Items tagged with Nvidia
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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In just a few more days, NVIDIA will release its most affordable graphics card based on Ampere yet, that being the GeForce RTX 3060 (not to be confused with the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti). And as you might expect, retailers are ready to go. Or at least one of them is, with pictures showing multiple retail boxes from various different brands stuffed onto metal racks. These are all custom models from NVIDIA's add-in board (AIB) partners, including ASUS, MSI, and Zotac. The pictures highlight five different models in all, with what appears to be dozens of retail cards ready to be sold to the public when the launch date—Wednesday, February 25—rolls around. The folks at Coreteks posted several...
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On Thursday morning, NVIDIA made two big announcements regarding GPUs. The company revealed that it will be launching the Crypto Mining Processor (CMP) HX GPU Series specifically for the mining community. According to NVIDIA, the GPUs used in these cards "don’t meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don’t impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers.” The second big announcement, and one that was a bit more concerning to those that like to mine for cryptocurrency on the side, was that the incoming GeForce RTX 3060 is going to be handicapped with respect to mining performance. NVIDIA can "detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency...
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The launch of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 is just around the corner, which means that budget gamers are probably eagerly anticipating an upgrade. NVIDIA first announced its newest mainstream graphics cards in early January, and it will officially launch on February 25th. However, one thing that many people have wondered is just how hard will it be to obtain a GeForce RTX 3060. After all, given its $329 price tag, it's sure to be a hot ticket item. Well, NVIDIA is trying to alleviate at least some demand to make sure that the GeForce RTX 3060 gets into the hands of enthusiasts and not cryptocurrency miners looking to make big bucks on the side. In this case, NVIDIA is altering...
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It has been around five months since NVIDIA announced its intentions to acquire Arm Holdings from SoftBank for $40 billion, including $12 billion in cash. For the deal to be finalized, however, NVIDIA will need to pass regulatory scrutiny in several territories, and some of the industry's biggest tech giants are urging antitrust officials to nix the deal as constructed. NVIDIA designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for a variety of market segments, gaming and professional graphics cards. It also develops system-on-chip (SoC) solutions, and in more recent years, has focused heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies, with various solutions for high performance...
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Late last week, NVIDIA confirmed the GeForce RTX 3060 will launch on February 25th. However, at the time, the company didn't provide us with any additional concrete details on specifications for the new entry-level GPU. The company only let us know that the GeForce RTX 3060 would be capable of 13 shader TFLOPs, 25 RT-TFLOPS, 101 Tensor-TFLOPs and that it would have 12GB of GDDR6. NVIDIA is now ready to spill the beans on more specs for the GeForce RTX 3060, so we have a better idea of how it stacks up to the more expensive GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. We now know that the GeForce RTX 3060 will have just 3584 CUDA Cores compared to 4864 for its Ti counterpart. The GeForce RTX 3060 has...
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Earlier this week, we got wind of a rumor that NVIDIA's entry-level GeForce RTX 3060 would be launching on February 25th. Yesterday, however, NVIDIA confirmed the February 25th launch date in a statement to AnandTech, which means that cards will likely go on sale at 9am EST that morning. NVIDIA first announced the GeForce RTX 3060 last month at CES 2021, and it will slot in under the already launched GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. While the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is priced at $399, the new GeForce RTX 3060 comes in at a more affordable $329 price point. Looking at NVIDIA's complete GeForce RTX 30 desktop Ampere lineup, here's how the pricing situation stacks up: GeForce RTX 3090:...
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Late last year, NVIDIA announced its intentions to acquire Arm for a staggering $40 billion, making it one of the biggest chip deals in history. The acquisition plan has recently hit some roadblocks with antitrust regulators worldwide, which could require months of additional maneuvering by NVIDIA. Now, individual companies who are customers of Arm and competitors to NVIDIA, such as Qualcomm, have also objected to NVIDIA’s bid to buy Arm. According to anonymous sources, the San Diego-based mobile chipset company has reached out to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), European Commission, the U.K Competition and Markets Authority, and China’s State Administration for Market Regulation....
