gpu

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Still Headed for a May 23 Release

Paul Lilly — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:33:48 +0000

Rumors point to the GTX 780 launching next week.

Near the beginning of the month, news and rumor site Fudzilla reported that Nvidia was planning to launch its GeForce GTX 780 graphics card on May 23 at 6:00 AM PDT. That date is now only a week away, and so far, things are looking good. Withing naming anyone, Fudzilla says it's now heard from "multiple sources" that the May 23 launch date is accurate, at which time Nvidia's hardware partners will debut reference clocked cards.

As with most video cards these days, overclocked versions will inevitably pop up, though most of them will come out "several weeks" after the initial launch.

Reference cards are said to be using a GeForce Titan cooler quality since it's a high quality design. You may even spot overclocked cards using the same cooler, though vendors typically like to slap on their own cooling solutions, which often do a better job than reference at whisking away heat and run quieter to boot.

According to Fudzilla, the GTX 780 part based on reference specs should sell for around 500 Euros. That's about $645 USD, though PC component pricing doesn't always follow a straight currency conversion from one market to the next.

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AMD Bills New Radeon 8970M as World's Fastest Mobile GPU

Paul Lilly — Wed, 15 May 2013 04:01:00 +0000

There's a new mobile sheriff in town.

Mobile gamers rejoice, for AMD hasn't forgotten about you. On the contrary, the Sunnyvale chip designer just unveiled its Radeon 8970M, which AMD claims is the fastest laptop GPU on the entire planet. And not only is it smoking fast, it's also more efficient than previous designs, which means you can expect longer battery life, according to AMD.

AMD's 8000M series falls into three different tiers, including Mainstream (Radeon 8500M and 8600M Series), Performance + Gaming (Radeon 8700M and 8800M Series), and Enthusiast (Radeon HD 8900 Series). The 8970M part being launched today sits at the top of the mobile GPU totem pole and boasts 1,280 stream processors, an 850MHz engine clock (900MHz with boost), and 1,200MHz memory. That translates into 2304 GFLOPS of single precision compute power and 144 GFLOPS of double precision compute power.

Speaking of which, AMD tells us the 8970M is engineered for compute with support for OpenCL and GPU acceleration. DirectX 11.1 is obviously part of the package, as is improved image quality and video playback.

As for gaming performance, AMD provided a handful of benchmark comparisons that shine a positive light on its mobile part. For example, according to AMD's testing (Intel Core i7 3770K, 4GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM, Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive), a Radeon HD 8970M is 54 percent faster than a GeForce GTX 680M in Tomb Raider running at 1920x1080 with TressFX turned off (53.6 fps versus 34.8 fps). In Bioshock Infinite (also at 1920x1080), the 8970M benched 63.29 fps, which is 42 percent faster than the GTX 680M chip (44.52 fps). And so it goes across the board.

One of the first notebooks to feature the 8970M will be MSI's GX70 gaming laptop, which is an upgraded version of the GX60 AMD's latest and greatest mobile part. It will come with a copy of Crysis 3.

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Nvidia Release Game Ready Beta 320.14 Driver for Metro: Last Light

Paul Lilly — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:29:25 +0000

Enjoy a free and easy performance boost in Metro: Last Light.

It doesn't matter if you're sitting pretty with a single Nvidia-based graphics card or rocking multiple GeForce parts in SLI, you should see better framerates in Metro: Last Light (launches tomorrow) after applying Nvidia's latest beta driver, version 320.14. Also included in the newest driver release are all of the performance optimizations and SLI profiles found in the recent 320.00 beta release, which benefits games such as Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, GRID 2, Tomb Raider, and several others.

Nvidia put a lot of time and effort into optimizing its code base for Metro: Last Light, and it also put together an extensive graphics and performance guide related to the 4A Games' title. To provide a single example of the performance boost you can expect by installing the beta driver, Nvidia says Metro: Last Light will perform up to 10 percent better on a single GeForce GTX 660 graphics card and up to 9 percent running two GTX 660 parts in SLI.

