Graphics Cards - Page 252

Ah, RumorTT, it's my favorite part of the day. Recent rumbles are pointing toward NVIDIA launching its GEFORCE GTX 670 alongside their dual-Kepler-based GTX 690 graphics card. This comes from Fudzilla, who notes their sources are talking of a May 10 launch date for both GPUs.

We're just hours away from the official announcement of some sort at the GeForce LAN/NVIDIA Gaming Festival (NGF) in Shanghai, China, on the April 28. This is where we should see NVIDIA's dual GK104 GPU, the GTX 690. Fudzilla's sources are saying that the official release date is the 10th of May, and that the GTX 690 should see a partner in its launch in the form of the GTX 670.

Availability, that's always an important question with GPU launches. GTX 690 availability is said to be not great at all, with some partners receiving cards next week. We should have more information as this happens. More news as it happens.

It's hard to have enough screen real estate to do everything that we want. And gaming across multiple monitors helps to engage the player all the more. This is why AMD created Eyefinity. Moreover, this is why today PowerColor released the only HD 7870 graphics card that supports up to 6 monitors using Eyefinity technology.

The HD 7870 Eyefinity 6 supports up to 6 monitors via its six mini display ports onboard. The graphics card comes clocked with a 1000MHz core clock with a 1200MHz memory clock. It sports 2GB of memory on a 256-bit bus. And being a 7000 series card, it supports DirectX 11.1 so that all of the eye candy is available.

The full press release can be read below:

AMD have now announced that they won't be supporting Radeon HD 4000 series and below in Windows 8. Most people will read this and be shocked, but the GPUs are old now and Windows 8 by the time it comes out, will be considered a 2013 release.

Windows should ship with some form of support for legacy Radeon cards, but AMD themselves won't be providing future driver updates for those GPUs. AMD have made this quite clear in their press release:

We know Team Green are ready to launch their dual-GPU Kepler card, the GEFORCE GTX 690, but where are Team Red and their Radeon HD 7990? If current rumblings are to be believed, we should expect AMD to unveil the Radeon HD 7990 at Computex 2012 in Taipei.

This is only 6 weeks away, which means if NVIDIA drop the GTX 690 ball in between now and then, NVIDIA will have four weeks of people talking about their product, building hype and what not. But, it gives AMD four weeks to re-tweak their GPU and have it ready to open up a can of red whoop ass on NVIDIA, hopefully.

The HD 7990 is expected to sport two full HD 7970 GPUs onto a single PCB. It should also have 6GB of GDDR5 baked into it, as well as 4096 GCN cores, and the ability to run 6-screen Eyefinity setups right out of the box. We will be at Computex in force this year, and will have as much news as we can of this new Red Beast. Hopefully it'll punch all other GPUs in the nuts, again.

Never settle. That's AMD's motto for their new Radeon HD 7900M series of GPUs for notebooks. In terms of specs, the Radeon HD 7970M nearly meets what the desktop Radeon HD 7870 GPU, except for slightly lower GPU core clock speeds.

The HD 7970M sports 1280 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface which features 2GB of memory. Core clocks are at 850MHz, with 1200MHz (4.8GHz effective) GDDR5 memory clocks which push out 153.6GB/sec memory bandwidth.

The Radeon HD 7970M also features something called AMD Enduro Technology which "seamlessly powers down" the GPU when it's not required, to below even 1W. The HD 7970M should be seen baked into notebooks over the coming days.

There are some rumors floating around that Nvidia could be announcing the newest member of the Kepler architecture at GeForce Lan in Shanghai. With the arrival of crowbars to reviewers and a countdown to an announcement by Nvidia at that same LAN seems to lend credibility to this rumor, however, I wouldn't hold my breathe. We haven't had enough leaks quite yet.

Well, the first of many leaks can be seen above. This is the first picture of the yet unannounced GTX690. The GTX690 should either be a dual GK104 or possibly the GK110 chip that could feature 7 billion transistors. I would prefer it being the single, 7 billion transistor chip as dual chip cards seem to be plagued by more problems.

