Video Cards & GPUs - Page 324

AMD has released their new Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 16.12.2 drivers, taking care of some of those bugs and problems that some Radeon graphics card owners have been complaining about since the ReLive Edition drivers launched.

First off, we have fixes for the flashing and corruption issues found in Battlefield 1 when using Radeon RX 400 series graphics cards in CrossFire, various recording issues, and issues relating to the overlay/toolbar when Frame Rate Target Control is enabled, on the Radeon ReLive Edition drivers. The new driver also takes care of the performance-related issues with Borderless Fullscreen application mode when using FreeSync-enabled monitors.

The new drivers can be downloaded here, with a full list of highlights below:

NVIDIA is wanting to get more people into the PC gaming space, with a tease of something it is calling the PC Gaming Revival Kit - and it includes a graphics card, SSD, PSU, and even a game.

Inside, you'll get an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB graphics card, a 240GB SSD from Corsair, and a 450W semi-modular PSU - as well as a free copy of Gears of War 4. The only thing is, if you purchased all of these products and Gears of War 4 separately, it would be cheaper - NVIDIA is just making it much more convenient to buy the gear in one place, at one time, in a single box.

The upgrade box will cost 399 EUR, which converts to around $415.

GALAX has hit a milestone with its GeForce GTX 1060 HOF GOC used to reach a record breaking 3GHz GPU clock, beating the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 performance in pixel fill rate - but the company had a surprise for the world at its event.

GALAX teased a single slot GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, with a slick metallic shroud that has an exposed area on the left of the card that teases its pure copper heat sink. GALAX has equipped the single slot GTX 1070 with a blower-style cooler that pushes the air out of the exhaust vent on the back, with the PCB smaller than the Founders Edition card, and it uses an extended shroud cover.

We can expect dual SLI connectors, 1 x 8-pin PCIe power connector - and display connectivity that consists of 1 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI, and 1 x DVI. GALAX is expecting to launch the card in early 2017 with a retail price of around $379.

A few hours ago I wrote about AMD's great success throughout 2016, but it has been both Team Red and Team Green that have exploded this year - with NVIDIA hitting a record high $100.21 per share (at the time of writing).

NVIDIA started the year with its shares at $32.37, but reached $45 or so at the time of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 unveiling in May. But it was on November 10 that NVIDIA stock skyrocketed from $67.77 per share, to $87.97 per share on November 11. Why? NVIDIA released their analyst-beating Q3 2016 results, riding the success of their GTX 10 series graphics cards, dominance in machine learning, AI, deep learning, and more.

And now, NVIDIA stock has reached a record $100.21 per share, with Evercore ISI's CJ Muse expecting NVIDIA shares to reach $120 soon, with machine learning "making more and more use of NVIDIA GPUs". NVIDIA has been pushing into the deep learning market for a couple of years now, unleashing their HBM2-powered Tesla P100 graphics card, powered by the Pascal architecture, during GTC 2016 earlier this year.

When NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards in Texas earlier this year, the company teased that its GP104 GPU could hit 2.1GHz, and that has been true - most samples can run between 1.9GHz and 2.1GHz - but 3GHz? Yes, please.

The GALAX GeForce GTX 1060 HOF GOC was used to hit 3010MHz (3.01GHz) on its Pascal-based GP106 core, with the same card reaching 2.8GHz under LN2 last month, but the 3GHz milestone is a big one. Inside, the GALAX GTX 1060 HOF GOC features 1280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 RAM, and a 1620MHz clock that gets boosted to 1847MHz. The 8GB of GDDR5 is clocked at 8GHz, providing 192GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

GALAX provides a TDP of 120W, but includes improved PWM and VRMs that require more power to the card for improved stability and overclocking. But where does it help? At the 3GHz barrier, GPUPI (10M) calculations were just 21.685 seconds, and the overclocked GTX 1060 was able to hit higher texture and pixel fill rates than a GTX 1070, and even beating the pixel fill rate performance of a GTX 1080.

ASUS has announced its new ROG XG Station 2, their next-gen external graphics enclosure that replaces the original XG Station that was launched in 2007.

The new ROG XG Station 2 handles the best of the best GPUs on the market, with 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors - handling up to 500W. Not only that, but it can provide another 100W of power to give your notebook some battery love, with the internal PSU meeting 80 Plus Gold efficiency.

ASUS utilizes the high bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 for its new ROG XG Station 2, where it can use GbE network connectivity, and a 4-port USB 3.0 hub thanks to the additional bandwidth provided. If the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 isn't enough (40Gbps) you can slap on an additional USB 3.0 connection (with another 5Gbps of bandwidth) - with ASUS claiming it will improve performance, but I'm guessing not by that much (less than 10%).

We've been hearing rumbles of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for a while now, but it seems we might be closer to the release than we thought - now that NVIDIA is reportedly preparing "Club GeForce".

What is Club GeForce? PCWorld reports that NVIDIA's own GeForce Experience software teases it as: "I think of GFE Rewards as more than giveaways-it's a Club with exclusive benefits for GFE users. Through the Club we can help improve our customer's gaming experience and build a GeForce/GFE community". The benefits? One free indie game once a year, as well as a free skin or in-game item for a AAA game once every quarter. There's also weekly giveaways of full games, beta codes, hardware, and more.

In the post, there is a tease for "980 Ti users get first spot in line for 1080 Ti pre-orders"... which is, well, rather interesting to see. The post itself is from a LinkedIn post by NVIDIA looking for a Senior Marketing Manager - GeForce, Gamer Loyalty & Advocacy.

NVIDIA has announced a new indie VR game bundle for new GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1060 customers, or those buying a GTX 1050/1060-powered system or laptop at participating retailers.

Those who grab a new GTX 1050/1060-powered system, notebook or graphics card will get to choose from the following games:

Maize, from Finish Line Games, is a just-released first-person adventure game about what happens when two scientists misinterpret a memo from the U.S. Government and create sentient corn. Explore an abandoned farm and a not-so-abandoned underground research facility as you solve puzzles and uncover the mysteries around Maize, and possibly learn a bit about yourself along the way. With a colorful cast of characters and an absolutely absurd world, Maize offers up a unique experience that keeps the surprises coming.

If there's one thing to be excited for right now, leading into 2017 - it would have to be AMD's next generation GPU architecture: Vega.

AMD flew out select technology press to Sonoma, California for its annual Tech Summit - where we finally got our chance to see Vega 10 running in-person, but it was at the New Horizon event that the public got to see Vega 10 running 4K 60FPS in Star Wars: Battlefront's new Rogue One DLC.

AMD was also powering the gaming PC with its upcoming Ryzen CPU, which was announced a couple of days ago. It's an impressive showing so far, with DOOM being teased at 4K 60FPS+ on Ultra and Nightmare graphics settings during the event, something we wrote about here.

Now that AMD has let the Radeon Instinct cat out of the bag, with the Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerator powered by a Vega GPU, we can begin putting some of the pieces together. We don't know much about Vega 10 itself, but we can look at the servers that will be powered by the MI25 accelerator, and do some math.

We also now know that the Vega 10 with its 8GB of HBM2 is capable of running DOOM at 4K 60FPS+, which is impressive for a pre-production, very early board.

AMD teased the upcoming Inventec K888 server with Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerators (4 of them) capable of 100 TFLOPs of GPU power, meaning a single Vega-based Radeon Instinct MI25 has 25 TFLOPs of performance (MI25 = Machine Intelligence 25 TFLOPs, or at least that's how it seems to me). One big caveat here is that AMD is claiming FP16 performance, so we should expect 12.5 TFLOPs of single precision (FP32) performance.