NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition Review – RTX For The Masses?

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RTX has come to the masses!
Launched in January 2019
, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2060 Founder’s Edition aims to bring ray-tracing and next-generation gaming performance to the mid-range market. With cut-down versions of all the party tricks from its big brother (less GDDR6 memory, fewer Tensor / RT cores, fewer shaders), but still commanding a hefty price premium (MSRP : USD 349) for its midrange pretensions, can the RTX 2060 finally make the case for ray-tracing enabled graphics cards?

Spec Sheet

GPU Architecture / Chip

Turing / TU106

Shaders

1920

Variant

TU106-200A-KA-A1

TMUs

120

Foundry

TSMC

ROPs

48

Transistors

10.8 billion

Tensor Cores

240

Clock Speed

1365 Mhz

RT Cores

30

Boost Clock

1680 Mhz

Memory

6 GB GDDR6

Die Size

445 mm
2

Bus

192-bit

Memory Clock

1750Mhz (14 GHz effective)

Bandwidth

336 GB/s

TDP

160W

Outputs

2x DisplayPort

1x HDMI

1x DVI

1x USB-C

Power Connector

8-pin

Width

Dual-Slot

Dimensions

229mm (L) x 113mm (H)

Giga Rays /s

5

Pixel Rate

80.64 GPixels/s

Texture Rate

201.6GTexels/s

The Basics

Like its more powerful siblings, the RTX2060 Founder Edition sports a dual-fan blower style cooling solution, finished in a mix of chrome-looking lettering, matte black and gunmetal grey.

There’s a single 8-pin connector which is placed rather weirdly at the rear of the graphics card, instead of the front/top as has been the case with most graphics cards for the past 5 to 6 years.

On the rear of the card, you’ll find the outputs – 2x DisplayPort, ONE(1) HDMI, a single DVI port and a USB-C connector meant for VirtualLink / VR. On the top / front (the bit you’ll see when you plonk the card into your motherboard) there’s some rather tastefully done ‘GEFORCE RTX’ lettering, which gives off a rather comforting green glow when your system is switched on.

Hooking up to your motherboard via a PCIe x16 connector, the RTX 2060 Founder’s Edition (FE from now on, okay?) will work with any platform (AMD / Intel) released in the last 7 years.

Right off the bat, I can say that regardless of how the
RTX launch
 has gone, the new cooling solution that NVIDIA have gone for on their Turing-based cards is a definite eye-candy upgrade on the polygonal / chiseled look of previous FE cards. Strikingly minimalist, clean lines and a lack of in-your-face design elements give the RTX 2060 (and other RTX cards) a lovely ‘come check me out’ vibe.

The dual-fan blower setup should provide better thermal performance compared to the thankfully-discontinued vapour-chamber setup.
The tradeoff, unfortunately, is that the hot air is now exhausted directly into your case. Can’t have it all, eh?

Enough of the looks – we’re here to game, so let’s see how that works out!

Benchmarks – Methodology

Where possible, in-game / software benchmarks were used to give a consistent representation of the performance of the cards being tested. FIVE (5) runs were carried out at various settings / resolutions. The highest and lowest recorded FPS / score readings were discarded (to reduce the possibility of outliers), and an average of the three readings is then taken.

If there is no in-game benchmark available, then a repeat run of a certain portion of the game would be used, making sure that the portion in question would have an accurate cross-section of various game scenarios. FPS readings would then be recorded via CSV data collated from Razer Cortex, and averaged out accordingly.

All tests were carried out on our test bench (mentioned below), which is water-cooled via a Bykski custom-loop with two 360mm radiators to prevent any possible temperature bleed.

Two cards were used in benchmarks aside from the RTX2060 FE. Our main test bench card, a ZOTAC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080TI Mini, is also water-cooled. The next card in our line-up is a Manli GTX 1060 6GB Gallardo, running on a stock cooling solution.

Test Bench

CPU

Ryzen 7 2700X (water-cooled)

Motherboard

ASUS ROG Crosshair VII Hero Wi-Fi

Chipset

X470

Memory

16GB DDR4 OC’ed @3466MHz (Patriot VIPER RGB)

Graphics Card (comparison)

ZOTAC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti Mini (water-cooled)

Manli Gallardo NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition

Drivers – 417.71 / 418.81 (DLSS Testing)

SSD

OS : M.2 – Pioneer APS-SM1 (240GB)

Gaming SSD – LiteOn 512GB

PSU

Cooler Master G650M Semi Modular 650W

Monitor

Samsung LU28E590DS

3840 x 2160

28”

Benchmark Results – Games

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V has been around for quite a while, but the PC version, with hi-res textures and an optimised game engine, really pushes modern hardware to its limits. At 1080p, we see the RTX 2060 handily beating the GTX 1060 by a 25% margin. The RTX 2060 in turn loses out to our test bench GTX 1080Ti by about 30%. The gap increases when raising the resolution to 1440p, with the margin now 31% (vs 1060) and 39% (vs 1080Ti Mini). This trend continues into 4K territory, with the 1060 and 2060 both failing to run at 8xAA and only able to run at 4xAA.

The bigger gap to the 1080Ti can be accounted for with the reduced VRAM for both cards (6GB vs 11GB). The faster VRAM in the RTX 2060 mitigates the VRAM capacity, but ultimately still hamstrings performance at 4K.

F1 2018

F1 2018 is known to run relatively kinder on graphics cards in return for amazing visuals, and this is proven by all cards achieving playable framerates even at 4K resolution (yes, including the 1060, if you can accept a console-esque 31fps).

The gap between 1060 and RTX 2060 is stark, moving from 40% at 1080p to 36% at 1440p, and eventually 39% at 4k. The 1080Ti runs rings around both cards, with 4K performance a particular highlight. The RTX 2060 gives a respectable account of itself at 4K, and can easily achieve 60 fps if you turn down some of the settings.

Assassin’s Creed : Origins

AC: Origins is a strange title that seems to not just be GPU-dependent, but also CPU-dependent as well. With all the bells and whistles turned on, the gap between RTX 2060 and 1080Ti at 1080p is just 14%. This gap stays the same at 1440p, before growing to 21% at 4K.

The 1060 just can’t keep up, lagging behind by 26% at 1080p, 35% at 1440p and 40% at 4K. To achieve 60fps for the 1060, you’d have to go for medium or lower presets on the settings.

Shadow Of The Tomb Raider

Shadow of The Tomb Raider, at the time of writing, still hasn’t received a Ray Tracing / DLSS patch as of yet, so we’re going to have to wait to test DXR performance. In the plain-jane world of rasterisation and CUDA cores, the higher VRAM capacity of the GTX 1080Ti handily sees off any challenge from the RTX 2060.

From a gap of 39% at 1080p to 32% at 1440p, and 37% at 4K, the RTX 2060 still maintains respectable performance. The 1060 is nowhere to be seen, lagging by 40% at just 1080p, and disappearing in the distance like Commissioner Gordon in a foot race against the Flash.

Battlefield V

DXR performance is covered later on – let’s talk DX12 and plain old CUDA cores for the moment. BF V is a multiplayer game that’s going to be kinder on GPUs, and the performance numbers bear that out.

The 1080Ti takes a 38% lead at 1080p from the RTX 2060, with the gap closing to 36% at 1440p and coming to a halt at 38% at 4K. The 1060 stays close to begin with, registering a 14% deficit at 1080p and 29% at 1440p before ballooning to 62% at 4K.

Benchmark Results – Software / Rendering

3DMark – TimeSpy, DX12, 1440p

3Dmark benchmarks are pretty straightforward, giving a clear indication of the graphical performance of these cards. The 1080Ti clocks in at 27% faster than the RTX 2060, which in turn performs a whopping 44% better than the 1060.

3DMark – TimeSpy Extreme, DX12, 4K

At 4K, the 1060 is again nowhere to be seen, lagging behind the RTX 2060 by 45%. The 2060 itself is behind the 1080Ti by 25%.

