directx11
Latest
NVIDIA sends GeForce GTX 550 Ti into the $150 graphics card wars
It wasn't that long ago that we were commending ATI on the stellar regularity of its product launches while NVIDIA was floundering, yet now the roles are reversed and we're seeing NVIDIA flesh out its second generation of Fermi products with the midrange GeForce GTX 550 Ti presented today. Its biggest attraction is a $150 price tag, but it makes a major concession in order to reach that pricing plateau -- there are only 192 CUDA cores inside it, equal to the previous-gen GTS 450, but less than the celebrated GTX 460. NVIDIA tries to ameliorate that shortage of parallel processing units by running the ones it has at an aggressive 1800MHz allied to a 900MHz graphics clock speed, and it also throws in a gigabyte of RAM running at an effective rate of 4GHz. That too is constrained somewhat, however, by a 192-bit interface, rather than the wider 256-bit affair on its bigger brother GTX 560 Ti. What all these specs boil down is some decent performance, but few recommendations from reviewers -- mostly due to the abundance of compelling alternatives at nearby price points. Hit up the links below for more. Read - AnandTech Read - Tech Report Read - Guru3D Read - PC Perspective Read - techPowerUp! Read - Hexus
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2Win has 'double the win,' becomes NVIDIA's first dual-Fermi graphics card
Why, it was only yesterday that we were eyeballing a dual-GF104 board from Galaxy, presuming it an artifact of a 2010 project that went nowhere, but there's at least one NVIDIA partner that's going to deliver exactly such a creation, and soon at that! EVGA has just set loose the details of a new GTX 460 2Win graphics card, which ticks along at 700MHz, has 672 cumulative CUDA cores served by 2GB of GDDR5, and reportedly collects more 3D Marks than NVIDIA's finest card out at the moment, the GTX 580. The company also gleefully reports that pricing of the 2Win model will be lower than the 580's. It's interesting that NVIDIA is opting for a pair of the older-gen GF104 Fermi chips here, but then again, those have been big winners with critics and price-sensitive gamers alike, with many touting the use of two GTX 460s in SLI as a more sensible solution than the elite single-card options. Well, now you have both, in a manner of speaking. Skip past the break to see EVGA's latest in the flesh. [Thanks, Ben]
AMD launches Radeon HD 6990 powerhouse for $699, maintains 'world's fastest' title
If you're scoring at home, NVIDIA currently holds the lead in single-GPU graphics cards with its GeForce GTX 580, but ATI's dual-chip Radeon HD 5970 has been holding down the absolute speed crown for a good long while. Now, bearing the name of AMD Radeon HD 6990, its successor sidles up to the throne and demands attention as the fastest single expansion board you can plug into your shiny new motherboard. The 6990 boasts a massive 4GB of GDDR5, 3,072 Stream Processors, 64 ROPs, and an 830MHz core clock speed. A dual-BIOS switch will let you crank that clock up to 880MHz with a corresponding increase in voltage, but don't expect to see much overclocking headroom above that. Reviewers note, alongside their fawning assessment of the world's best performance, that the HD 6990 is a massively power-hungry card (375W TDP) and one that makes quite a bit of noise while going through its herculean tasks. That's in spite of a new vapor chamber cooling system that allegedly supports up to 450W of thermal output. If all this strikes you as a somewhat flawed execution, maybe you'll join us in hoping NVIDIA's imminently upcoming response, dubbed the GTX 590, will be able to offer a neater, more efficient assault on the extreme peaks of graphical performance. Read - HardOCP Read - AnandTech Read - Tech Report Read - PC Perspective Read - techPowerUp! Read - Hot Hardware Read - Hexus
Sony VAIO YB now shipping AMD Fusion to your door for $600
The wait on AMD's Fusion has been so long that we feel like we should pop open the bubbly every time another laptop ships with it. Latest off the assembly line is Sony's VAIO YB series, which gives you a 1.6GHz processor to make similarly-clocked Atoms AMD-green with envy, 4GB of RAM and 500GB of hard drive space, an 11.6-inch glossy screen with 1366 x 768 resolution, and up to six hours of battery life for $599.99. It's available in silver and pink varieties today, or you can wait a little while longer for Amazon to get stock of its lower-specced variant, with 2GB of RAM and 320GB of storage, which will cost you $50 less. See more of the VAIO YB in our CES hands-on gallery below. %Gallery-112579%
AMD Radeon HD 6970M reviewed: major leap from HD 5870M, not quite a GTX 485M
What has 960 shaders, two gigabytes of dedicated GDDR5 memory with throughput of 115.2GBps, and the ability to churn 680 million polygons each and every second? Yes, the Radeon HD 6970M. AMD's fastest mobile chip to date has been doing the review rounds recently and the response has been unsurprisingly positive. Most modern games failed to trip up the 6970M even at 1920 x 1080 resolution, though the usual suspects of Crysis and Metro 2033 did give it a little bit of grief. All in all, the leap from the HD 5870M was significant, although NVIDIA's still relatively new GeForce GTX 485M has managed to hold on to its crown as the most powerful GPU on the mobile front. Benchmarks, architectural details, battery life tests (what battery life?), and value-adding enhancements await at the links below.
