Graphics Cards - Page 268

Earlier today we made a mention that nVidia might have a demo of their GT300 (NV70) DX11 GPU ready for September. Well we have a little more information.

If the information we are reading is correct, nVidia already has the GT300 and has only been working out driver issues. Add-in-Board makers should be setting the timelines for demoing the new product. The Demos should start in September.

One thing that is interesting. While we hear that technical demos of the GT300 are starting in September, we hear from another source that the GT300s that will be shown will be renamed GT200 parts.

But while Charlie says that they will be using DDR3 on the new GT300s we also hear that nVidia plans on
ECC functions in the memory controller. This should require DDR5 to work.

So in the end while we know that nVidia is working on the GT300 we are really not any closer to knowing what its final form will be or when we should see it. I am leaning towards an official demo to AIBs in late September with at least a paper launch right before Windows 7 hits. This should cause people to wait to purchase a DX11 card. They will want to see who has the best price/performance before making an investment.

Earlier today we told you that AMD/ATI would probably launch the Evergreen GPU family before the scheduled launch of Windows 7. We felt that they would want to get these out with plenty of lead time.

As it stands Windows 7 should have a good adoption rate and having DX11 parts on the shelves at launch will help AMD/ATi.

Well it seems we were right. According to new information September 10th looks to be the launch date. The launch will take place on the USS Hornet. This is plenty of time for the media to be sampled, reviews to be published and the stores to get stock before Windows 7 hits the retail shelves.

The launch timing and location in the US is significant as Patriots and Heroes Week runs from September 5th to the 11th. The USS Hornet is a Decommissioned Ari Craft Carrier that is now a museum.

With all the news on ATi DX11 hardware coming out of Quakeconn it is interesting to see that someone finally managed to get a good picture of the whole adapter used.

The picture that we found comes from Chiphell and shows us what the 40nm Juniper will look like.

The new card will look familiar as it closely resembles the HD 4770 with the exception of the black PCB. The card pictured also shows two DVI ports, one HDMI, and one Display Port. Not bad for connectivity.

There is still no word on when these will be ready nor how much they will cost but you can expect them before the holiday season, more than likely just before the launch of Windows 7 so that people will have hardware to support the new DX11 OS from MS. I would also expect to see Grid-2 and Dirt-2 around this time to take advantage of the launches. Maybe we will see a nice bundle...

What's in a name? After all a rose... ok no Shakespeare this morning. But you know, you really have to wonder about that. I can remember a time when naming was simple. CPUs were nammed after their speed. For example the Pentium 133 was a 133MHz Pentium CPU. The K62 333 was a 333MHz CPU. They we got into equivalent performance Like P1200+ meaning that it should run like a competing 1.2GHz CPU. But nothing on how fast it was.

Well over the years this has gotten worse and worse, especially with companies like nVidia renaming and rebranding continually in an attempt to confuse the consumer.

Well it looks like nVidia is at it again with another name change for the upcoming 40nm GPUs. Gone is the GT and GTX labeling and back is the old GeForce so we are going to see things like GeForce 210 (like the old GeForce 3 and 4 series. I suppose next we will see the GT and GTX go at the end of the number again just to keep things simple...

I have already talked about how much I enjoy new operating system releases but to be honest with you I enjoy the hype that leads up to and following any product launch.

Since we have word that ATi/AMD is launching Evergreen in September we need a new rumor about nVidia. Well we have one. According to a few sources we hear that nVidia will be pushing out a dual GT300 card. This will be a direct competitor to ATI's planned dual RV870 card.

There is not much information to go on other than what we already know about the GT300. The big thing to ask will be what form factor will this be. Traditionally nVidia has chosen to implement dual cards with a dual PCB solution. However recently nVidia allowed for a single PCB design that worked very well.

Since we know that GT300 has taped out and might be in at least preproduction silicone (called A1) it is possible that we will see this card before the end of the year in at least demo form but it is unlikely that it will hit the retail shelves before q1-q2 2010.

Ok this seems like a line from about two years ago, but nVidia's CEO and all around top guy Jensen Huang says that DX10.1 is not important. No, what's important is that two stood against...Oh sorry slipped into a movie there.

Basically Huang feels that incremental updates to DX are not enough to get excited about. This is interesting as ATi's support of DX 10.1 allowed them to outperform nVidia DX10 cards in Assassin's Creed. This was enough to prompt Ubisoft to pull the DX 10.1 support; at least according to the rumors at the time.

Still Huang says that nVidia is very excited about DX 11. They are working hard to support these features but feel that DX 11 games are probably about two years away. This is due to the lack of acceptance of DX 10 by many game developers who are still coding for XP to keep the majority happy.

AMD/ATi has been having a pretty good year. In addition to beating nVidia to 40nm and actually getting a 40nm part in the market first (although supply is still an issue) they have shown DX11 parts while nVidia has been lagging behind.

So it comes as no surprise to hear that AMD has launched a new 3D Workstation part. This new part is an addition to their "Fire" line of cards. Called the FirePro V8750 it is the fastest that AMD has made to date.

AMD put the FirePro V8750 up against the nVidia Quadro FX4800 and found that it was able to keep up and in many spots outperform the Quadro.

The down side? AMD still has a ways to go in the GPGPU department. This means that while in raw OpenGL performance you might see the FirePro out in front, when there is OpenCL enabled acceleration nVidia will still have the upper hand. Oh, that and it is not for gaming, despite the 2GB DDR5 and triple monitor support.

With AMD's recent announcement that they will be launching a complete line of DX11 parts in time for the Windows 7 launch we have to wonder what nVidia has up their sleeve.

Many are saying that nVidia has nothing or at least nothing new. In fact several of the better known anti-nVidia gang are claiming that nVidia will only be launching refreshed parts or little more than a Die-Shrink.

They claim that what is to become the GT300 will not hit the market until mid to late 2010.

I said many, but not all. In fact there are a couple of sites claiming the opposite. They agree that AMD will release DX11 40nm parts to the market before nVidia. But they go on to say that the GT300 will be ready and in the greedy hands of gamers in Q4. This will put them out by the holiday shopping season.

If this is true then perhaps we will a consumer friendly shopping season instead of a one sided one. nVidia is keeping quite about this but according to some of the sources I have spoken to it looks more like this is a reality than a fantasy.

It was not that long ago that Mushkin announced its UltimateFX line of add-in video cards. The announcement showed that Mushkin was ready to enter the world of graphics (just like OSZ did) and they had some nVidian offerings in the works.

Today we hear that Mushkin is now working on an UltimateFX version of the Radeon HD4850. The new Radeon HD 4850 will feature a completely custom build. The cooling system looks a lot like the one found on the Sapphire HD4670 offering though. Specs are; 800 stream processors, 256-Bit memory interface, 625MHz/1986MHz CPU/Memory stock clock and 700/2020 for the OCd version. There will be three ports for output (DVI, D-Sub and HDMI).

All this will come in a handy wooden box. There is no indication on when you can get these nor how much they will cost you once ready.

MSI has come clean about its new Cyclone Radeon HD 4890. The new line of will all feature the RV-790 GPU, 1GB of GDDR5, a 256-Bit Memory interface, Solid Capacitors, SSCs and a monster of a fan.

The fan itself will be a full two slots and have four heatpipes. These will be cooled by a 100mm fan.

The three models will be the R4890 Cyclone (850Mhz/3900Mhz), the R4890 Cyclone OS (880Mhz/3900Mhz) and the R4890 SOC (1Ghz/4000MHz). Availability should be in the next few weeks. There is no word on pricing as of this writing.

We told you yesterday that nVidia was pushing out to low-end desktop 40nm GPUs. Well now we have confirmation that these cards have reached OEMs and should be popping up in systems soon.

The two quietly launched GPUs are the G210 and the GT220. Both will have DX10.1 support as well as HDMI outputs. They will differ in number for cores (16 got the G210 and 46 for the GT220).

Speeds will be different as will the amount of memory and width of the memory controller.

What is interesting is that these new cards we launched without any fan fare from nVidia. One reason for this is that they do not have quite the punch that ATi's 4770 40nm part has. It is not known if these parts will end up on retail shelves or if they will stay an OEM only product.

After being out shown by eVGA it looks like nVidia is finally catching on to what their users want; more frequent updates for gaming.

eVGA has been getting great press as they put out their SLI enhancement patches. These handy little patched include updated SLI profiles for games and often provide for much faster and stable performance running SLI.

nVidia traditionally does not do interim updates to the SLI profiles and instead waits for driver revisions to add them in. However, nVidia has just pushed out its own SLI patch which does pretty much the same thing as the eVGA patch.

This could signal the end for the eVGA patches but as the new nVidia patch is still listed as a Beta it could be some time before we see this on a routine basis from the big green machine.

Although this is not really a surprise (people have been talking about this for some time) it looks like eVGA could be making a switch from nVidia to Intel.

I am not talking about chipsets either. It seems that Intel might have got eVGA all excited about the Larrabee GPU and they are looking to push them on the public.

As it stands eVGA is one of the last nVidia only AIBs out. They have increased their reputation by standing behind their cards with Life-Time warranties, Upgrade programs, and free overclocking tools and software (might explain why they do not work with AMD/ATi).

If this is the case and eVGA moves to Larrabee it will mean that the first Boards with this new GPU will at least come from a good company.

Read more here.

Shuttle has just popped up a pretty neat video of their latest SFF system. This one is actually powered by the VIA nano. As part of the XS29 series the new nano powered systems will be completely fan less. This means minimal noise for those that are picky about a quiet system.

The flavor of Nano under the hood will be the 1GHz U1700, up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, with graphics powered by an VIA Chrome9 HC3 integrated GPU.

The box will be small and light and according to Shuttle will sip a mere 50 Watts of power under load.

Read more here.

In shocking news and in opposition to what most are reporting it looks like at least one ATi partner will be going ahead with a Radeon HD4890X2.

The HD4890, which launched on the 2nd is giving the GTX 285 a good run for its money. ATi and their partners must feel that an X2 version of this part would clean up the rest of the nVidia parts and recapture the speed crown from nVidia.

Read more at Bright Side of News.

GIGABYTE has announce that they have extened SLI support to all of their X58 lineup.

Last week it was discovered that NVIDIA was redesigning the GTX 295 by reworking things to fit on a single PCB. While it made sense to do so in that it would lower the manufacturing costs, it made little sense due to the cost of re-engineering the card.

AMD has begun volume shipments of the Radeon HD 4890 to distributors and retailers, however GPUCafe is a little bit miffed that nobody will come clean with the official release date.

It looks like there will be over 40,000 cards available at launch and the company has hopes of 250K cards being available by the end of the first half of this year. As the Catalyst driver team just released the 9.3 drivers and they usually like to release updates in the latter half of the month, it looks like previews using beta drivers should start showing up soon.

With the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 just weeks away, it should come as to no surprise that pictures are starting to pop up all over the web. It is unusual however that we see non-reference designs so early.

ASUS is working on a high-end version of the 4890 with beefed up power circuitry. TechPowerUp thinks that it will fit in nicely as either a "TOP" or "MATRIX" lineup when released.