V-RAY Render Benchmark

From V-RAY’s website :
If you are not familiar with V-Ray, it is one of the leading raytracers in the world that is used in many different industries including architecture and automotive design. It has also been used in over 150 motion pictures and numerous episodic television series. It also won a Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement in 2017.

Making use of the CUDA cores in NVIDIA cards to run ray-traced rendering, V-RAY Benchmark is a great tool for measuring the raw compute power of these cards. Bear in mind that they do not make use of OpenGL or DirectX capabilities.

The 1080Ti is 30% quicker than the RTX 2060, which in turn is 30% faster than the 1060, indicating a healthy jump in performance generationally, and a respectable closing of the gap to the previous flagship NVIDIA card.

Octane Render Benchmark

OctaneBench is a benchmark that uses graphics card resources to render four different scenes with three different rendering techniques (info channels provided by scene files, direct lighting and path tracing) to accurately gauge the amount of computational rendering potential that the chosen graphics card has.

Here we can see that the 1080Ti scores 26% higher than the RTX 2060, which in turn absolutely destroys the 1060 by a 43% margin.

Ray-Tracing Benchmarks

Battlefield V – DXR ON

With all settings set to Ultra / High where possible, ray-tracing performance for the RTX 2060 works well at LOW / MEDIUM DXR settings. However, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference in-game as DXR is heavily dependent on the environment you’re in. You’d need a massive amount of reflective surfaces (water, metal, glass etc) to appreciate even the smallest of differences.

Once you bump up the DXR settings, the framerate drops quite significantly (by up to 35% at 1080p, and 45% at 1440p). At 1080p, even at Ultra DXR, the level of detail is barely discernible, and is only really noticeable at higher resolutions – which ends up penalising your framerate. For a competitive / twitch shooter, lower framerates don’t help – and if any of you have a fancy 144Hz monitor, your experience with DXR on might be less than optimal.

Is slightly more realistic lighting really worth jeopardising your gaming experience? That’s a question for you to decide.

3DMark – Port Royal DXR Benchmark

3DMark’s latest benchmark really pushes DXR on the RTX 2060 to the limit, as evidenced by the barely-tolerable FPS readings even at 1080p. Pushing up the resolution almost halves the performance, while 4K is nothing more than a stuttering slideshow – akin to a poorly laid-out PowerPoint. Blame that on the lower VRAM capacity as well as the lack of RT cores compared to the RTX 2060’s more powerful siblings.

3DMark – Port Royal DLSS Benchmark

Following the new NVIDIA driver release (418.81) and an update to 3DMark’s Port Royal benchmark, we’ve had the opportunity to test out DLSS. NVIDIA claims a 50% increase in DXR performance on average. The reality is slightly different.

DXR performance with DLSS off in the Port Royal benchmark indicates that DXR settings are set to Medium, and tallies with our previous testing. With DLSS on, performance improves by 45% at 1080p, 44% at 1440p and… 157% at 4K. The last figure is meaningless as 3.6 frames per second is just about as playable as playing a first person shooter using a Nokia 8210.

Visual quality at 1080p seems to degrade partially when DLSS is switched on, resulting in a slight blurring and pixelation. At a higher resolution (1440p), DLSS works much better with improved visual quality still marked out by a bit of blurriness, as though someone overdid it slightly with the anti-aliasing. Check out the screencaps to see what we mean.

DLSS OFF
DLSS ON
DLSS OFF
DLSS ON
DLSS OFF
DLSS ON
DLSS OFF
DLSS ON

A Word About Temperatures

Compared to previous FE’s that could hit 84 degrees during stress testing, thermal performance of the new dual-blower design is much improved. However, the internal case temperature is raised due to the air being exhausted into the case. By how much? This depends on your case ventilation and fan setup.

In Conclusion

We have a new
champion at 1080p / 1440p! The RTX 2060 is a powerhouse of a card even at its MSRP (USD 349, which is 100 USD more than the GTX 1060 6GB). It easily obliterates the GTX 1060 at these resolutions, although is still not capable of being a 4K card.

The 1070Ti is also effectively dealt with, putting the performance / price ratio into perspective – The 1070Ti launched at an MSRP of USD 450, and is just about outclassed by the RTX 2060. However, the questionable decision to have only 6GB of VRAM hamstrings performance and ultimately hampers this card’s potential. An extra 2GB would probably see the RTX 2060 outpace the GTX 1080. What is the wisdom in pairing a Porsche engine with the fuel tank of a Kancil?

This might be the RTX card for the masses – yet only at low settings, where the effect of “RTX ON” is barely noticeable in comparison to the usual graphical bells and whistles we are already used to. This forces us to ask the question – is the addition of Tensor cores and ray-tracing capab
ility actually worth the extra financial outlay at low settings? Is the FPS penalty for high / ultra DXR settings also worth it? Based on the evidence at hand and our prior misgivings over what NVIDIA is doing with the RTX line,
we don’t think so.

DLSS shows that it can indeed improve performance at any given resolution (yes, including 4K!) – however, there is a small penalty to be paid with visual quality in comparison with non-DLSS settings. As it is, the only DLSS benchmark we have is an artificial one, and does not represent actual real-world performance in gaming.

Having said that, don’t take anything away from the sheer grunt that the RTX 2060 has – this is still a very very capable piece of hardware, and is admirably close to the previous Pascal flagship in terms of performance while sitting in the gap between GTX 1070Ti and GTX 1080. If you bought one right now on that basis alone, you’ll be a happy camper.

What Works

Generational leap from 1070 to 2060 at a lower price

70% of GTX 1080Ti Performance @ Half the Price

Beautiful design

Great thermal performance vs previous FEs

USB-C / VirtualLink – Future proof for VR

What Doesn’t (Really) Work

Weird placement for 8-pin connector

DXR – only really works on LOW and in ONE game

Barely discernible improvement in visual quality vs gameplay vs penalty to FPS

Limited VRAM – An extra 2GB would be great!

DLSS does indeed improve framerate, with a slight visual quality degradation

What Doesn’t Work (At All)

Still no widespread DLSS implementation

Still no widespread DXR implementation

You’re paying for tech that isn’t actually used much

Gallery

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 cards will arrive on 17 October 2018

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With the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti already on shelves around Malaysia, many of us who do not want the highest end RTX cards are waiting for the mid-high end cards, specifically the RTX 2070 and RTX/GTX 2060. We might have to wait for a while more before we hear anything about the RTX/GTX 2060, but Nvidia GeForce Malaysia has just announced the availability of the RTX 2070.

Based on their post, the card will be on shelves starting October 17 and will retail for $499 or $599 for the Founders Edition cards. Taking into account the non-Founders Edition card, the partner cards should retail for around RM2100 – RM2500 based on direct conversion. The card will come with 2304 CUDA Cores, core clock of 1410MHz, boost clock of 1620MHz, 8GB of GDDR6 RAM, 7.5 TFLOPs of computing power and a TDP of 175 watts. It is also based off the Turing architecture which should support DSAA and Ray-Tracing graphics.

https://www.facebook.com/NVIDIAGeForceMY/photos/a.1574299189508102/2199823700288978/?type=3&theater

As of now, there is no mention of any companies that will be producing these RTX 2070 cards yet. We should get more news in the coming weeks but based on our assumption, we expect Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and Zotac to announce pre-orders for the RTX 2070 cards soon.

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 to use recycled GA104 GPU, says reports

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NVIDIA is
reportedly

planning to launch new GeForce RTX 3060 cards that will make use of the more powerful GA104 GPU.

Recycled GA104s used in unannounced RTX 3060s
https://t.co/ma9XHreCc3
 new dev ID 2487

— Matthew Smith (@T4CFantasy)
September 17, 2021

That GPU was previously seen in the more powerful RTX 3070 and RTX 3060Ti cards, but we’ll now see it arrive in entry-level segment too, but there’s a catch; the new RTX 3060 card will come with 3548 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6 memory; and 42% of the GA104’s potential will be capped, compared to the 7% cap of the GA106 in the
original RTX 3060
.
 This is to ensure the RTX 3060 can stay within the affordable price segment.

