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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
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?
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
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 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 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?
NVIDIA launches sub-$80 GeForce GT 430 for single-slot cooler enthusiasts
The graphics card that doesn't require a fridge-sized cooler is turning into something of a rarity nowadays, but we doubt the market for quiet, efficient, and halfway-decent GPUs is ever going to disappear completely. NVIDIA is fleshing out its Fermi family today with a creature that aspires to such epithets, the 96 CUDA core-equipped GT 430. It's a patently humble GPU, as indicated by its $79.99 typical price, 49W TDP, 5.7-inch board length, and single-slot cooler design. Mind you, while those are typically considered positives, they do limit gaming performance quite significantly, with the GT 430 getting roundly beaten by ATI's (sob!) AMD's similarly priced Radeon HD 5670. So what niche is left for this card? Well, it's an upgrade over integrated graphics and it gets you on the 3D bandwagon, but on the whole we're left scratching our voluminous craniums as to why anyone would dodge AMD's more accomplished hardware for NVIDIA's latest. Hit up the reviews below and form your own opinion, if our one doesn't suit your outfit today. Read - HardOCP Read - AnandTech Read - PC Perspective Read - Hot Hardware Read - Legit Reviews Read - Hexus%Gallery-104721%
NVIDIA makes GeForce GTS 450 official, promises beastly overclocking
Say hello to NVIDIA's GF106 core (please pretend you've never met before). The company's third Fermi desktop iteration is described as "a little more than half of the GF104 implementation," which in real terms means 192 CUDA cores versus the GTX 460's 336, reduced memory bandwidth with a 128-bit-wide bus and a lower number of ROPs at 16. These disadvantages are ameliorated by 783MHz graphics and 1566MHz processor clock speeds as well as a much more forgiving power profile -- the new GTS 450 cards will require just the one 6-pin power connector for auxiliary juice. Pricing is aimed squarely at conquering the market currently occupied by ATI's HD 5750, which, as we saw over the weekend, plants the 450 around the $130 mark. You'll have to read the reviews below for confirmation, but NVIDIA promises "awesome" overclocking headroom on its new card, going as far as to suggest stable 900MHz graphics clocks aren't out of the realm of possibility. Read - HardOCP Read - Tech Report Read - Guru 3D Read - PC Perspective Read - Legit Reviews Read - Hot Hardware Read - TweakTown%Gallery-101980%
AMD names second Bobcat APU Zacate, shows off Ontario die size
AMD might still have no actual Fusion product to sell us, but it's added a fresh new codename to the stable of future CPU/GPU hybrids. The Zacate Accelerated Processing Unit is a Bobcat derivative, much like the Ontario, but it operates at a higher TDP of 18W and is intended for ultrathin and mainstream laptops along with power-sipping desktops and all-in-ones. Both it and the Ontario APU will offer two Bobcat cores allied to Radeon graphics capable of performing DirectX 11 instructions, though the Ontario dips all the way down to 9W with the stated aim of punching up netbook and small form factor pc performance. Just for reference, that'll have to compete against Intel's own dual-core solution, the 1.5GHz Atom N550, which scrapes by on just an 8.5W TDP... though, of course, it doesn't integrate the same graphics processing prowess that Ontario promises. The two chips, Ontario and Zacate, will ride AMD's Brazos platform when they finally debut early next year. Until then, enjoy the technicolor die shot after the break.
Eurocom serves up GTX 480M SLI and HD 5870 CrossFireX options, seasons with Core i7-980X
It boggles the mind to think that one Fermi GPU could be fit inside a laptop, but two? Eurocom has just outed its 17.3-inch Panther 2.0 mobile gaming station -- which looks like a straight rebadge of the Clevo X7200 -- with the most overpowered set of component choices we've yet seen. You can go SLI with the GTX 480M or NVIDIA's more professionally minded Quadro 5000M, crank up CPU speed to 3.33GHz and beyond with the Core i7-980X from Intel (yes, the desktop variant), stash up to 24GB of onboard RAM, and jack in up to four storage drives, our preference being for the 2TB of SSD goodness option. Of course, if you prefer ATI's Evergreen side of the fence, dual Mobility Radeon HD 5870 GPUs are on tap as well. Sadly, we've no idea how much these spectacular specs will set you back, but launch is set for later this month and you can always call up and get yourself a quote; we're guessing it'll be in five figures.
