Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 312

We've only been introduced to the GeForce GTX Titan X, but now we're hearing about the GeForce GTX 980 Ti which will also reportedly be based on the GM200 core, but cut down. Not only that, in some leaked benchmarks both of those cards are being compared against the upcoming AMD Radeon R9 390X.

According to the benchmarks, the new Radeon R9 390X looks like quite the force to be reckoned with at 4K, where it beats the R9 290X by 49%. It even beats the new Titan X and the cut down GM200 or GTX 980 Ti. Keep in mind that the above benchmarks are not in FPS, but in relative % to the Radeon R9 290X. We also have an unreleased GTX 96* GPU (GTX 965 or GTX 960 Ti) that you'll find lower on that list.

The same can be said for 2560x1600, where the Fiji-based R9 390X continues to dominate with a 40% jump on the R9 290X. It beats the Titan X by 3%, and the GM200-based GTX 980 Ti by just over 10%. But what about one of the more important aspects of the new architecture: power consumption? This is where, according to the leaked benchmarks, it looks like AMD has done something incredible: increased the horsepower of the 390X over the 290X, but kept to the same TDP.

NVIDIA has already teased its GeForce GTX Titan X which should arrive next week at the company's GPU Technology Conference next week, but now we're hearing about the new Fiji-based Radeon R9 390X, and that it will come in two variants: one with 4GB of VRAM, the other with 8GB.

Because AMD will be using High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on these cards, the 8GB version will not have the numbers to go mainstream compared to its 4GB counterpart. The 8GB version will require eight 8Gbit chips (1GB per chip) that will provide a huge 1024MB/sec of bandwidth. This card will be quite the force to be reckoned with, but considering the GeForce GTX 980 already performs super well at 4K with its 256-bit memory bus, the 1024-bit memory bus and this next-gen HBM RAM should usher in some 4K numbers we haven't seen before.

We are expecting the new Fiji-based R9 390X to be unveiled at Computex in June.

Inno3D has had some interesting VGA cards in the past, but their new iChill GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 Black Series Accelero Hybrid S cards are looking like some of their highest-end solutions yet.

As you can see in the pictures above and below, they sport an integrated air and liquid cooling solution made by Accelero. This all-in-one solution provides up to 200% better cooling performance, and 9x quieter than the stock cooler. It is maintenance free, which is a huge bonus. As for the insides of the cards, we have the Maxwell-powered GTX 980 and GTX 970. Detailed specs are below:

iChill Black GeForce GTX 980:

It was less than 24 hours ago that we provided the best look at the GeForce GTX Titan X yet, but without drivers we can run anything on it, so performance numbers right now are a total secret. We can do guess work, where I said to expect 30-50% additional performance on top of the GTX 980, which it looks like we have in the Titan X.

VideoCardz has some very early performance numbers, where it really trounces everything else in its path. The tests performed, 3DMark 11, show us that it demolishes the GTX 980, Radeon R9 290X 8GB, GTX Titan Black, and so much more. It swings punches with the dual-GPU Radeon R9 295X2, but gets awfully close in successive benchmarks.

They ran the Titan X in 4-way SLI, which would just be so great to see in person, where the performance reaches 427% that of the single Titan X - some impressive SLI scaling.

When NVIDIA's founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang tease the world with the first GeForce GTX Titan X during the Epic Games GDC 2015 event, the world went crazy. We kind of knew it was coming, but were expecting it to be unveiled at NVIDIA's own GTC 2015 event starting on March 17.

Well, media samples are now spreading across the world with TechGage receiving their sample and taking some up close and personal shots. There's nothing new to tell you here, but we do have a much better look at the card itself. Sitting next to a GeForce GTX 980, we can see in the above shot that the Titan X looks virtually identical from the front (or top in the case of this photo), with the only difference being "GTX 980" and "TITAN" and of course the color scheme has been changed from silver, to a blackish color.

The Titan X has had its backplate removed, which I'm sure is because the GM200 GPU powering the Titan X and its 12GB of VRAM runs much hotter than the GTX 980. The GTX 980's backplate gets ridiculously hot as it is, so I think this is a great move by NVIDIA and something that needed to be done in order to keep the card from getting too hot.

GDC 2015 - Earlier today we were introduced to the GeForce GTX Titan X from NVIDIA, its Maxwell-based card that features a gigantic 12GB of VRAM. We don't know much else about it other than it featuring 12GB of framebuffer and 8 billion transistors, until now.

Legit Reviews spotted NVIDIA's soon to be dominant card at the NVIDIA booth at GDC, housed inside of the beautiful In Win Tou Tempered Glass chassis, where they got a closer look at the GTX Titan X. Thanks to the closer look, we can see that the GTX Titan X is a dual-slot card with a 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and two SLI connectors that mean you could have four of these bad boys in SLI. Yes, four GTX Titan X cards in SLI, for a total of 48GB of VRAM.