According to
Tech Power Up
, the GA104-based RTX 3060 will draw power from a 1x 12-pin connector, and comes with 1x HDMI, and 3x DP. The card will occupy a PCIe 4.0 x16 lane on your motherboard. It measures 242mm in length and 112mm in width.

There’s no word on its official availability and pricing yet, but it’s to hear that there will be more affordable GPU units heading our way in the near future, what with the global chip shortage and all.

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 will arrive this October 15: Priced from RM2,399

485

NVIDIA announced that the much-anticipated
 RTX 3070
 will be available to purchase this October 15 – quite a bit later than its bigger siblings, the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.

The
latter two
, as we know, will launch this month; and we suppose NVIDIA is just being a big tease considering the it’s the RTX 3070 that everyone’s talking about. It’s projected to perform better, if not, on par with the RTX 2080Ti, while costing a whole around RM1,000 to RM2,000 less than any new RTX 2080Ti you can buy now.

In terms of specs, the RTX 3070 comes with 8GB of VRAM, 20.4 Shader TFLOPs, 40 RT-TFLOPs, and 163 Tensor-TFLOPs. It packs a whopping 5,999 CUDA Cores, with a maximum boost clock of 1.74GHz. It also has a relatively low TDP of 220W and uses an 8-pin connector, unlike its more powerful siblings, which need a 12-pin connector instead.

NVIDIA also introduced NVIDIA Reflex, a new technology that cuts rendering queue from CPU to GPU to improve latency – the company is marketing this towards the e-sports market it finds its largest use cases.

So, if you’re gunning for a GPU upgrade soon, you might want to wait till next month for arguably one of the best bang-for-your-buck graphic cards around.

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NVIDIA is giving a free copy of Overwatch to lucky GeForce Experience users

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NVIDIA is giving a chance to users of the GeForce Experience software to win a free copy of Overwatch, the team-based multiplayer first-person shooter developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment. The software is able to analyze specific GPU, CPU and display monitors to customize game settings for the best experience on your setup. Game Ready drivers are optimized for each new release titles and can be installed with a single click, keeping your rig updated and run better than ever.

From May 30 to June 6, NVIDIA will be giving away hundreds of free Overwatch game codes to those that download GeForce Experience, join the fray of an intense multiplayer showdown with a diverse cast of heroes to choose from with an epic, globe-spanning conflict. To be part of this and future giveaways, all you need to do is download the GeForce Experience and opt to receive the latest rewards, promotions, and more from GeForce and NVIDIA.

To download the software visit the official GeForce Experience page
here
 and keep up-to-date with the giveaways
here
.

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Nvidia GPU users face high security risk due to several flaws in previous patches

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If you’re an Nvidia GeForce, Quadro or Tesla owner and user, the American company has issued a notice, warning you to update your driver to the latest 431.68 to fix several security issues.

Image credit: Nvidia

Nvidia had identified five exploits in the previous NVIDIA Windows GPU Display Driver that could allow attackers to modify privilege settings, deny service and even perform local code executions, rendering your device unusable to you.

With a base score on security threat of 8.8 – Nvidia has deemed this vulnerability highly dangerous and you should look to update your driver as soon as possible. Other dangerous flaws found include vulnerabilities in DirectX drivers which could also lead to denial of service or code execution.

These are the Nvidia GPU models and driver versions that are at risk:

Image credit: Nvidia

According to Tech Radar, these exploits would require the attacker to have local access to your system, so unless you’re working in, say, a co-working space or even your own office space, you’re in danger of being a victim. You can get more information
here
.

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NVIDIA GRID 2.0 unveiled in vForum Singapore, delivers two times faster graphics virtualisation

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As the BYOD (bring your own device) trend continues to strengthen in the large enterprise space, business applications have become more resource demanding due to the tremendous amount of data transactions, NVIDIA certainly isn’t sitting on its laurels to let these challenges overwhelm enterprises as it unveils GRID 2.0 at VMware vForum 2015 in Singapore, the upgraded NVIDIA GRID 2.0 is now more powerful and capable of delivering two times better performance than its predecessor, and enterprises can take advantage of delivering graphics intensive applications over the cloud. The new GRID 2.0 will support major virtualisation platforms from VMware and Citrix.

NVIDIA understands that the workplace is no longer a fixed location and has partnered with VMware to offer GPU accelerated virtualisation to demanding enterprises. GRID 2.0 now offers two times faster virtualisation performance, configurable on Blade server systems and supports Linux applications.

By leveraging on the powerful Maxwell architecture found on its GeForce GTX and Quadro GPUs, the new Tesla M60 GPU only requires 300W of power and has dual 2048 CUDA cores to power up to 16 concurrent users in a single OS environment. NVIDIA GRID 2.0 profiles are now integrated into the latest VMware Horizon 6.2 VDI application and the new platform will allow IT departments to deploy virtual desktops almost instantly with the help of real-time app delivery, should the hosts go down, its smart provisioning feature performs a cold migration over to its new hosts to ensure the most minimal down time.

With GPU accelerated virtual desktops, users are able to take advantage of NVIDIA’s advanced GPU technologies such as Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) and Ambient Occlusion to render 3D images over the cloud using VMware Horizon without the need to worry about owning a high-end computer, as NVIDIA has demonstrated to us using a NVIDIA SHIELD TV and a MacBook Air, the results are somehow impressive for rendering items in applications such as Cinema4D and Autodesk 3D.

NVIDIA’s GRID has been successfully deployed on over a hundred of global organizations since launch, NVIDIA and VMware has set up a GRID 2.0 test drive programme for interested customers over
here
, hardware partners like Dell, HP and Lenovo will also be offering servers to support GRID 2.0 as well. To learn more about how GRID 2.0 will be able to benefit your organisation, head on to NVIDIA’s GRID microsite
here
.

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Nvidia has officially introduced the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070

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After two years of wondering and waiting, the biggest graphics card maker has finally introduced the successor to the GTX 10-series, the RTX 11-series. New graphics cards that are powerful and allows you to utilize and enjoy the power of Ray-Tracing (RTX), a  new method of rendering shadows and reflection in games.

They started the presentation by going in-depth about RTX, and while most of it was catered towards computer graphics artist, it gives us a small understanding that this new technology is no joke. From what we understand, this new tech will change the way lighting, shadows, and reflection is done in games. They are also using AI in their new Turing architecture, to accurately generate missing pixels to increase the speed of rendering graphics.

They went on to show games that are using this new RTX technology mainly, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus, and Battlefield V which we really recommend you watch the videos of the game with and without RTX.

Finally, they went on to announce three cards, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition comes with a 4352 CUDA Cores, a base clock speed of 1350 MHz, boost clock of 1635 MHz and 11GB of GDDR6 memory. The reference card comes with all the same specs except for the boost clock which is lower at 1545 MHz. Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition will come with 2944 CUDA Cores, a base clock speed of 1515 MHz, boost clock speeds of 1800 MHz and 8GB of GDDR6 memory. The reference graphics card for the RTX 2080 comes with a boost clock of 1710 MHz. Lastly, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition will come with 2304 CUDA Cores, a base clock speeds of 1410 Mhz, boost clock speeds of 1710 and 8GB of GDDR6 memory. The reference design comes with a boost clock speed of 1620 MHz.

Nvidia recommends a 650-watt power supply for the RTX 2080 cards and 550 watts for the RTX 2070, the cards are open for preorder on their
website
 and will start shipping on 20 September. The RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and the RTX 2070 will cost up to $999, $699 and $599 respectively. However, we recommend that you dont preorder the cards for now as the pricing on the website and the presentation are not the same.

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Nvidia releases hotfix for faulty driver that causes high CPU loads

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It’s either Nvidia or AMD when it comes to dedicated GPU options, and in general, you cant go wrong with either. But for every good that each brand brings, along with it the bad as well – and both share negatives in one department – drivers.