You can also expect double-digit percentage performance gains in Dirt: Showdown and Tomb Raider regardless of whether you're running a single GPU or multiple graphics cards.

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Nvidia's Revenue Slips 14 Percent, GPU Maker Eyes Return to Growth in Second Half

Paul Lilly — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:56:06 +0000

Compared to last year, Nvidia is moving in the right direction.

Nvidia reported revenue of $954.7 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2014 ended April 28, 2013. That's down 13.7 percent from $1.11 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013, though up a little more than 3 percent compared to last year. A similar story played out with regards to Nvidia's net income (profit), which totaled $77.9 million for the quarter, down 55.2 percent sequentially but up 29 percent year-on-year.

"The success of Kepler-based GPUs within and beyond the PC helped drive another quarter of record margins," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of Nvidia. "Kepler is capturing share among gamers, strengthening our workstation and supercomputing segments, and will fuel new growth opportunities for our GRID server graphics solutions. With Tegra 4 devices and Tegra 4i certification on the way, we're gearing up to return to growth in the second half."

Nvidia had a few notable product launches last quarter, including its Tegra 4i SoC (System-on-Chip), it's first fully integrated 4G LTE mobile processor that it claims is three times faster and half the size of its nearest competitor. The GPU maker also launched the GeForce GTX Titan graphics card for desktops.

Like Apple, Nvidia is planning to line its shareholders pockets. Nvidia said it will return in excess of $1 billion this fiscal year to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and quarterly dividend payments.

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Getting Loco with Video Cards

Tom McNamara — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:28:11 +0000

Maximum PC's Best of the Best Updated

We're closing in on Cinco de Mayo, which celebrates Mexico's Battle of Puebla fought on May 5, 1862, a victory against overwhelming odds and an important step towards Mexican independence from European rulers. These days, it's a popular holiday for getting drunk, dancing and making loud noises, but maybe that's just me. I think I'm gonna play it low-key this year instead, and take the opportunity to update our Best of the Best with a couple new entries: the EVGA GeForce GTX Titan and AMD's Radeon HD 7850.

This time around, we're changing the "high-end video card" category to the best "Single-GPU video card." Every GPU category will be getting a refresh. Because at Maximum PC, we care about your wallet.

Below, there is more text and words that you may find informative and entertaining.

And as always, let us know in the comments what you think about our picks!

Nvidia Rumored to Release GeForce GTX 780 Graphics Card on May 23

Paul Lilly — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:49:03 +0000

The GPU wars are heating up.

Analysts can talk all they want about the demise of desktops and the rise of tablets, we're not buying it. And you know what? Neither are discrete graphics card makers. If they were, Nvidia wouldn't be getting to release a GeForce GTX 780 video card, which if the latest web chatter is true, will be launching in just a few weeks. After that, Nvidia has another GTX 700 Series card to unleash.

According to Fudzilla, the GTX 780 part is scheduled to launch on May 23, 2013 at precisely 6:00 AM PDT. Exactly one week later to the minute, Nvidia will follow that up by launching its GeForce GTX 770 graphics card, both of which will be sold by top tier vendors.

The GTX 780 is based on the GK110 architecture found in Nvidia's Titan cards, and the GTX 770 is based on GK104 425, which Fudzilla says is an improved version of the original 28nm part.

Other than those details, we don't know much about either card, though we expect both to be at least marginally faster than the 600 Series they're replacing.

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Intel's Iris Technology Will Get You Excited About Integrated Graphics

Paul Lilly — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:50:09 +0000

Select Haswell parts will feature Intel's supercharged Iris graphics.

Nobody brags about integrated graphics, and that's because there's not much there worthy of boast. That's fine, but if manufactures insist on pushing thin and light platforms on the masses and shrinking the desktop, then is it too much to ask for an integrated graphics solution that either (A) doesn't suck, or (B) is better than just serviceable? Intel doesn't think so, and its Iris graphics might be just what the market needs.

Intel Iris graphics will be available on select SKUs of the chip maker's 4th Generation Core processor line (Haswell) and will offer up to 2X the 3D performance of today's fastest mobile Intel HD Graphics solutions, the company claims.

