Items tagged with GPU
Although the situation is improving, it is still extremely difficult to score some of the latest graphics cards at prices even approaching their MSRPs. With that in mind, we’ve held off on covering some of the hottest GPUs to come through the lab for a while, because the coverage was inevitably (and understandably) met with groans and frustration by some of you. We get it, but the beat goes on, and GPUs are some of our favorite things to cover around here, especially models like the Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 XT we’ll be showing you today. We’re going to go ahead and spoil this review right out of the gate and say the Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 XT is one of the best...
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When it comes to graphics cards, we typically think of NVIDIA and AMD as being roughly equals. Both companies offer competitive performance these days across their respective product lines and provide robust driver software packages supporting their hardware. Each has had its fair share of software [and hardware] bugs over the years, but they are typically squashed with a subsequent update. So, we were certainly shocked when it was brought to our attention that electronics retailer Micro Center was spreading misinformation about AMD graphics cards. In a post to Micro Center's official website, a buying guide was presented to help customers choose the best hardware components for their gaming...
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After an official unveiling at Computex 2021 and last week’s launch of the powerful GeForce RT 3080 Ti, NVIDIA is ready to go open kimono and spill all of the new, more-mainstream GeForce RTX 3070 Ti’s juicy details. Cards are due to go on sale tomorrow, but we’ve been able to put a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition through its paces and have everything laid out for you on the pages ahead. As its branding suggests, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is an update / upgrade over the original RTX 3070 which launched about seven months ago. NVIDIA didn’t just goose the clocks and call it day, however. Though its performance isn’t otherworldly versus the original standard card,...
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AMD is expanding its line-up of RDNA 2-based GPUs today, with a trio of new Radeon Pro graphics cards targeting the professional workstation market. These new Radeon Pro cards leverage the same GPU architecture as their consumer-class Radeon RX-branded counterparts, but Radeon Pros feature completely different designs, go through additional qualification and are certified for a myriad of pro-vis applications. The new line-up is spearheaded by the Radeon Pro W6800. The Radeon Pro W6800 is packing AMD’s current top-end Navi 21 GPU and a beefy 32GB of GDDR6 RAM with ECC support. Though the Radeon Pro W6800 is AMD’s newest flagship professional GPU, the card’s configuration foreshadows...
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During their Computex 2021 keynote, NVIDIA’s Jeff Fisher, GeForce Senior Vice President, and Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing, unveiled a number of new enterprise and consumer products, targeting multiple market segments. For all of the gamers though, it was Jeff Fisher’s official unveiling of the oft-rumored GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti cards that most likely got your juices flowing. The new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the spiritual successor to the previous-gen flagship RTX 2080 Ti, while the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti builds upon the popular RTX 3070 with much faster memory and some goosed specifications that should boost performance quite a bit. We’re about a week away...
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PowerColor has historically released its high-end, customized Red Devil-branded Radeons in lock-step with AMD. AMD launches a new GPU with one set of specifications, and a short time later, board partners like PowerColor come through with tweaked versions injected with their own special sauce. On the surface, that’s how today’s launch of the PowerColor Red Devil Ultimate Radeon RX 6900 XT also went down, but there is some additional mojo at play here. PowerColor already has a “non-Ultimate” Red Devil 6900 XT in its line-up, but the Red Devil Ultimate Radeon RX 6900 XT takes things to the next level. The silicon on this card has been specially binned to ensure stability...
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NVIDIA’s board partners have released a wide array of GeForce RTX 30 series cards, with various form factors, aesthetics and differentiating features. Some use higher frequencies to entice gamers and enthusiasts, while others are crammed with flashy lighting or over-the-top cooler designs. The Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Vulcan OC-V we’ll be showing you here today seems to target virtually every type of enthusiast. Whether you’re after peak performance or wild aesthetics, this card has you covered. Factory overclocked? Check. User-Addressable RGB lighting? A high-performance cooler? An adjustable, customizable, built-in LCD? Check, check, and check. The Colorful iGame...
