Graphics Cards - Page 245

GTC 2015 - We didn't expect to see HBM 2 shown off in person here at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, but here we are - SK Hynix has a HBM 2 wafer on the show floor, and it's beautiful.

Here it is, in all of it's glory.

A closer shot of the wafer itself.

GTC 2015 - NVIDIA has just started providing many more details on its next generation GPU architecture, known as Pascal. Pascal is going to be a giant leap from Maxwell, where it will be "10x faster than Maxwell" according to co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang.

Pascal will feature NVLink and 3D Memory which will provide some impressive performance and bandwidth, where we can expect 3x the memory bandwidth of Maxwell, which is quite the leak. On top of that, we have 400% more mixed precision, but the Pascal architecture itself is a huge leap for NVIDIA, even compared to the already impressive Maxwell architecture.

We have NVLink which has 5x the bandwidth of PCI Express, which is quite the jump in terms of available bandwidth. NVLink will provide the ability of having 8 GPUs, up from the 4-way limit of SLI right now.

GTC 2015 - NVIDIA has made its GeForce GTX Titan X official at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, based on the full GM200 core. The GeForce GTX Titan X packs quite the performance punch with 8 billion transistors and 12GB of VRAM.

The new GeForce GTX Titan X is the most powerful GPU from NVIDIA yet, with the full GM200 core compared to the 'cut down' GM204 that makes the GTX 980 tick. The new Titan X is a powerhouse VGA card, with 30-50% additional performance of the GTX 980, and in some cases, much more. That's without taking into consideration the 12GB of framebuffer, too.

We have 3072 CUDA cores, 7 TFlops of performance and the huge 12GB framebuffer. We will have more details on the Titan X shortly. NVIDIA has also announced a price of just $999.

Hours before NVIDIA takes the veil off of its GM200-based GeForce GTX Titan X at GTC 2015, there are leaked details on specifications and performance for AMD's upcoming Fiji-based Radeon R9 390X.

According to the latest leaks, the new Radeon R9 390X with HBM memory will be up to 60% faster than the Radeon R9 290X with its 4GB of GDDR5 RAM. The leaked specs see the Fiji XT model featuring 4096 stream processors, a 4096-bit memory bus with up to 8GB of HBM memory, something that will provide 600GB/sec+ of memory bandwidth.

Comparing this to the R9 290X, we have 8.6 TFlops of performance on the R9 390X, which is a huge leap on the 5.6 TFlops that the R9 290X is capable of. HBM is said to be "leaps ahead" when it comes to video memory technology, where we have "drastically increased power efficiency" compared to GDDR5, and so much more. The R9 390X has full support for DirectX 12 and Mantle, with "new dual-GPU modes with upcoming drivers" being teased, as well as an "immersive VR experience with AMD LiquidVR".

We've heard that the Radeon R9 390X will arrive in both a 4GB and 8GB version, but the latest rumor is that AMD will release a Water-Cooled Edition as the Radeon R9 390X WCE.

The news is coming from a leaked slide which shows the R9 390X featuring 4096 shader units, DirectX 12 support, "optimized for 4K gaming & beyond", and it will arrive in a "special enthusiast water-cooled edition" with up to 8GB of ultra-high bandwidth HBM video memory. The more we hear about the R9 390X, the more we want to see it.

We've only been introduced to the GeForce GTX Titan X, but now we're hearing about the GeForce GTX 980 Ti which will also reportedly be based on the GM200 core, but cut down. Not only that, in some leaked benchmarks both of those cards are being compared against the upcoming AMD Radeon R9 390X.

According to the benchmarks, the new Radeon R9 390X looks like quite the force to be reckoned with at 4K, where it beats the R9 290X by 49%. It even beats the new Titan X and the cut down GM200 or GTX 980 Ti. Keep in mind that the above benchmarks are not in FPS, but in relative % to the Radeon R9 290X. We also have an unreleased GTX 96* GPU (GTX 965 or GTX 960 Ti) that you'll find lower on that list.

The same can be said for 2560x1600, where the Fiji-based R9 390X continues to dominate with a 40% jump on the R9 290X. It beats the Titan X by 3%, and the GM200-based GTX 980 Ti by just over 10%. But what about one of the more important aspects of the new architecture: power consumption? This is where, according to the leaked benchmarks, it looks like AMD has done something incredible: increased the horsepower of the 390X over the 290X, but kept to the same TDP.

NVIDIA has already teased its GeForce GTX Titan X which should arrive next week at the company's GPU Technology Conference next week, but now we're hearing about the new Fiji-based Radeon R9 390X, and that it will come in two variants: one with 4GB of VRAM, the other with 8GB.

Because AMD will be using High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on these cards, the 8GB version will not have the numbers to go mainstream compared to its 4GB counterpart. The 8GB version will require eight 8Gbit chips (1GB per chip) that will provide a huge 1024MB/sec of bandwidth. This card will be quite the force to be reckoned with, but considering the GeForce GTX 980 already performs super well at 4K with its 256-bit memory bus, the 1024-bit memory bus and this next-gen HBM RAM should usher in some 4K numbers we haven't seen before.

We are expecting the new Fiji-based R9 390X to be unveiled at Computex in June.

Inno3D has had some interesting VGA cards in the past, but their new iChill GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 Black Series Accelero Hybrid S cards are looking like some of their highest-end solutions yet.

As you can see in the pictures above and below, they sport an integrated air and liquid cooling solution made by Accelero. This all-in-one solution provides up to 200% better cooling performance, and 9x quieter than the stock cooler. It is maintenance free, which is a huge bonus. As for the insides of the cards, we have the Maxwell-powered GTX 980 and GTX 970. Detailed specs are below:

iChill Black GeForce GTX 980:

It was less than 24 hours ago that we provided the best look at the GeForce GTX Titan X yet, but without drivers we can run anything on it, so performance numbers right now are a total secret. We can do guess work, where I said to expect 30-50% additional performance on top of the GTX 980, which it looks like we have in the Titan X.

VideoCardz has some very early performance numbers, where it really trounces everything else in its path. The tests performed, 3DMark 11, show us that it demolishes the GTX 980, Radeon R9 290X 8GB, GTX Titan Black, and so much more. It swings punches with the dual-GPU Radeon R9 295X2, but gets awfully close in successive benchmarks.

They ran the Titan X in 4-way SLI, which would just be so great to see in person, where the performance reaches 427% that of the single Titan X - some impressive SLI scaling.

When NVIDIA's founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang tease the world with the first GeForce GTX Titan X during the Epic Games GDC 2015 event, the world went crazy. We kind of knew it was coming, but were expecting it to be unveiled at NVIDIA's own GTC 2015 event starting on March 17.

Well, media samples are now spreading across the world with TechGage receiving their sample and taking some up close and personal shots. There's nothing new to tell you here, but we do have a much better look at the card itself. Sitting next to a GeForce GTX 980, we can see in the above shot that the Titan X looks virtually identical from the front (or top in the case of this photo), with the only difference being "GTX 980" and "TITAN" and of course the color scheme has been changed from silver, to a blackish color.

The Titan X has had its backplate removed, which I'm sure is because the GM200 GPU powering the Titan X and its 12GB of VRAM runs much hotter than the GTX 980. The GTX 980's backplate gets ridiculously hot as it is, so I think this is a great move by NVIDIA and something that needed to be done in order to keep the card from getting too hot.

GDC 2015 - Earlier today we were introduced to the GeForce GTX Titan X from NVIDIA, its Maxwell-based card that features a gigantic 12GB of VRAM. We don't know much else about it other than it featuring 12GB of framebuffer and 8 billion transistors, until now.

Legit Reviews spotted NVIDIA's soon to be dominant card at the NVIDIA booth at GDC, housed inside of the beautiful In Win Tou Tempered Glass chassis, where they got a closer look at the GTX Titan X. Thanks to the closer look, we can see that the GTX Titan X is a dual-slot card with a 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and two SLI connectors that mean you could have four of these bad boys in SLI. Yes, four GTX Titan X cards in SLI, for a total of 48GB of VRAM.