The culprit in question this time around is Nvidia as they previous GeForce Driver 430.39, which was released a week ago, were reported to cause unusually high CPU loads as well as freezing issues for the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Image credit: Nvidia

What caused the issues was the NVDisplay.Container executable that was found to have ran in the background, taking up to 20% of CPU recourses. Credit to Nvidia for noticing the issue and as a result have pushed the 430.53 driver hotfix which should resolve the issue once and for all.

Whether or not this puts a dent on Nvidia’s push for market share is still left to be seen, especially considering AMD’s recent rise to the top with their value for money propositions. We doubt consumers would pick based on who messes up the least with their drivers, The hotfix is available  to download now on Nvidia’s driver page.

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NVIDIA Increase performance for Deep Learning Training

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NVIDIA today announced the latest updates to its GPU-accelerated deep learning software that will double deep learning training performance. With the latest software, it will empower data scientists and researchers to supercharge their deep learning projects and product development work by producing more accurate neural networks through faster model training and more sophisticated model design.

The NVIDIA DIGITS Deep Learning GPU Training System version 2 (DIGITS 2) and NVIDIA CUDA Deep Neural Network library version 3 (cuDNN 3) provide significant performance enhancements and new capabilities. Apart from that, data scientist can use DIGITS 2 to deliver automatic scaling of neural network training across multiple high-performance GPUs that will double the speed of deep neural network training for image classification compared to a single GPU.

For deep learning researchers, codeine 3 features optimized data stored in GPU memory for the training of larger, more sophisticated neural network and it also provides higher performance than cuDNN 2 by enabling researchers to train neural networks up to two times faster on a single GPU. Apart from that, the new cuDNN 3 libraries will be expected to integrate into forthcoming versions of the deep learning frameworks Caffe, Minerva, Theano and Torch, which are widely used to train deep neural networks.

The all new automatic multi-GPU scaling capability in DIGITS 2 maximizes the available GPU resources by automatically distributing the deep learning training workload across all of the GPUs in the system. By using DIGITS 2, NVIDIA engineers trained the well-known AlexNet neural network model more than two times faster on four NVIDIA Maxwell architecture-based GPUs, compared to a single GPU and initial results from early customers are demonstrating better results.

The DIGITS 2 preview release is already available today as a free download for NVIDIA registered developers and to learn more or download, visit the DIGITS website. The cuDNN 3 libraries are expected to be available in major deep learning frameworks in the coming months.

The DIGITS 2 Preview release is available today as a free download for NVIDIA registered developers. To learn more or download, visit the DIGITS website. The cuDNN 3 libraries are expected to be available in major deep learning frameworks in the coming months. To learn more, visit the cuDNN website.

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Nvidia infringes on Samsung patents, may be facing sales ban

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About a year ago
, Nvidia sued both Samsung and Qualcomm because both companies have allegedly infringed on seven of Nvidia’s patents. Now though, the tables have turned against the graphics card maker as not only has Samsung not infringed on any of Nvidia’s patents, the U.S. Trade judge in charge of the case has found out that Nvidia did infringe on three of Samsung’s patents.

Findings in the case revealed are currently subjected to review by the U.S. International Trade Commission based in Washington. Should this reveal work against Nvidia’s favour, one of the consequences that Nvidia may face include a sales ban, preventing all Nvidia products to be sold in the U.S. market.

Understandably, Nvidia is “disappointed” with the recent development, saying that the Samsung patents in question date back to the 1990s, covering older technology that is no longer in use in modern chip designs.

Samsung does not believe so as they believe the patents are the foundation of modern day chip design. Whatever the case, the ball is now in Samsung’s court and Nvidia may be facing severe consequences if they have been found guilty of infringing Samsung’s patents.

Source :
Bloomberg

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Nvidia introduces DesignWorks VR SDK

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A few months back, Nvidia annouced GameWorks VR, an SDK made for game developers who wish to move their games into the realm of Virtual Reality. Now, Nvidia is opening the VR gates to the designers and professionals as well, by introducing DesignWorks VR.

Tailor-made for the people working in specialized fields such as architecture, automotive design, oil and gas, aviation, and visualization companies, the DesignWorks VR SDK allows them to create, sculpt and design their latest projects, all while taking advantage of Nvidia’s currently existing rendering technology. Some of the tech that is available for use includes IRAY, Ray Tracing and Front Buffer Rendering.

Nvidia gave an example of the potential of DesignWorks VR SDK by using the field of automotive deisgn. DesignWorks VR would allow car companies like BMW or Ford to give their customers a chance to view a specific car model in VR. Customers can then change any part of that car in real time, without even needing to touch or see the car physically.

Also shown off during the conference was how the new SDK could be manipulated wirelessly through a tablet. Nvidia took the time to demo this by showing a render of a car being transmitted wirelessly to an Nvidia Shield Tablet from a nearby desktop system that runs off two Quadro M6000 workstation graphics solutions.

Professionals who are interested in DesignWorks VR can acquire it by
registering here
. On another note, Nvidia will be making their IRAY software avaiable via their store. The software will be available for a free 90-day trial, afterwhich it will have a fee of USD 295 per month.

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NVIDIA introduces GeForce RTX 40 Series, 4x better performance than RTX 30 series

5K

After much anticipation and rumors, NVIDIA has officially introduced the GeForce RTX 40 series GPU, based on the new Ada Lovelace architecture, NVIDIA claims that the flagship RTX 4090 will have up to 4x better performance than its predecessor along with the introduction of DLSS 3.

Touted as the world’s fastest gaming GPU with astonishing power, acoustics and temperature characteristics, the RTX 4090 is up to 2x faster in today’s games while maintaining the same 450W power consumption, while the new architecture allows it to feature 76 billion transistors, 16,384 CUDA cores and 24GB of high-speed Micron GDDR6X memory.

On the other hand, NVIDIA has also announced the RTX 4080 in 16GB and 12GB memory GDDR6X memory variants, the RTX 4080 16GB has 9,728 CUDA cores and is 2x as fast in today’s games as the RTX 3080 Ti and more powerful than the RTX 3090 Ti at lower power, while the RTX 4080 12GB features 7,680 CUDA cores and with DLSS 3, it is faster than the RTX 3090 Ti.

The RTX 40 series performance improvements are also enabled by a series of new technological innovations, including:

Streaming multiprocessors with up to 83 teraflops of shader power — 2x over the previous generation.

Third-generation RT Cores with up to 191 effective ray-tracing teraflops — 2.8x over the previous generation.

Fourth-generation Tensor Cores with up to 1.32 Tensor petaflops — 5x over the previous generation using FP8 acceleration.

Shader Execution Reordering (SER) that improves execution efficiency by rescheduling shading workloads on the fly to better utilise the GPU’s resources. As significant an innovation as out-of-order execution was for CPUs, SER improves ray-tracing performance up to 3x and in-game frame rates by up to 25%.

Ada Optical Flow Accelerator with 2x faster performance allows DLSS 3 to predict movement in a scene, enabling the neural network to boost frame rates while maintaining image quality.

Architectural improvements tightly coupled with custom TSMC 4N process technology results in an up to 2x leap in power efficiency.

Dual NVIDIA Encoders (NVENC) cut export times by up to half and feature AV1 support. The NVENC AV1 encode is being adopted by OBS, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, Discord and more

The GeForce RTX 4090 will be available on October 12 starting at US$1599 (RM7,288), while the RTX 4080 will only be made available in November starting at US$1,199 (RM5,465) for the 16GB model and US$899 (RM4,097) for the 12GB model.

As usual, these new GPUs will be available from the usual custom board partners including ASUS, Colorful, Zotac, Gigabyte and more, OEMs such as Acer, Alienware, Dell, HP and more will soon be offering systems with RTX 40 series GPUs as well.

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NVIDIA introduces GT 1030 budget graphics card

426

NVIDIA has just introduced the NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 graphics card which is based off NVIDIA Pascal architecture and comes with powerful graphics engine and state-of-the-art technologies, catering towards home and business PC users giving them the power needed to drive the most demanding PC applications.

