Items tagged with graphics
About two years ago, NVIDIA started talking about a shader rendering method that applied varying levels of quality to different objects in the game world. That method was called Variable Rate Shading, or VRS. When applied skillfully and artfully in different areas of a scene that are less prominent in the gamer's field of view, the resulting rendered image quality wouldn't look all that different than if the whole scene had been fully shaded, though the graphics workload savings would improve performance significantly. Fast forward a year or so, and benchmarks became available for measuring the performance differences with and without VRS enabled. Indeed, there was performance to be...
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The war of the Watch Dogs series has always been fought in two parts -- physically with weapons and by proxy in the online space. In the original, which took place in Chicago, hacker Aiden Pearce, aided by the DedSec crew, hacks just about any device in his vicinity on his quest to make up for the loss of his niece, Lena, and take down a mysterious software called Central Operating System (ctOS) that ran the city and spied on its citizens. Then in Watch Dogs 2, players entered the shoes of Marcus Holloway, a DedSec activist whose goal it was to overcome ctOS version 2.0 in San Francisco while simultaneously exploiting its weaknesses for their own gain. This time around in Watch Dogs: Legion,...
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NVIDIA is expanding its line-up of Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series cards today, with the relatively affordable GeForce RTX 3070. Although the card was announced alongside the higher-end GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 during NVIDIA’s GeForce Event hosted by CEO Jensun Huang last month, and was originally due to be arrive a bit sooner, NVIDIA decided to hold off on the official launch until its partners could ramp production and ensure shelves were adequately stocked upon launch. The more powerful flagship GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 sold out in a blink the moment they became available. While we’re sure NVIDIA would love for the GeForce RTX 3070 to sell just as quickly (what company...
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A few weeks back, we showed you NVIDIA’s Reviewer Toolkit, which gives publications like ours the ability to quantify GPU performance, power, and system latency in finer detail than we could before. One of the main components of the Reviewer Toolkit is a small device, dubbed LDAT, or the Latency Display Analysis Tool. LDAT connects to a system via USB and features an integrated photoelectric luminance sensor, along with a direct connection to the left mouse button on a modified Logitech G203 gaming mouse. When connected to a system and mounted to the proper location on a monitor, LDAT can track the amount of time between a physical mouse click and a luminance change on-screen, like muzzle...
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The Ampere-based NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 review embargo lifted yesterday and immediately got hardcore gamers and GPU enthusiasts buzzing. Cards may not be in the hands of consumers just yet, but witnessing the power and performance of the GeForce RTX 3080 alongside NVIDIA’s and AMD’s now previous-gen flagships, it is plain to see that Ampere is giant leap forward. The $699 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 skunked even the ultra-high-end Titan RTX and it blew past the similarly-priced GeForce RTX 2080 Super. What about AMD you ask? Well, for all intents and purposes, the GeForce RTX 3080 was more than twice as fast as AMD’s current flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT in GPU bound situations, essentially...
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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang officially unveiled the GeForce RTX 30 series based on the company’s Ampere architecture a couple of weeks back, to much fanfare. According to Jensen, who owns more spatulas than any human realistically should, the GeForce RTX 30 series represents the greatest generational leap in the company’s history. During the presentation, Jensen claimed the GeForce RTX 3080 would offer double the performance of its predecessor, with better efficiency, and it would feature leading-edge technology throughout its design, from its chip packaging, to its PCB, a new cooling solution, and its GDDR6X memory. After the unveiling and subsequent follow-up briefings, we were obviously...
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A couple of days after NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang officially unveiled the company's Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series of GPUs, the company held a few additional briefings to give press and analysts a deeper dive into its latest innovations. Should you have missed NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 series event and our additional coverage of Ampere’s architecture and new features, we’d suggest checking out those articles to set the stage for what is in store over the next few weeks. Intermingled with one of NVIDIA’s follow-up talks, company officials also unveiled a new set of tools it’s calling the “NVIDIA Reviewer Toolkit for Graphics Performance”. We're lucky...
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NVIDIA held some virtual briefings yesterday to provide some additional color to CEO Jensen Huang’s GeForce RTX 30 series event from earlier this week. There weren’t many significant new announcements made, but a number of the slides Jensen presented were fleshed-out a bit more, with additional details and a few new visuals revealed, that paint a more complete picture of Ampere and the GeForce RTX 3090, GeForce RTX 3080, and RTX 3070. If you haven’t already read our coverage of the launch event, we strongly suggest checking that out. There overview provided will lay the foundation from some of the deeper details presented here – and the pictures of the cards and Jensen’s...
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By now, AMD's Radeon RX 5700 family of GPUs is a pretty well-known quantity. The Navi architecture that makes up the current crop of AMD-based graphics cards offers pretty good bang for the buck from the mainstream Radeon RX 5500 XT up to the biggest and baddest Radeon RX 5700 XT, thanks to aggressive pricing and the economics of TSMC's latest 7-nanometer manufacturing process. We were pretty impressed with Navi when it initially launched, and partner cards sweetened the deal with higher clocks and better acoustic performance. Unfortunately, ASUS's earliest Radeon RX 5700 designs from the ROG Strix brand came under scrutiny because they ran hot under load. The company itself issued a bulletin...
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Fresh off the official unveiling of Intel's 10th generation 'Comet Lake-S' desktop processors culminating in the 10-core/20-thread Core i9-10900K, Raja Koduri, head of the company's graphics division, reminded the world that Intel is still heavily invested in launching a discrete GPU this year. And he used Twitter to get his message across. There are two interesting tweets of note. The first one [which has since been removed] came from the verified "Intel Graphics" account. It contained a series of pictures, including the one you see above. The two other photos shows engineers staying the course amid the Coronavirus outbreak, donning masks. Among them are Koduri and Jim Keller. "Silicon...
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AMD is further fleshing out its professional workstation graphics cards line-up, with an additional Navi-based offering that targets a more affordable price point. The Radeon Pro W5500 we will be showing you here offers essentially the same feature set as its more powerful cousin, the Radeon Pro W5700, but it's outfitted with a scaled down GPU, with commensurately lower compute performance. The scaled down GPU, however, also allows for somewhat smaller form factor and lower-power consumption, though the card has a similar amount of on-board graphics memory and higher GPU clocks than the Radeon Pro W5700. A breakdown of where the Radeon Pro W5500 currently fits in AMD’s pro-GPU line-up shows...
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To close out Intel’s CES 2020 press conference, Gregory Bryant, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Client Computing Group showed off an upcoming Tiger Lake-based mobile platform with discrete DG1 GPU running a game live on-screen. We were on-hand to capture video of the short demo and have it posted for you here. The demonstration at the press conference used a discrete DG1, but not a standalone graphics card. That’s an important distinction; although Intel didn’t disclose the exact configuration of the Tiger Lake-based mobile platform used for the demo, it obviously wasn’t packing a desktop-class graphics card. The discrete GPU was likely linked...
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Sometimes we see leaks and rumors originate from the most unusual (and unreliable) sources, but that is not the case here. One of AMD's board partners, briefly posted a product page for a "Radeon RX 5600 XT Challenger D 6G OC" graphics card, with key specifications outlined for all to see. The manufacturer has since pulled the listing, though the cat is already out of the bag. Not that it matters a ton—we have said before that we are fairly certain AMD will be announcing the Radeon RX 5600 series soon, based on various leaks from around the web. For example, there's an EEC listing that references multiple Gigabyte Radeon RX 5600 XT Eagle series cards. This OEM's product page, however, is...
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AMD launched its Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 series GPUs for gamers a few months back and customized, higher-clocked boards from its partners quickly followed soon thereafter. Navi, and its newly-designed RDNA-infused microarchitecture and instruction set, will be the foundation of an entire family of GPUs from AMD moving forward, that will span multiple market segments. The first products based on Navi targeted enthusiast gamers, but now AMD is ready to inject its leading-edge GPU architecture into the pro-graphics space with the brand-new Radeon Pro W5700, which we’ll be showing you here. In addition to using its latest GPU design with the Radeon Pro W5700, AMD is using the opportunity...
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NVIDIA is expanding its GeForce GTX family of graphics cards today, with a pair of new Turing-based GPUs. As their branding suggests, the new GeForce GTX 1660 Super and GeForce GTX 1650 Super sit above their “non-Super” branded counterparts in NVIDIA’s line-up, but a notch below GeForce GTX Ti variants. It is only the GeForce GTX 1660 Super that is arriving on store shelves today, however. The GeForce GTX 1650 Super will be arriving at little later in November. NVIDIA is introducing some new driver and GeForce Experience-related features today too, which we will cover in a just bit. We’ve got a couple of GeForce GTX 1660 Super cards on hand, one from Gigabyte and the other...
