Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 264

We all knew it was coming with a bunch of rumors flying through the internet, but now it has been 100% confirmed: ASUS has given up their ROG brand for Radeon graphics cards by introducing their new AREZ brand.

AREZ is derived by Ares, the Greek god of War, with ASUS explaining in their press release: "AREZ-branded graphics cards are built using industry-leading automated manufacturing to provide AMD gamers and enthusiasts with superior cooling technology and a robust software ecosystem".

This pretty much confirms that ASUS has dropped the Republic of Gamers brand from Radeon graphics cards, which will be reserved for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX line of products. ASUS is expected to sell multiple different cards in the AREZ brand that include Expedition, Phoenix, Strix (non-ROG), and Dual.

TweakTown has been the first with most of the next-gen Navi GPU architecture news, where a few months ago now I wrote that sources of mine had said that Vega was such a "disaster" that the RTG team "don't know where they're going forward" and that Navi will be "just as bad" as Vega.

Well, now Chris Hook has left the company along with Raja Koduri - both from the Radeon team in architecture and marketing, respectively. On top of that, we have fresh rumors from Fudzilla that AMD's next-gen Navi GPU will offer GTX 1080 / Radeon RX Vega 64 performance and that it will replace the RX 580 as a mainstream gaming card in 2019.

None of this is new, as I reported about this months ago but the rumors are fresh again and most tech media is picking it up so I thought I would cover it and give it a bit of an injection of reality.

AMD is losing key staff left, right and center, but one of the best guys in the industry is now gone from Team Red: Chris Hook. Hook joins major talent like Raja Koduri that have abandoned the what seems to be sinking ship that is Radeon.

Hook took to his Facebook page to announce the news, but had briefed some of the press before hand. I have been in contact with Chris for years now, he is a good friend of mine and it is sad to see him depart AMD, but I believe he will be landing on his feet very soon with some exciting news to share.

On his FB post, Hook said:

TweakTown was the world exclusive with news that AMD was preparing a rebranded Radeon RX 500X series, and here we are: a full confirmation that AMD has simply rebranded the RX 500 series, with the 'new' RX 500X series.

AMD is simply rebranding their entire lineup of Polaris-based RX 500 series cards, the same cards that they released last year that were tweaked RX 400 offerings. The RX 500X series the same RX 500 series cards that AMD will now be giving to system builders, OEMs, and mobile platforms. AMD is simply refreshing the brand for OEMs and notebooks.

The deal here with the rebranded Radeon RX 500X series is that AMD is ensuring that the RX 500X series cards are using the latest hardware and driver revisions for Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition for 2018. It might not be a big deal to gamers because this isn't a new card, but this means a lot to OEMs selling Radeon.

I had an interesting conversation with someone a couple of days ago regarding the future of Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and the future of GPU technology going into the 2020s.

What was confirmed on that phone call was that Intel is serious about entering the gaming graphics card market, something the company confirmed in February. More so since Raja Koduri left AMD to get inside Intel (pun intended), as well as a few other key staff and news coming in the next few months. We're in for a big ride.

My sources have said that Raja is "building a great team", that Intel wants to take big bold risks by thinking big and courageous. Raja and Intel want to drive these people hard and that they're 100% in it, with Raja wanting to bring people in to win with Intel now that he's outside of the downward spiral with AMD and their non-direction-no-action-at-all with Radeon.

AMD is forging ahead with its next-next-gen Zen CPU architecture, with lead Zen architect Mike Clark confirming that AMD is now working on the "Zen 5" CPU microarchitecture.

The news comes directly from a one-year-later video from AMD about their Ryzen CPU, right before the new Ryzen 2000 series processors launch on April 19. AMD hosted a panel with the top brass behind Ryzen, with people from both their CPU engineering and marketing departments.

VideoCardz reports that "manufacturers often skip 4 due to its meaning in Chinese culture. It's an unlucky number because it's homophonous to the word 'death'. Something that AMD surely does not want to be associated with Zen architecture". Interesting.

It looks like ASUS is preparing a new brand of graphics cards, completely separate to their gaming-focused Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand, exclusive for AMD and their Radeon family of cards.

VideoCardz reports that ASUS is preparing a new AREZ brand for Radeon graphics cards, where they might not even be branded as ASUS at all. There will not be an AREZ ROG STRIX graphics card, it would simply be AREZ STRIX, we should also see other sub series including the AREZ branding including Phoenix and Expedition.

It's an interesting move, but if NVIDIA is forging ahead with its GeForce Partner Program, I'm sure one of their biggest AIBs (ASUS) would want to stay in NVIDIA's good graces and continue pumping out GeForce GTX series graphics cards under its strong ROG brand.

An interesting set of data was compiled by WCCFTech today, with the site keeping a "very close eye" on the graphics card market over the last year or so. The site has looked at prices over the last month and noticed a huge drop on Amazon's price of both GeForce and Radeon graphics cards.

It was only back in January that an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti was $1600 and AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64 was $2100, but prices have been coming down slowly through February, and much faster into March with sharp declines between March 27 leading into today.

Starting out on March 5, the price of an XFX Radeon RX Vega 64 was $1400 and has dropped drastically back to down $945 on March 27.

Just over 8 months after announcing the AMD Radeon Pro SSG based on the "Vega" GPU architecture, Adobe has announced native support within Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

As some may recall, the AMD Radeon Pro SSG was the first card on the market to have 2TB of NVMe storage integrated onto the graphics card. This card is specifically targeted to users who have high demand workflows such as high-resolution video, VR, and 360 video stitching. The announcement by Adobe is the first major partnership to be publicly shown by AMD to harness the unique design of the card.

The soon to be shipping version (April 3, 2018) of Adobe Premiere Pro CC allows for high-resolution video production, supporting 4K and 8K footage in popular native camera formats, including ARRI AMIRA, Canon XF and RAW, Panasonic AVC and P2, REDCODE RAW, and Sony XDCAM, XAVC, and RAW. The Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Radeon Pro SSG workflow should reduce the CPU and memory bottlenecks traditionally encountered, which will allow editors to increase their productivity.

ASUS has just unveiled their new Radeon RX 570 Expedition graphics card, and as you might notice this is a mid-range offering and not in the ROG Strix family of products, that could slide into that GPP from NVIDIA.

The new ASUS RX 570 Expedition features a dual-slot cooler, with GPU clocks of up to 1256MHz and its 8GB of GDDR5 sitting at 7Gbps.

ASUS has used a custom-designed unit with aluminum fin-stack cooler with two 8mm thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes that are cooled by a pair of 80mm fans.