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NVIDIA's RTX 3000 cards make counting teraflops pointless
With NVIDIA's first RTX 3000 cards arriving in weeks, you can expect reviews to give you a firm idea of Ampere performance soon. Even now, it feels safe to say that Ampere represents a monumental leap forward for PC gaming. However these cards stack up, though, it’s clear that their worth can no longer be represented by a singular figure like teraflops.
NVIDIA's massive A100 GPU isn't for you
In this mini-episode of our explainer show, Upscaled, we break down NVIDIA's latest GPU, the A100, and its new graphics architecture Ampere. Announced at the company's long-delayed GTC conference, the A100 isn't intended for gamers, or even for workstation users. Volta never directly came to consumers — aside from the Titan V and a Quadro workstation card — but the improvements and tensor cores it introduced were a key part of Turing, the architecture which underpins almost all of NVIDIA's current GeForce and Quadro cards.
NVIDIA's GTX 1650 GPU delivers modern gaming for $149
NVIDIA's cutting-edge Turing architecture has been gradually making way to more affordable graphics cards, and now it's finally reaching the entry level. The company has introduce the GeForce GTX 1650, a starter GPU that aims to provide the perks of modern games (such as complex shader effects) at an easier-to-swallow starting price of $149. It's a significant step down from the GTX 1660, but NVIDIA is betting that you won't mind in light of improvements over predecessors.
NVIDIA's GTX 1660 Ti offers gaming power without ray-tracing for $279
NVIDIA has officially unveiled the much-leaked GTX 1660 Ti. It's a next-gen Turing card that lacks the RTX-series' ray tracing, but costs less and boosts performance over the last-generation GTX 1060. The new cards come with 6GB of GDDR6 RAM running at 12Gbps, 1,536 CUDA cores and a 1.8GHz boost clock speed that allows further overclocking. It'll deliver 1.5 times the performance of the GTX 1060 6GB card, with 1.4 times the power efficiency -- fast enough to power games like Fortnite, PUBG and Apex Legends at 120 fps/1080p.
NVIDIA is the latest tech giant blaming China's economy for poor sales
Add NVIDIA to the list of companies pinning at least some of their problems on China's struggling economy. The graphics chip maker has warned that its fourth quarter results will fall short of expectations due partly to "deterorating macroeconomic conditions," especially in China. People were more hesitant to buy graphics cards, NVIDIA said. It added that sales of "certain" high-end Turing-based GPUs (read: the RTX series) fell short of expectations because people were both waiting for price drops and games that made better use of RTX features like raytracing.
NVIDIA teases the Titan RTX, its upcoming flagship GPU
A bunch of social media personalities have teased the Titan RTX, NVIDIA's next flagship GPU, in what looks like a coordinated campaign. Google Brain co-founder Andrew Ng showed off the card on Twitter in an otherwise vanilla recruiting photo, "slow mo guy" Gavin Free teased a shot of it on Instagram with his cat, and Linus from Linus Tech Tips "accidentally" pulled the card out twice on his YouTube show.
NVIDIA unveils the Quadro RTX 4000, its mainstream workstation GPU
NVIDIA has unveiled the Quadro RTX 4000, a workstation and deep learning version of its GeForce RTX 2070 gaming GPU. Like that model, it packs 2,304 NVIDIA CUDA cores, 288 Turing Tensor Cores for AI and 8GB of GDDR6 graphics memory, but has fewer ray-tracing (RT) cores with 36 rather than 42. It also uses slightly less power (150 watts) compared to the RTX 2070's 185 watts, likely because of reduced clocks speeds. It's equipped with 8K video decoding and encoding capability for multiple professional formats, and connects to VR headsets by VirtuaLink.
NVIDIA focuses on AI in the internet and for industries
NVIDIA's graphics technology is useful for a lot more than just lining up pixels on gamer's monitors, and in a presentation at the GPU Technology Conference, CEO Jensen Huang revealed a few more layers of its plans. The Jetson AGX Xavier platform unveiled earlier this year for autonomy is rolling out, and now developers can order a Drive AGX Xavier devkit to test software for self-driving vehicles. Speaking of AGX, NVIDIA announced that several Japanese companies (FANUC, Komatsu, Musashi Seimitsu and Kawada Technologies) will integrate the Jetson technology into their autonomous robots.
NVIDIA’s RTX speed claims fall short without game support
At its big RTX event at Gamescom, NVIDIA made some bold claims about its new Turing RTX cards. First and foremost was that the GeForce RTX 2080 offered performance "six times faster" than current 1000-series Pascal-based GTX cards. That's in large part because of new ray-tracing tech that helps the GPUs calculate complex game lighting much more quickly. "This is a new computing model, so there's a new way to think about performance," said CEO Jensen Huang.
Leaks reveal NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards ahead of August 20th event
NVIDIA hasn't been shy about plans to unveil Turing-based GeForce video cards at its August 20th Gamescom event -- its teaser video effectively spelled out "GeForce RTX 2080" through not-so-subtle clues. But just how powerful will these cards be? You won't have to wait until the launch to find out. A slew of leaks on Reddit, WCCFTech and VideoCardz have spilled the beans on the first GeForce RTX-series boards, and they promise fundamental leaps in performance over the GTX 1000 hardware you're used to.