AMD ships 1.3 million Fusion APUs, 35 million DirectX 11 GPUs, says it has 'momentum'
Hey, this interim CEO thing doesn't seem to be too hard at all. Thomas Seifert, the temporary solution to the problem created by Dirk Meyer's departure from AMD's top spot, has had a pretty comfy ride reporting the company's latest quarterly results. The pecuniary numbers themselves ($1.65b revenue, $375m net income) were tame and unexciting, but Seifert got to make a pair of juicy milestone announcements. Firstly, on the mobile and ever-so-efficient front, he noted that 1.3 million Fusion APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) have been shipped to partners since AMD started deliveries in November, and secondly, in terms of discrete graphics chips, he disclosed that the Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 series DirectX 11 GPUs have surpassed the 35 million units shipped mark. To give you some perspective on what that means, sales of Nintendo's bestselling Wii console are hovering somewhere around the same figure. So yes, AMD, your wagon has momentum, but shouldn't it have a driver too?
AMD announces Fusion-based Embedded G-Series platform
We've just seen what AMD's Fusion platform can do for a laptop, and it looks like we'll soon also be seeing it in a lot more devices -- AMD has just announced its new Fusion-based Embedded G-Series platform, which can be used for things like set-top boxes, in-car computers, small form factor PCs, and more. That platform include the low-power x86 "Bobcat" core we've seen all along and a "world-class" DirectX 11-capable GPU, which AMD says adds up to a level of advanced computing that simply isn't available in the embedded market today. Among the first products based on the platform to be announced are a pair of Mini-ATX boards from Fujitsu and three SFF systems from Kontron, which will be joined by a range of other products from various manufacturers that are expected to launch in the "coming weeks." Head on past the break for the complete press release, plus a video of a G-Series-based car computer that AMD was demoing at CES.
Intel's next CPU refresh will include DirectX 11 graphics support
Tick, the CPU and GPU get integrated into the same 32nm die, tock, they both go down to 22nm with the latter gaining DirectX 11 support. Intel's only just unveiled its Sandy Bridge processors, but the next update to the company's desktop and laptop hardware has already gained an important detail. Mooly Eden, general manager for the PC Client Group, has disclosed the news that Ivy Bridge -- the die shrink of the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture -- will include DX 11 graphical capabilities when it arrives late in 2011. We're inclined to agree with Intel that DirectX 11 really wasn't a necessary implementation for Sandy Bridge given its humble gaming credentials, but Mooly expects a lot more applications will have harnessed the available APIs by the time we come to cross the Ivy Bridge. Let's hope it is so.