In the picture, you can see that the card is massive. It features a single PCB so since the fan is situated in the center, it follows that the chips, if a dual GPU card, are situated on either end of the PCB. Due to the angle of the picture, it's hard to say much more about the chip. Obviously it can be expected that it will be one beast of a card after what Kepler was able to do.

Something I've covered in my various editorials, that mobile SoC (system-on-a-chip) graphics performance will pass console level performance soon, and NVIDIA agrees with me. NVIDIA predicts mobile SoC graphics performance will surpass the Xbox 360 graphical capabilities by 2014. More so, mobile GPUs are expected to equal the graphics processing power of the Xbox 360 by next year.

NVIDIA provided a slide, which in usual fashion doesn't look like it makes a hell of a lot of sense, to Anandtech, highlighting how far graphics performance has come since 2001, and where they expect it to go by 2014. The solid lines in the chart are estimated performance, while the dotted lines represent trends.

The console line starts in 2001 with the release of the NVIDIA-powered Xbox, and continues with the ATI-powered Xbox 360 released in 2005. You can see it flatline as its released, as the hardware doesn't change. Mobile GPU is shown from 2007 with the release of the first iPhone and moves through to Tegra 2 and existing Tegra 3 parts. The solid green line are presumably NVIDIA GPUs throughout the years.

A new posting by Nvidia for one of its sessions at the upcoming GTC has some very interesting pieces of information in it. Mainly the fact that they are promoting "div[ing] into the features of the compute architecture for 'Kepler' - NVIDIA's new 7-billion transistor GPU." Yeah, 7 BILLION, which is just under double the GK104 chip that powers the GTX680.

Oh please let this be reality! As long as that isn't a typo, and yields are good, then it's very possible that this could power the rumored GTX690 instead of two GK104 chips. And, with the date of the conference, it's highly likely that we could see this chip next month. What price will it debut at? I'll put a bet at $1000.

The full text from the session posting is below in case NVIDIA removes it:

Team Green stamped down their whoop ass foot a few weeks ago when they launched their GEFORCE GTX 680, and now AMD are returning the favor by not only dropping prices on the HD 7000 series cards, but offering three free games for any purchase of the HD 79xx cards.

The name of this promotion is called "Three for Free", because, well, that's what it is. If you purchase a HD 7950 or 7970, you'll receive Dirt Showdown (when it drops in May), Nexuiz (again, in May) as well as Deus Ex: Human Revolution (as well as the Missing Link DLC pack), which hits in May too. If this is not enough, the offer lasts up until April 30th, and you have up until May 31st to download the respective keys to the games listed above.

On top of this, there are price drops on the 7000 series, with the HD 7970 dropping from $549 to $479, the HD 7950 drops from $449 to $399. On the mid-to-low-end range, we see the HD 7770 dropping $20 to $139. You have two weeks to act on this, so if you want to grab some Team Red hardware, some free games, and a new bunch of pricing, hit it up as soon as possible!

Palit have already launched their GEFORCE GTX 680 JetStream, but did you really think they'd go back to their man cave and continue gaming on their high-end GPUs and not work on anything else? Ha!

Now we have the new JetStream which sports 4GB of RAM. The new GTX 680 JetStream 4GB joins the 4GB ranks being made up by Gainward and their Phantom 4GB as well as Galaxy's GTX 680 4GB. This new extra RAM definitely comes in handy for those insane resolution and anti-aliasing that you can use, as well as the triple-monitor Surround Vision setups.

The new GEFORCE GTX 680 JetStream standard model with 2GB comes with core speeds of 1150MHz and 6.30GHz on the memory. The 4GB variant sticks to the NVIDIA reference clocks of 1056MHz and 6.00GHz for the core and memory, respectively. It will still use the 6-pin plus 8-pin PCIe connectors. The card itself looks quite sexy with three fans, too.

We previously posted regarding how it was unlikely that AMD would be implimenting any price drops on its HD 7000 series GPUs for a couple of reasons. Now KitGuru is reporting that they got a call from an insider and is claiming that AMD is preparing price drops from the 7970 down to the 7770.

