Graphics Cards - Page 249

AMD's Radeon HD 8000 series is just around the corner, something I expect to be unveiled closer to Computex which happens in June, but for now, we have a tease of one of the GPUs in the HD 8000 series, the HD 8570.

The Radeon HD 8570 or "Oland Pro" is set to feature 384 stream processors (or GCN cores), 24 texture units and it should come with a clock speed of 720MHz. The memory side of things sees the HD 8570 with a 128-bit memory bus, where two versions will be available - the first, a 4.6GHz GDDR5 edition, and a 1.8GHz GDDR3 edition.

With these specs, we should expect the HD 8570 to be around 75% of the performance of the HD 7750. AMD are really aiming the HD 8570 at 720p gamers, which isn't a bad thing as that is what current-generation consoles run at. There were also some benchmarks run, with the performance of these tests below:

Today, NVIDIA is hosting its investor day at which CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off graphics produced with its next-generation mobile GPU. The new GPU is currently known as Kepler Mobile and Huang said that NVIDIA made a huge investment to take its high-end Kepler products and shrink them down for use in mobile devices.

The interesting benefits of this is that smartphones and tablets could soon be able to play games that utilize DirectX 11. "We want to get multiple years ahead of the competition. It was worth the sacrifice," Huang said.

To show what Kepler Mobile is capable of, Huang demoed Kepler Mobile playing Battlefield 3. The future of tablet gaming looks bright indeed.

We've seen leaps and bounds in graphics over the years, helped by each iteration of DirectX. But, after games started being made for, and optimized for consoles, the push of graphics started to sink.

It has gotten to the point where AMD's vice president of global channel sales, Roy Taylor, stated during an interview with German publication Heise.de, that AMD don't believe we'll see a DirectX 12 API. We won't be seeing DirectX 12 with Windows 8, or Windows Blue either.

Taylor was responding to a question about next-generation GPUs and technologies that they can be built around, where Taylor replied they'd normally build them around new DirectX versions to help the next-generation GPU architectures, but there won't be a DirectX 12, which means AMD's next-gen GPUs will integrate other technologies.

NVIDIA have already entered the dual-GPU arena with their GeForce GTX 690, and have taken the crown once again with their Titan GPU, so AMD have been sitting out of the GPU spotlight for a while now.

This might all end with the unveiling of their Radeon HD 7990, their dual-GPU behemoth. GM of AMD's Graphics Business Unit, Matt Skynner, held up the card for the world to see, saying: "This is the first public showing. We're not saying much about it other than it's two series-7900 GPUs on a single card, and it's whisper quiet."

AMD's Radeon HD 7990 will be a full-sized, dual-slot card, which was expected. The heatsink and fan design runs down the entire card, with no less than three fans keeping the two GPUs cool. We should hear more on this card in the coming weeks, and I'm sure a proper unveiling before, or at Computex in Taipei in June.

NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose earlier today unveiled some interesting developments with the company, with NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun-Huang revealing the next step in their GPU roadmap - Volta.

Volta will arrive after Maxwell, and will provide GPUs with an insane amount of memory bandwidth. Volta-based GPUs will provide up to 1TB per second of bandwidth, made capable by stacking the DRAM on top of the GPU itself, with a silica substrate between them. Then, cutting a hole through the silicon and connecting each layer provides the ability for this insane level of bandwidth. Something Huang has said has the ability to shift "all of the data from a full Blu-Ray disc through the chip in 1/50th of a second."

I don't know what this will do in the consumer space, as even the unreleased next-gen consoles will be holding back a beast like Volta. The future is looking great for NVIDIA, and I'm excited to see what we'll see from these next-gen GPUs.

There have been rumblings about this for a few weeks now, but Sapphire have just announced the release of their new HD 7950 Mac Edition graphics card. From the model alone, you can tell this is destined for an Apple machine, more specifically, their Mac Pro series of desktop PCs.