ATI CrossFireX versus NVIDIA SLI: performance scaling showdown
We know who the daddy is when it comes to single-card graphics performance, and we've even witnessed NVIDIA and ATI duking it out with multiple cards before, but this here roundup is what you might call comprehensive. Comparing a mind-boggling 23 different configurations, the Tech Report guys set out to determine the best bang for your DirectX 11 buck. Their conclusion won't shock those of you who've been following the recent love affair between reviewers and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460: a pair of these eminently affordable cards regularly outpaced the best single-GPU solutions out there. Slightly more intriguing, however, was the discovery that its elder siblings, the GTX 470 and 480, have improved in performance to the point of being markedly ahead of ATI's Radeon HD 5870, with the blame for this shift being put squarely on the shoulders of NVIDIA's driver update team. Hurry up and give the source a read while it's still fresh, we can't imagine ATI letting this be the status quo for too much longer.
The Road to Mordor: Forum diving
[Special note: Obviously, the news that LotRO is going free-to-play hit after this article was already written, so stay tuned as we dissect what it means for existing and potential new customers next week!] Lately, it feels like we're in a holding pattern for Lord of the Rings Online. The last major content patch, Volume III: Book 1, is fading into distant memory, and we're pushing into summer without definite news of the next update -- or better yet, the next expansion. Players are also nervous about any changes or new directions the game may take after the recent acquisition of Turbine by Warner Bros., and the silence certainly doesn't help any. However, there's always hope in the darkest places of Middle-earth, and the same can be said for the game itself. The Summer Festival should be around the corner, and as for new news, Sapience handed out a bit of vague encouragement on the forums: "You guys know we're preparing an announcement. I can't give you a specific date as to when we'll make it, but I can say I just ran into Adam Mersky coming out of an E3 planning meeting and he was pretty stoked!" While we continue the wait for the next step forward for LotRO, I thought it'd be a good idea to head over to the official forums and do a little diving for some of the more interesting topics and discussions bouncing around the LotRO community today.
NVIDIA GTX 480 makes benchmarking debut, matches ATI HD 5870 performance (video)
We're still not happy with NVIDIA's failure to publish anything on its site alerting users about the doom that may befall them if they switched to the 196.75 drivers, but the company's making an effort to get back into our good books with the first official video of its forthcoming GeForce GTX 480 and even a benchmark run against ATI's flagship single-GPU card, the HD 5870. It looks like you'll need to jack in a pair of auxiliary power connectors -- one 8-pin and one 6-pin -- to power the first Fermi card, as well as plenty of clearance in your case to accommodate its full length (stop giggling!). NVIDIA's benchmarking stressed the GTX 480's superior tesselation performance over the HD 5870, but it was level pegging between the two cards during the more conventional moments. It's all well and good being able to handle extreme amounts of tesselation, but it'll only matter to the end user if game designers use it as extensively as this benchmark did. As ever, wait for the real benchmarks (i.e. games) before deciding who wins, but we're slightly disappointed that NVIDIA's latest and greatest didn't just blow ATI's six-month old right out of the water. Benchmarking result awaits after the break, along with video of the new graphics card and a quick look at NVIDIA's 3D Vision Surround setup. Go fill your eyes.
NVIDIA Fermi pushed back to March, ATI prepping midrange refresh for early Q1?
Considering the present date, it's no longer a mystery that Fermi won't be seeing the glaring lights of store shelves this year, but now DigiTimes reports that the delay might be even longer than feared. Sources from within board manufacturers have been informed by NVIDIA that the launch of the 40nm GPU will be pushed back to March 2010. Though NVIDIA's flagship DirectX 11 card has yet to get out of the starting blocks, ATI -- already the proud papa of a litter of DX 11 parts -- is said to be preparing a renewed onslaught on the mainstream market with two new releases slated for late January or early February. The HD 5670 (Redwood) and HD 5450 (Cedar) will slot in alongside the unannounced HD 5570 and HD 5350 to flesh out the lower and middle portions of ATI's Evergreen refresh. So that's one whole family of DirectX 11 parts from ATI, and one long wait from NVIDIA.
