radeon – Tech Today w/ Ken May

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. AMD isn’t providing the most extensive benchmarks to go with the Vega launch, but its emphasis is on baseline performance over peak frame rates. Its highest-end models should offer a minimum of 53 frames per second when playing numerous games on an ultra-wide 1440p monitor, which is comfortably higher than the 45 of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080. AMD is almost certainly cherry-picking tests that favor its design (what about maximum FPS or 4K gameplay?), but it’s reasonable to say that its fastest GPUs are at least competitive with those of its arch-rival, which is more than we could say for a long, long while. Thankfully, the firm isn’t leaning on speeds alone to reel you in. The RX Vega line can handle single-cable 5K displays, which are hard to find outside of the Mac ecosystem . A software plugin gives you the first hardware-accelerated playback for 4K VR video. And if you spring for the most advanced board, you’ll get liquid cooling that promises both more headroom for overclocking and a quieter PC. You might pay for more than you were expecting, though. The line starts off with the usual stand-alone cards, including the $399 Radeon RX Vega 56 (named for its 56 compute units) and $499 Vega 64 Air Cooled (logically, 64 compute units). However, AMD is pushing the concept of Radeon Packs that bundle two games (in the US, Prey and Wolfenstein II ) and discounts on the prices of both a Samsung ultra-wide monitor as well as a Ryzen 7 -plus-motherboard combo. You’ll need to spend $100 more to get the Vega 56 and 64 Air boards with these packs, and the $699 Vega 64 Liquid Cooled is only available with a Radeon Pack. Also, be prepared to wait a little while: the whole Vega series ships on August 14th. Oh, and the company has one more piece of gamer-focused news in store. Remember that ludicrous 16-core Threadripper processor? It finally has a release date. The $999 beast arrives on August 10th alongside a more modest 12-core CPU ($799), while a ‘low-end’ 8-core part ($549) shows up on August 31st. Threadripper is absolute overkill for most home users and is really meant for people who juggle many apps at once, or just want to show off and have money to burn. However, it was impressive enough that it prompted Intel to fire back with the Core i9 . Clearly, both AMD and Intel see the value in over-the-top core counts, even if it’s just to help sell processors to gamers that insist on the best hardware. Source: AMD (RX Vega) , (Threadripper)

More:
AMD returns to high-end gaming graphics with Radeon RX Vega

AMD unveils Radeon Pro SSG graphics card with up to 1TB of M.2 flash memory

While graphics cards with more than 8GB of memory might seem like overkill to gamers, those in the creative industries like VFX and 3D modelling can’t get enough of the stuff. After all, VFX studios like MPC often create scenes that require upwards of 64GB per frame to render . The trouble is, even the most capacious graphics card—AMD’s FirePro S9170 server GPU—tops out at 32GB GDDR5, and there are steep cost and design issues with adding more. AMD has come up with another solution. Instead of adding more expensive graphics memory, why not let users add their own in the form of M.2 solid state storage? That’s the pitch behind the all new Radeon Pro SSG (solid state graphics), which was revealed at the Siggraph computer graphics conference on Monday. The Radeon Pro SSG features two PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots for adding up to 1TB of NAND flash, massively increasing the available frame buffer for high-end rendering work. The SSG will cost you, though: beta developer kits go on sale immediately for a cool $9999 (probably £8000+). Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