With the GeForce GTX Titan Z on the market being a dual-GPU solution, the Titan X is 100% confirmed as a single GPU card which means the single GPU is using all of that 12GB framebuffer. With four of these in SLI, we will be seeing 12GB of VRAM used in total which is much better than the Titan Z, or even the Titan Black Edition cards which have 6GB per GPU.

According to the latest report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR), NVIDIA is dominating the GPU market share game against AMD. JPR's data for Q3 2014 has NVIDIA securing a huge 76% of the GPU market share, leaving AMD with just 24%. Matrox and S3 are now out of the game, with Matrox losing its small 0.10% market share to NVIDIA.

JPR's estimated graphics add-in-board (AIB) shipments and suppliers' market share for the quarter tracks add-in graphics boards, which feature discrete GPUs. These AIBs are used in various devices, such as desktop PCs, workstations, servers, and other devices "such as scientific instruments". JPR's report has found that AIB shipments have decreased by 0.68% from the previous quarter with the total AIB shipments decreasing over the quarter to 12.4 million units.

AMD's quarter-to-quarter total desktop AIB unit shipment has decreased 16%, while NVIDIA's quarter-to-quarter unit shipments increased by 5.5%.

Tom's Hardware has quite the exclusive report, where they're saying that they have a "source with knowledge" on the matter of DirectX 12, that will see that the new API will combine the powers of competing GPUs. In order words, an NVIDIA GeForce GPU will work together in a multi-GPU set up with an AMD Radeon card.

This is something DirectX 12 has on its side with its Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities, which will throw all of the various graphics resources in a system, and into a single "bucket". From there, the game developers will have to work out where the workload will be split, which could see different hardware being used in specific tasks.

One of the major points of this new multi-GPU technology is that multi-GPU configurations will no longer have to mirror their frame buffers, or VRAM. In previous APIs, right up to DX11, you needed two cards of identical VRAM amounts to work in tandem, but only one lot of VRAM is utilized, it's not combined. This is a limitation of rendering an alternate frame (AFR), but DX12 is removing the 4 + 4 = 4 limitation of AFR, replacing it with a new frame method called SFR, or Split Frame Rendering.

We know to expect some big things from DirectX 12, but the more we hear about it, the more we want it now, now, now. AnandTech has completed a deep-dive into the upcoming API from Microsoft, noticing some huge improvements across a range of hardware.

We've written about Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock and his impressions of DX12, but he has said that using an "unreleased GPU" he was able to see a huge 100FPS difference between cards. He tweeted that he "did a test of DirectX 11 vs. DirectX 12 on an unreleased GPU with an 8core CPU. DX11: 13fps, DX12: 120fps. Lighting and lens effects".

When pressed, Wardell said he was using a Crossfire system, with an Intel Core i7 CPU. Since he's using an "unreleased GPU" we can gather he might be using the new Radeon R9 390X, which is another nice nugget of information, it means that they're out in the wild. Better yet, Wardell said that "one thing it does make it easy to treat multiple GPUs as a single identity". This is something we reported on not too long ago, where we reported that the VRAM on multi-GPU systems would be seen as one.

AMD is on the verge of announcing and releasing its new Radeon 300 series of cards, but according to a new report from Sweclockers, the codename Fiji GPU will be the only new chip in the Radeon 300 series family. The rest of the cards, will have the current GCN cores, with the GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.2 architecture powering them.

The Radeon R9 390 and R9 390X should feature the new Fiji architecture, with the R9 390 arriving with the Fiji Pro GPU, while the R9 390X will rock the Fiji XT core. When it comes to the Radeon R9 395X2, we don't know if we'll see two of the Fiji XT or Fiji PRO GPUs on it just yet. We do know that we should expect the Radeon R9 390X to feature 4096 cores, 4GB of 4096-bit (1024-bit per channel) HBM memory and hopefully, much more. These new cards will be the first video cards in the world to feature SK Hynix's HBM memory, as well as the first look at the latest GCN 1.3 architecture.

The biggest beast of the new cards will be 'Bermuda' which is the R9 395X2 dual-GPU offering, which should feature the new GCN 1.3 architecture and the super-fast new HBM memory. We don't know what else to expect, but I would like to see AMD make two versions of its R9 390X available: one with 4GB of HBM memory and the other with 8GB of VRAM. Another nice touch would be to have two versions of the R9 395X2: one with 8GB of VRAM (4GB per GPU) and another with 16GB of VRAM (8GB per GPU).