Video Cards News - Page 6

We all know the pain of trying to find a graphics card right now, and while we thought AMD was rumored to not experience as much of a shortage with its new Radeon RX 6700 XT as it has with its Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6900 XT cards -- it, very unfortunately, looks like that'll be the case.

Igor's Lab is reporting that there will only be a couple of Radeon RX 6700 XT cards for the entire of Germany, but there will just be a few thousand for the entire of the European Union (or EU). Igor explains: "If you condense the information of various board partners and distributors to a trend, then there are, depending on the manufacturer and model, only a few pieces (for Germany) to a few thousand for the EU as a whole".

But then there's the UK and Red Gaming Tech that reports that there should be 1000-2000 units of the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards made at launch -- and weekly afterwards. It looks like the UK will have many more cards than the entire of the EU, which is a bit of a shocker -- but I think we'll be finding the RX 6700 XT nigh impossible to buy at launch.

• Read more: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT announced: starts at $479, launches March 18

It was barely a month ago that Intel GPU boss Raja Koduri teased that he was benchmarking the gaming-focused Intel Xe-HPG graphics card, and now he's teasing it again.

Raja Koduri posted a picture to his Twitter account from the Folsom, California building at Intel -- testing the new Xe-HPG graphics card in some 3DMark benchmarks. You can see the CPU-looking device under Raja's arm, with its own heat sink and cooler -- connected to a PCIe riser and cable and then into a motherboard.

There are two power supplies, with one PSU plugged into the GPU evaluation board and another PSU powering the motherboard. I love the insider look that we're getting at Intel's return to the GPU market, this is something I've wanted to see more of -- I'd love to have livestreams from inside of the lab and fireside-style chats with Raja about GPUs.

NVIDIA has released a new GeForce 461.81 hotfix driver, which tweaks some issues in some games including Fortnite and Red Dead Redemption 2.

The new GeForce 461.81 Hotfix drivers sort some issues out with the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER graphics card, Fortnite and Red Dead Redemption, Rocket League, and Detroit: Become Human. There's also some fixes for NVIDIA Surround with new 4K HDMI 2.1 TVs, and more.

You can download the new NVIDIA GeForce Hotfix 461.81 drivers right here.

AMD isn't too far away from the release of its mid-range Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card and we've got some early crypto mining performance numbers to share.

NVIDIA might have tried to limit the hash rate power of the GeForce RTX 3060 as it was scared they'd be eaten up by crypto farms for crypto mining rigs and bitcoin mining rigs, but people are forgetting about AMD's new Radeon RX 6700 XT. An industry source of mine is claiming the new Radeon RX 6700 XT is achieving 40MH/s of ETH mining power, with wiggle room for overclocking.

If you consider that a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is reaching around 50MH/s in stock form then that is pretty good... while the Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT all reach around 60MH/s of ETH mining power. It'll be interesting to see how the power tuning and overclocking on the Radeon RX 6700 XT will fair.

• Read more: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT announced: starts at $479, launches March 18

MSI has just very quietly introduced two new custom GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards, with the new MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING Z TRIO and MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING TRIO PLUS variants.

The new MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING Z TRIO is now the new flagship GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card from MSI in their GAMING range (not the SUPRIM range) with its GPU boosted up by another 15MHz over the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING X TRIO -- now sitting at a factory overclocked 1830MHz. It'll be interesting to see if manually overclocking the GAMING Z TRIO against the GAMING X TRIO is any different.

MSI has also added some subtle venting on the backplate of the card, and it's also thinner and lighter than the MSI RTX 3080 GAMING X TRIO. That's welcomed and all, but unless properly explained on the box it will go unnoticed -- and who knows if there will be review samples of this (email has been fired off already).

We've seen a GeForce RTX 3070 modded from 8GB to 16GB and even a GeForce RTX 3090 modded to work on an M.2 slot inside of a laptop -- but now a GeForce RTX 3070 has been modded with 16GB of VRAM and it works.

