Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 4

Want a flagship graphics card? Intel's Arc A770 may not nearly be up there with the top NVIDIA or AMD offerings, but it's a speedy enough mid-range performer for its price tag - and that cost just dropped through the floor with a Cyber Monday deal we just spotted.

Over at Newegg in the US, the ASRock Phantom Gaming Arc A770 (8GB) is a steal at $210 at the time of writing, plus you get a free AAA game with that to boot.

Namely Assassin's Creed Mirage, a fresh instalment for the veteran franchise from Ubisoft, released last month. So if you were planning to bag that game, this really is an incredible deal (or alternatively you could always flog the Assassin's Creed code on your favored auction site).

It seems there are more and more regular NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards being disassembled, tweaked, and put back together as an AI accelerator and sold for huge profits in China... where US sanctions have destroyed the AI market in the country, which is why companies are getting around those issues.

I was tagged on Twitter overnight by I_Leak_VN, who had some photos of more GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards being turned into AI GPUs and sold in China, where you can see more and more boxes -- and I'm sure these are just a handful of these photos -- filled with expensive, unsellable RTX 4090 cards. US sanctions by the Biden administration have all but dragged the AI GPU market to a halt in China, so companies stockpiled RTX 4090s and are now ripping them apart and making AI GPUs out of them.

This is also something thast's not new, with VideoCardz pointing out that blower-style RTX 4090s have been on the market since November 2022, so over a year now. NVIDIA could've changed its thoughts on the design of its flagship RTX 4090, lifting restrictions with AIB partners that stopped them from making blower-style coolers for the RTX 4090.

AMD will have its future-gen Radeon RX 8000 "RDNA 4" series GPUs in the future, with the new "GFX1200" and "GFX1201" as unnamed graphics processors that have been spotted inside of Linux patches for the LLVM project.

The next-gen AMD RDNA 4 GPU architecture isn't the only one getting some patches for LLVM, with Intel's upcoming Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest series also getting some Linux lovin'. The GFX levels let us know which GPU architecture is being used on individual processors and also show us how similar each GPU is, as well as what features to expect from it.

We know that RDNA 1 was GFX101x, RDNA 2 was GFX103x, RDNA 3 is GFX11xx, RDNA 3.5 is GFX115x, while the next-gen RDNA 4 GPUs will be GFX12xx. That's why we're seeing GFX1200 and GFX1201 so early, which should be the not-so-high-end Navi 44 and Navi 48 GPUs, according to leaker RedGamingTech, who also has two possible configurations for the GPUs:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 pricing has started to rise quite significantly, with prices bursting over $2000 in the US on both Newegg and Amazon. Check it out:

BestBuy doesn't even have any RTX 4090 graphics cards for sale, MicroCenter doesn't have much stock at all -- and seems to be limited to physical stores, not online -- while the cheapest RTX 4090 seems to be Newegg with the MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X priced at $1999. That's actually not bad for a liquid-cooled RTX 4090. But, from there, you're looking at much higher pricing across the board from retailers that actually have RTX 4090s in stock.

Right now, something like the MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X costs $2397 on Amazon, while the GIGABYTE RTX 4090 AERO OC costs $2469. If you're looking for the ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4090 OC Edition, then that'll be $2619.

NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 is starting to rise in price in the US, while in China, the US sanctions have the GPU banned in the country... but what about the RTX 4090s already there? Well, they're being turned into AI accelerators and sold at a profit, of course.

We have news of some Chinese companies buying GeForce RTX series graphics cards and turning them into AI accelerators, given the huge limitations that the Biden administration and the US government have put on AI hardware being exported from the United States and into China. AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA are blocked from selling specific AI hardware to China, while the higher-end RTX 4090 on the gaming GPU side of things is also banned because of its high compute power.

An insider has recently posted on the Chinese Baidu forums, saying that specialized factories are being formed across China that were stockpiling the GeForce RTX 4090 shipments before the bans and now turning them into AI accelerators. We're talking about GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards from the likes of Palit, ASUS and its ROG Strix cards, and GIGABYTE's custom GAMING OC variants.

