Video Cards & GPUs - Page 333

Following NVIDIA's earlier release of Watch Dogs 2-optimized drivers, AMD has released its own.

Apart from improving that game experience, these drivers -- numbered 16.11.5 -- include a CrossFire profile for Dishonored 2 in DirectX 11, and fix flickering in the Division and Battlefield 1 when using CrossFire.

Hit the source for the download and/or known issues list. Otherwise, boot Radeon Settings and grab the drivers. If you want to remain on the cautious side, use AMD Clean Uninstall Utility before installing 16.11.5 to ensure no issues arise from overwriting your old drivers.

NVIDIA has released its new 376.09 drivers, specifically aimed at optimizing three major titles.

The first is Watch Dogs 2, due out tomorrow. Word is both the game design and PC optimization are much improved over the first game, so you should probably give it a shot if you wrote it off after the last go round.

The other two are Capcom's comedy zombie smasher Dead Rising 4 (due out December 6), and Steep, Ubisoft's winter sports game (due out December 2). You hardly see any winter sports games, especially on PC, so that's definitely one to look forward to, especially with NVIDIA's optimizations.

Details on the HIS single-slot Radeon RX 460 Slim-iCooler OC 4GB graphics card have emerged, with the new card being a single-slot solution packing the Polaris architecture.

HIS will be the first AIB partner with a single-slot Radeon RX 460, with the card packing its upgraded iCooler. HIS has used a strong lion image on the card, which makes the single-slot card look awesome. The Slim-iCooler itself has a 0dB fan, with the 50mm fan spinning up only when the GPU hits 60C.

HIS has overclocked the GPU, with the Polaris 11 chip running at 1220MHz, while the 4GB of GDDR5 runs at 7Gbps.

A few weeks ago we looked at the mid-range market and DX12 performance with Battlefield 1, where we versed the AMD Radeon RX 480 against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - with AMD coming out on top.

We've done it again, this time with some higher-end graphics cards with the older HBM1-based Radeon R9 Fury X and the newer, 16nm-based GeForce GTX 1070 from NVIDIA. The results are impressive to say the least, but AMD loses in a big way in DX11 mode in Battlefield 1 - and completely, and utterly swings it around with DX12 leadership.

Do you want to see more GPU showdowns like this?

EVGA has been in the headlines over the last couple of weeks over their GeForce GTX 1080 FTW catching fire, and one user even caught it on video - but there were obviously questions surrounding this issue.

Our friends over at GamesNexus, and Steve with his glorious lock of unicorn-quality hair™ has investigated the EVGA VRM thermal issues, concluding that it's not the killer of the cards. GamersNexus did state that EVGA isn't shining perfectly here, adding that "Overlooking thermal pads was silly, if only because their performance is measurably worse in at least one aspect when compared to competition".

They spoke with EVGA, with the company saying they're getting about 200 DPPM (Defective Products Per Million), which means for every 1 million cards shipped to consumers, 200 are defective. GamersNexus are still strict on EVGA, wrapping up: "To restate: This isn't saying EVGA is in the right. The card could have been designed better, and there are still failures, it's just not the reason everyone seemed to think. Maybe bad caps, maybe the usual mix of workmanship / supply-side quality control, but not the VRM temperatures".

This time last year, NVIDIA had over 80% of the GPU market - but things have changed in the last 12 months. AMD launched their successful Radeon RX 400 series graphics cards, powered by Polaris - while NVIDIA launched an onslaught of GTX 10 series cards.

AMD was sitting with just 18.8% of the GPU market share last year, but now they've climbed up to 29.1% - while NVIDIA has fallen from 81.1%, down to 70.9%. GFXSpeak reported from Jon Peddie's data: "New market data from Jon Peddie Research shows that graphics add-in board (AIB) sales are on an upward trend. Shipments during the third quarter of 2016 (ending September 30) increased from the second quarter of 2016 by 38.2%; this is considerably above the ten-year average of 14.3%. On a year-over-year basis, JPR found total AIB shipments rose 9.2%. By comparison, total shipments of desktop PCs fell 17.1% in the same period".

There were also some quick highlights that are worth looking at:

It looks like AMD is preparing to launch a next-gen graphics card, where the company should unveil its new Vega architecture soon - it's looking like we can expect the Radeon RX 490 to be unveiled soon.

The new Radeon RX 490 will be AMD's new 4K-ready flagship graphics card that will fight against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, and hopefully at a lower price point. AMD has said that we aren't to expect a faster Polaris graphics card than the RX 480, so I don't see why they would announce an RX 490 when they should jump to the RX 590 with a card that can beat NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 (which will only be replaced with a GTX 1080 Ti soon enough).

But, there's some exciting things to expect, according to WCCFTech:

Just as I was laying down to hopefully fall asleep after a massive 18-hour work day, I read a story over at TechPowerUp sourced from German tech site Heise.de, that AMD Radeon graphics cards were limited in their HDR abilities... well, click bait can be bad sometimes, and we now know the truth.

The original story can be read here, which claimed that Radeon graphics cards were reducing the color depth to 8 bits per cell (16.7 million colors) or 32-bit, if the display was connected to HDMI 2.0, and not DisplayPort 1.2 - something that spiked my interest.

10 bits per cell (1.07 billion colors) is a much more desired height to reach for HDR TVs, but the original article made it out to seem like this was a limitation of AMD, and not that of HDMI 2.0 and its inherent limitations. Heise.de said that AMD GPUs reduce output sampling from the "desired Full YCrBr 4: 4: 4 color scanning to 4: 2: 2 or 4: 2: 0 (color-sub-sampling / chroma sub-sampling), when the display is connected over HDMI 2.0. The publication also suspects that the limitation is prevalent on all AMD 'Polaris' GPUs, including the ones that drive game consoles such as the PS4 Pro," reports TPU.

AMD has released their new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.11.4 drivers, a new set of drivers that add support for Civilization VI, and fix some problems with graphical corruption on the R9 Fury graphics cards in Titanfall 2. Grab them here.

Here's a full list of what the RSCE 16.11.4 includes and fixes:

Support For:

NVIDIA released their new GeForce 375.86 drivers, and as usual millions of gamers will manually update or have GeForce Experience update for them - but this time around, NVIDIA is seeing some pretty serious issues in their new Game Ready drivers.

NVIDIA has posted to their own forums advising GeForce owners of Pascal-based GeForce graphics cards in the GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 having issues with the new GeForce 375.86 drivers, where the memory speed is capped at 810MHz. NeoGAF forum users have posted t hat Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare are also experiencing issues with the new drivers.

We'd recommend not updating your GeForce graphics card (at least if you've got a GTX 10 series card) to the latest drivers just yet, and if GeForce Experience has automatically downloaded the drivers, don't install them.