Video Cards & GPUs - Page 313

NVIDIA is expected to drop another Turing hammer on AMD with the impending release of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, and then this morning news broke of AMD reportedly dropped the price of its Radeon RX Vega 56 to $279 to get ahead of the GTX 1660 Ti.

Yeah well, that's not the case. Excited press were a little excited about the price as it was looked at in a way that AMD was dropping the price of the RX Vega 56 to $279, but it was however Newegg that had a "killer deal" for the Radeon RX Vega 56. Newegg very temporarily dropped the price of the Radeon RX Vega 56 to $279, and just $279 after a mail-in rebate. It sold out incredibly quick.

I checked Amazon at the time of writing and the Radeon RX Vega 56 can be found starting at $400-$500, a much higher price than the tantalizing prospects of securing the card for just $250 after the MIR.

NVIDIA hasn't had the best time with its launch of the GeForce RTX series of graphics cards, which rode in on the tail end of the cryptocurrency market falling into a black hole. Well, things have just gotten worse.

The company has just reported its fourth quarter and fiscal 2019 earnings, with a gigantic 45% year-over-year loss in gaming revenue. NVIDIA's quarter is down 24% in total, with gaming down 45% but professional visualization up 15%, datacenter revenue up 12% and automotive revenues up 34%. OEM and IP revenues dropped hard as well, down 36% for the quarter.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said that the GeForce RTX launch is a historic one, as it was the first time in NVIDIA's history that it launched with only high-end models first. Normally we see the two higher-end models released with the Ti variant coming later, but this time it launched with the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti out of the gate.

AMD is ready to take a proper swing at NVIDIA with its upcoming next-gen Navi GPUs, which were reportedly launching in July with the first rumors and then the new 'it's launching in October' rumor surfaced that seems to be squashed with yet another rumor.

The latest on Navi is that it will launch on July 7 which would see AMD using as many 7s as it can to launch Navi, with Navi coming on 7nm (one) and then the rumored 7/7 launch (two, three). If AMD launches a mid-range 'Navi 7' GPU there could be four 7s which would be quite the trick from AMD. The mid-range Navi GPUs will compete with NVIDIA's soon-to-be-released GeForce GTX 1160 Ti graphics card, and whatever other GTX 16 series cards that I'm sure will launch in the coming months.

It looks like AMD will launch its new Navi range of graphics cards during Computex 2019 alongside the second-gen Zen 2 architecture and Ryzen 3000 series of CPUs. It will be a big event for Team Red as they'll have a bunch of new products to launch that will have consumers and gamers alike excited.

NVIDIA was first out of the gate with some new GeForce 418.91 WHQL drivers ready for RTX and DLSS technologies that have just arrived for Metro Exodus and Battlefield V, but Team Red also has a new driver with AMD releasing its Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.2.2 drivers.

The new AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.2.2 drivers have support built-in for the new Radeon VII graphics card, as well as a slew of new games including Metro Exodus, Far Cry New Dawn, Crackdown 3, and Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm. There are a bunch of fixed issues with the new drivers, and a bunch of other improvements that arrive with new drivers.

You can grab the new Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.2.2 drivers here.

NVIDIA has just released their latest GeForce 418.91 WHQL drivers which add support for both ray tracing and DLSS technologies in Metro Exodus and Battlefield V. You can grab the new drivers right here.

NVIDIA recommends that in order to hit 60FPS on the RTX 2060 at 1440p in Metro Exodus with DLSS and DXR reflections, you'll need to run graphics settings on High, and DXR reflections quality on Medium. If you want 1440p with DLSS on, graphics on Ultra and DXR reflections on Medium then you'll need the RTX 2070 while DXR reflections at Ultra will cost you an RTX 2080. If you want it all up on Ultra with DLSS enabled and at 4K, you'll need the flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

When it comes to Battlefield V, here's what NVIDIA recommends for 60FPS gaming:

NVIDIA is all but expected to launch its GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card on February 22, with another AIB having its packaging leaked. This time we have GALAX and its upcoming GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, with no fancy 'OC' or other branding on the end. Plain and simple.

We can see here that NVIDIA is making AIB partners replace the word 'ray tracing' with 'Turing shaders', as the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti will not be capable of real-time ray tracing, but still feature a Turing GPU. The Turing GPU in question is the TU116 which will feature 1536 CUDA cores and is joined by 6GB of super-fast GDDR6 memory that should see the GTX 1660 Ti becoming a GTX 1060 successor.

The back of the GALAX GeForce GTX 1660 Ti doesn't really tell us much, but there's not much here that we need to know.

AMD just launched its new Radeon VII graphics card, but that'll be it for GPU releases for the company until the new Navi GPU architecture and its unveiling that should take place at Computex 2019.

According to the latest rumors, Navi will be unveiled in June at Computex, but won't be in gamers hands until October. This makes sense as the unveiling will have to take place after Sony and Microsoft announce and detail their respective next-gen consoles that will feature custom Zen 2 processors and custom Navi GPUs.

An October retail launch allows AMD to build larger numbers of Navi graphics cards especially considering they'll be on 7nm and most fab time for 7nm is being chewed up incredibly quick. AMD will be using GDDR6 memory which will see AMD having many more Navi cards than Radeon VII, which are according to our exclusive story, less than 5000 units in total.

We've all read the rumors of NVIDIA's purported GeForce GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti graphics card coming, a new Turing-based card that won't have real-time ray tracing abilities.

We have seen teases of both an MSI and GIGABYTE family of GTX 1660 Ti graphics cards, but after speaking with an AIB source of mine, it's confirmed: the GTX 1660 Ti is coming, and it isn't far away. I would dare say that NVIDIA will launch the new cards in the not too distant future, as it'll have to better compete with AMD's upcoming Navi-based graphics cards that should fall between $299-$599 in various SKUs.

To add to this news, VideoCardz is reporting that new listings have turned up for GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics cards on Russian retail websites with MSI and Palit custom GTX 1660 Ti cards teased. We are to expect the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti to be launched on February 15 (which is right around the corner) and then the GTX 1660 in 'early March' for prices of $279, and $229 respectively.

In a world exclusive article I wrote back in mid-January, I said that there would be less than 5000 units of AMD's new Radeon VII graphics card available. Well, it could end up being even less than that according to new reports.

OverclockersUK have said they've received just 76 units, with OCUK's allocation reportedly half of the entire stock that the UK will receive, but other countries are much worse off. Cowcotland reports that Spain and France will have just 20 each to sell, which is not a good position to be in at all. All of this underlines the fact that my source said there would be up to 5000 max and that "AMD is losing money on each card sold as they are, as I said before, just Radeon Instinct MI50 cards that are being re-purposed into 'new' Radeon VII cards".

In my report, I added that there would be "NO custom Radeon VII graphics cards made". We have yet to have seen a custom Radeon VII, as they are all reference models with some 'new' stickers added to the fans like ASRock's upcoming Radeon VII graphics card.

AMD has released a new set of Radeon 19.2.1 drivers that are optimized for the newly-released battle royale game Apex Legends that Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment just dropped on the world.

The new Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.2.1 drivers are not only optimized for Apex Legends but they have support for the upcoming private beta of The Division 2. There's also up to 5% additional performance in Assassin's Creed Odyssey on the Radeon RX Vega 64, with AMD making some optimizations in the new 19.2.1 drivers.

These changes also fix some problems with Battlefield V, issues with Anthem, and various other issues that are fixed in the Radeon 19.2.1 drivers.