Russian modder VIK-on is behind the mod once again, with a video that shows how he upgraded his NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 from its stock 8GB of GDDR6 memory up to a much better 16GB of GDDR6 memory and it works without a problem. VIK-on used the custom Palit GamingPro GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card for this mod.

He replaced the 1GB GDDR6 modules (K4Z803256C-HC14) that are made with Samsung with 2GB GDDR6 (K4ZAF3258M-HC14) also from Samsung, doubling the 8GB of GDDR6 on the GeForce RTX 3070 up to 16GB. Pretty awesome stuff right there.

• Read more: Check out this GeForce RTX 2070, modded from 8GB to 16GB of GDDR6
• Read more: This guy modded a GeForce RTX 3090 to work on M.2 slot in a laptop

It looks like AMD is working on RDNA-based cryptocurrency mining cards, with new information coming through Linux kernel patches with a new Navi 12-based GPU for crypto mining.

The new GPU does not support DCN (Display Core Next) and VCN (Video Core Next) that would see the new Navi 12 GPU without the ability of display output. The headless GPU would be the perfect compute acceleration card for working in clusters of GPUs, or in crypto mining farms.

It was back in October 2020 when the first tease of AMD working on a blockchain GPU first started, but that was with a Navi 10 part -- this is a new Navi 12 GPU. The Navi 12 GPU was only made for Apple and its Mac with the Radeon Pro 5600M, which had HBM2 memory. It would be interesting to see the Navi 12 with HBM2 memory as the Navi 10 chip has GDDR6.

The entire PC hardware and gaming market exploded in 2020 with the pandemic, with millions more people at home many gamers were upgrading and tweaking their machines like never before. NVIDIA launched new graphics cards, AMD launched new graphics cards that were actually kick ass enthusiast entries for the first time in ages.

But the issue is, you just can't buy Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards right now. If you thought buying an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series card was hard, Big Navi is a Big Hassle to find worldwide.

The reason? AMD's entire 7nm silicon allotment from TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) would be pushed into their semi-custom SoCs for Sony and the PlayStation 5, as well as Microsoft with the Xbox Series X/S consoles. Not only that, but AMD is using that 7nm silicon for its Zen 3 processors, Zen 3, EPYC, Threadripper, and everything in between.

NVIDIA hasn't made its GeForce RTX 3050 Ti mobility GPU official just yet, but ASUS may have just accidentally spoiled the RTX 3050 Ti reveal party with its upcoming TUF Dash F15 gaming laptop.

The new ASUS TUF Dash F15 gaming laptop will be powered by Intel's new Tiger Lake-H (35W) processors and will be customizable with up to NVIDIA's beefier GeForce RTX 3070 mobility GPU. But in the spec page for teh new ASUS laptop was the entry-level version with the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti mobility GPU.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3050 Ti mobility GPU has 4GB of GDDR6 on what should be a 128-bit memory interface, and should be a little faster than the GeForce RTX 2060 desktop graphics card. The interesting thing here is that you'll get RTX ray tracing features on an entry-level GeForce RTX 3050 Ti where previously we would've seen the RTX 3060 being the lowest in the RTX rung and could've had a GTX 1050 Ti without the RTX abilities.

AMD's next-gen Instinct MI200 has been in the headlines more and more over the last few months, with a new rumor suggesting the new Aldebaran -- a new compute architecture for Instinct MI200 that will be a dual-die GPU.

The new dual-die Aldebaran GPU has been spotted by Coelacanth's Dream inside of some new Linux patches and hidden in code, with a patch from February 24 referring to the Aldebaran dual-die GPU as 'alde_die_0' and 'alde_die_1'. This would, in very obvious terms, refer to a dual-die GPU -- or MCM (multi-chip module) which is similar to the chiplet technology AMD uses on its Zen CPU family of processors.

AMD's next-gen Aldebaran GPU will be their first multi-chip module GPU that will compete with Intel Xe-HPC and NVIDIA's next-gen Hopper GPUs which should be MCM designs also. In the same patches for Linux it shuold be noted that there are references to HBM2E, which is the faster variant of the super-fast memory technology.