Items tagged with GPU
AMD is expanding its mainstream RDNA 2 graphics card line-up today with another Navi 23-based offering, the new Radeon RX 6600. As its name implies, the Radeon RX 6600 is a close relative to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which launched just a few weeks back. This card also targets roughly the same audience, i.e. budget conscious 1080p gamers, though with proper support for FSR and a growing number of titles that enable it, smooth framerates at higher effective resolutions are also going to be possible. As was the case with the Radeon RX 6600 XT, AMD itself won’t be making its own reference cards for retail. Instead, AMD is leaning on its board partners for Radeon RX 6600 designs and there will...
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Graphics card pricing can't actually trend upward forever, right? Right!? Please tell me I'm right. Unfortunately, that is the disheartening reality we live in at the moment, where for the past several months, the cost of buying a graphics card has consistently gone up. This has been the case since earlier July, and even a little before, depending on the exact model. By now, the reasons are clear, or at least the apparent reasons are in focus. It is a combination of factors—a global shortage of silicon, the latest generation graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA being in high demand, cryptocurrency mining eating into the market for GPUs, and of course the newest game consoles (PlayStation...
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Do you ever feel like the universe just has it in for you? Adding to the theory that some entity is pulling the strings from behind the scenes and having a good chuckle at our expense, not only are graphics cards frustratingly almost always out of stock (and overpriced), but if you do manage to procure one, you may have to worry about it being infected with malware. It doesn't even matter if you opt for an AMD or NVIDIA graphics card. Or use integrated Intel graphics, for that matter. Sure, things could certainly be worse, and this falls under the purview of another first-world problem, but that's part of what we cover around these parts. And much to our chagrin, someone on a dedicated forum...
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While it may still be hard to purchase a discrete graphics card on the retail market, that doesn't mean that production or shipments of GPUs have stagnated. It's actually quite the contrary, as the latest figures from Jon Peddie Research show that the overall GPUs shipments rose during Q2 2021. During Q2, the overall global shipments of GPUs reached 123 million units, which grew 3.4 percent compared to Q1 2021 and 37 percent year-over-year. However, JPR noted that this quarter-over-quarter increase is out of character, as Q2 shipments typically trend down compared to Q1. Interestingly, AMD has consistently lost share in the overall GPU market going from 17.65 percent in Q2 2020 to 16.48 percent...
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The Radeon RX 6600 XT officially launched earlier this week, bringing AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture down to more affordable price points (relatively speaking). Radeon RX 6600 XT cards target mainstream, 1080p gamers, and the two models we previously looked in our initial coverage proved to be decent performers and quite power efficient. This time around, we’re going to take a look at a factory-overclocked Radeon RX 6600 XT from AMD board partner, XFX, the MERC 308 Black. The MERC 308 RX 6600 XT Black is the top-of-the-line model in XFX’s Radeon RX 6600 XT lineup. Like most of AMD’s board partners, XFX has an array of cards coming down the pipeline, ranging from simplified...
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Embargos lifted on Radeon RX 6600 XT reviews this morning, but that mainstream gaming GPU isn’t the only one AMD is pushing out the door today. The Radeon Pro W6600, which was announced back in early June alongside the more powerful Radeon Pro W6800, is also launching today. As its name implies, the Radeon Pro W6600, like its gaming-class Radeon RX 6600 XT counterpart, is a professional workstation GPU that targets more mainstream price points and performance levels than the W6800. The Radeon Pro W6600’s feature set is right in-line with higher-end RDNA 2-based offerings, however, and includes ISV certifications for many of the most popular professional design and content creation...
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AMD officially unveiled the Radeon RX 6600 XT in late July, and just last week we were able to give you a first-hand sneak peek and tour of one of the higher-end partner boards, the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT Red Devil. Today though, embargos lift on performance and power data, and we’re able to provide some additional pieces to the puzzle. Incidentally, there’s an additional embargo lifting tomorrow for other partner boards, so stop on by in the morning if you’d like some additional Radeon RX 6600 XT flavor. But we digress. On tap for you here today we have two Radeon RX 6600 XTs, the aforementioned PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT Red Devil and its somewhat more mainstream ‘Fighter’...
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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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