Items tagged with graphics
One of the great advantages of video game emulators is that they allow us to shine up old titles that may suffer due to low resolutions or frame rate limits. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has remained one of the most popular titles to emulate for exactly those reasons: in its original Wii U format, it labors under a 30-FPS cap even despite its 1280×720 render resolution. Under emulation, the resolution can be raised and the frame rate can be unlocked. Now, it is often said that the most important part of making a good-looking video game is the visual design, not the technology used to represent it. That's probably true, too; if you look at some of the most beautiful classics in...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
It's October 5th, which means Windows 11 is out. Naturally, that's set off a chain reaction of other release both hardware and software. Drivers could reasonably be mentioned in either category, though. Yeah, anyway—there's a new Radeon driver for Windows 11. Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.10.1 is out and has official support for Windows 11. That's not all, though; it also brings up to a 13% performance improvement in Far Cry 6 and 11% uplift in PUBG when playing that game using DirectX 12. Medieval fantasy battle royale Naraka: Bladepoint also gets unspecified official support, as does the open beta for Battlefield 2042. This release should reduce the idle memory clock on Radeon cards with...
Read more...
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’...
Read more...
Earlier this month, AMD took the wraps off the latest addition to its RDNA 2-based family of Radeons, the Radeon RX 6700 XT. During the livestreamed event, AMD disclosed that it was targeting high-framerate 1440p gaming with the Radeon RX 6700 XT, and that it would employ a new release strategy in an effort to get as many cards into gamers’ hands as possible at launch. Instead of releasing AMD-built reference cards first and following up sometime later with custom partner boards, AMD and its partners will be launching all flavors of Radeon RX 6700 XT today, across an array of on-line retailers and on AMD’s own website as well. The current supply chain issues and insatiable demand...
Read more...
The Episode 3 livestream of AMD’s “Where Gaming Begins” series just ended, during which the company revealed some feature updates coming to its Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs and officially announced the latest member of its RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6000 family, the forthcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT. But before we dive into the Radeon RX 6700 XT, AMD also announced updates coming to previous-gen Ryzen 3000 series processors and its Radeon Software suite, that should make more than a few gamers and performance enthusiasts happy... Smart Access Memory Comes To Ryzen 3000 Smart Access Memory – AMD’s branding for supper of the PCIe spec’s Resizable BAR feature – launched...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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,...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
