Video Cards & GPUs - Page 430

Sapphire Technology has announced the R7 250 Ultimate video card, a passively cooled video card based on the AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. No mechanical moving parts and a passive heat pipe and heat sink cooler that is quiet and fanless creates a great possibility of new video card designs, as demonstrated by Sapphire.

The video card has a core speed of 800MHz with 1GB of DDR5 memory, with Sapphire claiming it's the fastest passively cooled 1280bit GPU currently available. AMD included support for up to three monitors, 4K ultra-high-definition, an HDMI 1.4a port, dual-link DVI port, and DisplayPort 1.2 port.

DirectX 11.1 support is provided and the card is Microsoft Windows 8-compatible, as AMD and Sapphire wanted to ensure latest software is supported.

The New Year is here, but where are my New GPUs from NVIDIA? Well, it looks like they - yes, they, plural - could be very close. VideoCardz.com is reporting that we should expect two new high-end GPUs from NVIDIA: the GeForce GTX TITAN Black Edition, and the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 790.

Starting with the GeForce GTX TITAN Black Edition, which should be the same GPU found on the GTX 780 Ti, but it would feature higher double precision computing, in other words: more CUDA cores. We should see this GPU arrive with 6GB of VRAM on board, twice as much as the GTX 780 Ti features, something that is quite important to NVIDIA these days with 4K here.

We should expect the GTX TITAN Black Edition to feature 2880 CUDA cores, 240 TMUs, and 48 ROPS. The price on the GPU will be around $999, and we should hear more information on it shortly.

This morning MSI officially announced the release of its mid-grange Radeon R7 260 1GD5 OC video card to the public. The new GPU is a very budget friendly entry into the 4K gaming space, and is equipped with AMD TrueAudio technology for an immersive sound experience like any other.

The R7 260 1GD5 OC video card features a large 100mm fan that provides excellent cooling while keeping the sound levels at a minimum even when gaming. The heat exchange is assisted by dual heat pipes and an over sized heat sink that helps keep frame-rates up. Additionally, the GPU features MSI's exclusive Afterburner technology which supports core voltage adjustment technology and can be overclocked by up to 32.4% using the popular Afterburner overclocking utility. The core frequency can even reach up to 1.35GHz with just air-cooling. Enthusiasts can also use the Afterburner APP on their Android / iOS handheld devices to monitor and overclock their video cards.

CES 2014 - Intel's Thunderbolt 2 is widely considered the data connection of the future, and rightfully so as nothing else comes close to its transfer speeds. The protocol is so fast that companies can connect GPUs externally to devices such as laptops to give them a boost when needed.

Silverstone was showing off its XG2 Station, a Thunderbolt 2 External GPU housing designed in partnership with ASUS at the 2014 CES. The XG2 housed a AMD Radeon 7970 and small form factor power supply along with an ASUS designed main board that provided the Thunderbolt to PCIe connectivity. Unfortunately we did not get to demo the device, and no word was given on if or when we might see the XG2 Station hit the retail market.

We know that by leveraging AMD's so far impressive Mantle technology, DICE can squeeze up to 45% more performance out of Battlefield 4. But with a gaming market focused on first-person shooters (FPS), what can AMD's technology do for other genres, such real-time strategy (RTS) games?

Well, there's a game called Nitrous, which uses AMD's Mantle programming tool to speed up the communication between the CPU and GPU. This increase in communication sees the on-screen unit count climb from the usual 50-70 units, to around 5,000 units. These 5,000 units aren't just mindless pieces of robots on your screen, but they can be AI- or physics-driven entities.

Dan Baker, Oxide founder and previous Graphics Lead on Civilization V, has said: "It's a difference of at least an order of magnitude. Take the most complex scene you've ever seen in StarCraft II and multiply it by 10."

CES 2014 - VisionTek has just unveiled its latest high-end GPU and its features and price will surprise you. The new CryoVenom is based on a Radeon R9 290 and is fitted with a custom-built water cooling block that is said to offer a cooling performance increase of up to 38-percent.

VisionTek says that the custom liquid cooling block allows the Radeon R9 290 to be overclocked by as much as 24-percent, something that is just not possible with air coolers which have trouble just keeping the card at operating temperatures at stock clocks. Sweetening the deal, the CryoVenom R9 290 emits under 10dB of noise, ensuring for the most quiet Radeon R9 290 experience available on the market today!

Not only is the VisionTek CryoVenom R9 290 faster, cooler, and quieter, it's cheaper as well. With other R9 290 GPUs retailing for as much as $700, VisionTek has managed to offer the CryoVenom R9 290 for just $550. The card features a nickle plated block with acrylic top plate and fittings for standard G-1/4 fittings. For anyone looking for a liquid cooled R9 solution, this is the card for you!

CES 2014 - NVIDIA was showing off an amazing Origin Genesis PC that was heavily customized, pumping out Project CARS onto three 65-inch 4K TVs with 4-way GeForce GTX Titans.

Project CARS is one of the best-looking games being developed, with Slightly Mad Studios' coding abilities being shown off at CES 2014. It shows that Project CARS scales unbelievably well, all the way up to 12K (if that's even a thing) - or 4K Surround as NVIDIA would put it. The four GTX Titan's are going to cost you $4000 on their own, so imagine the total cost of this PC and the TVs... yes, it's for the PC master race, that's for sure.

As Google edges closer to the consumer release of its Glass headset, the search giant has unveiled some brand guidelines for developers. Google is trying to maintain control over the way Glass is treated by third-party companies, in the way of its marketing and branding.

For example, Google wants the "G" in Glass to be capitalized, and that the term is never possessive or plural. This means that the search giant won't allow "Glasses" or "Glass's", which might get annoying, fast. Apple has been here, done that, where it removed "the" before its iPhone, iPad, and iPod products. Another example of walking the fine wearable walk with Glass, is that you should never have the word "Glass" in its name.

It provide an example, "Glass Cat Facts" and "Glassy Cat Photos" are not accepted, but "Cat Facts for Glass" is acceptable. Google also wants to see developers using #throughglass when sharing Glass content, which it says is for better "discoverability and aggregation". As for e-mails, it wants to see users use "Sent through Glass".

CES 2014 - Razer has just unveiled its first foray into the fitness tracking smartwatch world at CES 2014, by introducing the Razer Nabu. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said: "We are calling it a cross between a smartwatch and a fitness band. It's a wearable device focused on helping you live smarter."

Razer's Nabu is a mashup of the traditional fitness tracking band, and the latest smartwatches. Nabu features two notification screens, one that displays the usual watch face, with the opposite side displaying wellness data and smartphone notifications. Nabu tracks your steps walked, distance traveled, and it will monitor your sleeping patterns, too.

The gaming peripheral maker suggests a battery life of around 7-10 hours, and is rain and splash proof. The Nabu is available to developers right now at a cost of $49, but this price should increase considerably when it reaches consumers.

Today Sapphire Technology unveiled a new variant of its R9 270X GPU. The new R9 290X Dual-X 4GB GPU features the same specifications of its previous counterpart, except the new 4GB model features double the RAM. Sapphire says that they have updated the card with 4GB of RAM to meet Battlefield 4 recommended specs.

The R9 270X Dual-X 4GB features 4GB of GDDR5 RAM that has been clocked in at 5.6GHz across a 256-bit wide interface and is capable of cranking out a bandwidth of 179GB/s. The card is a non-reference design, and features Sapphire's Dual-X cooling solution which helps the card remain budget friendly while managing to keep things cool. The new card is expected to retail between $220 and $230.