Graphics Cards - Page 77

ASUS has a new GeForce RTX 4070 model in the form of the ASUS Turbo GeForce RTX 4070 12GB GDDR6X, and based on the images, it features a more old-school blower fan design. A design choice that helps keep the dimensions down to a slim and compact 2-slot form factor and opens the door for multiple ASUS Turbo GeForce RTX 4070s to be used for AI and workstation builds.

The blower fan design is noisier than the chinkier cooling found on modern PC gaming GPUs but is the ideal solution for workstations, servers, and AI rigs because all of the hot air is vented through the I/O plate. And with that, the redesigned shroud of the ASUS Turbo GeForce RTX 4070 features "a raised edge to preserve air intake in cramped environments."

The rise of generative AI and powerful AI tools is slowly entering the enthusiast and desktop market. The AI-powered Windows 12 is expected to arrive in 2024 alongside dedicated AI PCs, so even though the specs point to the ASUS Turbo GeForce RTX 4070 being pretty great for PC gaming - its arrival helps mark the arrival of the AI PC market.

NVIDIA and GeForce RTX just passed an impressive milestone - 500 games and apps out in the wild that feature RTX technologies. This includes DLSS and/or ray tracing, where often the two go hand-in-hand. GeForce RTX GPUs first hit the scene back in August 2018, with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (check out Anthony's review from back then!) and RTX 2080 being the first consumer desktop graphics cards to feature hardware-accelerated ray-tracing capabilities and AI hardware in the form of dedicated Tensor Cores.

In 2018, real-time ray tracing in games was viewed as something still several years from becoming a reality, and with GeForce RTX GPUs featuring RT Cores and AI Tensor Cores, the combination of DLSS rendering to boost performance proved to be the secret ingredient. Game support was slow at first, and DLSS took a few revisions to get to the 'essential tech' place it is right now, but in 2023, having 500 RTX games and apps proves that NVIDIA was ahead of the game.

To celebrate the milestone, NVIDIA has provided some cool stats to showcase how prevalent RTX technologies have become - especially DLSS. Free performance without a noticeable hit to visual fidelity, DLSS is arguably the most important innovation in game rendering in the past decade.

NVIDIA has swiftly deployed a hotfix for its new Game Ready Driver which was released yesterday, and had a couple of annoying bugs - one of which was much more frustrating than the other.

We're talking about bouts of stuttering affecting the smoothness of gameplay when V-Sync is turned on. The other problem was when streaming on Discord, colors could appear muted.

Both of these are known issues with Game Ready Driver 546.29 and are cured by the hotfix which is version 546.31.

NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 is banned in China, and with news of the company will use a cut-down AD102-250 GPU for its upcoming China-friendly RTX 4090D... the RTX 4090D has been created specifically for the Chinese market.

NVIDIA reportedly started increasing the number of AD102 GPU shipments into China, so that the Chinese board partners could prepare for when the RTX 4090 was banned from the Chinese market. The company knew this would happen, so Chinese AIB partners were ready... but now, these same Chinese board partners are unlaunching the RTX 4090.

Some of the Chinese board partners are removing mentions of the RTX 4090 from their website, with the likes of GAINWARD and GALAX both removing the cards and even if you look for them manually, you won't find them. The GAINWARD and GALAX cards have also both been removed from their respective websites.

GPU scams are very real, and Sapphire (who make some excellent Radeon GPUs) is once again warning its followers and customers that scam sellers on Amazon offering brand-new GPUs with discounts of up to 50% are most likely fake.

Sapphire Technology notes that the best way to tell if you're looking at a scam is by checking the "Ships from" and "Sold by" sections, which should read Amazon.com - anything else and you're at risk of being scammed. This advice applies to all GPU purchases over on Amazon, as buying directly from the source is always the way to go regarding expensive PC gaming hardware.

Amazon.com is home to countless resellers and third-party merchants, so it can be hard to tell who you're buying something from, which can be very risky regarding tech. GPU scams on Amazon aren't limited to Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX from Sapphire, as there have been recent listings for GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs with pricing as low as $399.

The Steam Hardware and Software Survey results for November 2023 are in, and there have been a number of changes or corrections after October 2023's GeForce-heavy numbers. The most popular gaming GPU is still the GeForce RTX 3060, though its share has dropped dramatically - pointing to October's figures being a little out of whack.

Total AMD and Radeon market share is back at September 2023 levels, with a little bit of growth too, bringing Team Red up to 16.19% - though this is still a distant second behind NVIDIA's dominant 75.12% share. The biggest gains on the Radeon side come from the RDNA 2 line-up - with the Radeon RX 6700 XT, 6750 XT, 6800 XT, and the mainstream 6600 XT showing signs of growth.

It makes sense when you factor in just how heavily discounted RDNA 2 GPUs have been this year, which isn't amazing news for RDNA 3 and the latest Radeon RX 7000 Series. According to the latest Steam survey results the only GPU that seems to be resonating with PC gamers from the RDNA 3 generation is the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

The price of AMD's higher-end Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards is now getting higher now that the RTX 4090 has been banned by the US government from being sold in China.

We all know that the US government and its updated export rules seeing high-end AI hardware, and even high-end gaming GPUs like the GeForce RTX 4090, are banned not just in China but other countries throughout the world. New information from Board Channels teases that there is no ban planned for the Radeon RX 7900 series.

The report adds that AMD is having trouble getting more Navi 31 GPUs to board partners in China because more gamers want high-end GPUs in the aftermath of the RTX 4090 being banned. Board Channel's sources added that the Radeon RX 7900 series -- so that's the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards -- are seeing sales increase in China and that there's already a shortage of GPUs for board partners (but not yet for consumers).

Sycom has just launched its new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Silent Master graphics card, the latest member of their Silent Master family of cards... rocking dual Noctua fans and a huge design.

Sycom has already launched its RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 Ti Silent Master graphics cards, with each card featuring an individual cooling design, but they're all using Noctua fans. This means we get a chunky heatsink and dual Noctua fans that make for a huge quad-slot design, but that thermal system is worth it if you want virtually silent operation from the card.

Noctua's own black chromax fans are in play here, with the iconic brown and beige fan design that sits on top of a huge heatsink on the Sycom RTX 4070 Ti Silent Master. Sycom is using the Noctua NF-A12x25 PVM fans with a custom metal frame that was developed by Nagao Seisakusho, with the black frame actually handmade, exclusively designed and manufactured.

NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card is one of the hottest products in China right now, if you can get your hands on it, that is, you'll be paying double that price... which is seeing scalpers across the planet capitalize on expensive RTX 4090s being sold in China.

I was tagged once again by leaker I_Leak_VN on X, who pointed me to some pictures they had received from just one of the Vietnamese traders/scalpers that are hoarding GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards to sell to China. You can see in the photos above and below that the reseller has scores of ASUS, GIGABYTE, and ZOTAC custom GeForce RTX 4090 cards.. where there have to be over 100 in these photos alone.

Vietnam is also on the list of banned countries that the Biden administration and US government have been stepping down on, so it's not just China. Scalpers and resellers are always going to take advantage, especially when the price of an RTX 4090 is pushing past $4000 USD in China... it's safe to say things are out of control.

Falling under the category of 'harebrained schemes' is a project that combined NVIDIA's frame generation (DLSS 3) with Team Red's own take on this tech, AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF).

Surprisingly, it is possible to stack up and use both these rival technologies together, and doing so can boost frame rates massively - up to tripling them, in fact - but the full story is a lot more than just frames per second.

QuasarZone (a Korean tech site) carried out this experiment (flagged up by VideoCardz), using a PC with two graphics cards inside, one NVIDIA and one AMD as you'd expect.

Raspberry Pi can do a million things, but run a discrete graphics card it cannot... that is, until the new Raspberry Pi 5 and Jeff Gerling, who is running an AMD Radeon RX 460 and playing popular games like Minecraft and Portal through his Pi 5.

The newer Raspberry Pi 5 doesn't have any PCIe connectors, but it can be forced up to PCIe Gen3 specs (up to 10GT/s) compared to the Raspberry Pi 4, which was limited to PCIe Gen2 specs and simply didn't have enough bandwidth to accommodate an external GPU.

The previous versions of Raspberry Pi didn't only have limited bandwidth through its PCIe 2.0 interface, but also the Broadcom BCM2711 processor had multiple PCIe-related bugs that made running an external GPU almost impossible.

According to the U.S. government, the GeForce RTX 4090 was effectively banned in China because it's too powerful to sell in the region. With the export restriction in place, it's been a wild couple of weeks for the world's most powerful gaming GPU. Global prices are increasing, global shortages, and RTX 4090s are being repurposed with blower fans and upsold as AI GPUs.

This brings us to new reports indicating that NVIDIA is preparing a special edition of GeForce RTX 4090D for the region in 2024 that will comply with the new regulations and export restrictions. D as in the Year of the Dragon, but also D as in a lower tier and cut-down GeForce RTX 4090 that will reduce its overall Total Processing Performance (TPP) rating to fall within the new guidelines for GPUs sold to China.

According to new info from industry insider MEGAsizeGPU over on X, the China-exclusive GeForce RTX 4090D will make use of the AD102-250 GPU - a GPU chip that hasn't been seen across the GeForce RTX 40 Series line-up.

GPU-Z v2.56.0 has been released, with built-in support to scan your game libraries to find DLSS files, including DLSS 3.0 Frame Generation (FG) and DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction (RR). You can download GPU-Z v2.56.0 here.

Why does this matter? It'll make the process of finding those files -- if you're the type of user looking for them -- to replace them with new DLSS files that aren't out of date. For some users, this is a huge deal... and the folks at TechPowerUp have just made that process super easy with GPU-Z v2.56.0 here.

TechPowerUp has also added support for adding the sensor for the NVIDIA Crossbar clock (which you can enable or disable, but it's disabled by default). GPU-Z v2.56.0 adds support for the NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada, RTX 4500 Ada, RTX 4000 Ada, new RTX 2050 Mobile variant, L40S, and H800 PCIe cards on the NVIDIA side of things.

It looks like we'll be seeing the RTX 3060 graphics card rolling off the production lines for some time yet.

NVIDIA plans to keep the RTX 3060 GPU in production for the foreseeable future, rather than it being shelved now that the RTX 4060 has been available for a while.

According to a report from Chinese tech site IT Home - sprinkle salt aplenty around with this, as ever with the rumor mill - NVIDIA wants to keep manufacturing this last-gen GPU, at least in the near-term, to compete with AMD's RX 6750 GRE.

The Radeon RX 7900M is the latest flagship mobile GPU from AMD, and it recently made its debut in a variant of Alienware's M18 R1 gaming laptop line-up. It's the only laptop so far to feature the latest in high-end mobile Radeon graphics, and based on the in-depth review over at Notebookcheck, in-game performance is similar to an Alienware M18 R1 laptop rocking an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU.

This is an impressive showing for what should be a more affordable alternative to NVIDIA's high-end laptop GPU offerings (Radeon RX 7900M gaming laptops cost around $500 less than GeForce RTX 4080 laptops). But there's a catch. The same review indicates that when it comes to the Radeon RX 7900M, AMD's drivers are buggy and prone to issues like black screens, freezing on bootup, and rapidly draining the battery.

It's not a good look for the new flagship mobile Radeon chip and reinforces the general belief by some that AMD's drivers are buggy and that it's to be expected when it comes to new Radeon products.

Guess whose back? NVIDIA's back. Where are they back? China. NVIDIA is reportedly making a new GeForce RTX 4090 D graphics card, which fully complies with US export restrictions that have seen the RTX 4090 market go bananas in China.

Our friends over at Wccftech are reporting "exclusive information gathered by our sources, it seems like NVIDIA has a new GPU on the block." This will be the GeForce RTX 4090 D with the "D" standing for Dragon, a new China-exclusive design that will be a replacement for the GeForce RTX 4090, which is banned in China over its Total Processing Performance (TPP) rating of over 4800 points.

Because of those TPP restrictions, NVIDIA will water down its upcoming RTX 4090 D over the RTX 4090, with less gaming performance and less AI capabilities than the full RTX 4090. It will look, feel, and act like any GeForce RTX 40 series GPU would, DLSS, Reflex, everything... but the compute power will be restricted to meet US sanctions requirements.

NVIDIA is cooking right now as it always is, working on the next-gen Blackwell GPU architecture that will debut in 2024, while we're hearing early rumbles of the next-next-gen Rubin GPU architecture that will drop in 2025.

We've already heard about NVIDIA's upcoming 2025 GPU architecture as "X100" and its two siblings in "GX200" and "GX200NVL" on NVIDIA's 2024 GPU roadmap. Now we've got leaker "kopite7kimi" on X, where the leaker tweeted out a reply to a tweet about astronomer Vera Rubin, tweeting "Miss the Golden Age of Exploration". Which, with the capitalized letters, spelling "GAME," too.

NVIDIA has been constantly dominating the AI GPU industry with its current H100 AI GPU and upcoming beefed-up H200 AI GPU, which are both based on the Hopper GPU architecture. After that, we'll see the release of the next-gen Blackwell GPU architecture, powering the B100 AI GPU and GB200 AI GPU throughout 2024 and beyond.

NVIDIA will be gobbling up all of the HBM3e and future-gen HBM4 memory supply for its current and next-gen AI GPUs, with TrendForce's new report stating NVIDIA will soak up most HBM3, HBM3e, and HBM4 memory over the next few years.

TrendForce's latest research into the HBM market sees NVIDIA planning to diversify HBM suppliers for "more robust and efficient supply chain management". TrendForce sees NVIDIA buying up most of its HBM memory from Samsung because they'll be ready first, while SK hynix and Micron will have their new HBM memory ready in the second half of 2024.

Samsung's new HBM3 (24GB) is expected to complete verification with NVIDIA in the coming weeks, while its newer HBM3e memory is coming in 8-Hi stacks (24GB) and will reach NVIDIA by the end of July 2024. It's not just Samsung with HBM memory where SK hynix will have its HBM3e memory with NVIDIA in mid-August 2024, while Samsung will be last delivering HBM3e memory to NVIDIA in October 2024.

The Biden administration has started quite the underground AI GPU business in China, with many Chinese companies disassembling and reassembling GeForce RTX 4090 cards and turning them into AI GPUs with much higher prices.

US sanctions have all but stopped the AI hardware business in China, with even lower-end H20 GPUs that were cut down from Hopper GPU architecture delayed from launching this month and now into February/March 2024. Well, Chinese companies are now taking apart never-released graphics cards, including the GeForce RTX 3080 20GB and Radeon RX 580 16GB.

I was tagged in a new tweet by I_Leak_VN, who pointed me towards Chinese companies taking apart RTX 4090 cards and turning them into AI accelerators about new cards being used. NVIDIA never released its GeForce RTX 3080 20GB variant, but it was planned along the way, and now Chinese companies are using ex-crypto mining GPUs like the unreleased RTX 3080 20GB.

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).