NVIDIA has not shared any in depth details on the graphics card but it is packed with 2GB GDDR5 RAM clocked at 6,000MHz, core clock of 1,227MHz and a boost clock of 1,468MHz which delivers good PC graphics with support for 4K Ultra HD and HDMI/DP and comes with GeForce Experience that gives you easy driver upgrades and one-click game optimization. NVIDIA has also boasted that the graphics card will outshine integrated graphics by 3x in image editing, 6x in gaming and 11x in video editing.

The GeForce GT 1030 is available worldwide from NVIDIA GeForce partners with prices starting from $69. For more information on the graphics card or any other products from NVIDIA check out their website here.


NVIDIA introduces new Quadro line ups with Remote Rendering Technology

269

NVIDIA has introduced its latest
Quadro
 workstation graphics line up in its regional launch here in Bangkok, the new line of
Quadro
 workstation graphics will tend to address current challenges faced by professional industries such as graphic design, video production and product modeling. As time moves on, professionals require more computing power to perform complex designs with extremely high resolutions.

The new
Quadro
 line ups include the K6000, K5200, K4200, K2200, K620 and K420, the flagship K6000 has an extremely low power consumption at only 225W and will feature SDI and SYNC display technology.

NVIDIA mentions that the new
Quadro
 line ups will have extreme graphics compute power that will greatly reduce CPU usage and allow users to zoom into high resolution vector graphics and performing real-time 4K video rendering in a seamless experience. The performance is easily perceived when you are running applications such as Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Maya and etc.

One of the most exciting things about the new Quadro graphics is the ability to perform on-demand remote rendering with the support of the VCA (Visual Computing Appliance) hardware. It combines the number of server workstations with Quadropowered GPUs to deliver extremely fast and real time rendering of projects to client workstations, particular useful when you’ve multiple teams across the globe working on a rendering project, this technology will save much more time as the servers will be continuously performing the jobs while the user will not have any impact on working more on the job.

VCA will work with most NVIDIA certified ISV applications and requires the iRay remote plugin bridge to run on both server and client sides, the all new Quadro line ups will be priced similarly to current generation Quadro graphics and is shipping now worldwide.

Users can also opt to purchase workstations from
Dell
 and HP if they wish to have it bundled,
Mac Pro
 2011 users will also be able to use these new line of Quadro graphics card as well. For more details on how the Quadro graphics and VCA will work for you, do check out the videos down below.

How NVIDIA GPUs Accelerate Adobe Illustrator CC

Adobe Premiere Pro CC uses NVIDIA GPUs for Debayering and Smoother 4K Workflows

Better, Faster Modeling in Autodesk MAYA with
NVIDIA Quadro

Faster GPU Rendering in Autodesk 3dsMax with
NVIDIA Quadro

Scalable Interactive Quality, Exterior Styling Review with NVIDIA VCA

Better, Faster Design in SolidWorks with
NVIDIA Quadro

Physically-Architectural Visualization with NVIDIA VCA


Nvidia introduces the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB for cheap entry into mid-tier gaming

363

The Nvidia 1100-series graphics cards are closing in, but it looks like Nvidia is still holding on to the 1000-series in what looks like the last card before the new series comes in. The company has announced the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 3GB card which is to fill up the gap between the GTX 1050 2GB and the GTX 1050 Ti 4GB cards.

Nvidia has also mentioned that this card is made for gaming and not for crypto-mining, as the 3GB RAM is more suited for gaming and less useful for mining. The card comes with 768 CUDA cores, the same amount as the Ti variant, and will run 10 percent more faster than the 2GB GTX 1050. In a discussion with PC World, Nvidia has mentioned that it will occupy the price gap between the 2GB GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti.

This will be a good card for gamers that want to get into gaming at a mid-range price point, but if you have the extra cash lying around, it best to go straight for the GTX 1050 Ti. We should see EVGA, Asus, and Zotec releasing these cards by end June.

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Nvidia is placing restrictions on game codes acquired via purchase of a new graphics card

298

Those of you who purchase Nvidia graphics cards are probably familiar with how these card frequently come with a free game code with it. Previously, if you’re not interested in the game itself, you could always sell or give the code to someone else. Starting today, that is no longer possible as Nvidia has applied some measures to prevent this from happening.

Nvidia has just recently updated the system in which these game codes are redeemed. Instead of the pre-existing system that lets you redeem your Nvidia code from a website which can then be used on other games-centric platform such as Steam, the new system will only allow you to redeem the game through Nvidia’s ill-received GeForce Experience app. Furthermore, the app will perform a hardware check to ensure that the person redeeming the code does have a graphics card that is tied to said game code.

This new system implemented by Nvidia will most likely eliminate a large number of resold game codes, although it would not eliminate it entirely as the game codes can still be sold off to people with the appropriate graphics card in their system. Nevertheless, we don’t imagine this move to be widely popular among gamers

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NVIDIA launches GeForce RTX 3090 Ti for demanding content creators and gamers

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NVIDIA has officially announced the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU, its most powerful gaming graphics card ever made that features 10,752 CUDA cores and 24GB of the fastest 21Gbps GDDR6X memory. As a reference, NVIDIA claims that the RTX 3090 Ti is 60% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti and 55% faster than the TITAN RTX.

The RTX 3090 Ti uses the same Ampere architecture as the other RTX 30 series cards, the performance difference from the RTX 3090 include a faster base and boost clock speed of 1.67GHz and 1.86GHz respectively, 84 ray-tracing cores, 336 Tensor cores and 40 TFLOPS of single precision performance.

While you will most certainly get a slight performance bump in games, which NVIDIA claims up to 9% over the RTX 3090, NVIDIA is targeting the RTX 3090 Ti for more complex applications such as research systems for data science and AI, and large scale creative workflows that involves detailed models, super high resolution textures and massive sets.

In terms of power consumption, the RTX 3090 Ti could draw up to 450W from three PCIe 8-pin connectors, hence NVIDIA recommends an 850W power supply for any systems looking to pair up with the card.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in getting one, watch out pricing announcements from AIB partners such as ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, Palit, INNO3D, Colorful and ZOTAC here in Malaysia, NVIDIA lists the RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition for US$1,999 in the US.

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NVIDIA launches the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPU with significant performance improvements

383

NVIDIA may have been slow to react to AMD’s call on the desktop GPU competition, but at long last the company has finally launched the successor to the already two year old GTX 980 GPU, the all new Pascal architecture GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 is now officially the company’s fastest and best desktop GPUs ever made, the GTX 1080 delivers double the performance of a single GTX 980 and is fabricated on a faster and much efficient 16nm FinFET process, it is also the first GPU that utilizes the latest GDDR5X VRAM from Micron.

In NVIDIA’s keynote, CEO Jen Hsun Huang has presented that the reference GTX 1080 is in fact faster than a TITAN X and dual SLI GTX 980 GPU, modern games will now perform 1.6x times faster than the old Maxwell GPUs and users will also notice a significant performance boost in VR gaming. The GTX 1080 has a core frequency of 1607MHz, memory clock speed of 1733MHz, and will merely draw 180W of power from a single 8-pin connector, this makes it currently the most power efficient GPU with no compromises in gaming performance, meanwhile it would also mean that you can easily SLI the GTX 1080 and overclock it without worrying too much about power consumption.

NVIDIA certainly didn’t just improve the performance of its new GPUs, but the company also introduced “Simultaneous Multi Projection Technology”, a feature that allows the new Pascal GeForce cards to be able to create different viewpoints of the same virtual reality scene with decreased performance hit, it tends to deliver a smoother frame rate in VR applications which reduces dizziness when viewing from a VR headset, NVIDIA’s VR demo also showed a significant increase in frame rates from 66 fps to 96fps with this feature activated. While the company didn’t specify which VR headset would benefit from this technology, we are assuming on our side that a NVIDIA made VR headset could be in the works within the company’s lab.

Probably the most exciting part of the annoucement would be both the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070’s price tag, which will retail at $599 (MYR 2,395) and $379 (MYR 1,515) respectively, the latter seems like a pretty good price point for many gamers out there and I certainly can’t wait to purchase one to upgrade my old dated GTX 780. Meanwhile, stay tuned for our hands on with the new GeForce GTX 1080 in the coming weeks as we’ll be heading off to a regional press conference happening in Thailand soon.

