Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 321

The official GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition is a beast of a video card, but the AIB partners are cooking up some delicious alternatives, like the iChill GTX 1080 from Inno3D. This is on top of the news that the mobile GTX 1080M will be a beast, beating out the Titan X, and the mid-range GTX 1060 being a mainstream VR champion.

Inno3D's upcoming products based on the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 will feature a triple-fan cooling solution, with two LED stripes on either side of the fans. We could even see the two LED strips acting as GPU load or temperature indicators, and not just there 'just cos'.

Inno3D's iChill GTX 1080 will sport a custom board with a 6+8-pin PCIe setup, which will fly past that 120% TDP limit and really begin seeing the legs on the GP104 stretch. We should hopefully see Inno3D unveil its new video cards at Computex 2016.

We've just reported on the exciting promise of the GeForce GTX 1080M, offering Titan X level performance in a notebook, but what about the mid-range market? That's what the GTX 1060 will be for, as well as doubling as a price/performance VR monster.

Well, the GeForce GTX 1060 is expected to be unveiled in the near future, with the GP106-based card set to feature a 256-bit memory bus. The 256-bit memory bus will find itself with either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, which will handle most games thrown at it, including VR headsets. We could also expect NVIDIA to fill the bigger gap between the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 with the GTX 1060 Ti, which would allow the company to possibly offer the GTX 1060 with 4GB of RAM, while the GTX 1060 Ti could have its framebuffer bumped to 8GB.

We should expect around 1280 CUDA cores on the GTX 1060, knocked down from the 1920 CUDA cores on the GTX 1070 and 2560 CUDA cores on the GTX 1080. The GTX 1060 will fight off the slew of mid-range Polaris cards that AMD is preparing for launch, so expect a huge battle in the mid-range graphics market from both NVIDIA and AMD in the coming months.

NVIDIA has been ramping up towards a big Computex 2016, but the news just got much more exciting, with rumors that the company will unleash its next-gen GeForce GTX 1080M graphics solution at the show. We already know that the GeForce GTX 1080 is the new king, but it looks like the GTX 1080M will be the new mobile king.

The GeForce GTX 1080M will reportedly be faster than the GTX Titan X, which sells for $999 and is a desktop video card, not a notebook solution. The new GTX 1080M has been spotted on the ASUS website, with the company teasing benchmarks for a gaming notebook that beats everything else on the market.

NVIDIA had a fantastic mobile solution with the desktop GTX 980 being unleashed into notebooks last year, but this new GTX 1080M is demolishing everything else in its path. It's faster than AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X, R9 295X2, and NVIDIA's own GeForce GTX 980 Ti and Titan X - oh, and I have mentioned already, it's a notebook part - not a desktop part, which makes it even more incredible. The GTX 1080M pushes a huge 20,811 in 3DMark 11, while the Titan X and R9 295X2 trail behind.

AMD has just announced its press conference during Computex 2016, with AMD set to unveil their new Polaris GPUs and Zen APUs on June 1. There'll be plenty of top shelf AMD staff there, with AMD's CEO Lisa Su and Radeon Technologies Group boss Raja Koduri, with both of them being joined by AMD's CPU and APU boss, Jim Anderson.

The company said in its press release: "The event is slated to feature presentations from AMD executives including AMD President and CEO Lisa Su; Senior Vice President and General Manager, Computing and Graphics Business Group, Jim Anderson; and Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri. A real-time video webcast of the event will be accessible on AMD's Computex page (www.amd.com/computex) and on AMD's Investor Relations home page (ir.amd.com). A replay of the webcast can be accessed a few hours after the conclusion of the live event on both pages and will be available there for one year after the event".

While we are super pumped for the Polaris-based video card side of things, I think I'm equally as psyched about seeing just how good Zen turns out to be. AMD has quite a lot riding on the new Zen-based side of its CPU/APU business, as they're being shrinked down to thet 14/16nm node like the new Polaris-based GPUs. We're expecting a decent amount of improvement over the current Vishera- and Kaveri-based APUs, with Zen said to really ramp things up for AMD and have them competing against Intel on a much firmer ground.