If you frequently visit Maximum PC, you may have caught a glimpse of Iris before. It's the official name for GT3/GT3e, which we previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year, and when we asked readers to guess which of the two side-by-side systems was running Iris and which was running a GeForce GT 650M, the responses were fairly split.

Performance aside, Iris supports three-screen collage display, enhanced 4K x 2K resolution, OpenCL 1.2, and a few other goodies. It also delivers faster video and photo editing, and offers support for Intel's Quick Sync Video technology.

Let's not kid though, it IS the performance we're most interested in, and according to Intel, Iris will have advanced integrated 3D performance in 3DMark06 by 75X since 2006. Pretty incredible. Furthermore, Intel says if consumers were to upgrade a four-year old notebook with a Core 2 Duo processor to a new Ultrabook with Iris inside (Core i5 4200U), they would experience a 25X faster graphics performance in games and 17X faster video conversions.

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First Radeon HD 7730 Graphics Card Spotted in the Wild

Paul Lilly — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:56:03 +0000

MSI's Radeon HD 7730 breaks cover and gets benchmarked.

A rather active user on the Chinese-language forum Coolaler posted several pictures of an MSI Radeon HD 7730 graphics card. As far as we can tell, the entry-level card's model was supposed to have been kept a secret, as identifying information on the retail box was replaced with a red censor strip, but it's tougher to hide such things from software. In addition to the model number, there are also some benchmark numbers to share.

The forum user who posted the pictures also tossed up a few benchmark comparisons between the Radeon HD 7730 and HD 6670. Here's how it shook out between the two:

Radeon HD 7730, 3DMark Vantage Performance: 10,764
Radeon HD 6670, 3DMark Vantage Performance: 5,366
Radeon HD 7730, 3DMark 11 Entry: 4,539
Radeon HD 6670, 3DMark 11 Entry: 2,477
Radeon HD 7730, 3DMark 11 Performance: 2,609
Radeon HD 6670, 3DMark 11 Performance: 1,428
Radeon HD 7730, 3DMark Fire Strike: 1,680
Radeon HD 6670, 3DMark Fire Strike: 878
Radeon HD 7730, Cloud Gate: 11,959
Radeon HD 6670, Cloud Gate: 7,042
Radeon HD 7730, Ice Storm: 101,701
Radeon HD 6670, Ice Storm: 63,660

Those are some big gains across the board, and in some cases, the Radeon HD 7730 benched almost twice as fast as the Radeon HD 6670.

The entry-level part is a 128-bit card with 1GB of memory clocked at 1,125MHz and a core clockspeed of 800MHz. Most of the other details are still a secret, including price and release date.

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AMD Catalyst 13.4 Update Addresses Latency Performance in Several Games

Paul Lilly — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:43:11 +0000

AMD promises a significant reduction in latency in titles like Skyrim and Tomb Raider.

A new driver package is available for AMD Radeon, Mobility Radeon, and PowerXpress GPUs. It's AMD's Catalyst 13.4 update and it's supposed to "significantly" improve latency performance in Skyrim, Borderlands 2, Guild Wars 2, Tomb Raider, and Hitman Absolution, according to the release notes. it also offers performance gains in several titles across the entire range of Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics cards.

Specifically, Radeon HD 7000 Series card owners can expect the following:

Batman Arkham City (1920x1200): Performance improvements up to 5 percent
Borderlands 2 (2560x1600): Performance improvements up to 10 percent
Quake Wars (1920x1200): Performance improvements up to 13 percent
Hitman Absolution (2560x1600): Performance improvements up to 11 percent
Wolfenstein MP (1920x1080): Performance improvements up to 11 percent
Civilization V (2560x1600): Performance improvements up to 5 percent

In addition to all the above, AMD resolved a bunch of known issues, but the latency claim is the one gamers are likely to pay the most attention to. The latency issue is something we noticed when benchmarking AMD's Radeon HD 7990 graphics card, which can best be described as micro-stutter.

Are you planning to install the new driver package?

