Graphics Cards - Page 250

The thrifty among our readers will be happy to hear that the AMD Radeon HD 7850 has seen another price cut, bringing the retail price for the 2GB version down to $189. Along with that cut, the rest of the product line continues to trend downwards as the series ages, the process matures, and competition heats up between AMD and NVIDIA.

Anandtech has produced the nice chart you see above. The chart shows how the prices of AMD's offerings have declined continually since launch by comparing launch price, spring MSRP, late summer MSRP, and fall retail price. AMD has changed from quoting MSRP to quoting retail price as that usually is $10 lower than MSRP.

While the prices on the HD 7000 series started out really high, as of late they've become extremely reasonable due to the continual price cuts that AMD has been implementing. With the HD 8000 series due out early next year, prices will likely continue to fall on the HD 7000 series, though probably not until the holidays or just past.

NVIDIA have pushed forward something called the Green Light program, which is a certification process that is designed to ensure that GPUs meet specific requirements, reports the Bright Side of News.

The Green Light program requires vendors to send in their board designs to NVIDIA, where they wait for their approval from the GPU maker. NVIDIA will check that the design meets their noise, power, voltage and heat numbers - and if it meets them, the card is approved. If not, it is declined and they'll have to resubmit.

What happens if a partner doesn't submit their card for approval? Well, they can have their GPU warranty and BIOS support removed, or worse - they could have their allocation of GPUs from NVIDIA cut down, or stopped completely.

Here I was thinking we wouldn't see much toward this time of the year on the GPU landscape, but AMD are already close enough to the launch of their Radeon HD 8800 series with sources now leaking out some information on silicon that is codenamed "Oland".

Oland is built on the same 28nm process, throwing in 3.4 billion transistors onto a die-area of around 270 mm². If the news is solid, we're looking at the Radeon HD 8870 "Oland XT" outperforming its predecessor, the HD 7870 in both performance per watt, and cost-performance ratios.

If the chart is right, the HD 8870 could begin offering performance close to that of today's high-end offerings, which would really shake up the market. The HD 8870 clocks in at 1050MHz, with 1100MHz PowerTune Boost frequency, with its little brother the HD 8850 clocked at 925MHz with 975MHz boost frequency. Both SKUs have memory clocking in at 6GHz, providing an insane 192GB/s of memory bandwidth - even at a proposed $199 price for the HD 8850.

NVIDIA has had to push back its launch schedule due to troubles with the manufacturing processes. Originally, Kepler was supposed to launch in 2011, however, it is still being launched to this day and we've almost hit 2013. No new architecture will be produced until Maxwell in 2014.

Maxwell is an interesting animal. It will be a 20nm chip, which isn't a big deal. However, it is being designed so that it can be manufactured at GlobalFoundries, IBM, Samsung and TSMC. This should allow NVIDIA to ensure a large enough supply, or make a change if one of the fabs is having process issues.

The GTX 700 series should be a similar launch schedule to what has so far occurred with the GTX 600 series. This means we won't see anything until March 2013 or later. But the good news is that the new chip should between 25-30% higher performance and power efficiency. The Kepler refresh will have to compete with AMD's Sea Islands, so the real battle will take place in 2014 with Maxwell taking on Sea Islands.

It's about time that someone went and made a 7990. We've been hearing that AMD has them coming for a long time now, but they have failed to deliver. That is, until today. PowerCooler has announced the world's first dual-Tahiti GPU and is calling it the 7990. Does this mean that we may finally start seeing them from other manufacturers?

For right now, PowerCooler is billing this card as the first and only 7990 in the world. The specifications are pretty beefy and really provide what everyone was expecting. The Devil 13 HD7990 has default settings at 925MHz engine clocks and 1375MHz memory clocks and sports 6GB of GDDR5.

If you're looking to buy a new AMD graphics card, the time could not be better. AMD has again dropped prices on its high-end cards so that they are more competitive with NVIDIA's latest offering. With the NVIDIA GTX 660 Ti finally outed by the company, AMD wants to position its cards in places where they can compete.