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There are certain things you can count on in this world. Like death, taxes, and Tom Brady winning a Super Bowl. It is a short list of certainties, but one more to toss on the pile is more affordable graphics cards based on the latest generation GPU architectures (Ampere and RDNA 2) being in the works. One of those cards is a regular version of the GeForce RTX 3060 (read: non-Ti), announced at CES 2021, and the part is scheduled to launch later this month. Interestingly enough, NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti before the non-TI variant this round, whereas in the past the more powerful Ti models came out later. NVIDIA is also known for being a bit unpredictable, though, and each generation...
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In this episode of Two And A Half Geeks we'll discuss the dizzying array of GeForce RTX 30 laptop GPU SKUs, how to sift through them, and our experience with the new Alienware m15 R4 with GeForce RTX 3070. We'll also share key Ryzen 5000 desktop CPU performance optimization tips and discuss AMD's new Ryzen 5000 Mobile CPU platforms as well... Show Notes: 06:34 - AMD Ryzen 5000 Mobile Explored: The Future Of Zen 3 Laptops 17:47 - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop Performance: What To Expect 27:31 - Alienware m15 R4 Review: A GeForce RTX 30 Series Invasion 33:12 - NVIDIA's Dizzying Array Of GeForce RTX 30 Mobile GPU Configs Detailed By ASUS 46:08 - Maximizing Ryzen 5000 Performance With AMD Curve...
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NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud gaming service first went into beta way back in September 2015, but it wasn't until February 4th, 2020 that it was finally ready for its official public launch. So that means that today is GeForce NOW's first birthday and NVIDIA is celebrating with a few announcements for this week's GFN Thursday. The company was quick to point out some highlights for GeForce NOW's first "official" year in service: over 175 million hours of gaming have been streamed by subscribers, including 100 million hours for multiplayer games and 16 million hours for indie games. Currently, over 800 games are supported, including 80 free-to-play titles (Fortnite was understandably the most popular...
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Are you in the market for a gaming laptop? If so, ASUS has just done you and other potential laptop buyers a solid by specifying the parameters of the GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs employed in more than two dozen laptop models. This kind of information is important to have, because NVIDIA's hardware partners have a bit of flexibility in how to configure the various Ampere SKUs at their disposal. For example, the mobile variant of the GeForce RTX 3080 sports 6,144 CUDA cores, but the power range can be anywhere from 80W to 150W and even beyond. These directly affect the clockspeed. At the lower end of the TGP scale, the GeForce RTX 3080 runs at 1,245MHz, while higher powered configurations run at...
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When GeForce NOW launched, NVIDIA's cutting-edge gaming service supported streaming games that were rendered in cloud data centers to devices running a dedicated app. Over the course of 2020, the company opened up its cloud gaming service to browsers, starting with Chrome on ChromeOS. Adding GeForce NOW support to Safari on iOS devices also allowed NVIDIA to skirt Apple's apparent ban on game streaming subscription services that might compete with Apple Arcade subscription services. NVIDIA seems to be getting the hint that more users is always better, as the company has now opened up support for Google's Chrome browser on Windows and macOS. Providing browser-based solutions for traditional...
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As we have said before, where there is smoke there is usually fire, right? And there has been a fair amount of smoke related to a rumored graphics card joining NVIDIA's latest generation lineup, based on Ampere. That would be the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, essentially a beefed up version of the GeForce RTX 3080, with twice the amount of GDDR6X memory (20GB). Adding to the smoke are some leaked benchmark runs purportedly showcasing the unannounced GPU. It seems like an inevitability that NVIDIA will launch Ti variants of its higher end cards. Oddly enough, in the GeForce RTX 3060 tier, NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti first, followed by a GeForce RTX 3060 (non-Ti) later, with the regular version...
