It probably won’t come as a huge surprise, given the GTX 780‘s appearance last week, but today’s launch of the GTX 770 nevertheless brings us a very interesting product. The card is claimed to be about five percent faster than last year’s much more expensive flagship, the GTX 680, thanks to faster memory (7Gb/s instead of 6Gb/s), a slightly higher base clock speed (1,046 vs. 1,006MHz) and an equivalent number of CUDA cores (1,536). Seeing as how the the GTX 680 still holds its own with current games, this performance parity strikes us as something of a deal — assuming independent benchmarks back it up. We’re awaiting a confirmed US price, but we’ll eat our SATA cables if it’s anything other than $399 for a 2GB model (the press release just says “under $400”). UK and European prices match those of the GTX 670 (£329 inc. VAT, 329 euros exc. VAT), and availability begins today. Check out NVIDIA’s slide deck for more details, including power consumption and noise, SLI scaling (which looks healthy) and some in-house frame rate comparisons against other products.
NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience isn’t a baby anymore – several months in and 2.5 million downloads since this system’s introduction and eventual public beta release, this game optimizing control center will replace the company’s “NVIDIA Update” system as the standard. In each driver package included with a GeForce graphics card, the GeForce Experience will be packaged, starting this week with the R320 GeForce GTX 780 launch driver.
The NVIDIA GeForce Experience will be released in version 1.5 this week as well, bumping the number of games supported to 70 and ushering in support for the newest graphics hardware on the market with the GTX 780. This release will be the first in which the GeForce Experience is packaged with a driver, but will be retro-fit to all systems supported being released in the future – where applicable.
The GeForce Experience is now well out of beta, acting as both a user interface through which a gamer’s check and update to the newest GeForce drivers is made simple and providing a place where games can be optimized instantly.
The big deal with the GeForce Experience is the gamer’s ability to one-step optimize their game settings to the best they can be given their computer’s abilities. This system is made for two kinds of people playing games:
1. Users who know what some of the setting available to them are, but not the whole lot, and want to optimize their gaming experience.
2. Users who want to optimize their gaming experience and have no idea what the vast majority of the settings are – or mean – in each game.
For each of the 70 games optimized uniquely by NVIDIA graphics and performance specialists, maximizing image quality “while maintaining great performance” is literally as easy as clicking the button “optimize.”
NVIDIA has also let it be known that they’ll be releasing new features for the GeForce Experience later this summer, one of them being Optimal Playable Settings (OPS) Customization – this means you’ll be able to bump up a setting here, knock another down here, and the system will compensate and act accordingly. More than just “this is best” will be available to you once this customization feature is released.
This summer users will also see support for NVIDIA SHIELD. This little mobile device will have its own connection on your PC, rather than having its own Android application, this allowing you to optimize the full-powered network-streamed games it’s capable of playing straight from the source – but optimized for SHIELD. Further details surrounding unique SHIELD options will be coming soon.
Finally there’s ShadowPlay, another “later this summer” update. This release is essentially “TIVO for games”, as one NVIDIA representative puts it, allowing you to record video of your system constantly and select segments you’d like to save. ShadowPlay will use Kepler graphics driver technology to record 20 minute segments at a time, allowing you to keep what you want and toss the rest – all through the GeForce Experience.
In a move that most gamers will instantly see as a battle up against FRAPS, NVIDIA has this week shown off ShadowPlay, a screen capture feature for the future of the GeForce Experience. Before you get too excited, it’s important to note that ShadowPlay will not be implemented until later this summer with an update to the GeForce Experience – for now you’ll have to wait and wish for this optimized setup.
ShadowPlay will be a feature inside the NVIDIA GeForce Experience that’ll be working with all Kepler GPUs inside Summer 2013. NVIDIA has made this system out to be a system that more than takes on FRAPS, it out-does it: ShadowPlay takes a minimal performance hit so gamers can play with minimal draw on their system whilst playing.
While we’ll have to wait for this system to roll out to actually test that claim, at the moment what we’re being told by the company seems to be as easy to use as the GeForce Experience game optimization system itself.