NVIDIA has been dominating discrete GPU market share for a while now, but AMD has made a comeback in the last few months with its Radeon R9 300 series and the HBM1-powered R9 Nano and R9 Fury cards. In Q4 2015, AMD's discrete GPU sales increased by 6.69%, thanks to the release of the R9 380X.

On the other hand, NVIDIA's discrete GPU sales were down 7.56% after it released the GTX 950. This means that AMD could secure itself 7% of the discrete GPU market share in a single quarter, which is impressive. It won't be long until AMD fully unveils their next-gen Polaris 10 and Polaris 11-based video cards, but we'll have to wait until late this year according to the new rumors, or early 2017 for the HBM2-powered Vega GPU.

Right now, AMD has nothing to fight against the behemoth that is the GeForce GTX 1080, but it could shift focus to the mid-range market with its new Polaris 10-based cards priced at $299 or under.

We've just wrapped our review on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, with it blowing everything else out of the water, but one of the things I can't wait for is the cheaper GTX 1070.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1070 is going to be a video card that represents huge value for money, priced at $379. The specifications were hush-hush until now, but it looks like the GTX 1070 will feature 1920 cores, down from the 2560 cores found on the GTX 1080. The GP104-based GeForce GTX 1070 is expected to be faster than the current GM200-based GeForce GTX 980 Ti, and even the Titan X.

We can work out the rough GPU clock of the GTX 1070 if we look at the ~1600MHz Boost clock, comparing it to the 1733MHz Boost on the GTX 1080. The GTX 1080's default GPU clock speed is 1607MHz, so I'm expecting the GTX 1070 to fall somewhere in the 1400-1450MHz range. Coupled with 8GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit memory bus, we're talking about 256GB/sec of memory bandwidth - which is a kick down from the 320GB/sec on the GTX 1080 with its 8GB of GDDR5X on the same 256-bit memory bus.

Last week's Radeon 16.5.2 drivers included some optimizations for Doom, although no specific numbers were included. Now AMD has released a beta driver in 16.5.2.1 with yet more performance improvements, and this time with numbers in hand.

The company claims up to 35% better performance on the R9 390 over the previous drivers. Anyone on the 290 series should absolutely download these as well given the similar GPU architecture; it doesn't hurt to try for older cards either.

In my personal testing with a 290X, Ultra settings were giving me anywhere from about 40 to 110 FPS with frequent stuttering and a general feeling of input lag with 16.5.2; updating the drivers sees Ultra run smooth as butter, rarely if ever dipping below 60 FPS and often staying over 100, with little or no stuttering and no feeling of input lag. I'll go so far as to say this is likely the biggest performance improvement I've ever seen from a driver update.

We've been hearing a fair bit about AMD's next-gen Polaris architecture and its unveiling during Computex 2016, especially the rumor that AIB partners won't be showing off Polaris-based video cards during the show... boo.

Well, according to the latest rumors, press from around the world are being invited to an event on June 1 where AMD will unveil the new Radeon 400 series based on the Polaris architecture. Polaris 10 will be powering the Radeon 400 series while Polaris 11 will be baked into the lower/mid-range parts. The Polaris 11 GPU is what we saw last year in Sonoma, which was compared against the GTX 950 using less than 85W of power.

Some of the rumors have AMD using Polaris 10 to power the Radeon 400 and have it hit the mid-range segment, priced at less than $299.

id Software has unleashed DOOM onto the world, with AMD pushing out its new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.5.2 drivers, and now NVIDIA with its GeForce Game Ready 365.19 drivers.

The new GeForce 365.19 drivers are also Game Ready for Homefront: The Revolution, which drops on May 17. There's also support provided for Master of Orion, which has just hit Early Access on Steam. You can grab the new GeForce 365.19 drivers here, or grab them through GeForce Experience.

NVIDIA has officially unveiled its next-gen GeForce GTX 1080, but what will enthusiasts do without waterblocks? Never fear, BYKSI is here, with their new waterblock ready for the GP104-powered video card.

The new BYKSI N-GX1080-X waterblock isn't for sale just yet, but it'll be priced at less than $100. The company isn't known much outside of China, but they specialize in waterblocks for CPUs, GPUs and even motherboards. The official launch of the GEForce GTX 1080 kicks off on May 27, with BYKSI getting in quick so that it can be the first to market with a waterblock for NVIDIA's latest and greatest video card.