With the GeForce GTX Titan Z on the market being a dual-GPU solution, the Titan X is 100% confirmed as a single GPU card which means the single GPU is using all of that 12GB framebuffer. With four of these in SLI, we will be seeing 12GB of VRAM used in total which is much better than the Titan Z, or even the Titan Black Edition cards which have 6GB per GPU.

According to the latest report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR), NVIDIA is dominating the GPU market share game against AMD. JPR's data for Q3 2014 has NVIDIA securing a huge 76% of the GPU market share, leaving AMD with just 24%. Matrox and S3 are now out of the game, with Matrox losing its small 0.10% market share to NVIDIA.

JPR's estimated graphics add-in-board (AIB) shipments and suppliers' market share for the quarter tracks add-in graphics boards, which feature discrete GPUs. These AIBs are used in various devices, such as desktop PCs, workstations, servers, and other devices "such as scientific instruments". JPR's report has found that AIB shipments have decreased by 0.68% from the previous quarter with the total AIB shipments decreasing over the quarter to 12.4 million units.

AMD's quarter-to-quarter total desktop AIB unit shipment has decreased 16%, while NVIDIA's quarter-to-quarter unit shipments increased by 5.5%.

Tom's Hardware has quite the exclusive report, where they're saying that they have a "source with knowledge" on the matter of DirectX 12, that will see that the new API will combine the powers of competing GPUs. In order words, an NVIDIA GeForce GPU will work together in a multi-GPU set up with an AMD Radeon card.

This is something DirectX 12 has on its side with its Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities, which will throw all of the various graphics resources in a system, and into a single "bucket". From there, the game developers will have to work out where the workload will be split, which could see different hardware being used in specific tasks.

One of the major points of this new multi-GPU technology is that multi-GPU configurations will no longer have to mirror their frame buffers, or VRAM. In previous APIs, right up to DX11, you needed two cards of identical VRAM amounts to work in tandem, but only one lot of VRAM is utilized, it's not combined. This is a limitation of rendering an alternate frame (AFR), but DX12 is removing the 4 + 4 = 4 limitation of AFR, replacing it with a new frame method called SFR, or Split Frame Rendering.

We know to expect some big things from DirectX 12, but the more we hear about it, the more we want it now, now, now. AnandTech has completed a deep-dive into the upcoming API from Microsoft, noticing some huge improvements across a range of hardware.

We've written about Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock and his impressions of DX12, but he has said that using an "unreleased GPU" he was able to see a huge 100FPS difference between cards. He tweeted that he "did a test of DirectX 11 vs. DirectX 12 on an unreleased GPU with an 8core CPU. DX11: 13fps, DX12: 120fps. Lighting and lens effects".

When pressed, Wardell said he was using a Crossfire system, with an Intel Core i7 CPU. Since he's using an "unreleased GPU" we can gather he might be using the new Radeon R9 390X, which is another nice nugget of information, it means that they're out in the wild. Better yet, Wardell said that "one thing it does make it easy to treat multiple GPUs as a single identity". This is something we reported on not too long ago, where we reported that the VRAM on multi-GPU systems would be seen as one.

AMD is on the verge of announcing and releasing its new Radeon 300 series of cards, but according to a new report from Sweclockers, the codename Fiji GPU will be the only new chip in the Radeon 300 series family. The rest of the cards, will have the current GCN cores, with the GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.2 architecture powering them.

The Radeon R9 390 and R9 390X should feature the new Fiji architecture, with the R9 390 arriving with the Fiji Pro GPU, while the R9 390X will rock the Fiji XT core. When it comes to the Radeon R9 395X2, we don't know if we'll see two of the Fiji XT or Fiji PRO GPUs on it just yet. We do know that we should expect the Radeon R9 390X to feature 4096 cores, 4GB of 4096-bit (1024-bit per channel) HBM memory and hopefully, much more. These new cards will be the first video cards in the world to feature SK Hynix's HBM memory, as well as the first look at the latest GCN 1.3 architecture.

The biggest beast of the new cards will be 'Bermuda' which is the R9 395X2 dual-GPU offering, which should feature the new GCN 1.3 architecture and the super-fast new HBM memory. We don't know what else to expect, but I would like to see AMD make two versions of its R9 390X available: one with 4GB of HBM memory and the other with 8GB of VRAM. Another nice touch would be to have two versions of the R9 395X2: one with 8GB of VRAM (4GB per GPU) and another with 16GB of VRAM (8GB per GPU).