The 7970 is AMD's current flagship card. At top overclocks it can compete toe-to-toe with the GTX 680. It currently, however, is priced around $50 more than the competitor. It is set to drop in price by up to $60. The 7950 is set to drop around $55 which will move it into a price zone that is a fair bit less than the GTX680. Nvidia still has nothing for that price spot.

The drops are supposed to continue all the way down the to 7770 which is set to receive a drop of around $15. Obviously, none of this is set in stone and could change over the next couple of weeks before these occur. Prices on the shelves could take a bit of time after the price drops for board partners.

More leaks from the all too common source of Chinese channels confirms that Nvidia has a dual-GPU GTX 690 in the works. This leak also gives some more detail on the specifications of the yet unannounced card. This card will likely be released shortly after AMD tries to steal the thunder back from Nvidia's GTX 680 with their HD 7990.

The upcoming card will be based on the GK104 silicon and require the juice of two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The card will utilize a PCI-E 3.0-compliant bridge chip to link the two cards together. Its display output configuration will comprise three DVI and one DisplayPort. Obviously power consumption is a common concern, but for the people laying down cash for a chip like this, it shouldn't be too ridiculous.

Nvidia is supposidly setting the PSU requirement at 650 watt+ which seems oddly low for such a beast (assumed) of a card. It sounds like the chips may be slightly down-clocked in order to reach this TDP and keep temperatures under control. It can be expected that all of the features of the 680 will be in the 690. More as it comes.

The wonderful GPU that is Kepler keeps on giving to Nvidia. This chip really was make or break for the company and they came through will an incredible graphics card that has really put the squeeze on Team Red. AMD has not been forced to drop prices as of yet due to the fact that Nvidia hasn't been able to pressure the lower market yet.

But that's all about to change. Nvidia is preparing to recycle the chips that couldn't make it as GTX 680s by turning them into the GTX 670 and 670 Ti. The GK104 that will be in the 670s will have one fewer SMX, bringing the total CUDA cores down to 1344. This should put it in the range of the 7950 and the former 580. The specs are as follows:

The new cards undercut the Radeon HD 7950 by $50-100, placing the product around $349-399. You should expect the announcement around Computex Taipei in May 2012.

SAPPHIRE is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to their Toxic-branded video cards, and it looks as though the SAPPHIRE HD 7970 Toxic is going to be no different, and maybe even step it up a bit when it comes to smashing the ball out of the park. The card comes with a resolution-busting 6GB of memory in 24 GDDR5 memory chips, 12 on each side.

In order to power the factory-overclocked "Tahiti" GPU from AMD, and 24 GDDR5 7 GT/s memory that takes some seriously strong VRM. Sapphire decided to implement an 8+3 phase power supply, which uses solid-state chokes, that don't whine under stress, as well as International Rectifier DirectFETs. The FRM draws power from two 8-pin PCIe connectors. Sapphire went a step further by implementing LEDs for each of the 8 vGPU phases, which gives a real-time indication of their individual loading. These LEDs can be seen through a window on top of the card, as pictured below.

The cooler is built from a large aluminum fin heatsink which draws heat from teh GPU and memory chips on the obverse side of the PCB. The FETs on the obverse side are cooled by additional heatsinks. From here, we have the memory chips on the reverse side of the PCB cooled by a metal back-plate. The heatsink makes use of four 8mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes, as well as a vapor-chamber plate. This is ventilated by two 80mm fans.

With the release of the kick-ass GTX 680 at a competitive price point, many thought, including me, that the HD 7970 would undergo a price cut to be more competitive. Let's be realistic: the GTX 680 beats the HD 7970 in almost every single benchmark, including being more efficient, at a lower price point. It's pretty hard to justify charging $50 more for a worse card.

Or is it? Again, let's be realistic. The GTX 680 can hardly be purchased anywhere and when it is in stock, it's bought out in a matter of hours. This was something the HD 7970 had trouble with as well up until a few weeks before the 680 launch. Then it suddenly got plenty of stock. So while the 680 can hardly be purchased anywhere, the HD 7970 has the luxury of being widely available.

