Hasta La Gadget!

GDC 2013 has been pretty eventful all week long, and a lot of announcements have been made on new hardware and video games. However, AMD made an appearance but didn’t quite announce anything, but they did tease their new Radeon HD 7990 graphics card, which has unofficially been out on the market from a few third-party vendors, but AMD has never made it official.

The company made the new graphics card official earlier today, unveiling the official design of the card during a press conference at GDC 2013 (seen above). Little else is known about the new card, though. However, game developing studio DICE has admitted to using the HD 7990 card for its 17-minute Battlefield 4 preview that we reported on a couple days ago.

Other than a few pictures that we were treated with, nothing else was said about the specs of the card, other than that it’s a dual Tahiti card. However, the photos do give away some clues about the card itself. First off, the card has a complete open-air cooler, as opposed to previous dual-GPU cards sporting full blowers. This means that your computer case will have to be particularly well-ventilated and breezy.

There are also two 8-pin PCI-express connectors, which means that the power rating probably hovers around 375 watts, so you’ll definitely need a fairly robust power supply in order to get feed an adequate amount of juice to this bad boy. Other than that, AMD said that the card will be coming soon, but no word on an official release date.

[via AnandTech]

AMD Radeon HD 7990 makes an appearance at GDC 2013 is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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AMD’s taken some time at GDC to unveil Radeon Sky Graphics cards, the backbone of its cloud platform that streams games à la OnLive to PCs, Smart TVs, tablets and mobile devices. According to the outfit, the silicon is built upon its Graphics Core Next architecture, and is powered by its RapidFire tech to provide a “highly efficient and responsive” experience. Other details regarding the initiative are sparse, but it sounds like developers and cloud gaming companies will have to enlist the hardware before gamers can reap its benefits.

Update: Joystiq’s gotten word that the Radeon Sky series includes a trio of enterprise-grade graphics cards, with the top-of-the-line Sky 900 model toting 6GB of GDDR5 memory, 3,584 stream processors and sporting a memory bandwidth of 480GB per second.

[Image credit: mnsc, Flickr]

Filed under: Gaming, AMD

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We were half expecting AMD’s next graphics card to be some sort of supercomputing colossus, given all the buzz around NVIDIA’s GTX Titan. As it turns out, though, we’re looking at something more subtle and just slightly more affordable: the new Radeon HD 7790. It slots into a cosy niche between the 7770 and the 7850, targeting gamers who want a good helping of 28nm silicon and potential for CrossFire expansion but who don’t want to stretch beyond $149. Efficiency tweaks allow the 7790 to offer almost 50 percent more processing power than the 7770 while only demanding a smidgen of extra wattage (85 W instead of 80 W), which bodes well for cooling and decibels. Relative to the 7850, which can now be had for under $200, you’d be getting a card with half the power consumption, half the memory (1GB GDDR5), half the memory bandwidth (128-bit) and around 30 percent less processing power.

Compare it to the closest rival from NVIDIA, the GTX 650 Ti, which currently fetches upwards of $140, and AMD claims the Radeon HD 7790 offers an average 20 percent advantage in frame rates at 1080p — enough that you shouldn’t need to worry about games like Tomb Raider or Hitman: Absolution at that resolution. Check out the slide deck for further details and official frame-rate charts, and expect to see the card reach retailers starting April 2nd.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, AMD

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Having produced the graphics chips that powered both the original Xbox and the PlayStation 3, it was a surprise to see NVIDIA‘s name left out of Sony’s big PlayStation 4 reveal event last month. But there was AMD, picking up the empty spot left by NVIDIA, powering the PS4 with its 8-core “Jaguar” CPU and Radeon GPU. So, what happened? While we don’t know the specifics of how AMD won the contract, NVIDIA’s senior VP of content and tech Tony Tamasi tells GameSpot that his company, “Didn’t want to do the business at the price those guys [Sony] were willing to pay.”

In so many words, Tamasi says NVIDIA weighed its options against other potential products the company would be working on — rather than producing discreet tech for a single console manufacturer, thus being unable to use said tech elsewhere — and decided against it. “We had to look at console business as an opportunity cost. If we say, did a console, what other piece of our business would we put on hold to chase after that?” he tells the game site.

NVIDIA is indeed working on a variety of new products, including an Android-powered Tegra 4 gaming handheld called Project Shield. That’s in addition to its bread-and-butter business of PC GPU development — the company recently unveiled its Titan GPU, a $1,000 card with enough power to keep your gaming graphics needs met for years to come (or at least we sure hope so at that price).

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Sony, NVIDIA

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Source: GameSpot

Blocky, pixelated locks can really ruin a day of tomb-robbing, right? To put the feather back in those bangs, AMD’s just announced TressFX, software that’ll be seen in the 2013 release of Tomb Raider due on March 5th. The rendering tech offloads computation-heavy hair simulation to the graphics processor using Microsoft’s DirectCompute language, and was developed by AMD in partnership with Raider developer Crystal Dynamics — though it’ll work with any graphics card that supports DirectX 11, including those from arch-foe NVIDIA. The result is a coiffure that can move realistically in response to motion and external forces, detect collisions between strands, accurately reflect light and even allow for matting from moisture or rain. Lara may have preferred that AMD omit the latter, but anything’s better than the helmet-head look, no?

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Via: Bit-Tech

Source: AMD