Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 296

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega is my most anticipated graphics card of 2017, so the few teases we've had of the card in the last 24 hours have been beyond exciting.

The very first look at the Radeon RX Vega graphics card showed us the beautiful white backplate with red accents, and that awesome Vega branding.

Out of all of the custom GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards on the way, one of the most exciting for me is the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G - something we've just go an exclusive look at. We secured this shot of the card from an industry source.

From the first shot, we can see that MSI hasn't done much to the physical style of the GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G compared to the GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G, except that the 'GeForce GTX' branding is much more apparent here - and we have 8+8-pin PCIe power connectors.

I can see a DVI port on the card as well, so it's a nice touch that MSI is thinking of the gamers with DVI displays out there. This is all we have for now, but what do you think of MSI's upcoming GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G? Is this the GTX 1080 Ti for you?

Khronos Group has the technology and gaming worlds excited over its Vulkan API, which is a low-level API that provides more performance from your graphics card in games that utilize the API - like DOOM.

But after their GDC 2017 slides were looked over, native multi-GPU support for NVIDIA GeForce SLI and AMD Radeon CrossFire setups now require WDDM to be set to "linked display adapter mode", something that is exclusive to Windows 10. This means that Vulkan and its multi-GPU goodness is locked to Windows 10, eyeing off Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users with multi-GPUs, with a striking glare.

Game developers have to add multi-GPU, DX12, and/or Vulkan support in manually - so this isn't too much of a surprise, but whatever Khronos, Microsoft, NVIDIA, or AMD can do to make game developers' lives easier for multi-GPU goodness, they should be doing. This kind of feels like a step backwards.

AMD hosted its technology summit in Beijing, China covering its new Ryzen 5 processor launch - with AMD CEO Lisa Su taking the stage to unveil the new price/performance champions in the Ryzen family - but there was a very slight, but very exciting tease of Radeon RX Vega.

As you can see from these images, the Radeon RX Vega reference design sports a super-slick white/red/black style that I'm really loving - but the video was shown to select journalists, so we don't know how real it is. This could be an elaborate fake, and if it is - they did a good job, if it's not - AMD has an awesome looking next-gen graphics card on its hands.

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega has a beautiful Vega logo on the back, with a GPU Tach LED load indicator that will be super useful - the usual RADEON branding on top with red LEDs, and a dip-switch to change the color of the LEDs... awesome.

AMD Radeon graphics card owners will want to jump onto the new Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.3.2 beta drivers, with support for the soon-to-be released Mass Effect: Andromeda.

There's also a 12% performance improvement for Radeon RX 480 graphics card owners compared to previous driver releases. You can grab the new AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.3.2 beta drivers right here.

Known Issues

It shouldn't be too surprising at this point, but NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition graphics cards are sold out already - with NVIDIA seeing unprecedented demand for its $699 graphics card. This is both great news, and bad news.

First: the great side of it - gamers are starving for a super high-end graphics card, and NVIDIA over delivered with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. We have similar performance to the Titan X which costs $1200, but NVIDIA crammed it all into the $699 graphics card that became the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Demand is far exceeding the supply of GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, with most e-tailers and retailers either having no stock, or quickly running out. New stock isn't expected until March 25, which is 10 days away.

The bad side of it: NVIDIA can't make enough GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition cards to keep up with demand, so what does this mean for AIB partners and their custom GTX 1080 Ti cards? This will mean we'll be waiting a little longer for the custom GTX 1080 Ti, possibly waiting until the end of April... which is 6 weeks away. That's a very long time in the gaming world, or in any sense - and the GTX 1080 Ti is so good that people want it now, not later.

AMD is expected to launch its new Radeon RX 500 series graphics cards next month, led by the Radeon RX 580 - based on the Polaris 10, alongside the RX 570 - also based on Polaris 10.

The new Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 will rock higher clock speeds than their RX 480 and RX 470 counterparts, but we shouldn't expect anything over the top with the RX 500 apart from some tweaks, this is a rebrand of the RX 400 series. But, the process has matured over the last 12 months, so AMD could squeeze some power efficiency and higher clocks without creating too much heat from the RX 500 series.

AMD's flagship Radeon RX 580 graphics card is expected to have its GPU clocked at 1340MHz under boost, offering up 6.17TFLOPs of compute performance. 8GB of GDDR5 will be used, at 8Gbps on a 256-bit memory bus. AMD is expeccted to launch the RX 580 at just $199, which will really heat up the mainstream graphics card market.

NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the best graphics card on the market - yep, I recommend it over the Titan X which costs $1200 but barely outperforms the GTX 1080 Ti that costs $699 - and now, we have a new 3DMark Time Spy world record.

Legendary overclocker 'Kingpin' used an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition under LN2, hitting a huge 2.5GHz, with the 11GB of GDDR5X memory clocked from 11Gbps to 12.5Gbps. The memory being overclocked to 12.5Gbps is a big deal, as we're looking at over 500GB/sec of memory bandwidth - all without using the next-gen HBM2 standard that AMD will be using on their upcoming Radeon RX Vega graphics cards.

The overclock in question: with Kingpin using an Intel Core i7-6950X processor overclocked to 5.1GHz, EVGA X99 motherboard and one of EVGA's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition graphics cards.

NVIDIA just launched its Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1080 Ti with a huge performance crown earned at $699, and now we're hearing that TSMC is taking orders for next-gen HPC (high-performance computing) chips for AI applications from both NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.

The new report is coming from DigiTimes, which reports: "TSMC will fabricate NVIDIA's next generation Volta GPU using a 12nm process, said the paper, which added that the Volta GPU will be paired with NVIDIA's Xavier supercomputer chips for self-driving car applications".

NVIDIA is currently having TSMC produce its 256 core Pascal-based GPU and dual-core Denver 2 CPUs for their recent Jetson TX2 supercomputing platform, all on the 16nm process. NVIDIA's next big leap will be to Volta, on the smaller 12nm node - where things will really get interesting.

MSI has just unveiled their range of upcoming GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, with 5 new cards in the line up - being led by the Gaming X series, and flanked by the Armor and SeaHawk EK series of cards.

MSI will be changing the look of its upcoming GeForce GTX 1080 Aero - with a slicker black/green style, while the GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X should arrive just how we expected it with the black/red color scheme and aggressively styled card. To the right we have what looks like a beautiful GTX 1080 SeaHawk EK graphics card that features a waterblock, and MSI's first custom PCB for Big Pascal. To the right, we have the normal GTX 1080 Ti SeaHawk.

We should expect most of these cards coming soon, so prepare for an onslaught of GTX 1080 Ti reviews.