Video Cards & GPUs - Page 440

This morning rumors of two new NVIDIA GeForce Titan GPU's have made their way to our ears. Website 3DCeter.org is reporting that NVIDIA is planning to launch two revisions of its flagship Titan GPU, the Titan LE and Titan II.

The new models will bring the Titan lineup to three different units that all share the same GK110 processor with the Titan LE being a slightly underclocked model, that uses marginal chips that didn't make the grade for full-fledged Titan performance. The LE will feature 2,495 CUDA cores across 208 texture mapping units, 5GB of GDDR5, and a peak power consumption rate of 190W, according to the leak.

The GTX Titan II is an upgraded model to the now famous GTX Titan and unlocks more of the GK110's power than the stock Titan. The Titan II name is said to change to Titan Ultra on launch and will feature 2,880 CUDA cores across 256 texture mapping units. Clock speed is boosted to 950MHz with RAM staying the same as the stock Titan at 6GB.

AMD's Radeon HD 8000 series is just around the corner, something I expect to be unveiled closer to Computex which happens in June, but for now, we have a tease of one of the GPUs in the HD 8000 series, the HD 8570.

The Radeon HD 8570 or "Oland Pro" is set to feature 384 stream processors (or GCN cores), 24 texture units and it should come with a clock speed of 720MHz. The memory side of things sees the HD 8570 with a 128-bit memory bus, where two versions will be available - the first, a 4.6GHz GDDR5 edition, and a 1.8GHz GDDR3 edition.

With these specs, we should expect the HD 8570 to be around 75% of the performance of the HD 7750. AMD are really aiming the HD 8570 at 720p gamers, which isn't a bad thing as that is what current-generation consoles run at. There were also some benchmarks run, with the performance of these tests below:

Today, NVIDIA is hosting its investor day at which CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off graphics produced with its next-generation mobile GPU. The new GPU is currently known as Kepler Mobile and Huang said that NVIDIA made a huge investment to take its high-end Kepler products and shrink them down for use in mobile devices.

The interesting benefits of this is that smartphones and tablets could soon be able to play games that utilize DirectX 11. "We want to get multiple years ahead of the competition. It was worth the sacrifice," Huang said.

To show what Kepler Mobile is capable of, Huang demoed Kepler Mobile playing Battlefield 3. The future of tablet gaming looks bright indeed.

We've seen leaps and bounds in graphics over the years, helped by each iteration of DirectX. But, after games started being made for, and optimized for consoles, the push of graphics started to sink.

It has gotten to the point where AMD's vice president of global channel sales, Roy Taylor, stated during an interview with German publication Heise.de, that AMD don't believe we'll see a DirectX 12 API. We won't be seeing DirectX 12 with Windows 8, or Windows Blue either.

Taylor was responding to a question about next-generation GPUs and technologies that they can be built around, where Taylor replied they'd normally build them around new DirectX versions to help the next-generation GPU architectures, but there won't be a DirectX 12, which means AMD's next-gen GPUs will integrate other technologies.

NVIDIA have already entered the dual-GPU arena with their GeForce GTX 690, and have taken the crown once again with their Titan GPU, so AMD have been sitting out of the GPU spotlight for a while now.

This might all end with the unveiling of their Radeon HD 7990, their dual-GPU behemoth. GM of AMD's Graphics Business Unit, Matt Skynner, held up the card for the world to see, saying: "This is the first public showing. We're not saying much about it other than it's two series-7900 GPUs on a single card, and it's whisper quiet."

AMD's Radeon HD 7990 will be a full-sized, dual-slot card, which was expected. The heatsink and fan design runs down the entire card, with no less than three fans keeping the two GPUs cool. We should hear more on this card in the coming weeks, and I'm sure a proper unveiling before, or at Computex in Taipei in June.

NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose earlier today unveiled some interesting developments with the company, with NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun-Huang revealing the next step in their GPU roadmap - Volta.

Volta will arrive after Maxwell, and will provide GPUs with an insane amount of memory bandwidth. Volta-based GPUs will provide up to 1TB per second of bandwidth, made capable by stacking the DRAM on top of the GPU itself, with a silica substrate between them. Then, cutting a hole through the silicon and connecting each layer provides the ability for this insane level of bandwidth. Something Huang has said has the ability to shift "all of the data from a full Blu-Ray disc through the chip in 1/50th of a second."

I don't know what this will do in the consumer space, as even the unreleased next-gen consoles will be holding back a beast like Volta. The future is looking great for NVIDIA, and I'm excited to see what we'll see from these next-gen GPUs.

There have been rumblings about this for a few weeks now, but Sapphire have just announced the release of their new HD 7950 Mac Edition graphics card. From the model alone, you can tell this is destined for an Apple machine, more specifically, their Mac Pro series of desktop PCs.

Sapphire's HD 7950 Mac Edition comes with 3GB of GDDR5 memory, and works on the PC too thanks to its dual firmware support through a simple dual BIOS switch. The HD 7950 Mac Edition GPU is compatible with Apple Mac Pro late-2010 and up models, as long as there is an available PCI-Express x16 slot. Two six-pin PCIe power connections are required, which come in the box.

AMD brings along their powerful Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, which gives the Mac a number of technologies to play with. These include de-blocking, de-noising, automatic de-interlacing, Mosquito noise reduction and edge enhancement as well as advanced image quality enhancement technology, such as adaptive anti-aliasing and 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering.

It looks like NVIDIA may be working on a second GK110-based consumer GPU to fill the gap between the marginally expensive GTX 680 and the ridiculously expensive GTX Titan released last month. With a $500 gap between the GTX 680 and GTX Titan, NVIDIA has a lot of wiggle room to squeeze another GPU in the lineup.

The video card is said to feature 13 of the 15 streaming multiprocessors that are built into the GK110 silicon. This means we would have 2,496 CUDA cores to do our gaming bidding. Combine that with 208 texture memory units, 40ROPs, a 320-bit memory interface, and 5GB of GDDR5 RAM and you end up with a fairly powerful card.

The rumored release date is somewhere between July and August of this year.

There's a gap in AMD's GPUs that needs to be filled, which is the very lucrative $110-$170 price point. NVIDIA currently nails this with their GeForce GTX 650 Ti, but AMD are looking to correct their mistake with the HD 7790, or "Bonaire".

The Radeon HD 7790 looks to skip the "Pitcairn" and "Cape Verde" silicons, moving directly to an entirely new ASIC codenamed "Bonaire". The first SKU to be built on this silicon will be the Radeon HD 7790, which should feature 896 stream processors, and will perform at around 10% slowly than the HD 7850. This should definitely take some of the lime light away from the GTX 650 Ti, and if AMD work on the price, they could move a lot of that lime light away.

We should see the HD 7790 launched sometime next month.

Render. Rinse. Repeat! That's AMD's new recommended method of hair care. The company could have just very well ushered in a new era of 3D graphics with its new hair processing technique dubbed TressFX. The process showcases more "realistic" and "natural" hair for in game characters.

AMD says that the new technique allows for individual strands of hair to be rendered out, and everything will flow more naturally with unique physics properties and collision detection. Long gone are the days when you have to suffer trough Laura Croft's pony tail bouncing within a seemingly flat plane.

AMD's blog stated: