Video Cards & GPUs - Page 328

With tens of millions of gamers using Steam daily, it's always interesting to see just how many gamers use NVIDIA or AMD graphics cards, and the same for whether they use AMD or Intel processors.

According to Steam's new February 2018 hardware survey, NVIDIA and Intel utterly dominate gamers' PCs. A huge 85.3% of Steam gamers use an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card while just 8.9% of gamers use an AMD Radeon. AMD has nearly the same percentage of the CPU market with just 9.1% of gamers using AMD processors while a huge 90.88% use Intel CPUs.

The most popular graphics card used on Steam is NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060, which is followed by three more GeForce cards: the GTX 750 Ti, GTX 960, and GTX 1050 Ti.

I've been getting ahead of NVIDIA's next-gen graphics card reveal with some exclusive stories and pondering, but with sources revealing to me exclusively that NVIDIA would launch the GeForce GTX 20 series at GTC in May, these thoughts are ramping up.

NVIDIA's current flagship GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is still over $1200 on Amazon, and with news that graphics card prices will not get better this year (right through to Q3 2018), what could NVIDIA price their next-gen GTX 20 series at? $1499. Yeah, freaking $1499.

Think about it.

It looks like everyone is now thinking that graphics card prices will remain high throughout 2018, with Massdrop recently hosting NVIDIA at the Massdrop HQ where they talked about the current graphics card shortage.

Massdrop's Tech Community boss Brian Hutchins said he talked to NVIDIA about the graphics card shortage, with Hutchins writing: "All new cell phones coming out by Apple and Samsung (and others) last year started using the same memory as graphics cards. Apple and Samsung are willing to pay more for this memory to make sure they get it first and all of it that they need. This has created a shortage of memory for the much smaller companies like MSI, GIGABYTE, ASUS, and EVGA to make graphics cards".

Hutchins continued: "As long as I can bring them a better deal than what is currently available I will continue to do so. That being said MSRP is kind of out the window at this point so keep your eye on market price VS Massdrop as you will not see any cards out there anywhere close to MSRP for a while to come".

It was the year of cryptocurrency mining last year, and now that Jon Peddie Research's new GPU market report is out, we can get a better idea of just how many graphics cards AMD and NVIDIA sold to crypto miners.

GPU shipments actually decreased in Q4 2017 compared to Q4 2016 by around 1.5% but comparing these numbers year-over-year, GPU shipments actually decreased 4.8%. The report does state that 3 million graphics cards were sold to cryptocurrency mining, making $776 million in total.

AMD shipments increased 8.08% quarter-to-quarter while NVIDIA's shipments dropped by 6%. Dr. Jon Peddie, President of Jon Peddie Research, said in the report: "Gaming has been and will continue to be the primary driver for GPU sales, augmented by the demand from cryptocurrency miners. We expect demand to slacken from the miners as margins drop in response increasingly utilities costs and supply and demand forces that drive up AIB prices. Gamers can offset those costs by mining when not gaming, but prices will not drop in the near future".

If you want to cool that $3000 graphics card of yours, then your TITAN V deserves EK Water Blocks' new EK-FC TITAN V full cover GPU water block that will keep your GPU, HBM2, and VRMs nice and cool.

NVIDIA's super-fast TITAN V is a dual-slot graphics card in stock form, but the EK-FC TITAN V water block will reduce it to a sleek single-slot beast. EKWB's water block directly cools the GPU, HBM2 memory, and VRMs so that you can hit maximum overclocks without any part of the card cooking too much and reducing your OC headroom.

EKWB's new EK-FC TITAN V is available through EK's own Webshop and the Partner Reseller Network. It's availabble in four different varieties:

I've just gotten off the phone with a well-placed source in the industry who has told me that NVIDIA will indeed be launching a new GeForce GTX series at GTC 2018.

During NVIDIA's own GPU Technology Conference we should see the company launch the GeForce GTX 2080 and GTX 2070, although the naming scheme on them could change. We could see the GTX 1180 and GTX 1170, which wouldn't surprise me. Inside, the card will be running a refreshed Ampere architecture that should have even more power under the hood, as well as improved power efficiency over Pascal.

NVIDIA should be launching their new cards in late-April or early-May. NVIDIA traditionally hosts an Editor's Day to unveil their new GeForce graphics cards, but my source said this is being shifted around to GTC 2018.

ASUS has just unveiled their latest in their line of Phoenix branded graphics card with the new GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Phoenix, coming in with a compact design.

The new ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Phoenix is short, at just 18.3 inches long on a custom-made PCB. ASUS cools the new card with a simple aluminum heat sink, spiral-looking fans, and an 80mm cooler.

ASUS ships the GTX 1060 6GB Phoenix with NVIDIA's reference clocks, so we have 1506/1708MHz for base/boost GPU clocks, respectively. There's 6GB of GDDR5 memory on-board at its stock 8Gbps frequency.

BITNAND sent out an email overnight letting everyone know they have their new stock of NVIDIA P106-090 6GB Mining Cards about to drop, where they will begin shipping later this month.

The new NVIDIA P106-090 Mining Card can be purchased directly from BITNAND for $389, with individual card performance varying from batch to batch. BITNAND notes that the "overclocked performance is not a guarantee and will depend on individual card's performance". This is what BITNAND are promising, but these results will vary from card to card slightly:

As for the technical specifications of BITNAND's new NVIDIA P106-090 Mining Card:

AMD have just released their latest Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.2 drivers that are optimized for some of the latest, and biggest games on the market.

The new RSAE 18.2.2 drivers are optimized for the just-released Kingdom Come: Deliverance, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and Epic Games' runaway hit Fortnite. There are performance gains for the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 56 in Kingdom Come: Deliverance of 4% and 3%, respectively.

The new drivers improve Fortnite performance on the RX Vega 56 by 5%, while PUBG enjoys an additional 7% on the RX 580.

NVIDIA kicks off its GPU Technology Conference late next month and now we're hearing that the company will be launching its new Turing GPU architecture during GTC 2018.

Reuters is the source behind the news so we have some credit behind it, but the site says that Turing will be NVIDIA's new 'gaming GPU' which leads me to believe that my world exclusive story from a couple of days ago is right: NVIDIA will launch two new GPU series, with one focused on gamers and one for miners.

Turing is an interesting choice as the codename is a nod to Alan Turing who was "highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine" according to Wikipedia. Since Turing has roots in cryptography, it would make sense that the Turing-based card will be for miners, while Ampere will be aimed at gamers.