Graphics Cards - Page 251

We have been expecting to see NVIDIA's successor to its Kepler GPU for some time now, and this morning images were leaked on VideoCards.com that are said to be the first Maxwell architecture GPUs off the line. Although a but blurry, the GPU's are clearly visible, but something unexpected lies below the surface.

The GM107-400 and GM107-300 pictured above both feature the same CUDA cores found in the GK106 chip but utilize the memory bus of the GK107 which shrinks the die by about 30-percent. This also allows the cards to consume significantly less power, so much so that the GeForce GTX 750 cards featuring the GM107-300 will not require any power connector on the board.

The GM107-300 is built on a 28nm process with a die size of 156mm square. It features 768 CUDA cores with a 128-bit memory bus. The GM107-400 is also built on a 28nm process and has a die size of 156mm square, but differs with 960 CUDA cores. Both chips feature a TDP of about 75 watts with the GM107-300 variant being a little cooler. The GM107-300 is slated to be featured in the GeForce GTX 750 while the GM107-400 will find its way into the Ti variant of the same card.

Sapphire Technology has announced the R7 250 Ultimate video card, a passively cooled video card based on the AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. No mechanical moving parts and a passive heat pipe and heat sink cooler that is quiet and fanless creates a great possibility of new video card designs, as demonstrated by Sapphire.

The video card has a core speed of 800MHz with 1GB of DDR5 memory, with Sapphire claiming it's the fastest passively cooled 1280bit GPU currently available. AMD included support for up to three monitors, 4K ultra-high-definition, an HDMI 1.4a port, dual-link DVI port, and DisplayPort 1.2 port.

DirectX 11.1 support is provided and the card is Microsoft Windows 8-compatible, as AMD and Sapphire wanted to ensure latest software is supported.

The New Year is here, but where are my New GPUs from NVIDIA? Well, it looks like they - yes, they, plural - could be very close. VideoCardz.com is reporting that we should expect two new high-end GPUs from NVIDIA: the GeForce GTX TITAN Black Edition, and the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 790.

Starting with the GeForce GTX TITAN Black Edition, which should be the same GPU found on the GTX 780 Ti, but it would feature higher double precision computing, in other words: more CUDA cores. We should see this GPU arrive with 6GB of VRAM on board, twice as much as the GTX 780 Ti features, something that is quite important to NVIDIA these days with 4K here.

We should expect the GTX TITAN Black Edition to feature 2880 CUDA cores, 240 TMUs, and 48 ROPS. The price on the GPU will be around $999, and we should hear more information on it shortly.

This morning MSI officially announced the release of its mid-grange Radeon R7 260 1GD5 OC video card to the public. The new GPU is a very budget friendly entry into the 4K gaming space, and is equipped with AMD TrueAudio technology for an immersive sound experience like any other.

The R7 260 1GD5 OC video card features a large 100mm fan that provides excellent cooling while keeping the sound levels at a minimum even when gaming. The heat exchange is assisted by dual heat pipes and an over sized heat sink that helps keep frame-rates up. Additionally, the GPU features MSI's exclusive Afterburner technology which supports core voltage adjustment technology and can be overclocked by up to 32.4% using the popular Afterburner overclocking utility. The core frequency can even reach up to 1.35GHz with just air-cooling. Enthusiasts can also use the Afterburner APP on their Android / iOS handheld devices to monitor and overclock their video cards.

CES 2014 - Intel's Thunderbolt 2 is widely considered the data connection of the future, and rightfully so as nothing else comes close to its transfer speeds. The protocol is so fast that companies can connect GPUs externally to devices such as laptops to give them a boost when needed.

Silverstone was showing off its XG2 Station, a Thunderbolt 2 External GPU housing designed in partnership with ASUS at the 2014 CES. The XG2 housed a AMD Radeon 7970 and small form factor power supply along with an ASUS designed main board that provided the Thunderbolt to PCIe connectivity. Unfortunately we did not get to demo the device, and no word was given on if or when we might see the XG2 Station hit the retail market.

We know that by leveraging AMD's so far impressive Mantle technology, DICE can squeeze up to 45% more performance out of Battlefield 4. But with a gaming market focused on first-person shooters (FPS), what can AMD's technology do for other genres, such real-time strategy (RTS) games?

