Graphics Cards - Page 82

NVIDIA is reportedly working on a refreshed GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card that has been customized for the Chinese market, with the upcoming GeForce RTX 4090 D... the "D" stands for Dragon because it's the Year of the Dragon in 2024 for the Chinese New Year.

We've heard that NVIDIA will be using a tweaked AD102-250 GPU for the RTX 4090 D, which will feature less CUDA cores than the AD102-300 GPU that powers the RTX 4090. The new RTX 4090 D will also have a lowered 425W TDP down from the RTX 4090 and its 450W TDP, but new information is here about the GPU and power consumption: the RTX 4090 D will NOT support overclocking.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 4090 D being locked away from overclocking makes sense, given that it needs to not go over the US government and its constantly updated GPU restrictions in China, so these limitations need to happen. CUDA core counts, GPU clock speeds, TDP, and overclocking support for the RTX 4090 D will be what sets it apart from the RTX 4090.

The mainstream and affordable GeForce RTX 3050 8GB was the final Ampere GPU to hit the scene, with the card making its debut in January 2022 - so it's still relatively fresh in the world of discrete graphics cards. According to information from the Board Channels forum in China, NVIDIA is set to scrap the GeForce RTX 3050 8GB altogether and replace it with a cutdown 6GB model.

Rumors indicate that the new GeForce RTX 3050 will use the GA107 GPU from the mobile version and arrive with 20% fewer CUDA Cores (2048 versus 2560) and a boost clock of 1700MHz.

It's a pretty drastic cut, and the reason might come down to the new 75W power rating (compared to 130W for the existing model) - which would mean that the new desktop GeForce RTX 3050 6GB will get all of its power from the PCI Express slot. It's a strange move to replace the least powerful GPU in the current GeForce RTX lineup with a worse card.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is banned from sale in China thanks to new U.S. Government restrictions imposed to curb the country's advances in AI. And since that news dropped, it's been a roller coaster ride for the world's most powerful gaming GPU - with global prices increasing dramatically and rumors that NVIDIA plans to launch a China-exclusive GeForce RTX 4090D in January 2024. The Year of the Dragon, hence the 'D'.

The RTX 4090D uses the AD102-300 GPU, a cutdown version of the AD102-250 GPU in the existing GeForce RTX 4090 that will adhere to the new restrictions imposed on AI hardware exported to the region. The latest info from well-known NVIDIA leaker MEGAsizeGPU over on X/Twitter claims that the GeForce RTX 4090D will feature the same Boost Clock speed as the existing RTX 4090 (2520 MHz) but a higher Base Clock speed (2280 MHz).

Additional info from other sources claims that the RTX 4090D will also feature the same 24GB of GDDR6X memory, though further details like memory speeds and TDP are still being finalized. It's believed that NVIDIA will lower the CUDA Core count to fall within the restrictions that measure AI performance.

AMD's latest Adrenalin Edition 23.12.1 driver release for Radeon GPUs is a big one in that there's a lot more going on than simply adding day-one support for one of the last big PC game releases for 2023 - Ubisoft's Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The most immediate changes come with a redesign of the UI for the Home and Gaming tab to better integrate HYPR-RX.

HYPR-RX combines Anti-Lag+, Radeon Boost, and Radeon Super Resolution into a single-click option to make access to these technologies easier. However, due to issues with latency reduction interfering with game code, Anti-Lag+ is no longer a part of the equation, and there's no word on when it'll be coming back. Anyway, back to the UI redesign.

AMD's release notes state that HYPR-RX profiles can be enabled on a per-game basis on the Home Tab - a great addition as it brings AMD's tech to the forefront of the UI. Switching over the Gaming tab, users will be able to learn about each HYPR-RX feature and have direct control over any potential settings. It doesn't stop there, as Adrenalin Edition 23.12.1 introduces the brand-new AMD HYPR-RX Eco mode.

The mid-range GeForce RTX 4060 Ti comes in two flavors - the more common 8GB variant and one with 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a similar 128-bit bus. With a single 8-pin power connector and a TGP of 165W, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is one of the most power-efficient GPUs in the GeForce RTX 40 Series. This makes it the perfect candidate for smaller form factor models, cards designed to take up minimal space inside a build.

Enter the new GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Musou MAX or "Unchallenged" from Chinese NVIDIA partner GALAX, which features an ultra-thin single-slot form factor. I can't remember the last time I saw a single-slot graphics card capable of running the latest games, so this is pretty exciting.

With dimensions of 267x111x20 mm, the GALAX GeForce RTX 4060 Ti MAX includes a vapor chamber cooling system with a copper heatsink and a blower-style fan. It's a unique design because it marks the first GPU release for the GeForce RTX 40 Series to use a single-slot form factor.

A new report from Jon Peddie Research presents some great news for the PC gaming market: GPU shipments from AIBs for the desktop rigs have increased by 37.4% in the last quarter. When you factor in all desktop PCs and not those custom-built for gaming or sold as-is, GPU shipments increased 16.8% in Q3 2023 compared to the last quarter.

All three big players in the GPU space benefited from recovery, and the report proudly proclaims that the post-COVID slump for PC gaming hardware "is over." However, AMD and the Radeon line-up look to have benefited the most as AMD's shipments increased by 36.6%, NVIDIA's by 25.2%, and Intel's by 10.4%.

This sees AMD's overall market share increase by 2.4% compared to the last quarter, with NVIDIA's growing by 1.3%. The report notes that iGPUs and APUs account for the shift, and part of that will undoubtedly be due to the rise in popularity of PC gaming handhelds like Steam Deck and ROG Ally.

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.