So, there's a few conclusions that can be drawn from this. First, AMD thought Nvidia would continue their practice of pricing higher performing cards at a premium. Second, it could be that AMD can't afford to drop the price on the 7970. The silicon is a pretty complex chip, and as such is expensive.

Time for another rumor, so go ahead, get the salt out and throw some over your shoulder, and for good measure, find some wood and knock on it. Now that we're done with that, let's move onto the goods. We have what we believe to be the specifications for the Kepler based GK106. This chip should end up being a direct competitor to the HD 7950, HD 7870, GTX 560 Ti, GTX 560 Ti 448 and GTX 560.

The specifications are said to be as follows:

The card is expected to land in Q3 of 2012 which is still a fair distance off but could be just in time for the summer upgrade season. If it performs anywhere like the GTX 680, we should have another good card on our hands. It will be interesting to see if they price it at a competitive price like they did with the GTX 680.

According to 'Gibbo' on the Overclockers.co.uk forums, we should expect the new NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 670Ti and GEFORCE GTX 670 to launch late-April, or early-May. These two GPUs will be placed into price segments aimed at AMD's Radeon range of GPUs.

The GTX 670Ti will replace NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580, and take on the HD 7950 3GB. The GTX 670 on the other hand, replaces the GTX 570 and should be slightly faster, too. The GTX 560Ti and 560 are not expected to be replaced with 600-series GPUs until much later into 2012.

The low-end 520/550 cards will reportedly be rebranded into the 600-series, where we should expect the usual same card, re-boxed as 600-series GPUs. Gibbo also mentions the dual-GPU NVIDIA beast, which we should expect to arrive as the GEFORCE GTX 690, and "can be released when NVIDIA desire to do so". The roadmap that Gibbo is coming from says that the GTX 680 is the fastest single-GPU card, but a faster single-GPU card is expected later this year.

It looks like we're not quite done with news about the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680. As our review showed, the card is pretty amazing and is still efficient while being amazing. Pictures have surfaced of a Galaxy-brand GTX 680 which is cooled by a single-slot cooler. This is made possible by the amazing efficiency of the new Kepler architecture.

195w TDP is pretty high to be handled by a single-slot cooler, so frequencies should be expected to be reference or below. This device certainly will be nice for smaller, mid-tower PCs or for a cramped PC in which you want to run SLI. No release date or specifications have been released. For all we know, this could be a prototype that never sees the market.

Earlier on today we met up with the folks from Palit and Gainward at their Taipei headquarters to discuss all things NVIDIA and GeForce since they now (finally) have a new GPU model to pimp and sell, that of course being the GeForce GTX 680.

During our meeting someone (we never actually got introduced) walked into our meeting and dropped off a second video card, besides the first Palit one we were looking about - but that Palit model needs to stay quiet a little longer yet, we may have already said too much.

Anyway, back on topic - what the man dropped off was a Gainward GTX 680 Phantom video card. On first inspection I asked if it was passively cooled, quickly realizing that would be near on impossible due to the fact that the GTX 680 is a high-end GPU part and generates a lot of heat. On closer inspection we saw that the Phantom actually includes two cooling fans built inside or at least just below the massive radiator / heatpipe design which covers the full top surface of the video card.

Kepler truly was a make-or-break launch for NVIDIA. With their competiton, AMD, squeezing out a full top to bottom line up before NVIDIA could even manage one launch, they had to have something wonderful and able to compete with AMD's offerings. Enter Kepler. This card has been roughly four years in the making. Rumors have been flying rampant regarding its projected performance.

Finally, launch day arrived (today). We were the first to publish a comprehensive review of the new card, and what a card it is. It's faster and more efficient than AMD's top card, the 7970, and it even overclocks better, at least with extreme cooling solutions. The launch was a little bit messy, what, with us not getting a card and stuff, but overall, NVIDIA had a successful launch of the GTX 680. So much of a great launch, that the CEO sent out an email company wide. You can see the email below the line.

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