Sapphire's HD 7950 Mac Edition comes with 3GB of GDDR5 memory, and works on the PC too thanks to its dual firmware support through a simple dual BIOS switch. The HD 7950 Mac Edition GPU is compatible with Apple Mac Pro late-2010 and up models, as long as there is an available PCI-Express x16 slot. Two six-pin PCIe power connections are required, which come in the box.

AMD brings along their powerful Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, which gives the Mac a number of technologies to play with. These include de-blocking, de-noising, automatic de-interlacing, Mosquito noise reduction and edge enhancement as well as advanced image quality enhancement technology, such as adaptive anti-aliasing and 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering.

It looks like NVIDIA may be working on a second GK110-based consumer GPU to fill the gap between the marginally expensive GTX 680 and the ridiculously expensive GTX Titan released last month. With a $500 gap between the GTX 680 and GTX Titan, NVIDIA has a lot of wiggle room to squeeze another GPU in the lineup.

The video card is said to feature 13 of the 15 streaming multiprocessors that are built into the GK110 silicon. This means we would have 2,496 CUDA cores to do our gaming bidding. Combine that with 208 texture memory units, 40ROPs, a 320-bit memory interface, and 5GB of GDDR5 RAM and you end up with a fairly powerful card.

The rumored release date is somewhere between July and August of this year.

There's a gap in AMD's GPUs that needs to be filled, which is the very lucrative $110-$170 price point. NVIDIA currently nails this with their GeForce GTX 650 Ti, but AMD are looking to correct their mistake with the HD 7790, or "Bonaire".

The Radeon HD 7790 looks to skip the "Pitcairn" and "Cape Verde" silicons, moving directly to an entirely new ASIC codenamed "Bonaire". The first SKU to be built on this silicon will be the Radeon HD 7790, which should feature 896 stream processors, and will perform at around 10% slowly than the HD 7850. This should definitely take some of the lime light away from the GTX 650 Ti, and if AMD work on the price, they could move a lot of that lime light away.

We should see the HD 7790 launched sometime next month.

Render. Rinse. Repeat! That's AMD's new recommended method of hair care. The company could have just very well ushered in a new era of 3D graphics with its new hair processing technique dubbed TressFX. The process showcases more "realistic" and "natural" hair for in game characters.

AMD says that the new technique allows for individual strands of hair to be rendered out, and everything will flow more naturally with unique physics properties and collision detection. Long gone are the days when you have to suffer trough Laura Croft's pony tail bouncing within a seemingly flat plane.

AMD's blog stated:

We have some good news for you, NVIDIA are set to unleash their latest GPU, the GeForce GTX Titan on February 18. This is just days away, so if you had any cash saved from not buying Valentine's Day presents, you should look at getting one of these puppies.

Now, before you get too excited - this isn't the GTX 800 series, nor is it a refresh, nor is it the Maxwell-based GPUs we should expect later this year. According to TechPowerUp's database, this is what we should expect:

What should we expect performance-wise from the GeForce GTX Titan? Well, we should expect 2688 stream processors, 224 texture units, and 48 raster operating units. The Titan should slam its hammer down with 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 6GHz on a 384-bit bus. This is the GK110 chip, folks, featuring over 7 billion transistors laid down on a 521mm2 of space and will have clock speeds pumping at 875MHz.

During an interview with Japanese site 4Gamer.net, AMD's Product Manager for Desktop Graphics Products, Devon Nekechuk, revealed some startling information: that AMD won't be launching any new GPUs this year.

AMD will instead concentrate on their already great Radeon HD 7000 series, by adjusting the price and performance increases through driver releases. A slide released to 4Gamers.net shows that AMD's Radeon HD 7900 series (high-end), HD 7800 series (performance), and HD 7700 series (mainstream), will carry on the company's mantle "throughout 2013."

It looks like we're seeing a slowing down of GPU releases, which I'm guessing is because there's hardly any games that push GPUs anymore. It's also incredibly expensive in terms of R&D for GPU makers to continue pushing new GPUs out every 6-12 months, but I think the real reason is that a $200-$300 GPU will play most games at 1080p@60 now.

There's a benchmark score floating around the internet that was reportedly earned by NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce Titan. The number shows the new GK110-based GPU besting the dual-GPU GTX 690 by a hefty margin. In 3DMark11, the card reportedly earned a score of X7107. For comparison, a GTX only achieves a score of around X6000.

The details can't be confirmed because the site reporting this won't release their source. The Titan is said to be coming with 6GB of RAM on a 384-bit memory bus. The naming scheme is said to retain the GeForce Titan nomenclature, possibly as a reference to the Cray Titan supercomputer that houses just shy of 19,000 NVIDIA Tesla K20X cards.

Pricing is said to be $899 with availability starting at the end of February.

ZOTAC have just launched a new GPU, named the GeForce GTX 660 Thunderbolt Edition. With 'Thunderbolt' in the name, most people would expect that ZOTAC have baked in some Thunderbolt interface support, but nope - it has nothing to do with the high-speed connectivity called Thunderbolt.

The new ZOTAC GeForce GTX 660 Thunderbolt Edition, does however, arrive with a high-grade non-reference design PCB, and a very cool new cooling solution. The cooling solution sports a massive aluminum heatsink with heat-transfer helps by three copper heat pipes. This gives us a hybrid-type device, somewhere between heatsinks and fin-stacks. The pictures below show off how a hybrid heatsink is better than fin-stacks.

ZOTAC calls the cooler features "EClean", which is a mechanism that allows owners of the GPU to easily detach the cooler shroud on which the fans are mounted by simply pressing a retention notch, and sliding out the shroud that's suspended on rails on the main heatsink. All of this provides the ability to clean the heatsink, very, very nice.

A new rumor is saying that NVIDIA is readying a GK110-based GeForce Titan card to go toe-to-toe with the upcoming AMD HD 8000 series of GPUs. The new card would consist of a single GPU die and would have performance between the current GTX 680 and GTX 690, which is two GTX 680 dies on one card.

The move is likely to steal some thunder from AMD, who will try to take the performance crown back from NVIDIA. Several sources have said the card will materialize late next month with a price tag of $899. The name comes from the Titan supercomputer, which features 18,688 nodes utilizing NVIDIA's Tesla K20X GPU.

The GK110 die powers NVIDIA's enterprise Tesla video cards. The final die configuration will feature 2688 CUDA cores, an impressive number and over 1000 more than the GTX 680. Of course, this is all a rumor, though a lot of it does make sense. The card is likely utilizing chips that weren't quite up to par with the other Tesla chips as these cards have one SMX unit disabled.

I'm not a fan of rebadging GPUs, as you can see here with our AMD Radeon HD 8000M Series news, but it looks like NVIDIA have also pulled out their huge green rubber rebadging stamp, too. Le sigh.

NVIDIA are pushing new parts out to OEMs, with two being unveiled thus far: The GeForce GT 730M and GeForce 710M, there aren't many details on them at all, but AnandTech have used their magic powers to try and figure out what we should expect, as the picture above shows.

The 730M looks like a GK107-like rebadge, which we have now as the 640M, which supports Kepler-based tech such as TXAA, PCIe 3.0 and DisplayPort 1.2. This could end up being a 650M rebadge, but we won't know for a little while yet. The other part listed is the GeForce 710M which should be a GF117 rebadge, and should end up being a rehashed 620M. This chip doesn't support Kepler features such as PCIe 3.0, TXAA or resolutions above 2560x1600.

CES 2013 - AMD's new Radeon HD 8000M is something special for mobile computing, as its the first mobile GPU that is based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. These GPUs are built on the 28nm process and feature DirectX 11.1 support, as well as the cool AMD tech found in ZeroCore and Enduro.

The Radeon HD 8000M lineup will include 8500M models (384 stream processors, 650/1125MHz), 8600M series models (384 stream processors, 725/1125MHz), 8700 series models (384 stream processors, 850/1125MHz) and a higher-end 8700M that will feature 640 stream processors, 700MHz core and only uses GDDR5.