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Nvidia launches the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti; GTX 1080 gets a price cut

374

So here it is, Nvidia has finally unveiled the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. However, unlike the previous Ti cards that places it between the regular high end card and the Titan X, the GTX 1080 Ti is a first in the sense that the card sits above the Titan X in terms of performance.

With the GTX 1080 Ti, the card uses the GP102 GPU that can be found in the Titan X. The card will have a base clock speed of 1,480MHz and a boost clock speed of 1582MHz. The biggest difference between the GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan X lies in its memory. With the 1080 Ti, Nvidia has opted to give the card 11GB of GDDR5X memory, resulting in a 352-bit memory interface and 88 ROPs. For comparison, the Titan X comes with 12GB of GDDR5X memory, a 384-bit interface, and 96 ROPs. The reason that the 1080 Ti is capable of beating the Titan X comes from the fact that the card’s memory runs at 11GHz instead of the Titan X’s 10GHz. This gives the card a slightly highmemory bandwidth of 484GB/s.

Rounding up the details, the 1080 Ti will have a TDP of 250W and will be powered by a 6-pin and an 8-pin PCIe connector. The Founders Edition version of the 1080 Ti will also come with an improved vapour chamber cooler that Nvidia claims is quieter. If you’re looking to get the 1080 Ti, the card will retail for USD699, beginning from next week (RM3,114).

If the price of the 1080 Ti is too steep for your tastes, Nvidia has also announced that the GTX 1080 will be receiving an immediate price cut as well. Starting from today, the GTX 1080 will retail for USD499 (RM2,223).

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Nvidia launches the next generation Titan X; will retail for USD 1,200

262

If you thought the GTX 1080 was as high as Nvidia is going to go when it comes to graphics card, you have just been proven wrong as the graphics card makers have announced the Pascal-based Titan X.

Dubbed by Nvidia as “the biggest GPU ever built”, this new version of the Titan X comes with 12 billion transistors. It is based on Nvidia’s Pascal architecture and will come with 12GB of GDDR5X memory, and 3,584 CUDA cores at 1.53GHz, delivering an estimated 11 teraflops of performance.

While this makes the Titan X the single most powerful graphics card available to date, that level of performance comes with an equally asking pricetag. The Titan X will retail for USD 1,200 (RM 4,882), so if you’re looking to actually get one, be prepared to fast for the next few months or so, or get lucky in the lottery. The Titan X will be available for purchase in Europe and North America on the 2nd of August. Asia will get the Titan X at a later date.

Source:
The Verge

graphicscard
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NVIDIA may release GeForce GTX 960 Ti

316

AMD just launched the new R9 380X, which is designed for 1440p gaming experience recently. Since then, there are rumors that NVIDIA is preparing the launch of its GeForce GTX 960 Ti, a card that would compete against the just-released Radeon R9 380X from AMD. NVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce GTX 960 Ti is said to feature a cut-down GM204 GPU, but when it comes to the CUDA count, things could get interesting.

The GTX 960 has 1024 CUDA cores while the GTX 970 has 1664 CUDA cores, so we should expect somewhere in the 1280-1408 CUDA core range for the GTX 960 Ti. Besides that, the GTX 960 Ti should have a 10 or 11 SMMs compare to GTX 970 which has across 13 SMMs. We will be expecting NVIDIA to provide a 192-bit memory bus, up from the 128-bit bus found on the GTX 960.

With CES 2016 right around the corner, we might able to see NVIDIA unveil its new GeForce GTX 960 Ti in early January.

SOURCE:
WccfTech

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Nvidia might introduce the GTX 1180 on 20 August 2018

337

Its been a long time coming, we know that the new GeForce GTX 1100-series will be released by the end of August 2018 and it looks like we might have a date on when these new cards will be released.

Nvidia has sent out invitations to an event that will take place on 20 August 2018 in Cologne, Germany which they are calling GeForce Gaming Celebration. This could be a big indicator that they will be unveiling the upcoming GeForce GTX 1180 graphics cards. The new cards will be based on the Turing architecture which will succeed the Pascal architecture. At the same time, Nvidia has also unveiled many new game graphics advancements, including adaptive ray tracing rendering techniques and a new Adaptive Temporal Anti-Aliasing that will compliment it. It can eliminate blur that is caused by Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) and bring it close to 8x Super-Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA), presumably to distract people from the new cards.

The event is held one day before GamesCon which is another indicator that they might be releasing the new cards and rumours have mentioned that we will be able to see the cards before 30 August. We will just need to wait and see if these cards will be unveiled during their event.

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Nvidia officially announces the notebook variants of the Pascal GPUs

343

After a long wait, it’s finally official. Today, Nvidia has announced that the Pascal GPUs will be making their way to the notebooks, and with it, the gaming notebook scene is about to get a lot more interesting.

So first off, the Pascal GPUs. Upcoming gaming laptops from various brands such as MSI, Gigabyte, Alienware, Razer and other manufacturers will be shipping their Pascal-powered laptops in the very near future. These laptops will be running on either the GTX 1080, the GTX 1070 or the GTX 1060. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that there isn’t an M suffix at the end of the model numbers, that is because all of the Pascal GPUs used in the laptops will be the exact same ones found on the desktop card, albeit with a lower Thermal Design Power (TDP). In terms of performance, the notebook-based Pascals is expected to have a 10% performance variance when compared to its desktop counterparts.

What does that mean in terms of performance? For starters, the Pascal-powered laptops will see a 75% increase in performance when compared to their Maxwell-powered counterparts. For the laptop-based GTX 1080, Nvidia is saying that the card itself is twice as power as two GTX 980Ms running in SLI. The power draw of the laptop GTX 1080 is stated to be the same as the desktop version of the GTX 980.

Another department that proves the superiority of the Pascal-based GPUs over the Maxwells’ is in overclocking. According to Nvidia, the Pascal GPUs’ overclocking potential is two and a half times higher than Maxwell, with some variance depending on the laptop model. Furthermore, the Pascal GPUs will have Dual-FET power supply, multi phased power controllers and factory OC support. Battery life will also be improved thanks to Pascal, as Pascal-powered laptops see a 30% increase in battery life when compared to Maxwell. Nvidia will also be bringing a new feature to laptops called ‘Refined BatteryBoost.’ This feature would give laptops better performance in games despite the laptop itself being unplugged. This feature will be available on both Maxwell and Pascal-powered laptops via a driver update that will be available some time today.

With the introduction of the notebook-based Pascal GPUs, Nvidia has also announced that future gaming notebooks will be a lot more interesting. For one, future gaming laptops that run on the Pascal GPUs will be VR ready. The presence of Pascal on laptops also means that 120Hz 1080p GSync displays, as well as 1440p GSync displays, will be more prevalent going forward. As for laptop sizes, Nvidia has promised that the Pascal GPUs will be found on laptops of all shapes and sizes, ranging from heavy duty desktop replacements, to ultrabook-class laptops. Alongisde GSync, Nvidia will also be rolling out Ansel to Pascal-powered notebooks, a feature that will allow gamers to take special screenshots through an in-game interface.

Now that we’ve briefly introduced you to the Pascal GPUs, we’ll be giving you a quick first look as to what to expect from the notebook-based Pascal GPUs.

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NVIDIA opens pre-orders for the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics card at $450

358

NVIDIA has officially introduced the GTX 1070 Ti, a graphics card that falls in between the 1080 and the 1070 but still offering quite a significant improvement over the non-Ti version of the card.

It comes with 2432 cores comparing to 1070 which has 1920 cores, 8GB of GDDR5 RAM and memory speed of 8Gpbs. Based on the stats, it seems to be double in performance compared to the GTX 970 card and NVIDIA has mentioned that it will have no problems with it comes to overclocking.

 Pre-orders have also been open and it will retail for $450 (RM1908.22) in the US. We should be expecting to see many other companies offering the Ti version of their 1070 in the coming weeks but if you want the founder’s edition, you will have to get it from their
official online store
.