Dell has issued an internal Sales Advisory document to its salespeople to not sell hardware with AMD's most powerful RDNA 3 graphics cards to customers in China and other countries outlined by the U.S. government's recent export ban. The idea is to stem the flow of AI hardware to certain countries, and for Dell, this now includes the Radeon RX 7900 XT, Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and workstation options like the Radeon PRO W7900, which is a little strange.

The Export ban covers raw GPU power, which has led to the most powerful gaming GPU being banned in China. The GeForce RTX 4090 no longer appears on NVIDIA's Chinese website because it's so powerful it enters the realm of high-end AI hardware like NVIDIA's H100. Even though the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is powerful, it's no GeForce RTX 4090 - and as far as we can tell, it shouldn't require a special export license and doesn't fall with the current export restrictions.

Is this Dell misinterpreting the new export rules or a case of them being extra cautious? The list also includes AMD's AI Instinct MI210, MI250, MI250X, and MI300-series datacenter GPUs, which makes sense, but the inclusion of the Radeon RX 7900 XT doesn't.

ASUS recently launched its GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL SSD, which has an M.2 slot on the back, handling either an M.2 SSD or a flagship GeForce RTX 4090 as an external GPU, I guess... awesome to see, though!

The RTX 4060 Ti DUAL SSD graphics card uses only 8 of the 16 PCIe lanes it has connected to the motherboard, with the integrated M.2 slot on the back of the card adding more functionality to a mid-range GPU. ASUS has room for a full-sized M.2 2280 SSD, with the company making some changes to its card from prototype to retail on the RTX 4060 Ti DUAL SSD.

ASUS has teased the GPU pushing over 12GB/sec reads from the integrated M.2 slot, thanks to ASUS using an M.2 2280 PCIe 5.0 SSD slot on the back of the RTX 4060 Ti DUAL SSD.

If there were a collector's item from NVIDIA's current-gen Ada Lovelace GPU family, it would be the ASUS ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 that was personally signed by NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang and sold in an auction for $16,000.

The super-custom ASUS ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 was put up for auction by ASUS to celebrate the launch of the majestic-looking card that I'd never want to actually use, just display it somewhere, with proceeds going to the Make-a-Wish International charity, helping fulfill wishes for children undergoing medical treatment.

ASUS had its custom ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 signed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, with overclocker Der8auer spending a hefty $16,000 USD on the card, winning the auction. What did he get? Well, not only does he get the ASUS ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card that's personally signed by Jensen, but he also gets a ROG Matrix NFT... yeah, NFTs are still a thing it seems.

NVIDIA is supposedly set to discontinue the RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti when its refreshed RTX Super graphics cards are launched, but the vanilla RTX 4070 will stay on shelves.

This is the latest in a flurry of gossip around the revamped Super models NVIDIA is seemingly planning to reveal at CES 2024, and how they might dictate the fate of the existing mid-to-upper-range Lovelace line-up.

This comes from the Board Channels forum over in China (via VideoCardz), the claim being that the RTX 4070 Super is well differentiated enough compared to the RTX 4070 so they can both be kept on sale. (The full-fat AD104 GPU expected to be used in the Super offers a lot more CUDA cores than the considerably cut-down chip in the existing 4070, over 20% more in fact).

The world's fastest gaming GPU is no longer officially available in China, thanks to new US government restrictions that restrict sales of powerful GPU hardware that can be used for AI processing. Based on the new export measures, the GeForce RTX 4090 - a GPU designed for PC gaming - falls under the 'banned' list because it's simply too powerful. Every other gaming GPU, including the GeForce RTX 4080 and Radeon RX 7900 XTX, is okay.

As spotted by Videocardz.com, the GeForce RTX 4090 is no longer listed on NVIDIA's website in China - effectively removing it from the official GeForce RTX 40 Series lineup in the region after the restrictions took effect on November 17. The RTX 4090 has even been removed from all official performance charts, so the GeForce RTX 4080 is the most powerful GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU in China.

That said, you can still pick up an RTX 4090 in the region. Several reports indicate that NVIDIA and its partners sent a surplus of RTX 4090 stock into the region ahead of the restrictions. This isn't great news for the rest of the world because GeForce RTX 4090 prices are at an all-time high.