Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 310

The price of the R9 Nano from AMD just dropped by $150 to $499, which makes it a much better value and accessible to more people than it has been before.

In our review we really enjoyed the form-factor and performance given the power target of the Nano compared to it's big brother. In most cases it was 90% or above of the performance of the Fury X while sucking far less power and only being slightly louder. But what we didn't like was the high-price when it wasn't exactly performing at the same levels as the other $649 card in AMD's stable. It just didn't make sense, even if it was a fully enabled Fiji XT. Now that's been fixed.

This allows the Nano to potentiall be a more viable option in the eyes of gamers for their ITX rigs. It can do 4K when paired with the right CPU (and with the right graphical settings), and is now the only card of it's kind at this price point in this form factor. NVIDIA doesn't have anything to compete with it. The 970 ITX flavors are cheaper, but also not nearly as fast in any metric. So now there's no excuse not to at least consider team red when looking at your next minuscule system.

If you're planning on jumping on the VR bandwagon and just need to upgrade your video card, then we've found a good deal for you.

We've seen some pretty stellar deals from Tiger Direct over the last few weeks, including a VisionTek AMD R9 Nano for just $400. The latest sale sees a pretty beefy discount on a tremendous VR-capable video card: an XFX AMD Radeon R9 290X for just $251.99.

The deal shaves a clean $128 off of the card's retail price tag, and arms you with a substantial graphical contender that will carry you through this generation of virtual reality tech. The XFX Radeon R9 290X Black Edition's specifications include 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM, a core clock speed of 1050MHz with a memory clock speed of 5,000MHz, double dissipation Ghost2 Thermal cooling, 2,816 stream processors, and is packed on a 512-bit bus.

CES 2016 - During NVIDIA's CES 2016 press conference, CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage to talk about where NVIDIA is in its journey on automotive technology.

Huang announced that NVIDIA's next-generation Pascal architecture would be powering their automotive efforts this year, with it being as fast as 150 MacBook Pros. But, during my downtime in my hotel to read up on some of my favorite tech sites, I stumbled across AnandTech's piece on Drive PX 2.

One of AT's readers noticed that NVIDIA didn't use Pascal GPUs when Huang held up a prototype PCB with two Pascal GPUs. AT reports: "Kudos to our readers on this one. The MXM modules in the picture are almost component-for-component identical to the GTX 980 MXM photo we have on file. So it is likely that these are not Pascal GPUs, and that they're merely placeholders".

CES 2016 - EVGA prepares for the incoming storm of VR by converting NVIDIA's champion GeForce GTX 980 Ti GPU into a quick and easy solution for VR gaming.

EVGA has announced the VR Ready flavor of NVIDIA's graphics powerhouse GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which supports VR head-mounted displays right out of the box. It's the first card to feature VR-ready HDMI output. The card comes with a 5.25-inch x 3.5-inch front header panel outfitted with front-facing HDMI 2.0 ports and 2x superspeed USB 3.0/3.1 ports for Users can slide in the front header into a PC chassis, making for easy interfacing with VR headsets.

Apart from the front panel setup, EVGA's VR Edition GeForce GTX 980 Ti also sports a mini-HDMI port on the rear side of the card for compatibility with various virtual reality hardware. The card sports two different kinds of cooling solutions, ranging from ACX 2.0+ and a customized blower-type cooler, and EVGA has clocked the VR Ready GTX 980 Ti at reference clock speeds. Pricing and availability have yet to be revealed.

CES 2016 - Within 24 hours of AMD taking the NDA lift off of its next-gen Polaris architecture, NVIDIA announces that its Pascal architecture is being used in its new Drive PX 2 system for cars.

NVIDIA's upcoming Pascal GPU will be pushed onto the 16nm FinFET process, but outside of that we don't know too much. The automotive market will see a liquid-cooled, 250W beast inside of cars that is capable of taking in a crazy amount of information - up to 2500 images per second worth - which will drive the autonomous car market going into the future.

When it comes to video cards, we should expect NVIDIA to unveil its Pascal-based video cards at GTC 2016 in early April.

Now here's something interesting that's going around the Internet just before the New Year hits in North America. Several sources are claiming that the next generation architecture from AMD, previously thought to be codenamed Arctic Islands, might actually be called "Polaris".

