Video Cards & GPUs - Page 305

I've been spending my time diving into the performance, visuals and technological side behind Remedy's latest masterpiece; Control, and I have to say -- it's one of, if not the best-looking game of all time thanks to RTX.

Control is powered by Remedy's latest in-house Northlight engine, a finely-tuned sandbox engine used in Quantum Break but with a totally new coat of paint thanks to RTX. Powering the game with a GeForce RTX 20 or RTX SUPER series graphics card unleashes almost an entirely new game (at least visually) but cranking it to 4K and beyond really begins to pull on every last transistor of that Turing GPU.

8K monitors aren't a mainstream thing yet, but they're on the market -- with the Dell UP3218K monitor. Dell's UP3218K is a true 8K monitor offering 7680x4320 natively, 4x the pixels of a 4K monitor at 3840x2160.

AMD launched its Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT nearly two months ago now, and since then we've seen custom Navi cards from MSI (RX 5700 XT EVOKE OC review), SAPPHIRE (RX 5700 XT PULSE OC review), XFX (THICC review coming soon), PowerColor, and now ASRock.

The upcoming Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT Taichi OC+ models look absolutely awesome, with a large 2.5-slot design and triple-fan cooler.

I love the style of the backplate, well the whole design really -- it'll look awesome sitting inside of a new Ryzen-powered gaming PC and ASRock's own X570 Taichi motherboard.

I still remember getting my first 3dfx graphics card, the Orchid Righteous 3D -- a 3Dfx (capital D) Voodoo 1 with 4MB of RAM. I later had Voodoo 2 in SLI, and then a Voodoo 3 3000, but the Voodoo 5 was always a dream for me. But recently, TPU forum member 'SWZSSR' acquired a Voodoo 5 6000 Revision 3700A and it looks absolutely glorious.

3dfx announced and teased the Voodoo 5 6000 but it was never released, a halo product that rocked an insane 4 x VSA-100 processors each closed at 166MHz and each packing its own 32MB of 166MHz SDRAM. The Voodoo 5 6000 would've been the world's first graphics card with 128MB of RAM, but just 1000 test cards were made at the time.

In early tests the Voodoo 5 6000 was beating NVIDIA's at-the-time beast of a GeForce 2 Ultra, but it was just too expensive to make and in the end it didn't make it to market and 3dfx went out of business.

AMD has had a phenomenal past couple of years with it culminating better than anyone could've planned it to celebrate their 50th anniversary this year, with the company releasing their new 7nm CPUs and GPUs in the Zen 2 and Navi products.

The hype has become very real with AMD's new Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards, which has propelled the company into the headlines once again. According to Jon Peddie Research's new Q2 2019 GPU market reports, AMD shipped more graphics cards than NVIDIA for the first time in five years.

JPR's numbers includes all types of graphics processors, so we're not looking at just discrete graphics cards as this includes CPUs with integrated graphics. AMD has a boat load of those as well, but the new Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT have been immensely popular, even in a world where its competitor clearly has the superior product in terms of performance, technology, and feature set.

AMD looks to be working on a lower-end version of Navi with a new Navi 14 GPU showing up on Compubench, with 24 CUs that would put it into the Polaris 11 (or Polaris 21).

In total there are three different Navi 14 listings in Compubench, with 3GB, 4GB, and 8GB models. The internal name is Navi 14 but we should expect it as a Radeon RX 5600 series (or even RX 5500 series). Navi 14 has 24 CUs with 1536 stream processors, and what should be GDDR6 memory.

The three Navi 14 GPUs listed on Compubench:

XFX has officially launched the XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC II, with the new THICC II variant from XFX is another custom Navi card that out of the few on the market, looks like the best.

XFX is no stranger to custom Radeon graphics cards, but it has been dormant for what feels like forever from its beautifully-designed custom AMD cards. The new THICC II design is a re-work of the great work on the XFX double dissipation custom card, something that used to be a thing back in the Radeon R200 series family.

The company is using a 2.7-slot design with XFX tapping its own Ghost Thermal 2.0 cooler which promises great thermals and noise, with 35% less fan noise, it'll also be quiet. XFX uses 2 x 100mm fans to keep the Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC II nice and cool (and quiet).

Remedy has just released Control in what will now be cemented in as the 'new Crysis' when it comes to melting gaming PCs across the world, with NVIDIA releasing new GeForce Game Ready 436.15 WHQL drivers optimized for the new game.

The new GeForce Game Ready 436.15 WHQL drivers can be found here, or download them through GeForce Experience.

NVIDIA walks through just how much RTX is infused in Control in the above video, when compared against just RTX reflections in Battlefield V, RTX shadows in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and RTX global illumination for Metro Exodus. Control has the entire RTX feature set, including the kitchen sink.

AMD has had a super-successful year this year with the launch of its next-gen Zen 2 architecture and it powering the next wave of CPUs from the company in the form of the Ryzen 3000 series and just-released EPYC 'Rome' server CPUs with up to 64C/128T.

Not only that but the company has pushed out the new Navi-based GPU with the Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700 graphics cards, with all of the new Zen 2-based CPUs and Navi-based GPUs made on the 7nm node. One of the things absent from the new RX 5700 series cards is multi-GPU support, something that Vega could do with CrossFire, but Navi can't.

In a recent chat with the press at the Hot Chips press conference, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su replied to a question regarding the future of multi-GPU technology. She said: "To be honest, the software is going faster than the hardware, I would say that CrossFire isn't a significant focus".

MSI recently launched its Radeon RX 5700 XT EVOKE OC graphics card (my review here), its first custom Navi card -- but the company isn't finished, it has just teased its new GAMING variant at Gamescom 2019.

The new MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING series card is a chunkier triple-slot, dual-fan graphics card with dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors. We can expect higher GPU clocks on the MSI RX 5700 XT GAMING than the MSI RX 5700 XT EVOKE OC, but the company hasn't detailed those just yet.

MSI has even got a countdown for the RX 5700 GAMING launch, which is 3 weeks away. Above and below, we have some photos of the card. They're from screengrabs from a YouTube video, so I apologize for the quality.

It almost feels like NVIDIA had a bigger Gamescom this year than it did last year, considering the company launched its new Turing GPU architecture and GeForce RTX series graphics cards at the time.

NVIDIA announced its new Gamescom Game Ready 436.02 Driver, a special edition driver that celebrates the GeForce gaming community with huge software optimizations for Apex Legends, Battlefield V, Forza Horizon 4, Strange Brigade and World War Z.

is offering some pretty crazy performance improvements in games like Apex Legends, with up to 23% more performance in Respawn's currently embroiled in drama battle royale hit. Forza Horizon 4 gains as well, with GeForce RTX SUPER graphics card owners getting some nice benefits. I will be doing my own testing across the non-SUPER cards as well.