This will be a good option for those of you that want a powerful graphics card but don’t want to fork out the high price point of the 1080 but need something slightly stronger than the 1070. Will you be getting the new and probably last graphics card NVIDIA will release this year?

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Nvidia releases GeForce Experience 3.0; requires an account to use it

347

Nvidia graphics card owners take note, Nvidia has just released GeForce Experience 3.0 to the public. This version of Nvidia’s graphics card companion comes with some major design overhauls, but it comes with a big caveat.

Before we get into the caveat, let’s go through the changes that has been made to GeForce Experience 3.0. For starters, navigating the app is much easier now, and the game optimization windows now features boxart of the games themselves instead of a list. The Drivers tab has also been overhauled, providing detailed information about each driver update. Nvidia will also be doing giveaways for those who utilise GeForce Experience, with this month’s giveaways being MSI VR-Ready laptops and HTC Vives.

So what is the caveat you ask? Well, if you want to use GeForce Experience 3.0, you’re going to have to register for an account. Prior to 3.0, signing up for GeForce Experience has always been optional. Not this time though. If you want GeForce Experience and all of its perks, you’re going to have to get an account. Just so we’re clear here, GeForce Experience isn’t mandatory, but you won’t be able to participate in the giveaways that Nvidia will be hosting on the app. You’ll also be forced to download the latest graphics drivers manually, and features such as ShadowPlay, which is tied to the GeForce Experience, will not be available to those who refuse to sign up for an account.

Source:
GeForce Experience

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Nvidia releases Star Wars-themed Titan Xp graphic cards

355

Nvidia has a very interesting design profile when it comes to their Founders Edition graphics cards. So what happens when they make a collector’s edition? With a little change in design, they will be releasing two Star Wars-themed GeForce Titan Xp graphics cards, and what a beauty they are.

The two cards resemble both sides of the force and if you are not familiar with the Star Wars universe, there is a light side and the dark side. The light side is designed to give off a bight and appealing green glow and they did not go easy on the lighting as the centre of the card where is just a black square has now LED lights running down. On the dark side card, it has a sinister red glow. Both the cards have slightly different designs as the light side has a nice appealing design that resembles the Rebels and the dark side has a more of an eerie looming feel to it.

The beauty of these cards is that it will be the same price as the standard Xp cards $1200. The GPUs will be available on November 17 but Nvidia Experience members will be able to pre-order the cards on November 8.

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Nvidia releases the GeForce GTX 1660 boasting power and affordability

343

Nvidia turned heads when they released their GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card a few weeks ago, bringing their latest Turing architecture and GDDR6 memory to the masses at an affordable price.

Nvidia claims that the reasoning behind the name of the graphics card is to position it between the GeForce GTX 10 series and the GeForce RTX series, thus promising a balance between power and affordability.

Image credit: Tech Here

Yesterday, Nvidia made their move in the GPU market again by introducing the smaller non-Ti GeForce GTX 1660 card. It comes with the same Turing architecture used by its bigger brethren but gets GDDR5 memory instead.

According to The Verge, despite being lower capacity than the GTX 1660 Ti, it still out-performs the GTX 1060. Which makes sense considering the latter uses an older Pascal architecture as well as a larger 16nm process.

Also, Nvidia claims that the GTX 1660 should be 15% faster than the GTX 1060 and a whopping 130% faster than the still-very-capable GTX 960. The GTX 1660 6GB is priced from $219 (about RM896), which is only slightly pricier than the older GTX 1060 6GB. Like Ti variant of the card, you can expect this to only be provided via Nvidia’s partnered vendors, so don’t expect a Founders Edition of the GTX 1660.

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Nvidia releases the PC Gaming Revival Kit in Europe

359

Picture this: you have an aging gaming PC sitting in your house. You want to upgrade it, but you don’t quite have the time to research the various components that you’ll need to making your gaming PC great again. Nvidia has a solution that can simplify this process, and the company is calling it the PC Gaming Revival Kit.

Currently available only in Europe, Nvidia’s PC Gaming Revival Kit is a box that contains some components that can be used to upgrade your PC. Inside the box, you’ll find a MSI GTX 1060 3GT OC graphics card, a Corsair Force Series LE 240 SSD, a Corsair CX450M PSU, a Gears of War 4 game code, and a Nvidia T-shirt. The entire Revival Kit goes for EUR399.

The PC Gaming Revival Kit is a rather novel idea, as the package provides some of the basics that a gaming PC needs. This Revival Kit doesn’t appear to be a special offer box though, as the total individual pricing of the products found inside the box matches up to the Kit’s pricetag. Here’s to hoping that Nvidia’s Revival Kit will eventually be making its way to countries outside of Europe.

Source:
VideoCardz

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NVIDIA releases the Titan V graphics card focused on AI processing

427

Nvidia has just announced the newest addition to the Titan graphics card line, the Titan V, the catch here is that it is very much focused on AI and deep learning. It can still be used for gaming but there are other options than buying this $3000 card.

That puts it at a much higher cost than the Titan Xp card but there is a very good reason for that when looking at the specs sheet. It is also running on a new architecture called the Volta GV100 and it is using Tensor cores with 12GB of HBM2 memory. It still has CUDA cores with a whopping count of 5120 active cores. It does have a slightly lower clock speed compared to the Titan Xp and the 1080 Ti but it makes up for the sheer amount of cores that they included.

To put this card into perspective, it can output 14.9 TFLOPS of single-precision FP32 computations, a 31 percent increase compared to the Titan Xp. The HBM2 memory module has a clock speed of 1.7Gbps and 3072-bit memory which performs at 653GB/s of bandwidth. The department that it shines in is AI calculations as it has 640 Tensor cores to perform the calculations and a total of 128 FLOPS of power to perform multiply and addition calculations.

You will not see a huge change in gaming if you decide to slap this card into your system, but there is untapped potential there as different types of coding is required to make use of the new architecture. Never the less, the time will come where games will be able to use AI to process out game environments and that’s where the Titan V will shine.

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs launched – price starts at RM2,399

1.5K

NVIDIA has today announced their latest line-up of GPUs in the GeForce RTX 30-series which includes the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and the RTX 3090.

The chips powering these cards are made using the Ampere architecture and built on an 8nm process, plus each come with a whole lot more CUDA cores; the RTX 3070 packs a whopping 5,888 – which is a lot more than the RTX 2080
Ti’s
 4,325 cores. All the cards support PCIe 4.0 and comes with at least one 8-pin, while the top two models have double that amount. Below are the new GPUs’ full specs sheet:

Image credit: Anand Tech

The RTX 3070 starts at RM2,399 – it’s meant to succeed the RTX 2080
Ti
 with a higher boost clock of 1.78GHz, 162 Tensor-TFLOPs, 20.5 Shader-TFLOPs, and 40 RT-FLOPs. Interestingly, it consumes less power with a TDP of 220W while also packing less VRAM at only 8GB compared to the 2080
Ti’s
 11GB.

Then there’s the big-daddy RTX 3090 – it’s so bad-ass NVIDIA had to bust out number ‘90’ just for this beast. The Founders Edition version of this card measures 12.3-inches in length, 5.4-inches in width, and takes up 3 slots in your case.

It’s hefty for good reason too – it supposedly boasts 50% improved performance over the Titan RTX and can run games at 8K @ 60FPS. It has a dual axial fan design that is apparently 10 times
more quiet
 and is 30-degrees (we’re assuming Fahrenheit) cooler than the Titan RTX. The catch however, is that this baby will set you back at least RM3,360.

Then there’s the RTX 3080 which sits in the middle of the pack and will likely the best for most people looking for an upgrade – its specs allow it to run games at 4K @ 60FPS.

The trend is clear to see here with the new RTX 30-series that 4K is now the target for next-gen gaming standards – a massive bump up from today’s 1440p standard. This card will cost you RM7,208.

The RTX 3080 will arrive this September 17, the RTX 3090 will come this September 24, while the RTX 3070 will be available sometime in October. You can visit NVIDIA’s website
here
 to learn more about the new flagship GPUs.

