Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 316

MSI will be gracing the world with no less than 5 custom GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards over the next few months, and before we jump into those models - I have a big question I need answered: where the hell are the Lightning cards, MSI? I want the GTX 1080 Lightning, and GTX 1080 Ti Lightning cards.

MSI have released previous generation cards with Lightning Edition cards, and they were usually one of the best SKUs of that generation on the market. Many people, including myself, have waited for MSI to unveil the GeForce GTX 1080 Lightning - and now that we're seeing the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti enter the market, my question on where the Lightning Edition cards are is stronger than ever. MSI... where are they? Can we have them soon? The last one we saw was MSI's GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning, which was one of the best GTX 980 Ti cards ever.

Now, onto MSI's custom GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards: starting with the higher-end Gaming X, which we have the SeaHawk EK, SeaHawk, Armor, and Aero brands coming soon.

EVGA is on a winning streak today with in-house overclocker 'Kingpin' hitting 3GHz+ on the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition, but now the company has just unleashed more details on three of its upcoming custom GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards.

EVGA will have 3 different models of custom GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards, with the GTX 1080 Ti SC, GTX 1080 Ti SC2, and GTX 1080 Ti FTW graphics cards.

The GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Gaming will have its clocks at 1569/1683MHz, with 8+8-pin PCIe power connectors, and a 10+2-phase design - it'll also be the most customized GTX 1080 Ti card from EVGA.

Well... I don't even know what to say. The previous world record on the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti saw the GPU hitting speeds of over 2.5GHz - but now, legendary overclocker Kingpin - who seems to not sleep, or at least overclocks GPUs in his sleep - has hit a mind blowing 3GHz on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition.

Kingpin used LN2 to keep the GPU cool enough for it to clock past 3GHz, hitting 3024MHz on the dot - the pixel fillrate throughput reaches 229.3 GPixel/s and texture fillrate throughput of 583.7 GTexel/s.

The new 3024MHz GPU clock on the overclocked GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition also marks a new record for the Pascal architecture, which had previously been pushed to 3012MHz on the GTX 1060.

A few days ago we reported that multi-GPU support in Vulkan was exclusive to Windows 10, but Khonos Group has reiterated that this isn't true - and that multi-GPU support under Vulkan will work with Windows 7, Windows 10, and Linux.

Khronos Group explains: "Some of the Khronos GDC slideware mentioned that for Vulkan multi-GPU functionality, Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) must be in Linked Display Adapter (LDA) mode. That was not a very clear statement that has caused some confusion. And so it is worth clarifying that:"

They continued: "Khronos always strives to make its' specifications as cross platform as possible. Of course, what products ship on which OS is up to the implementers of each specification, but Khronos is already aware of vendor plans to ship multi-GPU functionality on platforms other than Windows 10, including Linux".

The latest rumors on AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega is that there will be 7 different SKUs on offer, something that was spotted by Phoronix, inside of the new Linux driver released by AMD.

In the first 100 patches released, the first Vega support was based on the GFX9 architecture, which is very different to GFX8 - or the Polaris architecture. The new architecture required around 40,000 new lines of code, something that included: "new video BIOS interface, new hardware intellectual property, support for video decode using UVD (UVD 7.0), support for video encode using VCE (VCE 4.0), support for 3D via RadeonSI, power management, full display support using DC, and support for SR-IOV virtualization".

The new patches include 7 new Vega IDs, which will include Radeon Instinct and Radeon PRO products based on the Vega architecture. As for the IDs, this is what we have:

We've been hearing rumbles of the Radeon RX 500 series for a while, but now we're getting more specific news on what GPU the refresh will use. We're still looking at the Polaris GPU architecture, but they're using a new node process, known as 14LPE and 14LPP.

AMD shifting its new Radeon RX 500 series to the 14LPE/14LPP nodes won't be the same as the larger shift from 28nm to 14nm FinFET, but it will be a nice little bump. Inside of the Radeon RX 580, we're now expecting the higher-clocked Polaris 20 XTX GPU, with 2304 stream processors, 144 TMUs, and 32 ROPs with 8GB of GDDR5 RAM at 8Gbps.

NVIDIA owns the high-end market right now with its new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, which is already selling out before all of the AIB partners have even started releasing their custom GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, and now we have one of the most unique ones yet.

Colorful has started teasing its new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti iGame graphics card, which features an LCD display on the top which displays GPU clock speeds - and I'm sure more details like GPU/RAM temps, and hopefully more.

It looks like Colorful are requiring 8+8-pin PCIe power connectors on the GTX 1080 Ti iGame, and we can see that it has a huge - and what I'm sure will be a kick ass cooler.

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega is my most anticipated graphics card of 2017, so the few teases we've had of the card in the last 24 hours have been beyond exciting.

The very first look at the Radeon RX Vega graphics card showed us the beautiful white backplate with red accents, and that awesome Vega branding.

Out of all of the custom GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards on the way, one of the most exciting for me is the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G - something we've just go an exclusive look at. We secured this shot of the card from an industry source.

From the first shot, we can see that MSI hasn't done much to the physical style of the GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G compared to the GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G, except that the 'GeForce GTX' branding is much more apparent here - and we have 8+8-pin PCIe power connectors.

I can see a DVI port on the card as well, so it's a nice touch that MSI is thinking of the gamers with DVI displays out there. This is all we have for now, but what do you think of MSI's upcoming GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G? Is this the GTX 1080 Ti for you?

Khronos Group has the technology and gaming worlds excited over its Vulkan API, which is a low-level API that provides more performance from your graphics card in games that utilize the API - like DOOM.

But after their GDC 2017 slides were looked over, native multi-GPU support for NVIDIA GeForce SLI and AMD Radeon CrossFire setups now require WDDM to be set to "linked display adapter mode", something that is exclusive to Windows 10. This means that Vulkan and its multi-GPU goodness is locked to Windows 10, eyeing off Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users with multi-GPUs, with a striking glare.

Game developers have to add multi-GPU, DX12, and/or Vulkan support in manually - so this isn't too much of a surprise, but whatever Khronos, Microsoft, NVIDIA, or AMD can do to make game developers' lives easier for multi-GPU goodness, they should be doing. This kind of feels like a step backwards.