NVIDIA's Turing GPUs can process 8K video in real time
You and I won't likely be working with 8K video anytime soon, but a lot of the movies and YouTube videos we enjoy are shot in that format. NVIDIA announced that with camera company RED's help, it has solved one of the thorniest problems with 8K. The latest Quadro RTX Turing GPUs will support real-time 8K playback and effects, significantly speeding up workflow for video editors, compositors and colorists. Eventually, the tech will make it possible for all of us to play videos in 8K glory, once we graduate to supported monitors and TVs.
NVIDIA's Turing-powered GPUs are the first ever built for ray tracing
Earlier this year NVIDIA announced a new set of "RTX" features that included support for advanced ray tracing features, upgrading a graphics technique that simulates the way light works in the real world. It's expected to usher in a new generation of hyper-realistic graphics but there was one small problem: no one made any hardware to support the new stuff yet. Now at the SIGGRAPH conference NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang revealed eighth-generation Turing GPU hardware that's actually capable of accelerating both ray tracing and AI. Turing can render ray tracing 25x faster than old Pascal technology thanks to dedicated processors that will do the math on how light and sound travel through 3D environments. They're also the first graphics cards announced with Samsung's new GDDR6 memory on board to move data faster using less power than ever before.
After Math: Merry Christmas, you filthy animals
It's been a wondrous week working up to Christmas Eve and not just for the guys with the Tommy Guns. Alamo Drafthouse announced it is starting a rental store and loaning out rare VHS, Protera is going to wake up tomorrow with an order for 25 of its electric buses under the tree, and Google is practically giving away its digital movie rentals. Numbers, because how else will you know how many gold rings you've got coming?
Lost Alan Turing letters found in university filing cabinet
A huge batch of letters penned by British cryptographer Alan Turing has been found at the University of Manchester. Professor Jim Miles was tidying a storeroom when he discovered the correspondence in an old filing cabinet. At first he assumed the orange folder, which had Turing's name on the front, had been emptied and re-used by another member of staff. But a closer look revealed 148 documents, including a letter sent by GCHQ, a draft version of a BBC radio programme about artificial intelligence, and invitations to lecture at some top universities in America.
Turing's new phone boasts human and digital assistants
Remember the Turing Phone? You're forgiven if you didn't. Turing Robotic Industries unveiled the ambitious phone to much fanfare, only to delay it multiple times and even switch operating systems. That isn't stopping the company from producing a follow-up, though -- it's teaming up with TCL to make its next upscale phone, the Appassionato. The Android device is still made from Turing's signature extra-strong Liquidmorphium alloy (complete with a ceramic-like carbon coating), but it now includes a hybrid concierge and voice assistant service named, naturally, Sir Alan. Details of how it works aren't clear, but it'll let you get "lifestyle and business recommendations" from both AI and human helpers.
Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee wins computing's highest award
World Wide Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee just chalked up another accolade, and it's one of his greatest yet. The Association for Computing Machinery has given him the 2016 Turing Award, frequently considered the Nobel Prize of the computing industry. He's receiving the award not just for inventing the basics of the web, but designing them in an elegant way. His concepts for links (URLs and URIs) were simple and easy to implement, while making HTML the heart of the web helped anyone publish info in a practical format.
Alan Turing's groundbreaking synthesizer music restored
Alan Turing is known for a few small achievements, like helping end World War II, laying the groundwork for modern computers and developing the "Turing test" for machine intelligence. You may not be aware, however, that he paved the way for synthesizers and electronica by inventing the first computer-generated musical tones. A pair of researchers from the University of Cantebury have now restored the first-ever recording made from Turing's "synthesizer."
The Turing Phone will ship with Sailfish OS, not Android
The Turing Phone promises to be the sturdiest, most secure smartphone around, and now it boasts one more unique feature: Jolla's Sailfish operating system. The Turing Phone will not use Android as promised, Turing Robotic Industries revealed in an email to "fans." The message isn't addressed to "owners" because the Turing Phone hasn't hit the market yet; it was supposed to ship in December, complete with Android, but it was delayed into 2016 at the last moment.
Turing Robotics' liquid metal phones to ship out in December
That rectangular, encrypted Turing Robotics phone that one of our editors called "charmingly quirky" is ready for release. In fact, it will start shipping out on December 18th -- that's also when Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters, and yes, the company rep admits, it's not a coincidence. The Turing phone has a 5.5-inch 1080p screen, features encrypted communication and is built from a metal alloy called liquidmorphium, which is apparently stronger than titanium. Turing Robotics already gave people the chance to reserve units sometime ago, but if you want the "Dark Wyvern" special edition, you can pre-order one on September 24th.
Touring the Turing, a wonderfully weird encrypted smartphone
You'd think a company that takes security as seriously as Turing Robotics does wouldn't paint its first smartphones purple, red, gold or blue, but you'd have it pegged wrong. For a freshman effort, CEO SYL Chao envisioned an Android phone that was meant for designers and aesthetes as much as it was for security nerds and paranoiacs who crave the encryption tech inside it. Weird? You bet, but after spending a little time with some pre-production prototypes, I can't help but pull for this underdog.
