Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 372

We heard the rumors, but ASUS has just made its new GTX 980 20th Anniversary Gold Edition official: the world's fastest GeForce GTX 980 video card. The company has used its impressive DirectCU cooler with 0dB-fan technology that allows for games like League of Legends and StarCraft to be played in total silence.

The all-important fact here is that it has a Boost Clock of 1431MHz, which is 215MHz above the reference Boost, providing an additional 15% performance. 4GB of GDDR5 is splashed on top, with three DisplayPort outputs, one HDMI and one dual-link DVI. One of the more unique parts of the VGA card is that it has a beautiful gold and black cooler, which is going to look incredible in gamers' PCs.

ASUS has told us that the GTX 980 20th Anniversary Gold Edition is a "short run, exclusive limited edition card", with its clock speeds beating even the best GTX 980s on the market from EVGA and its Kingpin GTX 980 and GALAX HOF 980 cards. We have reached out to our contact at ASUS to try and secure a sample, so check back for a review here at TweakTown soon.

It looks like AMD's Radeon 300 series is beginning to take better form, where we're learning that the new cards will be filled with a bunch of rebrands, something that has been discovered hiding in the Catalyst 15.3 Beta drivers. Here's the run down of what is found in the Catalyst 15.3 Beta drivers:

One of the stand out GPUs from this is the "Pitcairn" GPU, which, if these rumors are correct, will see its fourth use in AMD's line up. Pitcairn was introduced in 2012 as the Radeon HD 7870 and has been rebranded ever since. The mobile side of AMD's Radeon line up will also reportedly be rebranded, which you can see below:

An early April Fools joke is appearing online, so we're going to make it clear: this will probably not happen. But, OverclockersUK and BFG are teasing a new GeForce GTX Titan XXX, which has a huge 24GB of VRAM, double the framebuffer of the GeForce GTX Titan X, which has 12GB.

Most of the specs are identical to the reference GTX Titan X, except it has 24GB of VRAM and higher clock speeds. We have two 8-pin PCIe power connectors which use up to 300W of power in "300W OC mode" or 250W at its stock settings. The RAM has been overclocked to 8600MHz, up from 7000MHz on the reference card.

We have a Base Clock of 1268MHz and Boost Clock of 1493MHz, versus the 1002MHz and 1072MHz of the reference GTX Titan X. These overclocks are mammoth, but it would be very interesting to see this become a real card. The price? A huge $2400+, compared to the $999 pricing of the GeForce GTX Titan X.

GTC 2015 - We didn't expect to see HBM 2 shown off in person here at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, but here we are - SK Hynix has a HBM 2 wafer on the show floor, and it's beautiful.

Here it is, in all of it's glory.

A closer shot of the wafer itself.

GTC 2015 - NVIDIA has just started providing many more details on its next generation GPU architecture, known as Pascal. Pascal is going to be a giant leap from Maxwell, where it will be "10x faster than Maxwell" according to co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang.

Pascal will feature NVLink and 3D Memory which will provide some impressive performance and bandwidth, where we can expect 3x the memory bandwidth of Maxwell, which is quite the leak. On top of that, we have 400% more mixed precision, but the Pascal architecture itself is a huge leap for NVIDIA, even compared to the already impressive Maxwell architecture.

We have NVLink which has 5x the bandwidth of PCI Express, which is quite the jump in terms of available bandwidth. NVLink will provide the ability of having 8 GPUs, up from the 4-way limit of SLI right now.

GTC 2015 - NVIDIA has made its GeForce GTX Titan X official at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, based on the full GM200 core. The GeForce GTX Titan X packs quite the performance punch with 8 billion transistors and 12GB of VRAM.

The new GeForce GTX Titan X is the most powerful GPU from NVIDIA yet, with the full GM200 core compared to the 'cut down' GM204 that makes the GTX 980 tick. The new Titan X is a powerhouse VGA card, with 30-50% additional performance of the GTX 980, and in some cases, much more. That's without taking into consideration the 12GB of framebuffer, too.

We have 3072 CUDA cores, 7 TFlops of performance and the huge 12GB framebuffer. We will have more details on the Titan X shortly. NVIDIA has also announced a price of just $999.

Hours before NVIDIA takes the veil off of its GM200-based GeForce GTX Titan X at GTC 2015, there are leaked details on specifications and performance for AMD's upcoming Fiji-based Radeon R9 390X.

According to the latest leaks, the new Radeon R9 390X with HBM memory will be up to 60% faster than the Radeon R9 290X with its 4GB of GDDR5 RAM. The leaked specs see the Fiji XT model featuring 4096 stream processors, a 4096-bit memory bus with up to 8GB of HBM memory, something that will provide 600GB/sec+ of memory bandwidth.

Comparing this to the R9 290X, we have 8.6 TFlops of performance on the R9 390X, which is a huge leap on the 5.6 TFlops that the R9 290X is capable of. HBM is said to be "leaps ahead" when it comes to video memory technology, where we have "drastically increased power efficiency" compared to GDDR5, and so much more. The R9 390X has full support for DirectX 12 and Mantle, with "new dual-GPU modes with upcoming drivers" being teased, as well as an "immersive VR experience with AMD LiquidVR".

We've heard that the Radeon R9 390X will arrive in both a 4GB and 8GB version, but the latest rumor is that AMD will release a Water-Cooled Edition as the Radeon R9 390X WCE.

The news is coming from a leaked slide which shows the R9 390X featuring 4096 shader units, DirectX 12 support, "optimized for 4K gaming & beyond", and it will arrive in a "special enthusiast water-cooled edition" with up to 8GB of ultra-high bandwidth HBM video memory. The more we hear about the R9 390X, the more we want to see it.

We've only been introduced to the GeForce GTX Titan X, but now we're hearing about the GeForce GTX 980 Ti which will also reportedly be based on the GM200 core, but cut down. Not only that, in some leaked benchmarks both of those cards are being compared against the upcoming AMD Radeon R9 390X.

According to the benchmarks, the new Radeon R9 390X looks like quite the force to be reckoned with at 4K, where it beats the R9 290X by 49%. It even beats the new Titan X and the cut down GM200 or GTX 980 Ti. Keep in mind that the above benchmarks are not in FPS, but in relative % to the Radeon R9 290X. We also have an unreleased GTX 96* GPU (GTX 965 or GTX 960 Ti) that you'll find lower on that list.

The same can be said for 2560x1600, where the Fiji-based R9 390X continues to dominate with a 40% jump on the R9 290X. It beats the Titan X by 3%, and the GM200-based GTX 980 Ti by just over 10%. But what about one of the more important aspects of the new architecture: power consumption? This is where, according to the leaked benchmarks, it looks like AMD has done something incredible: increased the horsepower of the 390X over the 290X, but kept to the same TDP.

NVIDIA has already teased its GeForce GTX Titan X which should arrive next week at the company's GPU Technology Conference next week, but now we're hearing about the new Fiji-based Radeon R9 390X, and that it will come in two variants: one with 4GB of VRAM, the other with 8GB.

Because AMD will be using High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on these cards, the 8GB version will not have the numbers to go mainstream compared to its 4GB counterpart. The 8GB version will require eight 8Gbit chips (1GB per chip) that will provide a huge 1024MB/sec of bandwidth. This card will be quite the force to be reckoned with, but considering the GeForce GTX 980 already performs super well at 4K with its 256-bit memory bus, the 1024-bit memory bus and this next-gen HBM RAM should usher in some 4K numbers we haven't seen before.

We are expecting the new Fiji-based R9 390X to be unveiled at Computex in June.