The street prices have dropped accordingly:

The 7970 does not see a price drop in this latest round, the both the 78XX and 7950 have had their prices lowered. The 3GB 7950 price drop brings its price down to a level similar to the GTX 660. In tests, a 2GB 7950 and 660 Ti were about 50/50. The 3GB version will likely pull out a couple of extra wins, and with the new pricing, should win business.

Contrary to rumors flying around the internet, Sapphire has not cancelled the 6GB 7970 Toxic graphics card they produce. It seems that because one major reseller put "discontinued" instead of "out-of-stock", or something similar, enthusiasts freaked out that they wouldn't be able to get the super fast card.

At Gamescon, however, Sapphire has a large booth and sitting right in the middle as the pride and joy of the booth was the 6GB 7970 Toxic card. KitGuru asked Bill Donnelly for a little more information regarding the rumor flying around the web. The short answer? It's not discontinued, just facing production constraints.

The red camp fires back. AMD has just announced an updated version of the 7950 in the same vein as the 7970 GHz edition update. What this means is that the card is getting faster base clocks as well as a new feature that boosts the core clock when the TDP isn't fully loaded. With AMD and NVIDIA nearly matched on performance and AMD losing in power efficiency, they've decided to go for the best performance-per-dollar.

So, aside from throwing power consumption out the window, what else have they changed? Not much really. The new base clock is up to 850MHz from the original 800MHz. Boost clock speeds allow the clock speed to jump to 925MHz. The reason power usage will jump is they have increased the core voltage to support these speeds.

With the 7970, it wasn't too bad as they had top bin parts. With the 7950, they are dealing with either broken chips or chips that wouldn't hit clock speed requirements. Because of this, AMD is using 1.25v which is higher than the 7970GHzE's 1.218v. It will be interesting to see how this increase affects benchmark results.

NVIDIA is having lots of trouble with the launch of the Kepler series. It seems as though information about every single card leaked out before the actual card was released. We previously told you about the GTX 660 Ti specifications and launch date, and have now provided a review for your viewing pleasure.

This time we bring news of the GTX 650, a new card that will be aimed at the sub-$200 market and launched in time for back-to-school shopping. It's important for NVIDIA to get a Kepler card into this price range as AMD completely controls that segment of the market right now. This market segment is also where most of the money is made.

The GTX 650 is rumored to launch on September 17 and will be packing a chip based on the 28 nm GK107 ASIC, which is based upon Kepler. The chip will utilize 384 CUDA cores, a 128-bit memory bus, and 1GB of memory. A quick guess at performance based upon CUDA core count would put the card competing with the AMD 7770.

A report is claiming to know the launch date and specifications for the upcoming NVIDIA GTX 660 Ti. Nothing has been confirmed by NIVIDIA, so for now it will be treated as a rumor. According to the latest data scored by SweClockers, the GTX 660 is nearly identical to the GTX 670 and the launch is only about 3 weeks away.

The GTX 660 Ti is said to be a 28 nm GK104 GPU with 1,344 CUDA cores enabled, exactly the same as the GTX 670. In fact, the 660 Ti is said to have the exact same clock speeds for both the core and memory as the 670. The memory remains identical at 2GB, as well. It turns out that the only difference is that the memory bus is reduced to 192-bit, down from 256-bit on the 670.

This change will yield a 25% lower bandwidth for memory. It's likely to be arranged with four chips using 32-bit wide paths each and four other chips sharing two 32-bit wide paths. According to the report, the card will launch on August 16. Coincidentally, this is the first public day of the GamesCom event held in Cologne, Germany. This will likely serve as the launchpad for the product.

If you've been saving your money patiently waiting for the next big thing to come out of AMD, you may just get a chance to save a bit longer. Reports are coming in that the dual-GPU card based upon the 7970 silicon may not be released until late-August. This is directly opposed to other reports that it could be available this month.

