Video Cards & GPUs - Page 331

Intel is preparing for an earlier launch of its discrete graphics card than people know, at least according to my sources, and now we're seeing more proof of that with new GPU drivers.

Intel has launched its first-ever launch day graphics driver in history, something that marks the start of something truly new when the company launches its new GPU. The new driver has improved HDR support, Vulkan 1.1 support, fixes graphics problems in a bunch of games and other general issues.

We should begin to hear more about Intel's next-gen GPU technologies in Arctic Sound and Jupiter Sound, with these new GPU drivers the first step in a new direction for Intel.

AMD will be shrinking Vega down later this year from 14nm to 7nm, with the first real tease happening a few days ago when company CEO Lisa Su said they had the 7nm-based Radeon Instinct accelerator in their labs for testing.

This isn't a Radeon RX Vega refresh for gamers, but a professional graphics card with much more HBM2 on-board. The original Radeon Pro SSG and Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards both had 16GB of HBM2, but this new 7nm node shrink adds another 16GB of HBM2 for a total of 32GB of HBM2. Impressive.

There are GPU clocks and 3DMark runs but I wouldn't look at much of this without throwing in a grain of salt or 5000. For starters, the HBM2 clocks are at 1250MHz (up from the 1100MHz at maximum overclocks on the RX Vega 64 or 945MHz default HBM2 clocks). This would provide some truly crazy memory bandwidth numbers.

AMD has lost yet another executive to Intel after bleeding out Radeon Technologies Group boss Raja Koduri, and recently ex-Tesla (and former AMD CPU architect) Jim Keller recently joining the ranks of Intel, with Chris Hook marking the third AMD executive to join Intel in almost as many weeks.

Hook was the former Radeon marketing boss and will be leading marketing for visual technologies and dGFX (think graphics cards) at Intel. Hook will become their first graphics card marketer, where he'll form a strategy for Intel to use to fight AMD and NVIDIA in the graphics card market in the coming years.

Intel is forming quite the ex-AMD dream team for its CPU and GPU divisions, with both Raja and Hook quite the duo in the not-so-long-lived RTG team. AMD has been morphing very silently into a semi-custom company, with a bunch of high level executives exiting the company over the last few months, bleeding talent out into Intel, and other companies.

AMD has received one of their more exciting products in their hardware labs for testing, with a refreshed 7nm Vega 20 GPU that is expected to go into the new Radeon Instinct card that will arrive later this year.

Vega 20 on 7nm is nothing but a die shrink, so don't think because we're moving from Vega 10 to Vega 20 that the performance is doubled, or even improved that much. We should expect 5-10% more performance from a Vega 20-based card, with slightly lower power consumption.

We should expect AMD to detail its shift to 7nm on the Radeon graphics card side of things with refreshed Radeon RX cards later this year, with a tease of Navi at SIGGRAPH 2018 if all things continue going to plan for AMD.

NVIDIA has just released their latest GeForce 397.31 drivers, with the new release GameReady for both BattleTech and Frostpunk, while enabling RTX support for Volta GPUs, full support for Vulkan 1.1, and more. You can get the new GeForce 397.31 WHQL drivers right here.

NVIDIA's new GeForce 397.31 WHQL drivers are the first to remove support for Fermi GPUs and 32-bit operating systems, but has full Game Ready support for Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta-based graphics cards.

As for the two new games, BattleTech is from Harebrained Schemes, the studio that revived the Shadowrun franchise with several excellent RPGs, has now turned their hand to turn-based strategy with the release of BattleTech. Based on FASA's boardgame of old, BattleTech puts you in control of MechWarriors and their BattleMechs in an expansive campaign that requires you to outfit and upgrade your team of mercenaries before battling in strategic missions. Think X-COM, with big stompy mechs.

We knew it was coming, but the date was always a mystery... but now DigiTimes is reporting that Taiwan-based AIB partners of NVIDIA and AMD are expecting that the cryptocurrency mining demand will deflate, driving down demand for GeForce and Radeon graphics cards.