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Between silicon yields being too low, pandemic-induced production problems, cryptocurrency mining, and high demand, it has become an awful year to be a gamer trying to buy computer components and consoles alike. GPUs have been especially hard hit in the technology sector, with stock remaining limited and scalpers ruling the roost. Now, rumors are cropping up out of China that NVIDIA will try to pump the market with a supply of older GeForce GTX 1650 cards, but is that what people need or want? If you are looking to build a PC at the time of writing, you would perhaps be better off buying from the older used market or just waiting altogether. What are meant to be top-of-the-line cards at reasonable...
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As has been made abundantly clear, Intel has big plans in the discrete GPU space, with upcoming solutions for virtually every segment. Intel has teased its progress here and there, including a recent Twitter post, in which GPU boss Raja Koduri posted a video clip of Ponte Vecchio, a massive slice of silicon comprising the company's Xe-HPC chip. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger talked a little about this very part yesterday during the Intel Unleashed event. Following up on that, Koduri tipped his hat at Gelsinger on Twitter, saying the CEO's "infectious energy for technology is a great accelerant for our march onwards to bring this magic to a cloud near you." High praise from a bigwig himself. As for the...
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In case you've been living under a rock, you know that 2020 was a wild year for computer hardware complicated further by the COVID-19 pandemic. PC sales soared, driven primarily by laptops as more people work and learn from home. One sector that saw a massive increase in sales is GPUs. According to a new research report, overall PC GPU shipments ballooned by 20 percent in Q4 2020 compared to Q3 2020. Even more impressive was the fact that overall GPU shipments increased 29.1 percent year-over-year during Q4 2020 (that includes Intel and AMD CPUs with integrated GPUs). The second half of 2020 was a hot period for GPUs, given that AMD and NVIDIA launched next-generation Radeon RX 6000 and...
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Since the launch of new CPUs, GPUs, and consoles late last year, chip supply has certainly struggled to keep up with demand. This supply issue is due in part to an ongoing semiconductor shortage which is not showing signs of stopping any time soon. To look for solutions, President Joe Biden is stepping in to review the semiconductor supply chain ecosystem and hopefully fund increased manufacturing capacity in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic has ultimately wreaked havoc across many industries, leading to a trickle-down effect of shortages and delays in production. Subsequently, there has been pressure on the Biden administration, from both the GOP and other organizations, to take a look...
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NVIDIA is launching its latest Ampere-based GPU today, targeting the sweet-spot of the PC gaming market, the GeForce RTX 3060. The GeForce RTX 3060 was announced post-CES 2021, all the way back in mid-January, but cards are going on sale today. In addition to the relatively early initial reveal, NVIDIA is doing a few other things a bit differently with this launch. For one, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention last week’s announcements regarding specialized CMP HX mining GPUs and the GeForce RTX 3060’s intentionally gimped mining hash rash rate, when it comes to the Ethereum algo at least. On top of those two things, which have been the source of much debate, NVIDIA has...
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The graphics card shortage we find ourselves in this year is at least partially caused by cryptocurrency miners snagging mass amounts of cards with bots, or by other means. That sort of GPU gluttony does not come without consequences, however, as Iran is now finding out. With over a dozen large crypto-mining operations based in Iran, the power needed may have caused blackouts across the middle-eastern country. Since mid-January, it seems that rolling blackouts have plagued Iran, but this is not a new occurrence for the people. However, this is on top of the coronavirus battle, U.S. sanctions, and other issues that put the country under stress, and people are looking to place blame. According...
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NVIDIA unveiled its Ampere-based RTX 30 series mobile GPUs at a special GeForce Event during this year's virtual CES 2021 festivities. A wide range of notebook design wins were also showed off at various events, spanning a variety of form factors. With the GeForce RTX 30 series, NVIDIA is targeting high-performance gaming notebooks in form factors as thin 16mm, even with the flagship GeForce RTX 3080. Thinner, higher-performance form factors aren’t the only features NVIDIA is touting. A number of upcoming notebooks will also be sporting 1440p, ultra-high refresh rate IPS displays. In fact, the test vehicle we were lucky enough to evaluate for this article – an MSI GS66 Stealth...