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AMD Radeon HD 7990 First Look

Josh Norem — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:05:06 +0000

Nvidia’s GTX 690 finally has some serious competition

Today the embargo is lifting on the AMD Radeon HD 7990 that was teased back at GDC, so here’s the TLDR version; yes it’s just as fast and a tiny bit quieter than the Nvidia GTX 690, and it includes a mega bad ass eight-AAA-game bundle and costs the same price as its nemesis, making it quite a tempting package for those with the budget for it. Whether or not that will be enough to convince anyone to actually buy it remains to be seen of course, but at least AMD can no longer be knocked for conceding the $1,000 GPU market to Nvidia. It also signifies somewhat of a resurgence for AMD, who first came off the bench late last year and early this year with its totally righteous Never Settle game bundles, then attacked the midrange recently with the surprisingly powerful and quiet Radeon HD 7790 card, and is now going for the jugular with the dual-slot and triple-fan HD 7990. Whether AMD wins or loses that battle is slightly less important than the overall significance of this introduction, as in our minds its designed to not only beat Nvidia’s offering, but also to send a very clear signal to hardcore PC enthusiasts everywhere — AMD is still in the game, and doesn’t intend to give an inch of ground to Nvidia any time soon.

Spec Speak

Let’s start with the card’s basic specs: It features dual HD 7970 Tahiti GPUs clocked at 1,000MHz, which is a bit higher than we expected them to be, and higher than the clocks on a stock HD 7970 (925MHz) and the GTX 690 (915Mhz). Each GPU sports 3GB of GDDR5 RAM and has 2,048 Stream Processors, and the two connect to each other and the motherboard via a PCIe Gen 3 PLX bridge chip. The card takes up two slots, is 12 inches long, has a triple-fan cooler with copper heatpipes, and sports a semi-high TDP of 375w. For comparison, the GTX 690’s TDP is 300w. Power is provided by dual eight-pin PCIe connectors, which is the same requirement of the GTX 690, and one less than what was required on the dual-Tahiti PowerColor Devil 13 board. The board supports five displays with its four Mini DisplayPort connectors and single Dual-Link DVI port. The card will cost $999 and includes an eight-game bundle featuring: Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, Tomb Raider, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Deux Ex: Human Revolution. We thought Battlefield 4 would be included as well since the game was demo’d at GDC on the HD 7990, but that deal appears to have fallen through. The card should be available two weeks from the day this is published from all the standard add-in board partners such as Sapphire, HIS, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.

Benchmarks

When it comes to performance, the card performs just as well as you would imagine, if you were imagining that AMD would only bring this to market when it was sure it could beat Nvidia’s card. To do otherwise would be a fool’s errand, so naturally the HD 7990 is faster than the GTX 690 in most tests that we ran, but not in all of them (see benchmark chart below). Overall performance with both the GTX 690 is very close though, enough to effectively call it a draw. It's not as fast as the overclocked and water-cooled Asus Ares II, however, but nobody can buy those cards so the point is somewhat moot. When compared to a CrossFireX setup, the results are in favor of the HD 7990, but the CrossFireX results were achieved last month with an older driver, so it's quite possible that two cards would be a tiny bit faster than the HD 7990 if using updated drivers. Even more surprising is the card's lack of noise and heat, as the other dual Tahiti boards we've seen so far have either been water-cooled (Ares II) or so loud and hot as to require earplugs and heat shields (Devil 13), but not the HD 7990. It got up to about 85C in gaming and was a tiny bit audible, but not "loud" at all, which is an amazing development for AMD. We'd say all in all it's probably just a bit quieter than the GTX 690, and gets about as hot.

Benchmarks

Best scores are bolded. Our test bed is a 3.33GHz Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition in an Asus P9X79 motherboard with 16GB of DDR3/1600 and a Thermaltake ToughPower 1,050W PSU. The OS is 64-bit Windows Ultimate. All games are run at 2560x1600 with 4X AA except for the 3DMark tests.