ShadowPlay uses the H.264 video encoder built-in to every Kepler GPU to “seamlessly” record the users last 20 minutes of gameplay footage, 20 minutes at a time. With the driver you’ve got built-in to the Kepler graphics card already in your machine, this system will be able to run all the time, while you pick up the segments of video you want and the rest are dumped.
This ShadowPlay system’s pre-set 20-minute segments are the current optimized pre-set lengths that each video will be recorded in. This amount of time is not set in stone – NVIDIA may change before the final release – but for now, the company says it’s the best amount of time based on their testing of the feature.
As NVIDIA continues its journey down the gaming road with software specifics such as the GeForce Experience, so too do they continue to tweak and empower their graphics cards – like the GeForce GTX 780, for instance. This week the GTX 780 has been revealed with much of the same hardware delivered in the GeForce GTX TITAN, but with slight differences that make it just a little bit less expensive and, as NVIDIA has informed us, “more of a pure gaming focus card than TITAN.”
The GeForce GTX 780 works with the same GK110 GPU used in the GeForce GTX TITAN. Inside are 12 SMX units bringing 2,304 CUDA cores, along with six 64-bit memory controllers (that’s 384-bit) with 3GB of GDDR5 memory – that’s 50% more of each than the GTX 680 delivered.
This memory interface also delivers up to 288.4GB/second peak memory bandwidth to the GPU. Like TITAN, this card is meant to run next-generation technology such as WaveWorks and FaceWorks, each of these demoed at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference earlier this year.
GeForce GTX 780 works with a base clock speed of 863MHz while a typical Boost Clock speed works at 900MHz. This number comes from an average found by NVIDIA running “a wide variety of games and applications”, while the actual Boost Clock speed will depend completely on your actual system conditions. Memory speed on the 780 is noted at a 6008MHz.
The GeForce GTX 780 works with a new Adaptive Temperature Controller – working here with NVIDIA’s GPU Boost 2.0, fan speed will be adjusted up or down “as needed” to maintain a temperature of 80C. With the Adaptive Temperature Controller working on the GTX 780, an adaptive temperature filter eliminates “unnecessary” fan fluctuations with an advanced RPM and temperature targeted control algorithm.
The software solution that allows this control will be available on the NVIDIA reference design for the GTX 780 as well as to partners who wish to implement it on their fans. Expect a bit more of a smooth ride with this feature implemented on your card – TITAN quiet.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 is build to work with, again, the same die as the GTX TITAN, but here has no extra double-precision floating-bit. Users will be working with around a 70% performance upgrade over the GTX 580, and an overall experience that’s consistent with gamers wanting to blast out maximum graphics settings and screen resolutions with high levels of AA to boot.
The NVIDIA-made GeForce GTX 780 reference board is 10.5-inches in length and works with two dual-link DVIs, one DisplayPort connector, and a full-sized HDMI out. Users will need to power this amalgamation with one 6-pin PCIe power connector and one 8-pin PCIe power connector.
THe NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780′s pricing sits at $649 USD and this will be the first card delivered with NVIDIA giving manufacturers the GeForce Experience to include on their install disks. While the GeForce Experience is an entirely optional system to install, and it’s completely free to download from the web either way, this release does mark the first point at which NVIDIA is formally pushing the GeForce Experience as an interface they recommend to anyone and everyone working with GeForce hardware and a love for one-button graphics and performance optimization for games.
AMD might have already unveiled their HD 8000M series graphics back in December and at CES 2013, but they left out a certain chip in particular and saved it for today. The company unveiled the Radeon HD 8970M, which they claim is the world’s fastest laptop graphics chip, saying that it outpaces NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 680M graphics.
The new chip features AMD’s new “Graphics Core Next” architecture, and it’s quite a big jump up from the company’s HD 8800M series. The 8970M features 1,280 stream processors, and a clock speed of 850MHz with a memory speed of 1.2GHz. The new chip should be able to handle pretty much any new game you throw at it on your laptop.
As for the first laptop to get the new 8970M, it’ll be the MSI GX70, which will come with an AMD A10 quad-core processor, Eyefinity support, Killer gaming network card, and will have a 17.3-inch display with a 1920×1080 resolution. However, we should be seeing more laptops with the new graphics chip later this year, possibly next month at Computex.