The sources of the supposed leak, HWBattle and WCCFtech are citing the information based off of a photo that doesn't appear to have any context whatsoever to corroborate the evidence. WCCFtech is also reporting that the Polaris name was tweeted about just before the RTG Summit was held by AMD.

The photo, however, has recently been taken down from HWBattle at the request from the leaker of the image and in its place is a cautionary statement from slides that are no longer under embargo from AMD that references the codename "Polaris" as well. The tweet above also specifically refers to Polaris being 2.5x brighter today than it was in the time it was first observed. That number might have significance. I can say that we'll just have to wait and see. Perhaps more information will be revealed at CES. I'd take the above information with a huge pile of salt, however. The information could very well be fabricated and not necessarily correlative to anything.

After promising that their dual GPU video card would be released in late 2015, AMD has delayed its Radeon R9 Fury X2. The reason? Because they expected the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive to be out in late 2015, but both VR headsets were delayed into early next year, forcing AMD to delay its dual-GPU efforts.

Hardware.fr talked with AMD, which said: "The product schedule for Fiji Gemini had initially been aligned with consumer HMD (Head Mounted Display) availability, which had been scheduled for Q415 back in June. Due to some delays in overall VR (Virtual Reality) ecosystem readiness, HMDs are now expected to be available to consumers by early Q216. To ensure the optimal VR experience, we're adjusting the Fiji Gemini launch schedule to better align with the market". AMD continued: "Working samples of Fiji Gemini have shipped to a variety of B2B customers in Q415, and initial customer reaction has been very positive".

AMD has reportedly sent out key people their new dual Fiji card, with these lucky people including DICE god Johan Andersson. We should expect AMD to show off the "Gemini" dual-GPU card at CES hopefully, but I think we're going to see an April-June launch - possibly at Computex in early June 2016.

An industry insider has indicated to the Korea Electronic Times that Samsung will be mass producing Greenland graphics chips for AMD starting in the second quarter of 2016. This follows the recent news GlobalFoundries will be producing for AMD, so it has two partners on its hands as of now.

Word is AMD will be "fluidly regulating" how many chips are produced by each company based upon yield and other factors.

It's said Greenland, which is based on the 14nm FinFET process technology, is twice as efficient as the 28nm Fiji. It's also said that shortly after Greenland begins production, Zen production will begin, and will also see production split amongst Samsung and GlobalFoundries facilities.

It looks like AMD's next-gen GPU will be arriving in Q2 2016, which is the rough timeframe that we expected from all the rumors over the last few months.

AMD's new part will be made on the 14nm process by Samsung and GlobalFoundries, with it reaching mass production at the end of Q2 2016 - or in June. This is perfect timing for Computex 2016, as we saw the rumors - and the TweakTown exclusive during Computex 2015 that the new card would be called the Radeon R9 Fury X, and not the Radeon R9 490X that the world thought.

The new GPU will feature HBM2, which will not only increase the amount of VRAM that the new GPU will have - up from the 4GB of HBM1 found on the current Fiji cards like the Fury X and R9 Nano - but it will also see an increase in memory bandwidth. HBM1 allows for 512GB/sec, while HBM2 drives the memory bandwidth numbers through the roof to over 1TB/sec. We should expect to see cards from AMD featuring up to 18 billion transistors, and up to 16GB and even 32GB on the professional cards in 2016.

Today Taiwanese PC hardware maker BioStar has launched its new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti OC video card aimed at gamers on a budget.

BioStar's new GeForce GTX 750 Ti OC GPU is based on NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture and sports 2GB GDDR5 VRAM on a 128-bit bus. The card's main selling point is its new OC revision: the GPU's 640 CUDA cores are factory overclocked to 1127Mhz and can be further pushed to 1178Mhz speeds to boost frame rates and performance for DirectX 11 gaming. As far as a cooling solution, BioStar's GTX 750 Ti OC revision features the company's GAMING FPS dual-fan setup that's optimized to mitigate heat during overclocking or normal use.

The card can hit a max resolution of 4096 X 2160 via digital output, but doesn't come equipped with a Display Port outlet, instead featuring Dual-DVI ports and a single mini-HDMI. BioStar's GeForce GTX 750 Ti OC can perform alongside other NVIDIA GPU's in SLI, and is specifically designed to complement BioStar-branded motherboards.