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Despite the ongoing availability woes for current-generation GPUs, NVIDIA’s board partners continue to march forward with custom GeForce RTX 30-series designs, that are near complete departures from Founders Edition models. Case in point, the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X we’ll be showing you here today. Although it is built around the same GPU as NVIDIA’s Founders Edition, MSI went in a completely different direction than NVIDIA's design. While the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition has a relatively small, notched PCB with a small form factor power connector and a traditional 2-slot width, the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X is over a foot long, over 5”...
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Cyberpunk 2077 has been one of the most hotly-anticipated titles in recent memory. Expectations were so high for this title that it's quite possible that CD Projekt Red could never live up to them. After numerous delays, however, Cyberpunk 2077 launched on December 10 to a mix of high praise and mild disappointment from many reviewers. The game is so massive, however, that we elected to take our time to really soak it in before tackling this review. For those who are new to the franchise, Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the Cyberpunk tabletop role-playing game franchise. The second and fourth editions of Cyberpunk, known as Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red, are probably the most popular variants...
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A couple of weeks back, we were able to show you AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT in action, across an array of games and applications, in two different systems, with and without Smart Access Memory enabled. In that piece, we came to the conclusion that AMD’s latest high-end gaming GPUs are worthy adversaries for their NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series counterparts – the GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080. Today, however, we get to move all the way up the stack and show you Big Navi’s, Big Daddy, the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which AMD claims can go head-to-head with NVIDIA’s powerful GeForce RTX 3090. If you recall, the Radeon RX 6900 has more compute units than the Radeon...
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The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT launch is just over the horizon on December 8th. As we wait for official details to come out, some intriguing benchmarks have now been spotted online by a keen Twitter user. While the benchmarks show the 6900 XT neck and neck with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, there is a catch, so we may not be getting the full story. First noticed by leaker and data scavenger @TUM_APISAK on Twitter, an Ashes of the Singularity (AOTS) benchmark has surfaced with a Radeon RX 6900 XT running the Crazy_1080p preset. The RX 6900 XT system scored 10100 points, with the average FPS sitting around 102FPS, as shown by the image below. AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT AOTS Benchmark We can compare this...
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NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti today, and it offered some serious competition for the legacy GeForce RTX 2080 Super in our review. It is a beast of a card, and for only $399 to start off, it is a killer deal. If you are not into NVIDIA's reference design, however, you have plenty of other options from some of the company's board partners which we have rounded up for you below. ASUS ROG Strix 3060 Ti The Strix line of GPUs is notorious for being ASUS' top-end part with every graphics card launch, and this pattern is not set to change. ASUS took the wraps off the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (pictured up top) to beat out the nine other graphics cards that launched alongside it from...
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NVIDIA is bolstering its line-up of Ampere-based GPUs today with a new addition to the GeForce RTX 30 series, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. As its name suggests, the new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti supplants the previous-gen, Turing-based GeForce RTX 2060 / RTX 2060 Super and slots in just behind the recently-released GeForce RTX 3070, which we recently considered an Editor’s Choice winner at its introductory MSRP. For today’s launch, we got our hands on a pair of GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards, NVIDIA’s own Founders Edition and MSI’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio. Although these two cards are built around the same GPU, physically and aesthetically they are quite different. You’ll...
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This year, we've encountered a chaotic failure of both the red and green teams with respect to being able to meet demand at the launches of their flagship graphics cards. Stock disappeared almost immediately for both, but on the AMD side, the prices of cards from AIB partners especially have been over-inflated. According to the folks at AMD, however, this inflation situation could be changing soon. Steve and Tim, of HardwareUnboxed sat down and dove into a Q&A session from commenters, and the questions were largely about GPU pricing and availability, as that is on everyone’s mind of late. The first question to come up was by user Seconds, asking, “What are your thoughts about...
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For the past few weeks, PC gamers have been eagerly anticipating the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series, a.k.a. “Big Navi”. NVIDIA shook up the GPU market over the last few months with its Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30-series cards, which offer significantly more performance and value than their predecessors. But, limited availability of GeForce 30-series cards has left a large contingent of enthusiasts in the lurch, with a pile of cash burning a hole in their pockets, itching to upgrade. So, when AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series was officially unveiled in late October and it is was revealed that the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT would complete...
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