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Today is a pretty big day for gamers on the go—it marks the launch of GeForce RTX 30 series laptops sporting the company's latest generation Ampere GPUs, in mobile form. And right on cue, NVIDIA has released a driver update and a bolstered version of its GeForce Experience utility, the latter of which brings support for WhisperMode 2.0. There is a bit to unpack there. Let's start with the laptop GPUs, of which there are three main versions: GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3070, and GeForce RTX 3060. Each one can be configured to different power profiles and clockspeeds by the OEMs. And if you are curious what to expect, have a look at our GeForce RTX 3080 laptop performance preview, as well...
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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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Back in September, NVIDIA and SoftBank confirmed the chip giant's intentions to acquire Arm for $40 billion. In the intervening months since the announcement, tech giants and governments alike have shown a range of reactions from hesitance to outright opposition to the transaction. Arm has a history of licensing its ISA to just about anyone, leading to a huge variety of SoC makers crafting chips for all kinds of usage from smartphones to autonomous vehicles. That's why NVIDIA still faces so many questions from policy makers and regulatory agencies around the globe. A fresh report from Nikkei says that NVIDIA's plans to acquire Arm face big questions from governments worldwide, and that...
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Shopping for a gaming laptop might soon require a bit more research than it normally would, because of a supposed change in how NVIDIA intends to promote its third-generation Max-Q technology. The latest Max-Q standard is a big part of Ampere's push into mobile territory, which NVIDIA announced at CES 2021 last week, but upcoming laptops might not explicitly discern between a full-power or lower-power GPU. The way things work now is that OEMs typically attach a Max-Q label on laptops with lower power GPUs inside. These are mostly intended for thin and light designs. A full power GPU tucked inside a slim gaming laptop can run hotter than what the system's cooling potential allows. In light of...
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NVIDIA first launched the SHIELD TV way back in 2015, but the media streamer is still being updated on a continual basis. Thankfully, the original SHIELD TV hardware is still being updated -- even though several hardware revisions have been introduced -- and that includes today's Software Experience Upgrade 8.2.2, which is the 27th software update for the platform. The SHIELD TV is a powerful 4K set-top streaming box, and it doubles as a powerful gaming console. To that end, NVIDIA has added support for the new wireless controllers found on the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X. In addition, Sony's innovative new DualSense wireless controller from the PlayStation 5 is also supported....
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Want to party like it's 2019? Fantastic, because there is a rumor going around that NVIDIA is going to re-introduce a couple of graphics cards from two years ago, those being the GeForce RTX 2060 and GeForce RTX 2060 Super. As you probably know, both of those parts are based on the company's previous generation Turing graphics architecture, and not Ampere. So, why do it? Well for one, we do not know for sure that NVIDIA will actually re-release two previous generation graphics card models. Leaks and rumors can be fun to digest, but are best consumed with an unhealthy dose of salt, because they are not always accurate. That said, a re-introduction of the two Turing parts is at least plausible....
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Over the past few days, it was noticed that NVIDIA has made some changes to its marketing materials about what qualifies as a G-SYNC Ultimate display. It was previously assumed, based on the company's own wording, that a display needed a dedicated NVIDIA hardware module, HDR support, and a brightness rating of 1,000 nits (among other requirements like low latency and high refresh rates). It was the 1000-nits spec for brightness that had been nixed from NVIDIA's specifications for G-SYNC Ultimate, which raised eyebrows. There was plenty of speculation as to why NVIDIA would make such a move, but the company looked to clear the air with an official statement to OC3D. While the original...
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Have you looked at the price of Bitcoin lately? The volatile currency ballooned to nearly $40,000 in recent weeks and is now hovering at a little over $37,000. This has prompted renewed interest in cryptocurrency mining (not that it ever dissipated completely), and if demand is high enough (J.P. Morgan reckons it could eventually hit a $146,000 valuation to rival gold investments), NVIDIA said it would once again manufacture GPUs specifically aimed at miners. For the most part, mining Bitcoin is a tough gig for the casual user, in terms of making any meaningful money. Specialized ASIC hardware rules the day. However, there are some bigger operations that still employ scores of GPUs for mining....
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