Frame Latency and micro-stutter

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about ditching frames per second as a standard for how “smooth” a game runs on given hardware, and instead examining frame latency or frame times instead. The reason why is that sometimes frames per second can be misleading, as we all equate anything over 30fps to be “smooth” when in fact a game can be run at even 50fps and still be somewhat choppy if the frames aren’t being delivered on a consistent schedule. For example, if the GPU alternatively sends frames to the system at 20ms and 100ms or higher throughout a test, it’s possible to still have an average framerate above 30fps, but to have it feel like you’re dropping frames. This is not usually something that you notice when running a single GPU, but it’s more prominent in multi-card setups since both cards are sending individual frames to the system, hopefully in concert with one another. This has been a bee in AMD’s bonnet lately, and when we sat down for the briefing on this card in particular AMD mentioned it, and acknowledged it. They called it “micro stutter,” which is fitting, as it’s an almost imperceptible stutter/lag that you can feel but barely see when playing certain games on specific configurations of GPUs and CPUs.

As far as the HD 7990 goes, here is the situation. Yes this card and the latest drivers we used (13.5 beta 2) suffered from micro stutter, but it was imperceptible in most games with one major exception — Far Cry 3. We’re not sure what it is about Far Cry 3, but it runs like crap on this setup at 2560x1600 with 4xAA. We mean it feels like you are running through molasses the whole time, and when examining the frame time output from FRAPS it is easy to see why, as the latency between frames fluctutates wildly. When examining the frame time charts from other games the delivery times look pretty consistent, with only Crysis 3 showing some anomalies. AMD has told us it is working on a fix for this situation, but the remedy will most likely be a software implementation rather than a hardware fix. We have yet to receive and test a final software fix for this issue, and will sure to update you when we have tested it.

Final Thoughts

On the one hand, we’re pretty pumped to see the HD 7990 finally arrive, as it’s more than a year late to market, and its absence made a lot of people question AMD’s commitment to the uber high-end PC gaming market. Since AMD has sort of abandoned the high-end CPU market, having them leave the same GPU market would mean nothing but bad things for a lot of consumers, so we're stoked to see them join the fight. The card itself presents a very strong option for buyers looking to drop a large bill on a GPU given the fact that it includes over $500 of Kick Ass games. If the bundle wasn't included, we'd say you could flip a coin over whether or not to get this card or the GTX 690, but the gaming bundle clearly gives AMD a significant advantage against its competitors.

Now that the HD 7990 has launched, we have to wonder whether or not Nvidia will counter AMD's launch with the rumored GTX Titan Ultra, but it sure seems likely the way the two have been going at it lately. This effectively means the GPU cold war that has existed throughout 2012 is now largely over, with the two companies fired up and ready to wage war this summer. All we can say to that is "bring it on!"

Nvidia GeForce 320.00 Beta Drivers Increases Performance Up to 20 Percent

Paul Lilly — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:17:54 +0000

Free performance gain, if you don't mind beta software.

If you like to live on the edge by installing pre-release software, risks be damned, and own an Nvidia-based graphics card, today's your lucky today. Nvidia just released new 320.00 beta drivers for GeForce graphics cards, and if you install them, the GPU maker says you can enjoy performance gains up to 20 percent. Most of the gains won't be quite as high, though several titles receive a shot in the arm from the new drivers.

The examples Nvidia shared all pertain to GeForce GTX 660 graphics cards and include the following gains for single card setups:

Up to 20 percent in Dirt: Showdown
Up to 18 percent in Tomb Raider
Up to 8 percent in StarCraft II
Up to 6 percent in Sniper Elite V2
Up to 6 percent in Metro 2033
Up to 6 percent in Far Cry 3
Up to 6 percent in Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Up to 5 percent in F1 2012

Nvidia also added several new SLI profiles, including ones for Alien Fear, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Dead Island: Riptide, Dragon Sword, and a bunch more.

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Nvidia's May Launch GeForce 700 Series GPUs at Computex 2013

Paul Lilly — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:52:25 +0000

New graphics cards from Nvidia could be set for a summer debut.

Summer is just around the corner, and with it is the Computex computer expo in Taipei, Taiwan. Are you wondering what the event will introduce to the computing world? So are we, and word on the web is that Nvidia is planning to launch its next generation desktop GeForce 700 Series graphics cards at Computex. In addition to pushing the performance envelope, the GeForce 700 Series is said to be in response to AMD's aggressive game bundles.