AMD must be so close to unveiling its next-generation range of GPUs, but the latest information on the Radeon R9 390X has it rocking an all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooler made by Cooler Master.

Cutting to the chase, AMD will reportedly ship its reference Radeon R9 390X with an AIO cooler but AIB partners like SAPPHIRE, XFX and so forth will ship their own coolers. WCCFTech is now reporting that the new Radeon 300 series, and more specifically the flagship Radeon R9 390X will launch in "four to six weeks", which should see it released in late March, or early April.

AMD has said that it's working on something "crazy" for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015, which kicks off in early March. This new information could be true, with AMD showing off its new GPU at GDC 2015, which is incredibly exciting.

Many users are reportedly outraged due to NVIDIA's cancellation of overclocking capabilities for their 900M series - through the latest driver release. Although mobile video cards are not generally overclocked, customers who purchased systems containing GTX 980M GPU's were applying mild overclocks to get the most out of their system.

This driver update is the GeForce R347 (347.29), which has removed its overclocking tools and withdrew support for any third-party tools you may wish to install. Users have been issuing complaints on NVIDIA's official forums, which saw a response from NVIDIA staff. Manuel Guzman replied "unfortunately GeForce Notebooks were not designed to support overclocking. Overclocking is by no means a trivial feature, and depends on thoughtful design of thermal, electrical, and other considerations. By overclocking a notebook, a user risks serious damage to the system that could result in non-functional systems, reduced notebook life, or many other effects."

As seen on HotHardware, Guzman went on to express that allowing mobile GPU overclocking in the first place was a mistake made by his team and should have never been implemented.

It has been rumored that NVIDIA would slide out from under those warm cuddles that TSMC provide to manufacturer its GPUs, into the arms of Samsung or GlobalFoundries, but it looks like this won't be happening any time soon.

NVIDIA's CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang said during the company's recent conference call with investors and financial analysts during the week, where he said that TSMC will continue to be a big partner of theirs, but didn't confirm or deny that it could shift some of its production to another company. Huang said: "We always look at all foundries, and TSMC remains our most strategic [partner]. They are going to continue to be a very important partner for us for the foreseeable future".

TSMC will begin its 16nm FinFET production in the second half of the year, much later than the likes of its competitors in Samsung and GloFo. When it came to talking about the 16nm FinFET process, Huang said: "TSMC is a fabulous supplier, [...] their FinFET technology is excellent. [We have been] working with TSMC on FinFET now for a couple of years, and so we have quite a bit of confidence in their ability to deliver amazing FinFET transistors".

We don't normally see a behind the scenes look at the hardware powering a gigantic event like the Super Bowl, but we now know what powered the show. This year's Super Bowl half-time show was powered by MAINGEAR, with a system that packed quite a punch in the performance department.

According to 'Bulwerk' on the Octane forums, they needed to render animation at a huge 3780x3024, which requires a serious amount of number crunching power. So they asked MAINGEAR to construct an insane PC that featured four NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z GPUs, which were all liquid cooled using EK Water Block products.

On top of that, we have an ASUS X-99E WS motherboard, Intel Core i7-5930K processor, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM, a Samsung 850 PRO 256GB SSD, and two Corsair AX 1200i PSUs.

It looks like Google Glass will soon be getting a major revamp under its new leadership, with Tony Fadell taking over the project. Various people familiar with the matter told The New York Times that Google Glass will be completely redesigned.

One of the sources has said that Fadell is a product person, so he won't be releasing the new version of Glass until it is near perfect. Fadell said in a statement to the Times that the early version of Glass broke ground, allowing the company to learn what is important for consumers and enterprise users when it came to their revolutionary wearable device.

Fadell added that he is excited to be working with fashion guru Ivy Ross, who will be providing direction and support for the new version of Glass, and other devices that will be rolled out in the future. This means that we most likely won't hear about a new version of Google Glass for a while yet, until the company is much closer to a final, consumer version.