Video Cards & GPUs - Page 330

NVIDIA has just released their latest Game Ready 398.82 drivers, which are Game Ready for GeForce graphics card owners for World of Warcraft: Battle of Azeroth which launches on August 14, and Monster World Hunter on August 9.

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth is right around the corner, with NVIDIA recommending the GeForce GTX 1060 for 1080p 60FPS, the GTX 1070 for 1440p 60FPS and the GTX 1080 for 4K 60FPS. NVIDIA has benchmarks the game, where they've said: "If you like World of Warcraft, you like stats, so here's some: at 1920×1080, our benchmarking concluded with an average framerate of 65.4 on the GeForce GTX 1060, when paired with an i5-6600K. A minimum framerate of 53 was the lowest we saw, and the frametime plot was near-perfect, indicating performance was smooth and stable".

NVIDIA continues: "At 2560×1440, the GeForce GTX 1070 gave us a 65.6 FPS average, with a minimum of 52, and equally-smooth frametimes And at 4K, it's recommended that players step up to an i7 for a perfect 60 frames per second on a GeForce GTX 1080, with the occasional dip to 51 FPS".

NVIDIA's various AIB partners will have their GeForce GTX 11 series graphics cards in consumers hands in the August/September timeframe, with Inno3D ahead of the pack when it comes to subtle viral marketing of their new cooling technology.

Inno3D held an event in China recently where they teased their next-gen iChill AIO liquid cooling technology which should be used on their next-gen GTX 11 series graphics cards. Inno3D's next-gen iChill AIO liquid cooler will be used on the company's flagship overclocked GTX 1180 and GTX 1170 graphics cards (or whatever they end up as, GTX 1185 or GTX 1195).

The new coolers will have the iChill logo on both the front and the back of the card, illuminated by beautiful LEDs. It will be a dual-slot cooler with dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors while the watercooling tubes feeding out the back above the power connectors.

NVIDIA has just announced its new GeForce Gaming Celebration event for August 20, which will take place at Gamescom 2018 in Cologne, Germany.

NVIDIA will be showcasing its latest graphics cards and 4K 144Hz HDR G-Sync gaming monitors and 65-inch 4K 120Hz HDR BFGD TVs, alongside a slew of games and other gaming-related goodies during Gamescom 2018. Until now, rumors suggested July 30 as the release date for the GeForce GTX 1180 graphics card with an August/September release window that AIB partners told me during Computex 2018... and now that seems the case.

The company has officially announced teh event on their website, saying that it will be "loaded with new, exclusive, hands-on demos of the hottest upcoming games, stage presentations from the world's biggest game developers, and some spectacular surprises". I wonder what those "spectacular surprises" could be, eh?

NVIDIA delayed its GeForce GTX 11 series launch earlier this year which is why we're in such a sad state of affairs with rumors and leaks, and then the mining boom happened right in the middle of all of this, as well as AMD completely failing with its Radeon business... all of which have created the perfect storm for NVIDIA.

Now we have new information that VideoCardz is reporting from YouTuber 'Gamer Meld' who reportedly received an email from an NVIDIA AIB partner that provided some release dates for the GTX 11 series. The email said the GeForce GTX 1180 would be released on August 30, the GTX 1170 and GTX 1180+ on September 30, and the mid-range GTX 1160 on October 30.

So with this new information in-hand, let's break it down.

As we get closer to the purported release window of NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce GTX 11 series, the more juicy the rumors get - leading into today and the purported GeForce GTX 1170. As always, this is a huge rumor and I doubt it's even close to real, but let's take a look at it anyway.

The new purported GeForce GTX 1170 has been benchmarked with an Intel Core i5-8600K processor in 3DMark, beating out NVIDIA's best consumer GeForce graphics card, the GTX 1080 Ti. Inside, the GTX 1170 reportedly runs a 256-bit memory bus with 16GB of GDDR6 RAM and a GPU clock speed of 2.5GHz, which is huge.

