It seemed like a foregone conclusion that Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660 Ti would be based on the GPU maker's 28nm Kepler architecture, and lest there was any lingering doubt, a Swedish overclocking site got its hands on a spec sheet that seemingly confirms as much. If the information is correct, the GTX 660 Ti is essentially a GTX 670 card with a narrower memory bus (192-bit versus 256-bit). Here's what we know.
GPU bragging rights now belong to Sapphire, which claims its new HD 7970 6GB Toxic Edition graphics card features the highest clockspeeds of any consumer grade videocard on the planet. It also has a massive 6GB frame buffer, which is twice as big as your 'run-of-the-mill' Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, if there can be such a thing. Getting back to the clockspeeds, however, this thing comes straight from the factory sporting a 1050MHz GPU (1100MHz via PowerTune Dynamic Boost) and 6000MHz (effective) memory. That's just the beginning.
Nvidia's GTX 670 delivers almost GTX 680-type frame rates for $100 less, but that doesn't change the fact that we've yet to see a true mid-range card from Nvidia so far this generation. That could be changing soon, however, as sources for two different enthusiast websites have said that the much more mainstream GTX 660 Ti is set to launch about a month from now, midway through August.
One of our favorite utilities, GPU-Z, has yet to reach 1.0 status. We're not sure what the holdup is, but in the meantime, incremental updates keep rolling in, the latest one bringing the utility up to version 0.6.3 and adding support for nearly two dozen additional videocards in the process, along with improved Kepler boost clock detection, a handful of fixes, and other changes.
If you're building a silent PC, nothing beats a passively cooled GPU. Ditching all those spinning fans works wonders for noise levels! Unfortunately, most passively cooled video cards tend to be less-powerful models; with great power comes greater thermals, after all. Colorful, a Chinese graphics card maker, is bucking that trend and working hard to bring a fanless GTX 680 to the market.
A new Catalyst software suite, version 12.6, is available from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for Radeon and FireStream graphics card owners. The new driver packages, which play nice with Windows XP on up to Windows 7, offer up additional Dual Graphics Technology profiles for a handful of DirectX 9 games, and also stomp out a series of bugs that are mostly applicable to Windows 7.
If you've been following the PC scene for awhile, you may recall Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) beating Intel to the punch (if only by a hair) in getting a 1GHz CPU (an Athlon "Thunderbird") into the hands of consumers back in 2000. Here we are more than a decade later and AMD's still talking up its 1GHz achievements, only this time those bragging rights are related ot its GPUs, the newest one being the just launched Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition graphics card built around the company's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
Graphics professionals waiting for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to port its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture over to its FirePro series need not wait any longer (sort of -- more on that in a moment). The Sunnyvale chip designer on Wednesday announced the immediate availability of its FirePro W600 graphics card, the company's first professional videocard to feature its GCN design and a 28nm production technology.
For many would-be early adopters, trying to find a GTX 680 has been like trying to find a four-leaf clover; it can be done, but it takes some digging. Curious minds have wondered what the hold-up is. Manufacturing woes? Overbearing demand? We now have an idea. In a slide shown at an annual investors meeting, Nvidia claims that in the six weeks following the GTX 680's launch, it shipped and sold 60 percent more units than the GTX 580 did during its debut.
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