Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 332

We've been waiting for AMD to show off its Radeon R9 Fury X2 in the flesh, and now we seem to have seen the first real photo of AMD's dual-GPU based on the Fiji architecture, powered by HBM.

AMD's Roy Taylor posted a picture of the Tiki PC, built by Falcon Northwest, to his Facebook page. Taylor teased "another peak at the world's best developer box for VR and DX12". We can see the R9 Fury X2 (if that's what AMD names it, Gemini has also been teased) is a much longer card than the R9 Fury X, with the cooler built-in like the R9 Nano.

It looks like the R9 Fury X2 is just a super-long R9 Nano - but with twice the horsepower. We should expect the R9 Fury X2 to have a 300W TDP, but with Fiji's thermal throttling, we shouldn't expect the card to be running too hot - hence why we're seeing AMD not use a watercooler like they did on the R9 Fury X.

I've already reported that NVIDIA would unveil its new Pascal-based Titan X successor at its GPU Technology Conference in early April, but we should expect a "surprise" Pascal demo at GTC according to the new rumors.

NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will be kicking off his usual opening keynote on April 5 at 9AM PST, where we should be greeted by the next-gen GeForce GTX Titan X, based on the Pascal architecture. Now, NVIDIA is set to hit the 16nm process with Pascal, as well as using HBM2 - so we might see the Titan X successor unveiled, but not launched at GTC. When will NVIDIA launch the Pascal-based Titan X successor? According to the rumors, sometime around June - just like it did with the GTX 980 Ti last year.

We all know that AMD will be showing something Polaris-related at the Game Developers Conference next month, teasing they wanted to "spice things up", even more so that an AMD board with a "C91101" codename receiving the RRA's proof of certification.

What does the RRA certification mean? Well, all ASIC boards need to go through South Korea, just like the US - but, the RRA publishes its certifications in the public domain. A new board has been certified, and it belongs to AMD - with this board not popping up on the Zauba database, but it looks like a Polaris-based board. We already know that AMD will be launching its new Polaris-based products in mid-2016.

Lenovo unveiled their new Yoga convertibles at Mobile World Congress in the last 24 hours, with the new Yoga 510 and 710 models that can be configured with up to a Radeon R5 M430 and Radeon R7 M460.

It might not sound like much, but this is the first time we've seen AMD's not-yet-announced Radeon 400 series parts inside of a product, and this is just the beginning. There are no details other than the model 'R5 M430' and 'R7 M460' - but we do know each of them will include 2GB of VRAM.

We should expect the Radeon 400 series GPUs inside of Lenovo's latest Yoga 510 and 710 convertibles to be based on the Polaris architecture that AMD's Radeon Technologies Group unveiled late last year, but we'll confirm that 100% when we know.

AMD has been teasing its dual Fiji GPU for a while, but now we're seeing things become much more real as we get closer to the Game Developers Conference next month.

Well, Corporate Vice President of AMD and VR fan Roy Taylor posted a picture to his Facebook and Twitter accounts, teasing the new Tiki PCs built by Falcon Northwest. Inside, we have AMD's super-secret dual-GPU, the Radeon R9 Fury X2. Taylor teased: "Developers, we have something coming for you... :)". A picture, speaks a thousand words - of course.

Falcon Northwest collaborated with AMD on the new Tiki PCs, as they were the system builder of choice for the console-sized PC that sports an insanely powerful dual GPU. When should we see the Falcon Northwest Tiki PC powered by the Radeon R9 Fury X2? Well, we should see it next month at GDC.

NVIDIA said it teased its Pascal-based Drive PX 2 system at CES 2016 earlier this year, but we found out quickly after that it was just their Maxwell-based GPUs standing up for attention in the space of the Pascal GPUs. Well, now we're hearing that Volvo will be using NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 system in their self-driving cars, which will hit the road in 2017.

Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA said: "Volvo, well-known for its safety and reliability, will be the first to develop DRIVE PX 2, using it as the brain for its fleet of 100 self-driving cars to be publicly available next year in its hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden". Volvo will be using the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 for its self-driving capabilities, with NVIDIA providing both the hardware and software that will culminate in an array of cameras, lidar (light ray shooting radar), radar, and ultrasonic sensors.

All of this will create a 360-degree picture of everything going on around the vehicle. This will obviously require considerable horsepower, which is where the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 comes into play.

With the Game Developers Conference less than a month away, I've been wondering when the GPU hype train would begin from both AMD and NVIDIA regarding their next-gen GPU technology. Well, AMD just fired the first shots, with AMD Marketing Director Chris Hook taking to Twitter, teasing Polaris.

Hook tweeted to Raja Koduri, boss of AMD's newly-formed Radeon Technologies Group: "Someone told me GDC is looking kind of bland this year. I think we need some Capsaicin to spice things up a bit.....". We know that this is code for Polaris, with Koduri tweeting back to AnandTech's Ryan Smith, and Hook: "no worries Ryan - we will make it interesting for everyone".

Last year, NVIDIA unveiled its behemoth at GDC - with the GeForce GTX Titan X being revealed at the Game Developers Conference in March 2015. This year, we should expect both sides to be firing shots constantly - with NVIDIA poised to unveil its Pascal-based Titan X successor at GDC, or a few weeks later at its own GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

The mobile GPU isn't the simple architecture that it used to be. They're advanced pieces of technology that're capable of rendering a surprisingly amount graphics with the little power that they use. And mobile GPU's are only going to become more powerful and more frugal as the years go by. We can expect PS4 level graphics with the same, or less power consumption, by 2017, says ARM.

Rendered with Imagination Technologies ray-tracing tech

Speaking at Casual Connect Europe in Amsterdam this week, the ecosystem director at ARM, Nizar Romdan had a few interesting things to say about the state of mobile GPU's. "Mobile hardware is already powerful," said Romdan. "If you take today's high-end smartphone or tablet, the performance is already better than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It's catching up quickly with Xbox One and PlayStation 4."

NVIDIA's Pascal is quite the elusive GPU, not even actually physically shown at CES this year despite silicon rumored to be in testing and quite ready. Performance can only be speculated, however a new academic paper seems to have information regarding the actual theoretical compute performance of the Pascal Flagship.

The paper itself is a treatise on the benefits of new memory technologies and their impact on the compute landscape. In one of the slides the author, Manuel Ujaldon, compares Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube (HBM), GDDR5, DDR3 and HBM technologies. Surprisingly, one of the slides seems to have the theoretical double and single precision performance numbers for the flagship Pascal GPU compared to other compute devices, Kepler, Fermi, Xeon Phi and even a Bulldozer based Opteron. The DP performance is even slightly more than the SP numbers for GK110, and only 2000 GFLOPS less than the Titan X's SP performance. On the single precision front, it's simply off the charts.

Looking at the sources confirms that this particular fellow of CUDA indeed talked with NVIDIA, so his numbers aren't necessarily completely made up, and are likely based off of low estimates gained from internal testing. Of course, these are theoretical numbers and don't always translate into how a particular GPU actually performs in real-world tasks, but that's a lot of compute power. Even more than AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X

ASUS has launched the Savage At Heart promotion, which gives away a free copy of Ubisoft's new Stone Age adventure Far Cry: Primal with the purchase of select qualifying video cards.

To get the bundle, you'll have to buy an ASUS-branded NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 390 video card or better from Feb. 15 to Feb. 30.

Code redemption starts on March 1st, and oddly enough there's no sign-up process on the mainsite, so I'm not exactly sure how users are supposed to send in their PPID and GPU serial numbers. To register for the promo, you'll have to make an ASUS account and go here to find the event and sign up for it. The promo isn't listed on the events page, so maybe give it a few days.