - this time partnering with the Associated Press, and sending them a bunch of dual-GPU powered VR gaming machines. It was only a few days ago when we got our first real look at the R9 Fury X2 inside of the Falcon Northwest Tiki gaming PC.

Roy Taylor took to his personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, saying: "Thanks Wallace Santos for his partnership in shipping the world's best #VR solution to the #AssociatedPress". We still don't know what's inside, but I'm sure it's AMD's dual-GPU based on the Fiji architecture - currently known (or at least, it should be called) the Radeon R9 Fury X2. It's also gone by codename Gemini, which also sounds super-awesome.

AMD is set to "spice things up" at the Game Developers Conference on March 14, where we might see either the dual-GPU in action or Polaris.

Just in time for the launch of Far Cry Primal and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on the PC, which launched just earlier today, NVIDIA has a Game Ready Driver ready and available to help optimize the experience.

Driver 362.00 is was released earlier this morning as well and provides some nice stability and performance enhancements that make Gears of War: Ultimate Edition especially. Gears, unfortunately, is only playable on NVIDIA hardware at the moment due to some strange occurrences and performance issues happening on AMD hardware.

Optimizations have been made for Far cry Primal, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and for the newest Dying Light update. That update adds a few new graphics options that you can toy with.

One of the more impressive things we saw at CES earlier this year was the external GPU docking solution for the new Razer Blade Stealth, which has the ability of taking an external GPU. The technology used is impressive, with it being powered by Thunderbolt 3.

Well, external graphics are all the rage right now with Alienware's Graphics Amplifier, and MSI's Gaming Dock resulting in great external GPU power solutions, for your not-so-great gaming laptop. Jason Evangelho from Forbes is reporting that AMD's Robert Hallock teased on Facebook that an external video card solution could be on the way, with Hallock reiterating that ultra-thin notebooks are becoming more and more popular, especially when compared to the huge gaming notebooks on the market with seriously powerful mobile GPU solutions.

Hallock said: "I also bet there's a bunch of gamers out there who, as they get into their 30s and 40s, wouldn't mind condensing their entire computing life down into one device that does it all. I ALSO bet that some people wouldn't mind giving up an mITX LAN rig if their notebook had the potential to serve that role with gusto". External GPU solutions aren't a possible future, they are the future for laptops. Hallock added: "External GPUs are the answer. External GPUs with standardized connectors, cables, drivers, plug'n'play, OS support, etc. More info very soon".

Discrete GPU shipments increased in Q4 2015, but were down 9% from 2014 - so how were notebook discrete GPU shipments? Well, NVIDIA saw an increase of notebook discrete GPU shipments - an increase of 34.2% - a considerable number.

Why the increase? Thanks to the industry's fastest mobility GPU - the GeForce GTX 980. NVIDIA's notebook-based GeForce GTX 980 was launched in September 2015 and has been powering the fastest gaming notebooks since. The GTX 980 is capable of 1080p 60FPS without a problem, and even 1440p and 4K gaming. The Maxwell-powered GPU is the same technology found on the desktop GTX 980, but NVIDIA did considerable work to shrink the PCB and VRMs down to fit it into a notebook - and obviously, it has been met with great success.

We haven't seen a new GPU release in over 6 months, but GPU shipments are quite healthy. According to the latest data from Jon Peddie Research, overall GPU shipments increased 2.4% in Q4 2015 compared to the previous quarter. Why the increase? Well, new games were released in the last three months of 2015, but with next-gen GPUs only months away, consumers are holding back their wallets.

AMD noticed a 5.16% increase quarter-to-quarter while competitor NVIDIA had an 8.41% increase, leaving Intel with a smaller 0.73% increase. The attach rate of GPUs for Q4 2015 was 139%, which was up 0.59% from the previous quarter while discrete GPUs were in 31.28% of all PCs - a number that's up 1.34%. The entire PC market increased 2.01% quarter-to-quarter, but decreased 10.27% year-to-year.

We've been waiting for AMD to show off its Radeon R9 Fury X2 in the flesh, and now we seem to have seen the first real photo of AMD's dual-GPU based on the Fiji architecture, powered by HBM.

AMD's Roy Taylor posted a picture of the Tiki PC, built by Falcon Northwest, to his Facebook page. Taylor teased "another peak at the world's best developer box for VR and DX12". We can see the R9 Fury X2 (if that's what AMD names it, Gemini has also been teased) is a much longer card than the R9 Fury X, with the cooler built-in like the R9 Nano.

It looks like the R9 Fury X2 is just a super-long R9 Nano - but with twice the horsepower. We should expect the R9 Fury X2 to have a 300W TDP, but with Fiji's thermal throttling, we shouldn't expect the card to be running too hot - hence why we're seeing AMD not use a watercooler like they did on the R9 Fury X.

I've already reported that NVIDIA would unveil its new Pascal-based Titan X successor at its GPU Technology Conference in early April, but we should expect a "surprise" Pascal demo at GTC according to the new rumors.

NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will be kicking off his usual opening keynote on April 5 at 9AM PST, where we should be greeted by the next-gen GeForce GTX Titan X, based on the Pascal architecture. Now, NVIDIA is set to hit the 16nm process with Pascal, as well as using HBM2 - so we might see the Titan X successor unveiled, but not launched at GTC. When will NVIDIA launch the Pascal-based Titan X successor? According to the rumors, sometime around June - just like it did with the GTX 980 Ti last year.

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