NVIDIA’s GTX 1070 is a mid-range GPU that feels high-end

As impressive as NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 GPU is, its high price of $599 is tough to stomach for even the most dedicated gamers. That’s where the mid-range GTX 1070 comes in: It’s almost as fast as its more powerful sibling, but it starts at a more reasonable $379. That’s still a hefty chunk of change, but for the money it can tackle pretty much every game today (and likely for the next year or two) without breaking much of a sweat. That’s not too shabby for a mid-range video card. Due to travel ( Computex was quite the trip) as well as limited supply from NVIDIA, it’s admittedly taken me a while to put the GTX 1070 through its paces. But now that I’ve had some time with it, I can say without a doubt that the 1070 is an intriguing GPU. Even NVIDIA admits that among this generation of cars, this is the one most consumers will likely end up going for. Rounding out the lineup, the company also announced the lower-end GTX 1060 this week, which is quite the bargain at $249. The GTX 1070 is NVIDIA’s second card based on its 16 nanometer Pascal architecture, and it packs in 8GB of GDDR5 RAM and clock speeds between 1.5GHz and 1.7GHz. The company claims it pumps out 6.5 teraflops worth of computing power, compared with the 1080’s nine teraflops. I tested the slightly pricier $449 Founders Edition of the card, which sports the same elaborate metallic heatsink design as the 1080 Founders version. It has three DisplayPort connections, one HDMI port, one DVI port and is powered by a single eight-pin connector. 3DMark 3DMark 11 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Standard 13, 918/ Extreme 7, 703/ Ultra 4, 110 X7, 778 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Standard 15, 859/ Extreme 9, 316/ Ultra 5, 021 X9, 423 AMD R9 Fury X Standard 13, 337/ Extreme 7, 249/ Ultra 3, 899 X, 6457 AMD Radeon RX 480 Standard 10, 279/ Extreme 5, 146/ Ultra 2, 688 X4, 588 Let’s get to what you’re really here for: benchmarks! Not surprisingly, the GTX 1070 sits right between AMD’s $240 Radeon RX480 8GB card and the GTX 1080 in terms of performance on my rig (a 4GHz Core i7-4790K CPU, 16GB of 2400Mz DDR3 RAM and a 512GB Crucial MX100 SSD on a ASUS Z97-A motherboard). But it also consistently bests the Radeon R9 Fury X, which was AMD’s flagship card from last year. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have a GTX 970 or 980 Ti to benchmark.) 4K benchmarks Witcher 3 Hitman Doom NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 38 35 48 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 43 48 N/A AMD R9 Fury X 35 38 N/A AMD Radeon RX 480 20 25 35 Average frames-per-second performance in 1440p with all graphics set to maximum and NVIDIA HairWorks turned off. On the 4K front, it performed around the same as the R9 Fury X. It was noticeably less capable than the 1080 — in Hitman I saw around a 13 frames-per-second performance drop — but it’s still playable if you’re just looking to reach 30 fps at the minimum. It also reached an impressive 48 to 55 fps in Doom , a game that scales pretty well across GPUs of all types. 1440p benchmarks Witcher 3 Hitman Doom Overwatch NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 60 60 55-65 60 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 N/A N/A N/A N/A AMD R9 Fury X N/A 70 N/A N/A AMD Radeon RX 480 43 45 58 60 Average frames-per-second performance in 1440p with all graphics set to maximum and NVIDIA HairWorks turned off. Rather than pining for 60 fps 4K performance, I’ve settled on 1440p (2, 560 by 1, 440 pixels) as my ideal gaming resolution. It’s noticeably sharper than 1080p, and it’s easy to get high frame rates even with every graphical nicety imaginable turned on. With the GTX 1070, I consistently reached 60 fps with ultra settings (which will still look pretty great on a 4K display). Of course, it also had no trouble scoring well in 1080p benchmarks, but that’s no surprise. If you’re getting a new GPU today, you’re better off aiming for 1, 440p performance. Given that AMD’s cheaper RX 480 had no trouble with VR, I didn’t expect any hiccups with the GTX 1070. Indeed, it didn’t disappoint. Dogfighting in Eve: Valkyrie was fast-paced and didn’t show any sign of slowdown, and exploring alien environments in Oculus’ Farlands felt as immersive as ever. In fact, I didn’t notice any performance difference from the GTX 1080 with VR. When the GTX 1070 was announced, it seemed like the ideal affordable choice for PC gaming. Since then, though, we’ve seen the $200 AMD RX 480 debut, and NVIDIA announced the GTX 1060 , a $249 option of its own. So where does that leave the 1070? Based on what I’ve seen so far, it’s still a better option than the RX 480 and 1060 if you want to play at 1440p, or simply want a GPU that can handle next year’s games. And, of course, you’ve also got the option of picking up another GTX 1070 to run in SLI mode in a year or so, as well as overclocking to get some extra performance free. It’s hard to call a $379 video card affordable, but when you’re comparing it to a $599-and-up card, it seems a lot more palatable. And when you put it in context, as a GPU that trounces the cream of the crop from last year, the GTX 1070 is undeniably a great value.

See the original post:
NVIDIA’s GTX 1070 is a mid-range GPU that feels high-end

AMD unveils Radeon HD 8900M laptop graphics, ships them in MSI’s GX70 (eyes-on)

Did you think AMD showed all its mobile GPU cards when it launched the Radeon HD 8000M series in January? Think twice. The company has just unveiled the 8900M series, an adaptation of its Graphics Core Next architecture for desktop replacement-class gaming laptops. To call it a big jump would be an understatement: compared to the 8800M, the flagship 8970M chip doubles the stream processors to 1,280, hikes the clock speed from 725MHz to 850MHz and bumps the memory speed slightly to 1.2GHz. The net effect is about 12 to 54 percent faster game performance than NVIDIA’s current mobile speed champion, the GTX 680M , and up to four times the general computing prowess in OpenCL . The 8970M is more than up to the task of powering up to 4K in one screen, and it can handle up to six screens if there are enough ports. We’ll see how long AMD’s performance reign lasts, although we won’t have to wait to try the 8970M — MSI is launching the GPU inside the new GX70 laptop you see above. We got a brief, hands-off tease of the 17.3-inch GX60 successor at the 8900M’s unveiling, and it’s clear the graphics are the centerpiece. We saw it driving Crysis 3 very smoothly on one external display while powering 2D on two other screens, albeit through a bulky set of Mini DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA cables. Otherwise, the GX70 is superficially similar to its ancestor with that chunky profile, an unnamed Richland -based AMD A10 processor, Killer networking and a SteelSeries keyboard. More than anything, price should be the clincher: MSI is pricing the GX70 with the new Radeon at $1,100, which amounts to quite the bargain for anyone whose laptop has to double as a primary gaming PC. Gallery: AMD Radeon HD 8900M presentation Gallery: MSI GX70 eyes-on Filed under: Gaming , Laptops , AMD Comments Source: AMD , MSI

Visit link:
AMD unveils Radeon HD 8900M laptop graphics, ships them in MSI’s GX70 (eyes-on)

ASUS announces ROG Ares II video card, dual Radeon HD 7970 GPUs, 1050MHz clock speed

The original ROG ARES graphics card was a head spinner, and the just announced sequel seems to follow suit. ASUS’ ARES II features two AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition GPUs, and has a slimline two-slot design. The manufacturer claims it’s the fastest graphics card available, outperforming the GeForce GTX 690 reference card by some 13 percent. There’s 6GB of video memory, 1,100MHz boost clock, 1,050MHz base clock and 2 x 384-bit memory interface. If this sounds like something you just gotta have, then you’d better keep them eyes peeled, as upon release (no exact details on this just yet) it’ll be a limited edition. Also limited are the details on price. Spin up the source for more info. Filed under: Gaming , Peripherals , ASUS Comments Source: Anandtech

See the original article here:
ASUS announces ROG Ares II video card, dual Radeon HD 7970 GPUs, 1050MHz clock speed