Video Cards & GPUs - Page 300

I've been told by NVIDIA directly that there will "not be a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SUPER" graphics card, but that hasn't stopped the team from TecLab from making a Frankenstein-style RTX 2080 Ti SUPER themselves.

The team ripped apart two separate GALAX GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER graphics cards, taking their faster 16Gbps GDDR6 modules and using 11 x 16Gbps modules onto an RTX 2080 Ti. The stock GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has 11GB of GDDR6 at 14Gbps, but the RTX 2080 SUPER ships with faster 16Gbps modules.

NVIDIA, if it were to launch a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SUPER, would make it much beefier than just increasing GDDR6 bandwidth. We should expect more CUDA cores as well as maybe a wider memory bus, with faster GDDR6 as well.

There have been whispers that some big job losses were coming to Silicon Valley, and in that time I've reached out to some industry sources who have corroborated such things -- but now, it seems it's beginning.

Chris Hook and Heather Lennon, former Radeon Technologies Group marketing staffers, have left Intel. In the last couple of years they both left the crumbling team of RTG where most of them found a new home at Intel, and now Hook and Lennon have left the odyssey. I reached out to both of them and had the news confirmed independently, too.

Given that Intel are really starting to see their wheels wobble in the consumer market with huge market share losses to their consumer and now HEDT processors, AMD is really putting the pressure on them. Intel did a shady trick of having an NDA of their latest 10th-gen HEDT chips just before AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3950/3970X launched -- and then within a couple of days this news breaks out.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX and GeForce RTX gamers will want to jump on the latest GeForce Game Ready 441.41 drivers, which include optimizations for Halo: Reach that is about to drop on the PC, and offers optimal support for the new Quake II RTX v1.2 update.

Game Ready for Halo: Reach means that you get the latest performance optimizations, profiles and bug fixes from NVIDIA for the game -- while you get optimal support for the latest version of Quake II RTX, which provides even better quality graphics, water reflections, and ray tracing goodness.

There's also some issues fixed with Red Dead Redemption 2 when SLI is enabled and you're running Vulkan, while both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Forza Horizon 4 get some tweak love in the new GeForce 441.41 drivers. The big note here is the strange "known issue" about V-Sync which NVIDIA outright says in the new drivers: "V-Sync does not work". Alrighty.

NVIDIA very quietly updated its Tesla range of graphics cards in the last 24 hours, introducing the new Tesla V100s graphics card that packs a faster Volta GPU and quicker HBM2 memory.

The new Tesla V100s (note the small 's', I guess this means 'SUPER' in the Volta sense) is pretty much just as faster version of the original Tesla V100, with the same GV100 GPU on the 12nm node and the same 5120 CUDA cores -- but it's the clock speed and memory bandwidth that are impressive.

NVIDIA's original Tesla V100 has its GV100 GPU boost clock at up to 1367MHz resulting in 14 TFLOPs of compute performance, while the new Tesla V100s has its GV100 GPU at up to 1601MHz boost clock which results in 16.4 TFLOPs of compute performance.

NVIDIA has been pretty quiet when it comes to multi-GPU rigs with their latest Turing-based GeForce RTX and GeForce RTX SUPER graphics cards, but is all of that about to change? Quite possibly.

The creator of SLI Compatibility Bits, a super-useful tool for SLI and NVLink users, recently spotted that NVIDIA silently added Multi-GPU Checkerboard Rendering in their latest GeForce drivers. You'll need to manually enable this feature inside of the NVIDIA Inspector Profile tool by changing some of the settings including SLI compatibility bits (for DX10, DX11, and DX12) as well as the SLI rendering mode options.

Checkerboard rendering isn't something new as it's a method of rendering that's used in some console games, including the PlayStation 4 Pro and its upgraded 4K graphics in some games. But when we're talking multi-GPU configurations the kinda doors that Checkerboard Rendering can open are extensive -- like multi-GPUs working in DX10, DX11, and DX12 titles even if the game itself doesn't directly support it.

NVIDIA told me at E3 2019 during the GeForce RTX SUPER unveiling that there would NOT be a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SUPER, but according to the latest rumors it appears that the RTX 2080 Ti SUPER is really coming and it'll be a BEAST.

