Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 5

AMD recently re-launched the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, a GPU that outperforms the Radeon RX 7800 XT and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4070 while being priced the same as the latter. However, a hard lock (which AMD has said was unintended) on memory speeds at launch limited the GPU's overclocking potential.

This meant that an overclocked Radeon RX 7800 XT could be pushed to reach Radeon RX 7900 GRE performance (while drawing more power) with no option for the RX 7900 GRE to do the same. Still, it's an impressive GPU, with a price that brings some more competition to the stacked mid-range graphics card market that now has four viable choices - the Radeon RX 7800 XT ($499), GeForce RTX 4070 ($549), Radeon RX 7900 GRE ($549), and GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER ($599).

There's some good news for those eyeing a Radeon RX 7900 GRE. The memory overclocking limits have been removed courtesy of the latest Radeon drivers, Adrenalin Edition 24.3.1.

Real-time ray-tracing is not only hardware intensive to the point where it needs dedicated hardware to run complex calculations for advanced lighting effects but also heavy on VRAM usage. This has led to situations where 8GB video cards like the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti run into bottlenecks in heavy RT workloads.

According to a recently published patent filed by Microsoft, it is all about using level-of-detail (LOD) to improve ray-tracing performance and quality as needed. Different LOD settings and rendering exist in games, where objects in the distance are rendered with less geometry or detail to boost performance. This also applies to things like texture quality and foliage, which look their best the closer your in-game character is to a particular spot.

Ray-tracing involves a new "residency map for a sub-tree corresponding to a bounding volume hierarchy of objects," where ray-tracing detail is calculated based on an LOD system. Distant ray tracing will be of lower quality, but greater detail will be available up close, freeing up resources like VRAM.

Intel's next-generation Battlemage "Xe2-HPG" GPUs have been spotted, running with 20-core and 24-core GPU variants inside the SiSoft Sandra database. Check them out:

Intel is expected to roll out its next-gen Battlemage GPU later this year, filling out the Xe2-HPG and Xe2-LPG variants: Xe2-HPG will be discrete graphic cards, while Xe2-LPG will be integrated GPUs inside upcoming processors like Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake CPUs.

The new Battlemage Xe2-HPG GPUs were spotted by "miktdt" with the 20-core Xe2-HPG GPU featuring 160 Vector Engines and 2560 ALUs, while the 24-core Xe2-HPG GPU packed 192 Vector Engines and 3072 ALUs. Both of the Xe2-HPG GPUs featured 8MB of L2 cache, which is half of the cache Intel uses on Alchemist Xe-LPG GPUs with 32 cores. Both of the GPUs also packed 12GB of VRAM on what seems to be a 192-bit memory interface.

NVIDIA's set to reduce its production of Lovelace graphics cards from now on in preparation for the launch of Blackwell GPUs later this year.

That's the latest from the rumor mill, specifically Korean tech site Quasarzone as noticed by Wccftech.

Industry experts in South Korea are cited as sources who are saying that NVIDIA has told its manufacturing partners that it'll be dropping shipments in terms of supply for existing RTX 4000 graphics cards.

NVIDIA's RTX 3050 received a new spin on the graphics card not so long ago, a considerably cut-down version with 6GB of VRAM, and apparently it's selling well in China.

Indeed, this GPU - intended as a fresh option in place of the old GTX GPUs which have been chucked on the scrapheap - is under 'huge' demand in China, according to a report highlighted by Wccftech.

So much so, that apparently graphics card manufacturers over in the country are increasing the asking price of the RTX 3050 6GB, or that's the word on the grapevine, specifically from the Chinese Board Channel forums.

NVIDIA announced its next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture and the world's fastest AI GPU, the Blackwell B200 AI GPU, last week at GTC 2024 (GPU Technology Conference). CEO Jensen Huang said it'll be around 10 years before something like DLSS 10 renders every frame using AI.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang predicted the future of AI in gaming, saying that in under 10 years we will see AI generating every single pixel in every game, all in real-time. Jensen said: "I think with almost, almost everything in technology, the S curve is not longer than a decade once it becomes true, once it becomes practical and better. And, of course, ChatGPT is not only practical; in most cases, it's better. I think it's less than ten years away".