It's not fully clear why the card has been delayed. AMD certainly needs to challenge the GTX 690's performance and hopefully win the performance crown back, so it's not like AMD is liking having this delay. If they were ahead, then a delay like this could be the result of them trying to keep it in reserve as a later challenge to NVIDIA.

One possible reason for the delay could be due to a shortage of PEX8747 PCIe bridge chips by PLX. These chips have been reported to be experiencing a shortage and are needed at the heart of every dual-GPU card, including the GTX 690. Another issue could be AMD is trying to work out how to provide the best price-performance and performance-Watt ratios.

NVIDIA have released the tech demo for their latest and greatest GeForce GTX 600 series of GPUs dubbed 'A New Dawn'. It features the ever-so-gorgeous Dawn, looking (or is that rendered?) better than ever.

I don't have any GTX 600 series cards myself, but if I did you'd be hearing my personal thoughts on it. But, The Tech Report, er, reports that that on their test rig, which is powered by SLI GTX 680's at 2560x1600 looks "incredible".

You can check it out yourself by downloading it here (a shave under 800MB). I've heard it runs on GTX 500 series cards, so let us know how you go, and what you think of NVIDIA's 'A New Dawn'.

NVIDIA's mid-range of GeForce GPUs have always been the most popular, recently we've seen the GTX 460 and 560 cards soar through gamers' wish lists, as well as the Ti variants. But, with the Kepler-based GPUs, we haven't seen a mid-range card released.

According to Sweclockers, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti will arrive in mid-August carrying an MSRP of $299. This will make it a direct threat to AMD's Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition, which just received a new price last week. The GTX 660 Ti would be based on the same core as the GTX 670, the GK104 core architecture, with 7 SMX units enabled giving us a total of 1344 CUDA cores.

Memory specifications, and clock speeds are expected to be changed also. The GTX 670 sports two different choices in memory, either 2GB or 4GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit memory bus. The GTX 660 Ti will reportedly put on offer, 1.5GB or 3GB of GDDR5, on a 192-bit memory bus.

If video cards these days weren't built crazily enough, Gigabyte's newest kid on the block sure is. Gigabyte's upcoming Super Overclock version of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 is looking like it'll stand out from the crowd, sporting five 40mm fans mounted on top of a triple-slot radiator.

Gigabyte's GV-R797SO-3GD is surely going to be one of the hottest cards (and not in the temperature sense) when it hits, sporting a Tahiti XT-based GPU running a 384-bit memory bus backed up by 2048 stream processors. The overclocked model comes with a core clock of 1080MHz, up from the stock clock of 925MHz, and 3GB of GDDR5 memory clocking in at 5500MHz. Output-wise we find ourselves being offered two mini DisplayPorts, one gold-plated HDMI port, a single dual-link DVI port, meaning the card is capable of running four displays simultaneously.

Gigabyte's SOC card uses the five fans mounted at the top of the GPU to "pul" the heated air off the radiator, which the company says reduces "hotspots" on the bottom of the card due to minimal airflow created with traditional cooler designs. What this means is that the HD 7970 SOC is totally silent below 30C, with Gigabyte's Anti-Turbulence Pull Airflow System hitting 53dB at 57C, almost 9dB quieter than a standard HD 7970 running at 64C.

It looks like Team Red have just taken a pair of scissors to the pricing of some of their high-end Radeon HD 7000-series GPUs. Three of the cards have just received a price cut, with the new pricing to go into effect on Monday morning with online retailers. Here are some details:

But, it seems that a few online retailers are already doing these AMD GPUs cheap. Newegg only charges $289.99 for their cheapest HD 7870, and just $339.99 for the cheapest HD 7950. So one would think that this "new" pricing from AMD, is not that "new", and that maybe something else might happen.

Maybe a larger variety of cards, from more graphics card makers will receive cuts thanks to AMD's cutting of the pricing from the top? Whichever way you look at it, price cuts are win-win for customers.

AMD's dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 has been quite elusive until now, but "New Zealand" is now rumored to be hitting sometime late this month. It will sport two Tahiti XT GPUs and 6GB of GDDR5 memory, with special editions of the 7990 reaching an amazing 12GB of RAM on-board.