NVIDIA makes GeForce GT 500M family official, introduces GTX 485M as its fastest mobile GPU
Yes, NVIDIA's naming scheme really is all over the place, but here's what you need to know: as of today, the fastest mobile GPU coming from Jen-Hsun Huang's team will be the GeForce GTX 485. That chip will be equipped with a 256-bit memory interface and GDDR5 RAM and succeed the GTX 480M as the king of the (relatively) mobile castle. Moving up in numbers, but not performance, the new GT 520M, 525M, 540M, 550M, and 555M represent very mild refreshes of their 400M series counterparts. We were initially unimpressed by NVIDIA's decision to keep things stagnant but for some more aggressive clock speeds at the same TDP envelopes, but a recent review of the earlier-launched GT 540M showed appreciable gains from its predecessor, so maybe these graphics gurus actually know what they're doing. We've gathered some imagery of early units sporting NVIDIA's new graphics hardware -- notably paired with Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs -- in the galleries below, but we'll surely have more for you as we explore the halls of CES. After all, NVIDIA has an awesome 200 design wins combining its tech with Intel's latest, there should be plenty of previously unseen hardware for us to find. In the mean time, skip past the break to see a couple of benchmark runs showing off NVIDIA's new graphics processors. %Gallery-112252%%Gallery-112060%
AMD launches Radeon HD 6000M series, endows them with HD3D and EyeSpeed skills
AMD might have let the Radeon HD 6500M and 6300M out a little early, but today marks the formal launch of its new, second-generation DirectX 11 mobile chips, the HD 6000M family. The new arrivals are the HD 6900M / 6800M in the gaming-centric high-end (offering up to 1.3 teraFLOPS of compute power), the HD 6700M / 6600M in the upper midrange, and the HD 6400M to provide mainstream users with all the discrete graphics loving that they desire. The 6000M range introduces AMD's new HD3D hocus pocus, which will allow apps, games and other media to present themselves in 3D to you -- provided devs care to make them so -- while EyeSpeed is a marketing name for a set of technologies designed to improve video streaming and gaming performance by taking on more tasks with the GPU. You'll care about that if you're a big online media consumer and you'll also want to know that AMD has an exclusive on hardware acceleration for DivX video. Full press release awaits after the break.
AMD Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 launch assault on enthusiast gaming market
It's taken AMD a long time to refresh the top end of its graphics hardware, but today's culmination to that wait has to be described as somewhat bittersweet. Sweet, because we're finally getting a successor to the venerable HD 5870, one that offers improved power management and tessellation performance at a lower $369 price point, but also bitter because in terms of sheer firepower, the Radeon series doesn't seem to have made quite the leap many of us had hoped for. The new top of AMD's single-GPU pile, the HD 6970, offers 1,536 stream processors, an 880MHz core clock speed, and 2GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 5.5GHz for a total of 176GBps of memory bandwidth. Its partner in crime, the HD 6950, is expected to list at $299, for which saving you'll have to sacrifice some clock speed (down to 800MHz) and processing units (1,408 in total). There's a neat little addition to both new boards: a Dual-BIOS switch that will act like Google's hardware jailbreak toggle on the Cr-48, allowing tweakers to unlock the extra (unprotected by warranty!) performance headroom in their cards. Early reviews all seem to agree that both the Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 have struck a very fine price-to-performance ratio. The 6970 manages to spar with the much pricier GTX 580, but given that it's priced similarly to NVIDIA's GTX 570, it scores plaudits for being a more than viable alternative. The HD 6950 is seen as the real value item here, however, particularly since it occupies a relatively unique spot in the price range, and most reviewers tipped it as their new bang-for-the-buck leader. Read - HardOCP Read - AnandTech Read - Tech Report Read - Guru3D Read - PC Perspective Read - Hot Hardware Read - techPowerUp! Read - Hexus Read - TechSpot
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 debuts: the 580 goes on a power diet to fit into $349 price bracket
Want to know what the famous act of cutting down a graphics card to match a given price point looks like? Well, here it is, the $349 GTX 580 (aka GeForce GTX 570): it has 480 CUDA cores running at 1464MHz, a 732MHz graphics clock, and 1.25GB of GDDR5 memory hurtling along at an effective rate of 3.8GHz. Each of those specs represents a moderate downgrade from NVIDIA's original 500 series GPU, while the physical construction -- including that vapor chamber cooler -- is almost wholly identical to the 580. Aside from the paintjob, the only difference is that the GTX 570 can live on a pair of 6-pin auxiliary power connectors. The best comparison for the 570, however, turns out to be NVIDIA's former flagship, the GTX 480, as reviewers found the new card's performance to be nearly identical to the old tessellation monster. Verdicts invariably agreed that the 570 is quieter, cooler, and more power-efficient, making it pretty much a no-brainer of a purchase in its price bracket. Of course, every recommendation comes colored with the warning that AMD should finally be unveiling its upper-tier wares next week -- we'd wait the extra few days before parting with our cash. Read - HardOCP Read - Tech Report Read - Hot Hardware Read - AnandTech Read - Bit-tech Read - Hexus Read - Legit Reviews Read - PC Perspective
NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M refreshes mobile graphics midrange (update: hands-on pics)
Uh oh, just as we thought NVIDIA had moved beyond its penchant for rebadging hardware, here comes the vanguard of its 500M mobile GPU series -- which happens to be specced nearly identically to what's already on offer in the 400M family. The GT 540M chip maintains the same 96 CUDA cores and 128-bit memory interface as the GT 435M, but earns its new livery by cranking up graphics and processor clock speeds to 672MHz and 1344MHz, respectively, while also taking the onboard memory to a max speed of 900MHz. Power requirements have been kept unchanged, mind you, and NVIDIA itself admits it's exploiting the maturation of the production process to just throw out some speedier parts. China gets the GT 540M immediately, courtesy of Acer, while the rest of the world should be able to buy in at some point next month. Jump past the break for the full press release. Update: We've managed to track down the particular Acer model that'll mark the GT 540M's debut, it's called the Aspire 4741G. The option we saw came equipped with a 2.66GHz Intel Core i5-480M processor, 4GB of RAM, a 640GB HDD, a Blu-ray disc drive, and a 14-inch screen up top. There's not much, aside from the new top cover design, to really distinguish this from the rest of Acer's Aspire line, with the keyboard in particular being the very same one that we've witnessed on Timeline series machines for over a year now -- comfortable, well spaced, but exhibiting quite a bit of flex around the Enter key. See more of it in the gallery below. %Gallery-109305%
AMD's Bobcat APU benchmarked: the age of the Atom is at an end
So small, and yet potentially so disruptive. AMD's 1.6GHz Zacate chip, bearing a pair of Bobcat modules, has been taken off the leash today, resulting in a torrent of benchmarks pouring down onto the internet. While perusing the sources below, you might think to yourself that it's not exactly a world beater, sitting somewhere in the middle of the pack on most tests, but compare it to Intel's dual-core Atom D510 -- its most immediate competition in the target sub-$500 laptop price range -- and you'll find a thoroughgoing whooping in progress. The highlight of these new Fusion APUs is that they integrate graphics processing within the CPU chip, and Zacate didn't disappoint on that front either, with marked improvements over anything else available in its class. The resulting chips might still not have quite enough grunt to earn a place in your daily workhorse mobile computer, but their power efficiency and netbook-level pricing goals sure do look delightful. Or dangerous, if you're Intel. Read - AnandTech Read - Tech Report Read - PC Perspective Read - Hot Hardware Read - Legit Reviews
AMD GPU roadmap points to a happy 2011 for Radeon lovers
The ATI name might be dead, but Radeon graphics cards are only growing bigger, bolder and better. AMD's recent financial analyst day has made official what many of us already knew or suspected: there'll be three new high-end GPUs forthcoming in the first quarter of 2011. The slides explicitly describe the recently launched HD 6870 / 6850 as mere refreshes, aiming to bring HD 5800 series performance in a more efficient package, but peek beyond them and you'll see an armada of HD 6900 chips just itching to bring the fight to NVIDIA and its newly crowned GTX 580 king of the single-GPU hill. No specs yet, of course, but at least we now know there'll be some fireworks to greet us early in the new year. Oh, and if the mobile realm is more your thing, we've got a shot of AMD's plans on that front waiting for you just after the break.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 reviewed: 'what the GTX 480 should have been'
You saw the key specs slip out a little ahead of time, now it's the moment we've all been waiting for: the GeForce GTX 580 has been thoroughly benchmarked to see if its claim to being "the world's fastest DirectX 11 GPU" stands up to scrutiny. In short, yes it does. The unanimous conclusion reached among the reviewers was that the 580 cranks up the performance markedly relative to the GTX 480 -- with some citing gains between 10 and 20 percent and others finding up to 30 percent improvements -- while power draw, heat emissions, and noise were lowered across the board. ATI's AMD's Radeon HD 5870 wasn't completely crushed by the newcomer, but it was consistently behind NVIDIA's latest pixel pusher. Priced at $499, the GTX 580 is actually praised for offering good value, though its TDP of 244W might still require you to upgrade a few parts inside your rig to accommodate it, while current online prices are closer to $550. Anyhow, the pretty comparative bar charts await at the links below. Read - HardOCP Read - Tech Report Read - Legit Reviews Read - Bit-tech Read - PC Perspective Read - Hot Hardware
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 detailed: 512 CUDA cores, 1.5GB of GDDR5 on 'world's fastest DX 11 GPU' (update: video!)