Why? Well, Bitmain is releasing their Ethereum ASIC miner which kicks GPU mining's ass... with the Antminer E3 coming soon. DigiTimes reports that "Quite a few mining farm operators have even stopped purchasing graphic cards, as they are awaiting the rollout of Ethereum mining machines by China's Bitmain in the third quarter of 2018. They anticipate mining rewards to pick up gradually in the third quarter, as Bitcoin and Ethereum values may rebound following sharp declines seen in early 2018, the sources indicated".

This doesn't mean that NVIDIA and AMD are dropping the prices of their GPUs, it means that retailers won't be able to siphon as much profits from their cards in this mining boom that is deflating. Bitmain is handling that almost single handedly with their Ethereum ASIC miners impending release.

EK Water Blocks has just launched a new RGB version of its custom waterblock for EVGA's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 graphics card.

EKWB has put its usual high-class engineering into the RGB waterblock for the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 card, with the waterblock itself directly cooling the GPU, VRAM, and VRMs.

The company uses a central inlet split-flow cooling engine on the EK-FC1080 GTX Ti FTW3 RGB, something that offers best-in-class cooling performance when mixed with reversed water flow, that doesn't negatively impact cooling performance. The design allows the EK-FC1080 GTX Ti FTW3 RGB to be used in systems with not-so-great water pumps due to its impressive hydraulic performance.

I've been on holiday for the past week and didn't cover the purported specs on the GeForce GTX 1180 from WCCFTech, something I wanted to have the time to properly sit down and think about and then, write about... so here we go.

The site says "latest leaks, rumors and information provided" to them, without any names or proof, so this is all in the air. The site says the GeForce GTX 1180 will pack the unannounced Turing GPU architecture with the GT104 variant powering the GTX 1180, at up to 400mm2.

NVIDIA will pack an insane 3584 CUDA cores into the purported GeForce GTX 1180, with 8-16GB GDDR6 models on a 256-bit memory bus with the GDDR6 clocked at 16Gbps, blowing GDDR5X and HBM2 out of the water. This will provide the purported GTX 1180 with 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth up from the 320GB/sec offered on the GTX 1080 with its 8GB of GDDR5X at 10Gbps.

AMD is fighting the good fight with gamers with a new surprise bundle that is called Combat Crate. What is the new Combat Crate exactly? Well, there are two different Combat Crates so far, the first with a Ryzen 5 1600 and the other with a Ryzen 7 1700.

Both of the Combat Crates come with an MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard and MSI RX 580 Armor OC graphics card. This is a perfect combo for playing games at 1080p or even 1440p, and packing some hefty CPU power for a bundled price of just $599.

If you purchased these parts separately, it would cost $585 cheaper than the Combat Crate. But, the MSI RX 580 Armor OC graphics card is discounted from its original $379.99 price to $327.67, so if it was not discounted the bundle would be $35 cheaper or so.

Intel has announced new plans that would see the integrated GPUs on their processors used to scan for malware and viruses, something that will improve both performance and battery life on some PCs.

Rick Echevarria, Intel's platform security division VP explains: "With Accelerated Memory Scanning, the scanning is handled by Intel's integrated graphics processor, enabling more scanning, while reducing the impact on performance and power consumption. Early benchmarking on Intel test systems show CPU utilization dropped from 20 percent to as little as 2 percent".

Intel's new Threat Detection Technology is available on Intel's 6th/7th/8th gen processors, where it will move virus scanning abilities to the GPU, offloading it from the CPU. Right now virus scanners use the CPU to detect memory-based attacks, but entire system performance drops because of this. The company is hoping that offloading virus scanning to the integrated GPU that performance and power consumption will improve, as most PCs aren't using on-board GPUs to their full potential at all times. Might as well make use of that unused GPU power.