Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 269

NVIDIA is reportedly preparing some new GeForce GTX 1050/GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q products, which would really hit the mainstream gaming laptop market and crush everything AMD is hoping to do in the space with their recently-revealed Radeon RX Vega M GL product.

If you remember, Intel unveiled their new CPUs with Radeon RX Vega M technology inside, so NVIDIA shifting quickly with their GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q makes total sense. NotebookCheck have predicted GPU clock speeds of the purported GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q designs, where they think we'll see GPU boost clocks of 1417MHz on the GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q compared to the 1392MHz on the desktop GTX 1050 Ti, 1620MHz on the full GTX 1050 Ti mobile and 1455MHz of the GTX 1050 on desktop.

NVIDIA has one of the best single graphics cards on the market with the Tesla V100, a card that costs a whopping $8000 and isn't for gamers or even most people on the market. It's a card destined for workstations and servers, for AI and deep learning workloads - and strictly not for mining.

That however doesn't stop people from testing out these graphics cards for mining, with BuriedONE Cryptomining putting NVIDIA's Tesla V100 to work on various crypto mining adventures, with Ethereum mining hitting a 94MH/s. Considering that an overclocked TITAN Xp can achieve somewhere around 40-42MH/s and an overclocked Radeon RX Vega 64 can do anywhere between 38-42MH/s, this is a huge achievement for the Tesla V100.

NVIDIA's super-fast Tesla V100 rocks 16GB of HBM2 that has memory bandwidth of a truly next level 900GB/sec, up from the 547GB/sec available on the TITAN Xp, which costs $1200 in comparison. AMD trails behind with 483GB/sec of bandwidth with its 8GB of HBM2 on the Radeon RX Vega 64.

CES 2018 - AMD hasn't said much more about what's going on with the desktop Radeon GPU side of things since the departure of RTG boss Raja Koduri, but Scott Wasson (the owner and ex-journo of The Tech Report) has worked for AMD for over a year now and was at CES 2018 where he had some things to say about Radeon, and Vega.

During a video interview with PCGamesHardware.de, Wasson said that Vega 10 is capable of being used in a gaming notebook, and seemed to tease the news during CES. Wasson said: "I can't pre-announce products for our partners. It is possible to take a Vega 10 GPU and put it into a notebook. So we'll have to see".

If we take into consideration just how damn hot Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64 get in reference form, I can't see how in the hell laptop manufacturers will be able to use a full Vega 10 + 8GB HBM2 if they require 250-400W of power. Even if its heavily throttled, it would lose to a GTX 1060 or GTX 1070-powered gaming notebook.

Samsung has just announced its latest and greatest advancements in HBM2 technology at CES, something the company is calling "Aquabolt". This new HBM2 is much faster than the first spins of HBM2, where we're looking at bandwidth of an insane 2.4Gbps and in 8-Hi height (8GB) stacks which should see up to 32GB on next-gen graphics cards.

The 8-Hi stacks might sounds weird, but when there's 4 of them on a graphics card we're looking at 32GB of HBM2. As for bandwidth, we're looking at around 300MBps per pin, which on a 1024-bit memory bus should provide around 307GB/sec per package, times 4 bringing us to a crazy 1.2TB/sec of memory bandwidth.

Jaesoo Han, executive vice president, Memory Sales & Marketing team at Samsung Electronics explains: "With our production of the first 2.4Gbps 8GB HBM2, we are further strengthening our technology leadership and market competitiveness. We will continue to reinforce our command of the DRAM market by assuring a stable supply of HBM2 worldwide, in accordance with the timing of anticipated next-generation system launches by our customers".

With all of the hoopla surrounding the Spectre and Meltdown security bugs found in consumer CPUs, setting Intel pretty much on fire, how are the other companies fairing? Well, NVIDIA is doing fine.

NVIDIA's revised security bulletin has provided some insight, with NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang saying: "Our GPUs are immune, they're not affected by these security issues. What we did is we released driver updates to patch the CPU security vulnerability. We are patching the CPU vulnerability the same way that Amazon , the same way that SAP, the same way that Microsoft, etc are patching, because we have software as well".

Huang added: "I am absolutely certain that our GPU is not affected".

GALAX has surprised with a quick tease of its upcoming GeForce GTX 1070 Ti HOF graphics card, which will include its unique one-click button to increase the OC on the card.

GALAX will be deploying its chunky-but-cool triple-fan RGB cooling solution, with 8+8-pin PCIe power connectors (down from the 8+8+8-pin PCIe connector rig on the GTX 1080 Ti HOF variant).

The company even teased the card in SLI with Hyper Boost OC enabled, which is very impressive - and that SLI bridge, wow.

CES 2018 - NVIDIA might have announced its new 65-inch 4K 120Hz G-Sync TVs, specifically with the new ASUS ROG Swift PG65, but the company is also quick to release a new GeForce 390.65 drivers that includes a security patch for Spectre vulnerability.

NVIDIA's new GeForce 390.65 drivers also include support for the Freestyle beta, which lets gamers apply post-processing filters to your game, while you play. This can be done from an in-game overlay, letting you change the entire style of the game with adjustments to color and saturation and post-process filters.

At launch, NVIDIA has 15 filters with 38 different settings (with some filters packing more than one setting). At launch, NVIDIA is including:

It looks like we are to expect graphics card prises to rise in the next few months, with these inflated prices lasting throughout most of 2018, something that is being amplified by cryptocurrency mining.

According to DigiTimes, graphics card vendors are expected to increase the price of mid/high-end graphics cards by $5-$20 in the "near future to reflect increasing product costs caused by the tight supply of memory devices and GPUs". DigiTimes continued, saying: "Since demand for graphics cards from the cryptocurrency mining segment has not waned as quickly as expected, GPU supply remains tight in the first quarter of 2018".

The site adds that companies like ASUS, GIGABYTE, and MSI all "benefited from the cryptocurrency mining demand and their shipments dropped only mildly in the fourth quarter of 2017", adding: "Meanwhile, graphics card upgrade demand has been picking up in the gaming sector thanks to the recent release of the blockbuster game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Demand has been especially strong from China due to the game's strong popularity".

NVIDIA has just made some large changes to its GeForce EULA, where the company has now prohibited the use of their GeForce GPUs in datacenter deployment, except for blockchain processing.

This shift will force datacenters into the arms of Quadro and Tesla products from NVIDIA which are much more expensive, instead of chewing up the precious supply of gamer-oriented GeForce GPUs. An extract from the EULA explains it perfectly: "No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted".

Now for the tricky part: NVIDIA's updates to their GeForce EULA will see anyone using GeForce GPUs for anything but gaming and "blockchain processing" breaking the law, and would open them up for potential lawsuits.

NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 1060 5GB variant was exposed in the last 24 hours, with the new 5GB variant of the GTX 1060 destined for the Chinese internet cafe market. But now, we have a quick look at GIGABYTE's model in the GTX 1060 5GB WindForce OC.

GIGABYTE has confirmed that their new card will have GPU clocks of 1582/1797MHz in OC mode, while Gaming Mode will have the GPU clocked at 1556/1771MHz. The 5GB of GDDR5 will be clocked at 8008MHz on the same 160-bit memory bus that will provide 160GB/sec of memory bandwidth down from the 192GB/sec of memory bandwidth on the 6GB model with its 192-bit memory bus.

GIGABYTE will use their dual-fan WindForce 2X cooling solution that rocks a full cover backplate, while display wise we have 2 x DVI, 1 x HDMI and 1 x DP output.