It might not be November 9 all around the world yet, but NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 has already had its spec sheet dished out to the world, courtesy of CyberPower's seemingly early announcement. The new chip will offer a 772MHz clock speed, 512 processing cores, and a 192.4GBps memory bandwidth, courtesy of 1.5GB of GDDR5 clocked at an effective rate of 4GHz. CyberPower is strapping this beast into its finest rigs, and for additional overkill it'll let you SLI up to three of them within one hot and steamy case. Now let's just wait patiently for midnight to roll around and see what the reviewers thought of NVIDIA's next big thing. Update: CRN has a $499 price for us and a recital of NVIDIA's internal estimate that the GTX 580 bests the GTX 480 by between 20 and 35 percent. It seems, however, that the embargo for this hot new slice of silicon is set for early tomorrow morning, so check back then for the expert review roundup. Update 2: Lusting to see one on video? How about two side by side? Skip past the break for the eye candy [Thanks, Rolly Carlos!].
NVIDIA promises 'fastest DX11 GPU on the planet' very, very soon (video)
Nobody will be too shocked to hear NVIDIA expects its next flagship GPU to be the fastest that's ever been, but few will have guessed it'd also be one of the company's coolest and quietest. In the first public teasing of its next-gen graphics card (which is almost certain to bear the GeForce GTX 580 name tag), NVIDIA has revealed a new vapor chamber cooling system, which reminds us of Shuttle's ICE CPU cooler -- basically, water sealed within the chamber gets boiled by the hot elements (a copper plate in NVIDIA's case), which forces it to transfer heat away to the bits that are being cooled by the fan, where it chills out and recycles itself back to the boiling plate. The end result, according to NVIDIA, is about seven decibels less vroom relative to the GTX 480, along with lower operational temperatures. Besides that, the company's Tom Petersen also showed off an impressive tessellation demo and the first public display of Call of Duty: Black Ops gameplay, which was powered by this as yet unannounced GPU. Skip past the break to see it all on video. [Thanks, Vygantas]
AMD Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 officially pictured, coming this Friday
AMD said it's bringing the new heat this week, but, in a classic act of showmanship, it's teasing out only imagery today and insisting on making us wait until Friday to truly learn what the next generation of Radeon graphics is made of. For now, we have the full titles of its leading lights, namely the Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850, along with plenty of pictorial evidence of their existence in a lab somewhere. We note with glee that the default output arrangement includes no less than five ports, including two DVI, one HDMI (1.4a), and two Mini DisplayPorts. We'd rather the latter two were full-sized, but it doesn't look like ATI AMD had the room to fit them in. As to power requirements, the HD 6870 will need two 6-pin connectors to augment the juice it gets from the PCI Express port, while the HD 6850 will sate its needs with just the one. Anyhow, enjoy the gallery below and make sure to have your popcorn ready for the benchmark-heavy reviews coming up at the end of the week.%Gallery-105362%
AMD launching next generation of Radeon graphics cards next week, shipping by end of the year
The attentive newshounds over at AnandTech have picked out a golden nugget of disclosure from AMD's earnings call last night, citing CEO Dirk Meyer as saying "we will be launching our second-generation DX11 graphics offerings next week." What he's talking about, of course, is the highly anticipated refresh of the Radeon HD 5000 series, which some recent spec leaks suggested would bring a healthy bump in performance. After announcing the new product line next week, AMD promises to flood the market with "hundreds of thousands of units," which will be shipping before the end of this quarter -- meaning you'll have a Radeon HD 6xxx in time for the holiday gaming craze if you really want it. Can't ask anymore than that, now can we?