Well, there's a game called Nitrous, which uses AMD's Mantle programming tool to speed up the communication between the CPU and GPU. This increase in communication sees the on-screen unit count climb from the usual 50-70 units, to around 5,000 units. These 5,000 units aren't just mindless pieces of robots on your screen, but they can be AI- or physics-driven entities.

Dan Baker, Oxide founder and previous Graphics Lead on Civilization V, has said: "It's a difference of at least an order of magnitude. Take the most complex scene you've ever seen in StarCraft II and multiply it by 10."

CES 2014 - VisionTek has just unveiled its latest high-end GPU and its features and price will surprise you. The new CryoVenom is based on a Radeon R9 290 and is fitted with a custom-built water cooling block that is said to offer a cooling performance increase of up to 38-percent.

VisionTek says that the custom liquid cooling block allows the Radeon R9 290 to be overclocked by as much as 24-percent, something that is just not possible with air coolers which have trouble just keeping the card at operating temperatures at stock clocks. Sweetening the deal, the CryoVenom R9 290 emits under 10dB of noise, ensuring for the most quiet Radeon R9 290 experience available on the market today!

Not only is the VisionTek CryoVenom R9 290 faster, cooler, and quieter, it's cheaper as well. With other R9 290 GPUs retailing for as much as $700, VisionTek has managed to offer the CryoVenom R9 290 for just $550. The card features a nickle plated block with acrylic top plate and fittings for standard G-1/4 fittings. For anyone looking for a liquid cooled R9 solution, this is the card for you!

CES 2014 - NVIDIA was showing off an amazing Origin Genesis PC that was heavily customized, pumping out Project CARS onto three 65-inch 4K TVs with 4-way GeForce GTX Titans.

Project CARS is one of the best-looking games being developed, with Slightly Mad Studios' coding abilities being shown off at CES 2014. It shows that Project CARS scales unbelievably well, all the way up to 12K (if that's even a thing) - or 4K Surround as NVIDIA would put it. The four GTX Titan's are going to cost you $4000 on their own, so imagine the total cost of this PC and the TVs... yes, it's for the PC master race, that's for sure.

As Google edges closer to the consumer release of its Glass headset, the search giant has unveiled some brand guidelines for developers. Google is trying to maintain control over the way Glass is treated by third-party companies, in the way of its marketing and branding.

For example, Google wants the "G" in Glass to be capitalized, and that the term is never possessive or plural. This means that the search giant won't allow "Glasses" or "Glass's", which might get annoying, fast. Apple has been here, done that, where it removed "the" before its iPhone, iPad, and iPod products. Another example of walking the fine wearable walk with Glass, is that you should never have the word "Glass" in its name.

It provide an example, "Glass Cat Facts" and "Glassy Cat Photos" are not accepted, but "Cat Facts for Glass" is acceptable. Google also wants to see developers using #throughglass when sharing Glass content, which it says is for better "discoverability and aggregation". As for e-mails, it wants to see users use "Sent through Glass".

CES 2014 - Razer has just unveiled its first foray into the fitness tracking smartwatch world at CES 2014, by introducing the Razer Nabu. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said: "We are calling it a cross between a smartwatch and a fitness band. It's a wearable device focused on helping you live smarter."

Razer's Nabu is a mashup of the traditional fitness tracking band, and the latest smartwatches. Nabu features two notification screens, one that displays the usual watch face, with the opposite side displaying wellness data and smartphone notifications. Nabu tracks your steps walked, distance traveled, and it will monitor your sleeping patterns, too.

The gaming peripheral maker suggests a battery life of around 7-10 hours, and is rain and splash proof. The Nabu is available to developers right now at a cost of $49, but this price should increase considerably when it reaches consumers.

Today Sapphire Technology unveiled a new variant of its R9 270X GPU. The new R9 290X Dual-X 4GB GPU features the same specifications of its previous counterpart, except the new 4GB model features double the RAM. Sapphire says that they have updated the card with 4GB of RAM to meet Battlefield 4 recommended specs.

The R9 270X Dual-X 4GB features 4GB of GDDR5 RAM that has been clocked in at 5.6GHz across a 256-bit wide interface and is capable of cranking out a bandwidth of 179GB/s. The card is a non-reference design, and features Sapphire's Dual-X cooling solution which helps the card remain budget friendly while managing to keep things cool. The new card is expected to retail between $220 and $230.

