Posted 10/30/09 at 01:00:27 PM by Paul Lilly

We're hoping for great things out of Nvidia's upcoming "Fermi" graphics chips, and we can only hope the leaked pics showcasing what the GPU can do turn out to be legit.

The pics come courtesy of Chinese website PCZilla and show a pair of human face renderings like nothing we've ever seen before, at least not on the desktop. There's so much detail the images could pass as real photos, but let's hope they're not.

There's also an image of a ray-traced demo that may not look as impressive at first glance, at least until taking in the various lighting sources and reflections, which requires a second and third look to fully appreciate.

Update: Source video found! Find if after the jump. 

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Posted 10/05/09 at 11:05:31 AM by Paul Lilly

Not everyone considers themselves an early adopter of new technology, and one of the advantages in timing your next upgrade to coincide with new releases is that current parts tend to plummet in price. But if you're looking to score a deal on a GT200 series GPU once Nvidia launches its next-gen parts, you may find the opposite to be true.

According to sources in the retail channel, a shortage of 55nm-made graphics cards is expected to last through the holidays and into the first quarter of 2010. This will affect both AMD and Nvidia, as the two companies divert their attention toward DirectX 11-based 40nm GPUs, DigiTimes reports.

The sources went on to specifically point out Nvidia's GT200 series GPU, saying the graphics chip maker does not plan to increase supply following the launch of Windows 7.

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Posted 09/23/09 at 11:30:00 AM by Loyd Case

AMD’s graphics division, the former ATI Technologies, loves a good surprise. The company has been a perennial also-ran in the graphics performance arena, but every now and then, it one-ups the competition in a big way. That happened back in 2002, with the launch of the original Radeon 9700, which stole the performance lead from archrival Nvidia. It happened again last year, with the Radeon HD 4800 series. The 4850, 4870, and 4890 weren’t always faster than the competition, but they were small, efficient chips that forced Nvidia into a price war that was good for users but bad for Nvidia’s bottom line.

Now AMD’s doing it again, putting some serious hurt on the competition with the first GPU to support Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 11 API. AMD’s also been paying close attention to the emerging market for non-gaming apps accelerated by GPUs, such as video transcoding and digital photography, fully supporting DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL standards for general purpose computing on graphics cards.

This new chip is no shrinking violet in the numbers department. Every number associated with the new Radeon 5800 series is staggering: 2.15 billion transistors, 2.7 trillion floating-point operations a second, more than 20 gigapixels per second throughput, 1,600 shader units. Other numbers impress because of their smallness. One example: The idle power is a scant 27W— lower than many entry level GPUs.

Given the sheer scale and ambition of this GPU, does it deliver in the performance realm? And will it deliver at a price normal humans can afford? Let’s find out.

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Posted 09/15/09 at 07:12:51 PM by Paul Lilly

In exactly one week from now, AMD is expected to launch its ATI Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 videocards, which as it turns out will be a precursor of more 5000 series cards to come. And you won't have to wait long, either.

According to news and rumor site DigiTimes, un-named sources at graphics cards makers have been chirping about a new series of ATI Radeon HD 5700 GPUs just around the corner. Codenamed Juniper XT and LE, the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 should be in stores sometime in October. Both will come with 1GB of GDDR5 video memory on a 128-bit memory bus and support the recently announced multi-monitor Eyefinity technology.

Then in November, AMD will update its flagship offering with the R800-based Radeon HD 5870 X2. The reason for the slight delay, says Fudzilla, is that AMD is trying to figure out how to power and cool the dual-GPU card, which reportedly carries a TDP of 376W. By comparison, the HD 4870 X2's rated TDP is 286W.

In addition to its desktop lineup, AMD will also port its HD 5000 series over to notebooks, including the ATI Mobility Radeon 5400 for entry-level systems, 5600 for mainstream, 5700 for performance, and 5800 for high-end laptops.

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Posted 09/09/09 at 12:15:39 PM by Paul Lilly

With all the hoopla surrounding lifetime warranties by the likes of EVGA, BFG, and XFX, you probably don't own a Foxconn-branded videocard anyway. But in case you do, you may want to hold onto it as a nostalgiac keepsake, because pretty soon, there won't be any new Foxconn-branded videocards.

Foxconn said it's getting out marketing its own brand and has instead rearranged its Channel Service Division (CSD), along with most of its 9,000 employees, to its OEM division.

That doesn't mean Foxconn will suddenly disappear, however. The company still expects to ship 6-7 million of its own-brand motherboards in 2009, which is a whopping 5 million more than it shipped in 2008. As for videocards and other OEM products, the company expects shipments to reach 30 million units, those products just won't bear the Foxconn brand.

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Posted 08/03/09 at 09:00:00 AM by Will Smith

It’s no secret that ATI’s RV770 GPU, which first appeared in the Radeon 4870 and 4850 last year, is a performance beast. The spring refresh of the GPU, which offers increased core and memory clocks, along with a slight redesign of the GPU, tells an interesting story to anyone who isn’t yet running a second-gen DirectX 10 card (GeForce 2xx series or Radeon 48xx series). However, if you’ve already upgraded, there’s not much to get excited about here.

The Radeon 4890 is built on a 55nm process, just like the 4870 and 4850, but the company made significant tweaks to the architecture to accommodate higher clock speeds, which is evidenced by the fact that Diamond overclocks this board from 850MHz to 925MHz out of the box. Diamond also overclocks the card’s 1GB of memory 100MHz faster than the default, to 1,050MHz. The Radeon 4890 sports quad-pumped GDDR5 memory running on a 256-bit bus. The real stars of the Radeon 4890’s show are its pixel shaders, though, with 800 shader units running at the GPU’s core clock speed. The massive number of shader units gives the 4890 a significant advantage over comparable Nvidia cards in shader-limited benchmarks like Crysis.

Continue reading after the jump.

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Posted 07/22/09 at 10:35:00 PM by Michael Brown

The Radeon HD 4830 at the heart of this card is a cut-down version of AMD’s second-best graphics processor, the RV770. The 4830 has 640 stream processors, compared to the 800 processors in a higher-end card such as the Radeon HD 4870.

The 4830 is designed to run at slower clock speeds, too, and PowerColor sets this model to operate its core at 575MHz and its 512MB of GDDR3 memory at 900MHz. These are pretty hobbled specs compared to those of the reference-design Radeon HD 4870, which boasts core and memory clock rates of 780MHz and 1GHz, respectively.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

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Posted 07/22/09 at 10:34:00 PM by Michael Brown

Whereas AMD’s Radeon HD 4830 resembles a Radeon 4870 after a partial lobotomy, the Radeon HD 4850 that sits between these two cards comes with a full complement of 800 stream processors. But don’t make the mistake of thinking you can overclock a 4850 board to achieve the same performance as one based on the 4870: The latter uses GDDR5 memory while the former is limited to GDDR3.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

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