NVIDIA used a brick wall with GPU clock speeds with Pascal with even the most enthusiast-focused GTX 1080/1080 Ti hitting a maximum GPU clock of 2.2GHz, unless it was heavily modded to take more power. When that happened, the walls to 2.5GHz were risen, and the path to 2.7-2.8GHz were opened.

Apple announced a bunch of updated MacBook Pros with some additional GPU horsepower if needed, with the announcement of a team up with Blackmagic on a new external GPU.

The new external GPU in question is based on the Radeon Pro 580 with 8GB of VRAM, which Apple says is good for up to 2.8x faster graphics performance on the refreshed 15-inch MBP, while it should be a whopping 8x faster than the GPU inside of the new 13-inch MBP.

The new Apple/Blackmagic external GPU mash up packs 2 x Thunderbolt 3 ports, 4 x USB 3.0 ports, and 1 x HDMI 2.0 port which means it doubles as a docking station, too. It's also the first external GPU solution to support Thunderbolt 3 displays, such as the 5K-capable LG display that Apple itself recommends for the MacBook Pro.

AMD will be unleashing its refreshed Vega 20 GPU in the coming weeks, made on the industry-leading 7nm node and it'll feature some great improvements over the current Vega 10 GPU made on 14nm.

Vega 20 isn't being aimed at gamers and rather the HPC/automotive/AI markets with its huge 32GB of HBM2 and PCIe 4.0 standard. AMD is looking to aim Vega 20 at NVIDIA's current flagship Tesla V100 solution, which was recently bumped up to 32GB of HBM2 at GTC 2018 earlier this year.

The new details on Vega 20 see it coming in at just 360mm2 compared to Vega 10 at 510mm2, a huge 70% reduction in total die size thanks to the fresh 7nm node. This is where a fork in the road happens: AMD can choose power savings with the die size savings, or they can ramp clock speeds up.

AMD has lost a few people to Intel in the last year, and now they're fighting back by securing an ex-Intel executive who served as the Vice President, Core and Visual Computing Group, Chief Engineer, VTT and Director of Hardware and Co-Director of Architecture, VPG at Intel. Martin Ashton had a huge title at AMD.

Ashton was with Intel for just 21 months, and before joining Chipzilla hs worked in the UK with Imagination Technologies. Imagination Technologies, in case you didn't know, made the PowerVR GPUs that went over to Apple, with Ashton moving to Intel before that happened. And now as Intel is slipping in more ways than one, Ashton has jumped ship to AMD.

AMD reached out to me to let me know that Martin will be joining the Radeon Technologies Group and will "drive architecture and execution of Radeon graphics IP that will extend across our discrete graphics, integrated graphics, and semi-custom products".

NVIDIA is expected to unveil their next-gen GeForce GTX 11 series graphics card later this month, with a release in August/September as per our previous exclusive reports, but what about gaming notebooks?

Well, it looks like the GeForce GTX 1160 could fly in and save the day during the holidays according to LaptopMedia who are reporting the GTX 1160 6GB mobile GPU will be used inside of the updated Lenovo Legion Y530 notebook, a notebook that currently packs the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti depending on which model you buy.

We have no idea what to expect from the new GeForce GTX 1160 in mobile form, but we should expect NVIDIA to use tap that new GDDR6 technology which will give the mid-range GPU a nice bump in any laptop it powers. We could expect a rather large 336GB/sec from 6GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit memory bus, which would be a large performance jump that would bring it up to the 320GB/sec that the GTX 1080 pumps out with its GDDR5X.

ASRock made quite the splash with its new Phantom Gaming series of Radeon RX 500 series cards a few months ago, but it looks like the company is set to release the Radeon RX Vega variants in reference form, which is kinda boring.

Both of the new Vega-based cards will come in Phantom Gaming X form, with both the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 variants arriving in reference form, without any technological changes to the cooler... so don't expect cooler operation or quieter gaming at all. We will see the usual specs from the cards, with 8GB of HBM2 being the highlight here.

ASRock Phantom Gaming X RX Vega 64 Specs: