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AMD partner leaks two mid-range Navi GPUs
AMD is set to announce more GPUs based on its 7-nanometer Navi tech, according to a leak from Sapphire, one of its largest graphics card partners. At Computex, CEO Lisa Su will reportedly unveil the Navi XT that can best the NVIDIA RTX 2070 for $499. AMD will also launch the Navi Pro, with performance between the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 for $399. The Radeon VII, meanwhile, will remain AMD's flagship GPU.
NVIDIA's GTX 1660 lowers the high-performance gaming price barrier
NVIDIA has unveiled its cheapest Turing-based card yet, the $219 GeForce GTX 1660. Much like the $279 GTX 1660 Ti, it offers Turing performance that bests the GTX 1060 by around 15-30 percent. At the same time, it lacks the RT (ray tracing) and Tensor cores on NVIDIA's RTX series cards, making it about a third cheaper than its RT doppleganger, the $349 RTX 2060.
NVIDIA will stop supporting 3D glasses in April (updated)
Have you noticed that stereoscopic 3D is out of vogue, at least at home? So has NVIDIA. The graphics chip designer has unveiled plans to drop support for 3D Vision, its approach to gaming with 3D glasses. The last drivers to support 3D Vision will come with the final Release 418 in April, with future versions dropping it entirely. You'll still get support for "critical driver issues" in 418 through April 2020, but you'll otherwise need to move on.
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.
Watch AMD's CES press event in under 9 minutes
AMD didn't just respond to introductions from Intel and NVIDIA at CES 2019 -- it came out swinging. The chipmaker had plenty to show at its press event, and frequently claimed a performance edge over its rivals. The centerpiece was undoubtedly the Radeon VII, the first 7-nanometer graphics processor aimed at gamers. However, AMD had a little something for everyone, whether it was third-generation Ryzen CPUs for desktops, Epyc chips for heavy-duty number crunching and a talk about the hardware behind Google's Project Stream. That's a lot to digest, but our recap should help catch you up in a hurry.
NVIDIA officially unveils its flagship Titan RTX GPU
Shortly after teasing it, NVIDIA has officially unveiled the its top-end GPU, the Titan RTX. As expected, it has 72 Turing RT and 4,608 CUDA cores, up from 68 and 4,352, respectively, over the RTX 2080 Ti. However, this isn't so much a consumer card (unlike last year's Titan XP), but more in the family of the Titan V compute GPU. As such, it comes with a whopping 24GB of GDDR6 VRAM and packs a $2,500 price tag, both more than double that of the RTX 2080 Ti.
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’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.
AMD's Radeon Pro WX 8200 is for content creators on a budget
AMD has been pushing Intel on the CPU high-end with new, more budget-minded offerings like the 32-core Ryzen Threadripper, and now it's doing the same to NVIDIA. Just ahead of Siggraph 2018, AMD launched the Radeon Pro WX 8200, a card aimed not at gamers but workstation-using content creators. With 8GB of ECC RAM, the Vega 10-powered offers 10.8 teraflops of performance, close to that of AMD's flagship Radeon Pro WX 9100. However, the WX 8200 is less than half the price at $999, while significantly outperforming NVIDIA's similarly-priced Quadro P4000.
Cryptocurrency mining is hampering the search for alien life
It turns out that high-end graphics cards are fantastic for mining non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies, which has led to a global shortage of GPUs. Gamers are livid at the lack of supply, especially as prices skyrocket on secondary markets. But they're not the only ones with ruined dreams: The shortage has stalled plans to expand the search for alien life.
NVIDIA updates video drivers to help address CPU memory security (updated)
It's not just your processor and operating system that need patches for the Meltdown and Spectre memory vulnerabilities -- your graphics card does, too. To that end, NVIDIA has started releasing updated drivers that help protect against the CPU vulnerability. All its GeForce, Quadro, NVS, Tesla and GRID chips are immune to Meltdown and Spectre themselves, but the code could leave CPUs open to two Spectre variants. The new software immediately mitigates one Spectre flaw, and NVIDIA is promising future mitigations as well as eventual updates to address the second.
NVIDIA is gearing up to end 32-bit OS support
The time of the 32-bit OS continues its slow descent into obsolescence. NVIDIA announced that Version 390 of its graphics card driver would be the last to support 32-bit Windows, Linux and FreeBSD systems.
NVIDIA GPUs are 'Star Wars' merch now
It's easy to find flashy video cards that look good through a case window, but NVIDIA may have just kicked things up a notch. It's releasing two Star Wars-themed GeForce Titan Xp Collector's Edition GPUs that are very nearly art pieces, if also a classic example of arbitrary movie tie-ins. The Galactic Empire card is lit up in a sinister red and has a casing reminiscent of the dark, orderly nature of the Death Star, while the Jedi Order card is lit in a friendlier green and has the "battle-worn" finish you'd expect of Rebel gear. There are even nods to the hilt of Luke Skywalker's lightsaber.
NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1070 Ti battles AMD's latest video cards
NVIDIA has largely been sitting pretty since the GeForce 10-series arrived and gave it a comfortable performance lead in the graphics realm, but things have changed: AMD's Vega cards are at least fast enough that you might consider them instead. Needless to say, NVIDIA isn't about to let that situation stand. It's launching the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, a $449 upper mid-range card that could outperform the $399 Vega 56 and undercut the $499 Vega 64 on price. For all intents and purposes, it's very nearly as powerful as a GTX 1080: you have the same core clock speed as the pricier board, and only slight hits to the CUDA core count (2,432 vs. 2,560), texture units (152 vs. 160) and boost clock (1,683MHz vs. 1,733MHz). About the only major difference is that you're still limited to 'just' GDDR5 memory instead of the speedier GDDR5X on the 1080.
AMD returns to high-end gaming graphics with Radeon RX Vega
AMD has been content to cater to budget gamers with its graphics cards over the past couple of years, but it's ready to play in the big leagues once again. After plenty of leaks and no shortage of hype (Apple even name-dropped AMD at the iMac Pro debut), the chip giant has unveiled GPUs based on its high-end Vega architecture. The Radeon RX Vega series touts processors with numerous tweaks that promise to finally give AMD performance comparable to NVIDIA's higher-end offerings, including updated geometry and pixel engines, a high-bandwidth cache controller and support for multiple data operations per cycle. Overall, Vega promises twice the throughput per clock cycle and twice the memory bandwidth per pin of earlier Radeon hardware -- not the highest bar to clear given AMD's recent lack of top-end cards, but still a huge improvement.
NVIDIA posts Mac drivers for its latest graphics cards
NVIDIA is quickly making good on its promise to support its latest graphics cards on Macs. The GPU giant has quietly posted beta macOS drivers (direct download) that should support any GeForce 10-series card, whether it's a simple GTX 1050 or an all-out beast like the Titan Xp. It's a big step forward for Mac users who've had to settle for 9-series cards at best. However, the big challenge will be making the most of the cards given the current Mac lineup -- this is as much an investment in the future as anything.
NVIDIA's GTX 1050 graphics card starts at $109
This year has been a busy one for NVIDIA, what with the introduction of its highly anticipated GeForce GTX 1080 and, most recently, the high-end Titan X graphics cards. But the company isn't forgetting about the entry-level crowd. Today, it announced the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti, a pair of GPUs built for people who want to get into PC gaming. They're both based on NVIDIA's Pascal architecture, and the company says you'll be able to play many titles at a "smooth" 60 frames per second in 1080p. That includes games like Bioshock Infinite, Grand Theft Auto V, Star Wars Battlefront, The Division and more.