VR-Zone cites some of their sources saying that the boards are being sampled right now, with it all ramping up to a product launch before the end of the month. Pricing is one of the details that has been left out for now, and AMD are known to change pricing at the last minute.

Do you think we need a Radeon HD 7990? So there can be more broken 3DMark records? The only time these bad boys would really stretch their legs is for multi-monitor gaming, or when games really ramp up their graphics engines in the near-future, hopefully. I would love to see what one of the 12GB cards could do, CrossFired up with another HD 7990 12GB card, on 6 screens, oh the pants-wetting would be glorious.

Hazzan, an Indonesian overclocker has broken the world record for overclocking graphics cards, using 3DMark 11. Hazzan used a 4-way GEFORCE GTX 680 setup, pushing a score of P33190, 39 points ahead of the previous record.

In order to get the record-breaking score, Hazzah had to go to some pretty serious lengths, as you can see from the pictures. He stood over his PC with an open bottle of liquid nitrogen (as you do), and kept pouring some in every few minutes or so, just to keep those pesky temps down. His entire rig consists of:

Creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, has slammed NVIDIA for their lack of drivers/support in a public presentation. During the talk, Torvalds called NVIDIA "the single worst company we have ever dealt with" and ended it in a positive note with "NVIDIA: F*** YOU!!", I'm sure you know what are behind those *'s.

Torvalds made the colorful comments during a speech at the Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, Finland. Nearling the end of his hour-long speech, he was asked by one of the attendees about NVIDIA's hardware support and lack of open-source drive enablement/documentation, where he mentioned those colorful words. Torvalds did start off by stating that NVIDIA is an exception to Linux support, rather than the rule in terms of their lack of friendliness towards open-source drivers, and the Linux community.

Then things get better, Torvalds said he was happy to publicly point them out and their problems, where his statements toward NVIDIA continued. He said that NVIDIA is "one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers", continuing with "NVIDIA has been the single worst company we have ever dealt with". He ended his NVIDIA tirade with "NVIDIA: F*** YOU!" and flipped them off toward the camera.

In addition to showing off AMD's future roadmaps, Mark Papermaster showed off a cool triple-fan professional graphics card called the FirePro W9000. The card is detailed in the slide shown below and is meant to be a professional version of the 7970. Curiously enough, however, is the fact that the card he held up and the card in the slide appear very different.

Cyril Kowaliski of TechReport noticed the difference as well and put a call into AMD's Dave Erskine to get an answer. Erskine would only say that it was a "dual-GPU product that will be released later this year." Taking a good educated guess, I would say that the card is most likely a 7970x2 (7990?), or in other words, two 7970 chips on one PCB.

After all, AMD has to compete with NVIDIA's dual-Kepler beast, the GTX 690. AMD has been making dual-GPU consumer cards for something like 4 generations now (3870x2) and were rumored to be debuting one at Computex. That debut never occurred, but it seems unlikely that they wouldn't produce a dual-7970 card. The release time frame also indicates that it should be of the Tahiti flavor.

AMD has just announced the immediate availability of the FirePro W600. The FirePro W600 is the first professional-level graphics card to released by AMD that leverages the 28nm manufacturing process along with the Graphics Core Next GPU architecture. This card is designed to be used for large, dynamic screens that are easily updated with new content.

"Whether we are checking flight times at the airport or watching the latest ads on massive screens in city squares, digital signage has quickly become an important and ubiquitous part of our lives," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD Graphics. "To enable these displays, the digital signage industry demands technology that can be regularly refreshed with new, feature-rich content. With the launch of the AMD FirePro™ W600 professional graphics card, AMD is helping advance the digital display wall industry by providing suppliers and developers with impressive display density, performance and exceptional value."

There are many new screens being built that are leveraging the latest in HD LED, LCD and plasma technologies. These screens, in turn, are being installed together to create giant video walls. The AMD W600 was designed to power these huge, multi-monitor displays which are often used for advertising and video conferencing.