We all know that the main reason to buy a graphics card is to improve game performance (or for design work), but for those on the fence in which direction to go, AMD has been tempting upgraders with its Never Settle software bundles consisting of triple AAA titles.

According to Fudzilla, Nvidia has seen enough and isn't about to let AMD wrestle a larger share of the desktop GPU market than it already has. As such, the GeForce 700 Series might even launch ahead of Computex, the news and rumor site reports, though we're skeptical Nvidia will be quite that ambitious. We're also reluctant to get our hopes up of a summer release, as previous rumors pegged the launch to take place in 2014 sometime after the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), but we'll cross our fingers nonetheless.

As for the actual hardware, most assume the GeForce 700 Series will be based on a refreshed version of Nvidia's 28nm Kepler architecture.

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PowerColor Shows Off Passive Radeon HD 7850 Graphics Card

Paul Lilly — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:54:28 +0000

A passively cooled Radeon HD 7850 could be the centerpiece of a home theater PC (HTPC).

If you go poking around Facebook long enough, you're apt to run into teaser shots of unreleased products just like we did. Over on one of PowerColor's pages (the company has several), we spied a couple of photos of a passively cooled Radeon HD 7850 graphics card (SCS3), which to the best of our knowledge hasn't been done before. PowerColor didn't post any accompanying specs, though we suspect it will stick with the reference design.

The last thing a passively cooled card needs is overclocked parts and/or higher voltages, both of which generate additional heat. If we're correct in assuming PowerColor's card is based on AMD's reference design, it will feature an 860MHz engine clock and 2GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1,200MHz on a 256-bit bus.

It looks to be a dual-slot card with at least five heat pipes directing thermals through more than two dozen aluminum fins running horizontally across the card, plus several more on top. With no active cooling to speak of, you'll want to make sure your case has good airflow if you're considering a card like this.

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Costly DRAM is Driving Up Graphics Card Prices

Paul Lilly — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:48:41 +0000

Even with prices going up, it's still a great time to be a PC gamer.

Are you planning to build a gaming PC for the summer? If so, you might want to get started early in order to get the most bang for your buck. Yesterday we told you that desktop DRAM pricing is on the rise as contract chip prices have already jumped 50 percent in 2013, spiking 20 percent in March alone, and now we're hearing that graphics cards are getting more expensive.

Once again, you can blame memory chip makers. According to Digitimes and its sources within the graphics card business, several video card vendors have increased retail prices for products made with DDR3 memory in the DIY market. Prices are up 10-15 percent, the news and rumor site says.

Those same sources say it's unlikely graphics card pricing will drop in the next six months, though it's not all bad news. To help offset the rising retail costs, vendors are getting more aggressive in their promotions, some of which we've already seen. AMD, for example, has given away some sweet triple AAA titles as part of its ongoing Never Settle bundles. It's been rumored that the next Never Settle bundle will include Battlefield 4.

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Asus Launches Space Saving GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini

Paul Lilly — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:06:54 +0000

The first and only small form factor GeForce GTX 670.

Graphics cards aren't just getting more powerful by the generation, they've also grown in size over the last several years. Depending on your case, you might even need to remove a drive cage to accommodate a longer graphics card, though that's not likely to be a problem with Asus' new GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini. Living up to its "Mini" nomenclature, Asus claims it's the only small form factor (SFF) GTX 670 money can buy.

As such, it's designed primarily for SFF systems with mini ITX motherboards. It does take up two slots, though it measures just 17 centimeters, which is 7.13 centimeters shorter than the reference design for a GTX 670 card.

Asus said it re-engineered the DirectCU cooler to fit SFF cases. It's obviously shorter than the company's standard cooler, but to make sure it still cools effectively, Asus placed a vapor chamber directly on top of the GPU. This design leads to a 20 percent (or 7.5C) reduction in temperatures versus a reference GTX 670, Asus claims.

No word yet on price or availability.

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