Of course, you’ll be paying a pretty penny for any machine that will run AMD’s latest graphics chip, with the GX70 most likely exceeding well over $1,000, but they also have slower 8000M series chips that the company unveiled in January, including the 8500M, 8600M, and the 8700M. Of course, the 8500M may not live up to AMD’s 8970M chip, but the 384 stream processors along with the 650MHz clock speed and 1,125MHz memory speed should keep you humming along with most games while on the go.
We’ve seen plenty of the Radeon HD 7990 in action with Battlefield 4, but it’s taken AMD a little while to furnish us with full specs and pricing for its in-house reference design. Now that all the info is here, in the run-up to commercial availability in two week’s time, it’s finally possible to judge the pros and cons of what is arguably a very niche product. Read on past the break and we’ll do just that.
This week the man known as Raja Koduri has returned to a position with GPU company AMD from a 4-year appointment with Apple. So this former AMD CTO left to work with Apple four years ago, has worked there ever since (with the likes of some of the top minds on the GPU industry), and is now back to work with AMD. And this isn’t the only former AMD employee to jump back aboard!
It’s not often that we see a major company like Apple losing employees in the first place, much less to a company where they’d hired them from in the first place. But there it is: Raja Koduri has re-joined AMD as Corporate Vice President of Visual Computing. This title also lets us know that AMD is entering a new era: this is the first time they’ve combined GPU hardware and software under a single title.
Last year AMD also re-hired (read: snatched back) a former employee of theirs from Apple in CPU man Jim Keller. If you have a peek back at SlashGear’s original report on Jim Keller, you’ll see that such a switch is always a news bit in and of itself. Both Keller and Koduri working for AMD once again doesn’t necessarily spell anything really negative for Apple, but for AMD things are certainly looking up.
Speaking with Anand Lal Shimpi this week on his return, Koduri made it clear that he sees AMD as having challenges in the near future, but not challenges that will be insurmountable. It’s likely that some real System-on-chip results will be coming out of this new appointment.
Have a peek at our AMD tag portal to see how AMD is rolling in to 2013 with some real power in both the GPU and CPU universes, and expect some strong moves from the company in the next few years as well!
We have a feeling graphics artists are going to be begging their studios for Fusion-io‘s latest ioFX super-SSD. After receiving critical acclaim for its 460GB version, the company has today introduced a massively-speced 1.6TB variant at NAB. Despite the space increase, the new unit is not bigger than its older sibling. In related news, HP has also signed on to integrate ioFX into its HP Z 420, 620 and 820 all-in-ones, and it’ll also give current workstation owners the option to simply add the card to their existing machines. Fusion won’t be releasing any details about pricing for the 1.6TB ioFX just yet — that’ll remain under wraps until its released this summer. For now, movie makers can net the 460GB one for $2K (about $500 less that its release price). Full press release after the break.
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.
It looks like AMD is wanting to tackle the cloud gaming industry and take on the likes of OnLive. The company announced its new Sky series graphics at GDC 2013 this week, which is a new series of graphics chips being added on to the company’s current Radeon line. The Sky series was built specifically with cloud gaming in mind.
The new Sky cards are built on AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture and use RapidFire technology in order to deliver the best cloud gaming experience possible. The series includes three enterprise-level graphics cards, with the top-tier model being the Sky 900, which packs in 3,584 stream processors, 6GB of GDDR5 memory, and a memory bandwidth of 480GB per second.
The plan with these cards is to deliver cloud gaming to a number of devices, including PCs (obviously), smartphones, tablets, and even Smart TVs. The company said that they’re “working closely” with a handful of cloud gaming companies to build the best cloud-focused graphics cards out there. AMD announced partnerships with Otoy, Ubitus, G-Cluster, and CiiNow.
AMD’s new cloud gaming initiative comes a couple of months after NVIDIA announced its GRID cloud gaming system at CES 2013, which will allow gamers to stream games over the interwebs to their computer and other mobile devices, including the new Project SHIELD from NVIDIA, which can play graphic-intensive games on a small handheld. AMD’s plans for Sky are a bit scarce at this point, but we should be hearing more about it soon.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