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It'd be a gross understatement to say that retro gaming has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. Nintendo's NES Classic and SNES Classic mini-consoles or the Switch Online's NES and SNES catalogs might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about older games, but the House of Mario is hardly alone. Sony stumbled into the retro scene last year, and both the Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16 (by way of rights-holder Konami) will get their respective official love letters shortly. We'd be remiss, however, if we didn't think about the technology at the heart of all of these fun old games—good old software-based emulation. If it wasn't for SNES9x or Gens,...
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We know Intel has assembled a team to build its first modern discrete GPU, which if all goes to plan, will arrive next year. What we do not know, however, is what market segment it will target out of the gate. Raja Koduri, chief architect and senior vice president of Architecture, Software, and Graphics at Intel, may have shed some light on that in a recent interview. The interview spans just over 32 minutes, and part of the discussion apparently revolves around GPUs and Intel's desire to come out swinging at around the $200 price point. I say "apparently" because unfortunately, the entire video is dubbed over in Russian. [EDIT: And apparently that was not actually the case--see our update at...
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AMD has been talking about its next-generation Navi GPU architecture for ages. It was over 3 years ago that we first mentioned Navi here on the HotHardware, and since then there has been a slow, steady stream of information disseminated to the public, leading up the last month’s big architecture disclosure at E3 and the official unveiling of the initial Radeon RX 5700 series line-up, which we will be showing you here. If you missed our coverage of AMD's Navi GPU architecture and its newly-designed RDNA-infused microarchitecture and instruction set, you can find it right here. We strongly suggest checking that article out, because we cover a number of deep technical details, including...
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AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 5700 series of graphics cards is based on the AMD’s new Navi GPU architecture, which features a totally new compute unit design infused with “RDNA”, or Radeon DNA. For the past few generations, AMD’s GPUs have leveraged GCN-based, or the company's Graphics Core Next, compute units. GCN served AMD well for a number of years and is well-suited for a variety of workloads, but with the Radeon RX 5700 series and Navi, AMD wanted to update is microarchitecture and GPU line-up with Compute Units that have been fully re-tooled for gamers. With RDNA, AMD wanted to create the fundamental building block of a CU that could scale from a few watts, all the way...
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It is fair to say that AMD is firing on all cylinders these days, and companies are taking notice. Following the recent launch of its third-generation Ryzen processors based on Zen 2 and an unveiling of Navi, AMD has now partnered with Samsung to license its Radeon graphics IP, which will now find its way into mobile devices. That includes smartphones, as Samsung looks for "disruptive changes in technology," and "new opportunities." Partnering with AMD to license its Radeon graphics IP fits those agendas, and in a potentially big way. "Our partnership with AMD will allow us to bring groundbreaking graphics products and solutions to market for tomorrow’s mobile applications," said Inyup...
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Intel made some interesting disclosures at the FMX conference currently underway in Stuttgart, Germany, which focuses on advanced animation, film effects, games, and other types of immersive media. At the conference, James Jeffers, Intel’s Senior Principal Engineer and Senior Director of Advanced Rendering and Visualization, held a workshop during which he announced that Intel’s Xe architecture roadmap includes support for hardware accelerated ray tracing, among a couple of other graphics and rendering-related news. There is some nuance to the ray tracing tid-bit, however. A blog post covering much of what Jeffers discussed during the workshop is live on Intel’s IT Peer Network...
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Chris Hook, Graphics and Visual Technologies Marketing Chief at Intel had the crowd whipped-up into a fine frenzy earlier this week in San Francisco, at an event location right across from one of the Moscone Center halls of Game Developers Conference. Hook and various company execs, including Intel CEO Bob Swan and Intel SVP, Core and Visual Computing Raja Koduri, took to the stage to talk a bit more about the company’s plans and vision to bring next generation discrete graphics products to market in 2020. Intel’s messaging and presentation was keenly focused on community. The event was entitled the Odyssey – referring to the journey Intel is inviting enthusiasts and gamers...
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