The first video cards from the Club 3D '14Series will be the Radeon R9 270 and 270X, and should be an affordable product for PC users and gamers looking for a full-HD 1080p gaming experience.

The '13Series was introduced by Club 3D earlier in the year as an extension to its PokerSeries gaming cards - but the launch of R7 and R9 chipsets left Club 3D scrambling to upgrade. The '13Series was designed for system integrators and PC users looking for an added boost with a second GPU in their workstations - and the '14Series promises even better performance:

Club 3D Radeon R9 270 specs:

If you were holding off on pulling the trigger on that fancy new Mantle-capable AMD Radeon R9 290X, this news is just for you. According to "reliable sources" of VR-Zone, AMD is planning on releasing a new dual-GPU based on two Hawaii XT cores - the same core used in the R9 290X.

The dual-GPU has a unique codename: "Vesuvius", which is the only active volcano in Europe, and is located in the east coast of the Bay of Naples, in southern Italy. There's not much known about the card, but there are some questions: the R9 290X has had power issues, and gets pretty hot as it is, so what would AMD do with two of these cores on the single PCB?

We're talking about some serious horsepower here, which is going to generate lots of heat, which will require a more than formidable cooling setup. Exciting times ahead, I'm looking forward to what AMD can show us in the coming months.

Sapphire has had a long standing history of providing high-performing products as well as providing tools to make those products perform to the extreme. The company's latest R9 series of GPUs is not different and today Sapphire announced that it has released a new BIOS and Flashing Tool, that will help increase the performance of its R9 290 GPU.

Usually overclocking a Sapphire GPU is as simple as loading up the TriXX utility and adjusting clocks until things stabilize, but in the case of the R9 290 GPU. Its performance is capped by system as its temperature rises, and this is due to the way AMD engineered the Hawaii chip to operate. The newly released BIOS will allow the R9 290 to operate under a new fan profile, which will limit maximum fan speed to 47-percent while increasing performance and reducing noise. Head over to the source links below to download the new BIOS and Flashing Utility!

When it comes to video cards designed for supercomputing, it does not get much better than AMDs new FirePro 10000 video card. The GPU features 12GB of RAM, and is optimized for use in big-data high-performance computing environments. Featuring full support for PCI Express 3.0 and the OpenCL compute programming language, this card is made for some serious number crunching.

"Our compute application customers asked for a solution that offers increased memory to support larger data sets as they create new products and services," said David Cummings, senior director and general manager, Professional Graphics, AMD. "In response, we're announcing the AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition video card to meet that additional memory demand with support for OpenCL and high-end compute and graphics technologies."

"AMD is proving again to be a key player in providing outstanding 3D graphics and GPGPU compute solutions based on the OpenCL Khronos Group standard for the industry with the announcement of the new AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB video card," said Nicolas Duny, VP R&D Technologies, Dassault Systèmes. "AMD is an industry innovator by responding to our customers' needs with cutting edge technology. The AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB card will be a welcome addition to the market and to our customers."

Ever since AMD released its new Hawaii-based R9 290X and R9 290 graphics cards, users and reviewers have been reporting slower than advertised performance. This is mainly due to the way the new cards handle performance scaling. Normally a GPU will boost the clock speed to a guarantee a minimum level of performance, but the new R9 cards actually scale back the clock based on CPU temperature.

The fluctuating performance numbers is partially caused by variability in fan speeds when the card starts heating up. The reference speed is 2650 RPM for the R9 290 and 2200 RPM for the 290X in quiet mode. These speed's are enough to provide adequate cooling for the CPUs, but R9 290 and R9 290X cards from AMD's partners are varying in how fast their fans spin. Since all R9 290 and R9 290x cards on the market are reference design, this is a bit odd, but AMD has taken care of the issue in a new driver update.

A recent update to AMD's Catalyst Control Center has apparently fixed the fan speed issue and performance numbers are said to be back up to promised levels. The latest AMD CCC update can be downloaded right here at TweakTown by heading over to the downloads section. We want to know if your Radeon R9 290 or 290X have experienced slower than advertised performance, and if the driver update fixed this issue for you. Leave a comment below to let us know.