Jensen continued: "In ten year's time, you're at the other end of that S curve. In five years from now, you're probably right in the middle where everything is changing in real-time, and everybody's going, 'Oh, look at that, this is happening.' And so you just got to decide, are we two years into it, into that ten years? Probably. We're probably already two years into it. And so I would say that within the next five to ten years, somewhere in between, it's largely the case".

Samsung wasn't the only one showing off next-gen GDDR7 memory chips at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2024 event, with SK hynix also having some GDDR7 on the show floor. Check it out:

Our friends over at HardwareLuxx were on the show floor at NVIDIA GTC 2024, spotting SK hynix's new GDDR7 memory modules that offer up to 40Gbps per pin for up to 160GB/sec memory bandwidth per module. We've heard and reported that GDDR7 memory will start its life at 28Gbps on NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, with refreshes along the way packing higher-speed GDDR7 modules.

Samsung has claimed it is working on 37Gbps GDDR7 memory while also showing off next-gen 32Gbps and 28Gbps GDDR7 memory modules at NVIDIA GTC 2024. We should expect NVIDIA to roll out GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards with 28Gbps GDDR7 memory, but I would lean more towards 32Gbps GDDR7 to give them a huge performance leap over the GDDR6X-based flagship GeForce RTX 4090.

NVIDIA may have new spins on its RTX 4070, 4060 Ti and 4060 graphics cards inbound, but if so, let's make it clear from the outset that these won't be anything interesting.

A tweet has surfaced from regular leaker MEGAsizeGPU claiming some new versions are planned by NVIDIA, but before you begin imagining some kind of 4060 Super (or indeed 4060 Ti Super), these graphics cards will keep the exact same specifications as the existing versions (if they're anything at all - add salt as ever).

So, what's the point of that? Well, they will have a different chip, with the changes being as follows:

With Intel's Arc graphics now covering discrete GPUs like the Arc A750 and recent Arc A580 and integrated graphics in the new Intel Core Ultra series of mobile processors, the diligent team over at Team Blue continues to improve driver support for new games and older titles.

Over the past year, we've seen significant overhauls to DirectX 12 and DirectX 11 performance, with per-game optimizations bringing some game-changing improvements. The latest Intel Game On Graphics Driver release for Arc Graphics is no different, with new game support for Dragon's Dogma 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and Diablo IV's upcoming ray-tracing update; a bunch of older titles are also getting "up to 174% average FPS uplift."

Those massive performance increases are limited to a handful of titles, like Detroit: Become Human (Vulkan) and Granblue Fantasy: Relink (DX11). Still, a 36% performance bump to God of War running on a desktop Arc GPU and a 17% performance bump running on an Intel Core Ultra with built-in Arc are great to see.

AMD has released AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 24.3.1 for Radeon GPU owners, and the latest driver update from Team Red is a big one - not only in terms of new game support but also in the number of 'Fixed Issues.'

First, the Adrenalin Edition 24.3.1 adds day-one support to the two biggest PC game releases of the week (and month), with Capcom's Dragon's Dogma 2 and Sony's Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition getting some Radeon love. Outpost: Infinity Siege, the third game listed in the release notes, is more of an unknown. It's described as an "FPS, Base Building, Tower Defense" game, launching next week on Steam.

Onto the fixed issues, high-end Radeon RX 7900 Series GPU owners playing the smash-hit Helldivers 2 will be pleased to know that Adrenalin Edition 24.3.1 resolves and improves driver timeout issues and crashes when playing the game. Another win for all Radeon owners is AMD fixing micro stutter issues with AMD Fluid Motion Frames, improving the driver-based Frame Generation solution that's part of HYPR-RX.