Hey, they can't all be GeForce GTX 580 caliber cards and dual-GPU Cayman killers (which we're still waiting on), and sometimes you have to cater to the professional crowd as well. That's what Nvidia is doing with the launch of its NVS 300 graphics card, a GPU specifically designed for the enterprise with 25 percent more efficient power utilization when compared to the NVS 295, Nvidia claims.
"The NVS is built for demanding enterprises that require high reliability, improved manageability, and tremendous value," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, Nvidia. "The ability to support legacy and current display types provides an upgrade path without disrupting existing, complex installations."
Nvidia is touting versatile connectivity with the NVS 300. The low-profile card supports single and multi-display setups via the nView Desktop Management software and the built-in Mosaic technology, which allows for taskbar spanning and transparent scaling of any app across up to eight displays.
We're slightly perplexed with VisionTek's new "Killer HD 5770" graphics card, which the company touts as the world's first online gaming upgrade card for PCs. We get the marketing behind that statement -- after all, the videocard comes with Bigfoot Networks' Killer E2100 NIC baked in -- but who exactly is this card aimed at?
If you're buying into the hype of a dedicated hardware NIC for lower pings (you can read our review of the standalone Killer 2100 here), then integrating it into a videocard makes perfect sense. Two gaming solutions, one PCI-E slot -- that's a winning combo. Buy why not use a higher end GPU, like the HD 5850, 5870, or even one of the new 6000 series cards?
For those of you interested in a mid-range card from last year with an integrated NIC, the Killer HD 5770 is the "only upgrade card specifically designed to combine high-quality graphics and low-latency networking for gaming," VisionTek says. The combo card comes with 1GB of GDDR video memory and supports DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and everything else you already know about the HD 5770.
The Killer HD 5770 will be available early this month for $200.
Psst, come here. You aren't supposed to know this, but according to a Palit Product Information slide sweclockers.com posted online, it appears Nvidia is readying its GeForce GTX 570 videocard for a December 7, 2010 launch date, the same day as World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.
That's also just a few days ahead of AMD's Cayman launch, barring any last minute surprises. Regardless of how it all shakes out, Nvidia's GTX 570, according to the posted spec sheet, will come with 480 CUDA cores and 1280MB of memory clocked at 3800MHz on a 320-bit bus. The GPU will race along at 732MHz and the shaders at 1464MHz.
The GTX 570 will come with a pair of 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors and carry a 225W TDP, compared to 244W on the GTX 580 and 250W on the GTX 480.
Most people don’t need 2GB of frame buffer—if they’re gamers. Palit’s GeForce GTX 460 Sonic 2GB card isn’t aimed solely at gamers, however. Like any GTX 460 card, it does a bang-up job in most modern 3D games. But at roughly $250, it’s about $20 more than the equivalent 1GB card from Palit—which also runs at a higher core clock.
Don’t think of that 2GB of RAM as just frame buffer, though. The card was designed for the emerging class of applications that take advantage of GPU compute.
The Palit Sonic 2GB offers a core clock speed of 700MHz—just 25MHz above the reference clock and 100MHz slower than the 1GB Palit Sonic Platinum card. The memory clock runs at the standard 900MHz—which is actually fairly impressive given the frame buffer size.
We've already heard that Nvidia is planning to release a dual GF110 GPU videocard to snatch the overall performance crown from AMD (HD 5970), and courtesy of Chinese website enet.com.cn, we now get to see what the upcoming card will look like, Electronista reports.
Bear in mind that this is a prototype part built around Nvidia's reference design, so this isn't necessarily how the shipping part will look. That said, the dual-GPU part comes with 3GB of memory, a single SLI-connector, and two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors. There's also three DVI ports, which hints at support for Nvidia's 3DVision Surround.
Other than that, there isn't much new to report, such as a release date or pricing info. Stay tuned for more details as they become available.
Let's start with the good news. According to Fudzilla, Nvidia is definitely planning to release a dual-GPU videocard, and relatively soon. Ready for the bad? It won't ship in time for the holiday shopping season.
Citing "sources close to the company," Fudzilla says Nvidia wants to wait for AMD's dual-GPU Antilles Radeon HD 6990 before releasing its own dual-chip videocard. Nvidia already owns the single-GPU performance crown (GeForce GTX 580) and wants to go after the dual-GPU crown as well, but is reluctant to do so before knowing what AMD's upcoming part will be capable of, Fudzilla suggests.
The GTX 590, as it's rumored to be card, will almost certainly be faster than AMD's current flagship part, the HD 5970. But if it's not faster than the Radeon HD 6990, Nvidia may opt to tweak the design until it's certain it has the best performing videocard on the planet.
No, this really long card isn't an actual prototype, just a quick and dirty mockup.
Futuremark, the Finland-based maker of several popular benchmarking tools, today announced that 3DMark 11 will be released on November 30, 2010, with pre-orders beginning today.
The free version includes the Performance PC benchmark preset, an audio/visual demo fixed at 720p, the ability to browser, search, and compare results online, and store one result online.
For $20, the Advanced Edition ups the ante with Entry-level and Extreme PC benchmark presets, custom benchmark settings, custom resolutions for the audio/visual demo, benchmark looping to test stability, unlimited online results storage, hide results from public view, advert-free online service, and offline result management.
3DMark is largely a graphics card benchmarking utility with the upcoming release putting a heavy focus on DirectX 11, including tessellation and volumetric lighting created with DX11.
For those of you rocking an AMD videocard, the Sunnyvale outfit just released its Catalyst 10.11 suite, though you'll have to head over to the AMD Game! portal to find them (at the time of this writing, the 10.10 drivers were still showing up on AMD's homepage).
The Catalyst 10.11 package purportedly bumps up performance in Battleforge by up to 3 percent when using an ATI Radeon HD 5800 series card in either single or CrossFire configurations and with anti-aliasing disabled, while also improving performance in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat by up to 5 percent.
AMD also resolved a handful of issues with the latest driver release, such as nixing the desktop line corruption that plagued certain systems after hotplugging the HDCP display.
Nvidia isn't making a big deal about its GeForce GTX 460 SE videocard (hit the specifications tab), the latest addition to the GTX 460 line with the least amount of CUDA cores.
The SE version comes with 288 CUDA cores in all, compared to 336 on the standard GTX 460 in both 768MB and 1GB trim. It's also clocked a bit slower at 650MHz core and 1700MHz memory, compared to 1350MHz and 1800MHz on the two other models, respectively.
It does, however, sport the same 256-bit memory bus interface as the non-SE 1GB version, whereas the standard GTX 460 in 768MB form features a 192-bit bus. That provides the SE with more memory bandwidth than the 768GB version (108.8GB/s versus 86.4GB/s) though still less than the non-SE 1GB version (115.2GB/s). And finally, the SE comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory.
AMD made it clear that the ATI brand was living on borrowed time, and with the introduction of AMD's Radeon HD 6800 series, we figured ATI was officially dead. We may have been wrong.
Credit goes to Fudzilla for spotting a page in AMD's Developer Central portal outlining six upcoming Radeon 6000 series cards, and unlike the 6800 series, these new parts carry the ATI label. They include the ATI Radeon HD 6230, ATI Radeon HD 6250, ATI Radeon HG 6290, ATI Radeon HD 6390, ATI Radeon HD 6510, and ATI Radeon HD 6750 cards.
These are all Evergreen parts and may end up being renamed before all is said and done, or as OEM cards, but at least for now it appears the ATI label may live on a little longer.
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