Earlier this month we got our first look at NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780 Ti GPU when Anthony Garreffa attended NVIDIA's press event in Montreal Canada, and earlier this morning we saw official pricing and availability numbers released from NVIDIA. Now just a few hours later, we are learning that the GTX 780 Ti may be faster than anyone ever expected.

A member of the XtremeSystems forums posted earlier today, what he claims to be benchmarking results of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti from the 3DMark 11 benchmark suite. If true, the results are shocking to say the least. The GTX 780 Ti appears to not only be faster than AMD's recently released R9 290X, but it is much faster than NVIDIA's own GTX TITAN. Making this more remarkable, the GTX 780 Ti is only priced at $649, which is $350 less than its bigger brother the TITAN.

Whether or not the leak is a fake, I will leave up to you, but I would like to recant my previous statement that the R9 290X is the Titan Killer, and change things to state that the GTX 780Ti is in fact the Titan Killer. We will see the new GTX 780 Ti edition release to the public on November 7th.

Just over one week ago, Anthony Garreffa was at an event hosted by NVIDIA in Montreal Canada where he got the first look at NVIDIA's newest GPU, the GeForce GTX 780Ti. At the time, we did not know much about the new GPU other than it was based on the Kepler architecture, and that it would launch in the coming weeks.

Today NVIDIA announced that the new GeForce GTX 780Ti will release to the public on November 7th at an MSRP of just $699. This new GPU's aggressive pricing has caused the company's other mid to high-end GPUs to drop in pricing with the GTX 780 slipping to $499 and the GTX 770 set to lower to just $329 on October 29th. NVIDIA says that it has added the GTX 780Ti to its top-tier holiday bundle as well which includes a free copy of Batman: Arkham Origins, Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, plus $100 off a SHIELD purchase.

This morning AMD released its highly anticipated flagship GPU, the Radeon R9 290X. The new R9 290X is claimed by AMD to be the "Ultimate GPU for a new era in PC Gaming," and is said to deliver breathtaking performance while retaining an affordable pricing point. If you want to skip this news post and see how the 290X stacks up, just head over to Shawn Baker's review of the new flagship.

The AMD R9 290X features the company's new Hawaii processor and is based on the Graphics Core Next architecture, which AMD says gives it unrivaled advantages over the competition. The new GPU features 2,816 stream processors, a engine clock up to 1GHz, and 4GB of GDDR5 memory. When you combine that with a 5Gbs memory clock, 320GB/s memory bandwidth you get a processing power of 5.6 Teraflops in a single GPU.

"As the pinnacle of our new AMD Radeon R9 Series graphics cards, the AMD Radeon R9 290X GPU embodies AMD's leadership as the ultimate graphics solution for an exceptional gaming experience, affirming that Radeonâ„¢ is gaming," said Matt Skynner, general manager and corporate vice president, AMD Graphics Business Unit. "The formidable combination of Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, Mantle and AMD TrueAudio technology raises the bar for breathtaking audio and graphics, and powerful performance, giving enthusiasts an unprecedented gaming experience."

This has been the week of AMD R-Series GPU launches, and Sapphire Technology does not want to be left out of the party. Today the company announced the launch of its first two lines of AMD R-Series video cards. Sapphire is introducing two lines with three models each today which include the R9 280X TOXIC Edition, R9 280X Vapor-X edition, R9 280X Dual-X edition and the R9 270X TOXIC, R9 270X Vapor-X, R9 270 Dual-X edition.

The R9 280X TOXIC Edition features Sapphire's new Tri-X Cooler design which utilizes three airfoil section fans in conjunction with 10mm heat pipes to deliver unmatched cooling performance. The GPU features 3GB of GDDR5 memory and supports Direct X 11.2. Resolutions up to 2560x1440 are supported and 4K displays can be utilized via a built-in HDMI 1.4a port.

Sapphire's R9 280X Vapor-X edition is a slightly toned down version of the R9 280X TOXIC, and features vapor-chamber cooling. This cooling solution provides a more quiet but efficient method thermal dissipation that allows you to game at max while keeping the ambient noise low. Additionally a 280X Dual-X cooler edition has been announced that features the two Aerofoil fans, and heat pipe technology.