AMD have pulled their rubber rebadging stamp out of the 'why aren't we over this yet' cupboard, and are currently stamping rebrands of the HD 7000 family into the HD 8000 family to OEMs from top to bottom. Even the Radeon HD 8970 is a damn rebadge of the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition which sports 2048 stream processors, 1GHz core clock and 3GB of GDDR5 clocked at 6GHz, all sprinkled on a 384-bit bus.

CES 2013 - ASUS released the latest edition of its ARES Graphics Card line today and it, as usual, is a beast. The ROG ARES II is the fastest most powerful GPU available to date, and it looks almost as good as it preforms!

The ARES II features exclusive ASUS DIGI+ VRM and Super Alloy Power technologies for greater stability and product longevity. This GPU Monster is powered by two AMD Radeon HD 7970's, 6GB GDDR5, and is water cooled from the factory. Clocks are set at 1050MHz Base, 1100MHZ Boost, and 6600MHz Memory. Max resolution is set at 2560x1600 through a DVI connection.

ASUS has only manufactured 1000 of these beauties and each one is numbered for collect-ability. No word yet on pricing for the ARES II but with the previous ARES and MARS cards selling in the $1500 range, it is not far fetched to think the ARES II will be in that same range, if not higher.

Just days before the world reportedly ends, leaked details of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 8000M "Solar System" range of mobile GPUs have made their way onto the shores of the Internet.

The new mobile GPUs are set to launch for CES 2013, and will be based on the new Graphics CoreNext (GCN) micro-architecture. GCN supports DirectX 11.1, Enduro Technology and AMD ZeroCore power technology. Enduro is an NVIDIA Optimus-like tech which switches between discrete and integrated GPUs while the ZeroCore tech can completely power down GPUs when they're not needed.

Peering over the slides, we can see there is a new ASIC which covers three product lines - HD 8500M, HD 8600M and the HD 8700M. The sure-to-be-sweet silicon sports 384 GCN stream processors, a 128-bit memory interface that supports both GDDR5 and DDR3. The HD 8500M series sports GPU clock speeds of up to 650MHz, with the 8600M cranking it up to 775MHz. The 8700M series goes one better and sees clock speeds hitting 850MHz.

I'm sure you didn't see this one coming, did you? Neither did I, don't worry. Spanish site BitDreams.se has posted what they are claiming to be the specs on AMD's upcoming next-generation dual-GPU, the Radeon HD 8990.

The leak reports that we should expect the HD 8990 in Q2 2013, meaning it is not far away at all. The leaked roadmap unveils that there are two Radeon HD 8800 series GPUs to be shipped this quarter, and with just weeks left, if it did happen, it's most likely going to be a paper launch - if it happens at all.

Now that we've got the lower-end gear out of the way, let's get straight to that succulent GPU meat - the Radeon HD 8990 "Venus XTX" which will see two Radeon HD 8970s bound onto the single GPU. The card is teased as sporting a whopping 5.1 billion transistors, 5210 stream processors and 160 texture units per core. The HD 8990 is listed as featuring 48 ROPs per core, and two 384-bit buses. Memory should reach the dizzying heights of between 6GB and 12GB and should come factory clocked at 1250MHz. The GPU cores should be set at 950MHz if the leaked roadmap holds truth to it.

We've been sitting on the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series for a while now, and like anything else, that is set to change in the coming months. DigiTimes' latest report is that AMD plans to release their next-gen HD 8000 series in Q2 of 2013.

The company are currently going through a business reorganization in order to help their poor performance from the quarter just gone, according to DigiTimes' sources from the "upstream supply chain". DigiTimes reports that AMD were set to unveil their Radeon HD 8000 series at the end of the year to compete with NVIDIA, but pulled back.

The Chinese market is huge, and both companies want it - obviously. AMD's market share in the country has dropped to just 30%, and they're hoping that the launch of the next-gen GPUs will swell those numbers up considerably.