The latest rumors are coming from kopite7kimi on Twitter, who has leaked out other information on the previous RTX SUPER and GTX 16 graphics cards from NVIDIA. The new rumor pegs up some specs on the card with NVIDIA reportedly using the full Turing TU102 GPU with a mean 4608 CUDA cores, 576 tensor cores, 72 RT cores, 288 texture units, and 96 ROPs and even-faster 16Gbps GDDR6 memory.

We should expect NVIDIA to go above and beyond with the amount of GDDR6, with the non-SUPER GeForce RTX 2080 Ti having 11GB of GDDR6 the new purported RTX 2080 Ti could have 11-16GB of GDDR6. I would like to see it with 12GB minimum, but rather 16GB -- it provides a nice buffer between the insane 24GB of GDDR6 on the flagship TITAN RTX.

PowerColor has just unveiled what appears to be the best custom Navi graphics card yet, with the new Radeon RX 5700 XT Liquid Devil coming in with liquid cooling and its Navi GPU clocked at up to 2070MHz -- the fastest clocks on a Navi 10 out of the box yet.

The new PowerColor RX 5700 XT Liquid Devil features an EK Water Blocks made full-cover water block, with PowerColor tweaking it with their own logos and design traits. EK's water block on the Radeon RX 5700 XT Liquid Devil covers the entire PCB which means the Navi 10 GPU is liquid cooled, the 8GB of GDDR6 memory is liquid cooled, and the VRMs and MOSFETs are also cooled by liquid.

EKWB uses a nickel-plated copper base that takes heat away from the 7nm Navi 10 GPU, 8GB of GDDR6 memory and other heat-generating parts of the card. It does all of this while looking great too, with PowerColor throwing in some RGB lighting that isn't too over the top -- and if anything, really makes the card pop.

AMD has announced its first Navi-based workstation graphics card with the new Radeon Pro W5700, featuring the Navi 10 GPU based on the RDNA architecture on 7nm -- the world's first 7nm workstation graphics card.

The new Radeon Pro W5700 packs 36 compute units which translates into 2304 stream processors and 64 ROPs, meaning it's not the full Navi 10 chip used on the flagship Radeon RX 5700 gaming card. We do have the Navi 10 GPU clocked at up to 1930MHz, resulting in total compute power of 8.89 TFLOPs.

AMD has chosen to use 8GB of GDDR6 on the same 256-bit memory bus as the Radeon RX 5700 XT, with the GDDR6 clocked at 14Gbps we have memory bandwidth of up to 448GB/sec. The one thing lacking from the new Navi-based Radeon Pro W5700 workstation graphics card is the use of ECC memory, something that the Vega-based Radeon Pro cards did offer.

AMD is expected to unleash their second-gen Navi GPU at CES 2020 according to the latest reports, with a preview at CES of the second-gen RDNA-based Radeon RX 6700 family -- at least that's what I'll call it for now.

The new second-gen RDNA 2 architecture is expected to use an optimized 7nm+ process node, offer up enthusiast-grade graphics cards (YES!), hardware-level ray tracing support, both GDDR6 and HBM2 options, and even more power efficiency over the first-gen Navi products.

The note about AMD using HBM2 is interesting, which could be useful for the enthusiast-grade RDNA 2 cards that would not just compete with NVIDIA's current flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti but also whatever NVIDIA is cooking up for 2020 in their new Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 series cards that should see the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3080 Ti released at Computex/E3 2020.

The rest of our PC components and peripherals have RGB lighting, with one of the last pieces of the RGB puzzle being our display connectivity in DisplayPort and HDMI cables with RGB lighting... until now.

Vivify has announced their new HDMI cable with RGB lighting, with two lengths available -- a 9-foot cable for $80 (discounted from $150), or a longer 15-foot cable for $100 (discounted from $200). Vivify's new Arquus W73 (because people are going to call it that) is a 4K "gaming" HDMI RGB cable, with 7 different colors and a cycle mode to boot.

Vivify's new RGB laden HDMI cable isn't just an HDMI cable + RGB lighting -- the company adds that it has used high-quality fiber optics with the new Arquus W73 cable that allows for longer cables over passive copper HDMI cables. Traditional copper cables use electricity to transmit signals, versus fiber optic cables using lasers. Light (and thus, lasers) move much faster than electricity as well, on top of not being affected by electromagnetic interference (EMI) or radio frequency interference (RFI) like traditional copper-based HDMI cables.