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CES 2021: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 announced. Priced from RM1,330

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During the CES 2021 virtual conference earlier this morning, NVIDIA completes their
RTX 30-series
 line-up of GPUs in the form of the
RTX 3060
.

The company confirms that this will arrive this late February at the price of USD329 (about RM1,330). This is the most affordable offering in NVIDIA’s line-up, as last year’s RTX 3060
Ti
 retails at USD 399 (about RM1,614).

The RTX 3060 comes with 3,584 CUDA cores, a boost clock of 1.78GHz, a 192-bit memory bus width, and a 170W TDP. Resizable BAR is also supported on the card, which allows the CPU to access all the GPU memory at once, giving you better performance.

The GPU comes with 12GB GDDR6 VRAM and supposedly offers 10 times more ray tracing performance compared to its predecessor. Interestingly, NVIDIA touts this as the replacement for the GTX 1060. The card gives gamers a massive boost of FPS into the 60FPS range in modern games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where the GTX 1060 would only average below playable levels of frames.

NVIDIA clarifies that although the RTX 3060 does have more memory than the RTX 3070 (8GB GDDR6), the latter will still offer better performance due to the raw horsepower of the card – so if you’re looking for something beefier, the RTX 3070 is the way to go.

NVIDIA is also touting its DLSS technology to provide added performance by using AI upscaling to allow games to run much smoother without sacrificing fidelity. Take this with a grain of salt because not every big title that you’re
playing
 supports DLSS.

With that said, the RTX 3060 should be the new go-to for 1440p gaming at an affordable price tag, and should be flying off the shelves when it arrives in the country. We’ll be sure to keep you updated on the Malaysian pricing when we get more information.

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 official specs detailed

750

Announced
 earlier last month, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060’s
official
 specs have been detailed showcasing its improvements over the GTX 1060 and RTX 2060.

The card packs up to 3,584 CUDA cores, which is almost double the amount you get on the RTX 2060; it also boasts a higher boost clock of 1.78GHz, but a slightly lower base clock of 1.32GHz, compared to the RTX 2060’s 1.36GHz.

The card comes with 12GB of VRAM, which is 2GB less than the RTX 2060, but offers 3
rd
-Generation Tensor cores, built on NVIDIA’s latest Ampere technology. For power, the card uses an 8-pin PCIe connector, and will come with 12-pin adapter out of the box.

The RTX 3060 also supports HDMI 2.1 3x and DisplayPort 1.4a display outputs. The card has graphics power of 170W, can run up to 93 degrees
Celcius
 in terms of thermals, and
requires
 a 550W power supply.

NVIDIA says that the RTX 3060 series will start at $329 (RM1,325) and be available this February 25. For that price tag, you’re going to need to act fast before all the scalpers get their hands on them.

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Nvidia rumoured to be re-packaging the 3GB variant of the GTX 1060 into the GTX 1050

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Back when Nvidia first revealed the GTX 1060, many were saying that Nvidia will also have a 3GB variant of the GeForce GTX 1060 that would be a tad bit more affordable than the default 6GB version. According to recent rumours though, the 3GB GTX 1060 will no longer be a thing. Instead, Nvidia has decided to re-package it as the GTX 1050.

While Nvidia has not officially announced anything of the sort, an industry insider spoke to Tweaktown that Nvidia has decided against releasing the 3GB variant of the GeForce GTX 1060. This means that the GTX 1060 will only be available in the 6GB variant. Nvidia has since rechristened the 3GB GTX 1060 as the GTX 1050, and the current release date for this particular card would be in December.

As for specifications, the GTX 1050 is expected to have the same 192-bit memory bus that the GTX 1060 has, but with a 100W TDP instead. The card, much like the GTX 1060, will be powered by a single 6-pin PCIe power connector.

Source:
TweakTown

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NVIDIA Shield Tablet gets Marshmallow

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NVIDIA has started rolling out updates for its original NVIDIA Shield Tablet (not the K1), calling it Shield Tablet Software Upgrade 4.0, which includes upgrading your Shield Tablet’s OS to Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

Notable updates according to NVIDIA’s official website include Marshmallow’s new feature Google Now on Tap, better management of app permissions, power consumption improvements and app optimization.

NVIDIA has also indicated the update to a new camera UI inspired by Material Design, also improving its burst photo functionality. The rollout also includes user interface upgrades, such as new wallpapers, the ability to customize and rearrange the toggles the Quick Settings menu and the ability to use Google Now voice commands from the lock screen.

The Marshmallow update also means that your Micro SD card can now be integrated with the tablet’s internal storage. However, NVIDIA has highlighted the importance of backing up your Micro SD card as there will be two ways to set it up after the upgrade. The first option, Portable Storage will not wipe the SD card’s data. The second option, Internal Storage, will wipe all data on the SD card, and thereafter integrate it with the internal storage.

This is the first major update by NVIDIA for its budget gaming tablet since the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update in July 2015. Don’t worry if you haven’t received your update as NVIDIA has just started rolling them out.

Source:
NVIDIA

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NVIDIA Shield Tablet K1 receives Software Upgrade 1.2, adds Vulkan support

275

The Shield Tablet K1 was unveiled last year by technology corporation. It was launched as a follow up for the NVIDIA Shield Tablet, but with lesser bells and whistles. Ultimately, it still gets the job done whether or not it’s a gaming tablet or a budget tablet running the Android OS. The Shield Tablet K1 was launched back in November last year with Android Lollipop, but eventually received Marshmallow in a swift manner by the end of 2015.

Just yesterday, NVIDIA has begun rolling out a new software update for the gaming tablet, named Software Upgrade 1.2, which carries an upgrade from Android 6.0 to Android 6.0.1. As much as it sounds like a minor update, Software Upgrade 1.2 brings a load of improvements and upgrade to the Shield Tablet K1. The standard Doze feature is added for better battery optimization. In addition to that, you can now double tap the power button to launch the SHIELD camera app. Navigation buttons are repositioned in Landscape mode and also added is a set updated emojis. Another feature which is likely to apply to snoozers is “Do Not Disturb Until Next Alarm”.

On top of that, the Shield Tablet K1 now supports the new Vulkan API for high efficiency access to its graphics hardware and sees an addition of USB MIDI support for plugging in MIDI devices such as MIDI keyboards, although Android is still in the midst of solving the high latency of MIDI on Android devices. Other tweaks include adding memory compression enhancement, fixing issues when moving apps to SD Card, improved WiFi connectivity after waking the device from sleep, and many more. The release notes of Software Upgrade 1.2 is available
here
.

Source:
NVIDIA

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NVIDIA showed me how GeForce RTX can greatly benefit content creators

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The gaming industry has gotten exciting once again all thanks to the announcement of the RTX 2060 and RTX Max-Q gaming laptops, and NVIDIA has got a lot of credit to take for making games look incredible with its new graphics card.

On my visit today to NVIDIA’s private media room at CES 2019, I was shown a section that sports a video studio setup, it is the very first time that NVIDIA has expand its demo experience out of gameplays, as the GeForce RTX isn’t just made to have games run faster with more realistic effects, it is also designed to help content creators achieve more.

NVIDIA showed two demos, one PC is running REDCINE-X Pro encoding of a RAW 6K footage shot from a RED camera effortlessly, and the other one running Autodesk’s Maya that completes a 3D render in 3-5 seconds and de-noise almost instantly as you move around the 3D subject, this is achieved all thanks to the Tensor cores, which uses AI technology to significantly reduce loads on the CPU while accelerating creative tasks and ray-tracing, this is also achievable when using a RTX Max-Q powered gaming laptop.

According to NVIDIA, many content creators on the go have invested in the GeForce GTX cards for their content creation needs, and the GeForce RTX cards simply helps them to achieve even more at a much faster performance.

While I did ask if such promotion would confuse users on making a choice between a Quadro powered workstation and a GeForce RTX powered gaming PC, NVIDIA clarified that Quadro works differently from the RTX as it has features that can only be used on certain 3D rendering applications and can do more complexed computational tasks.

For content creators, the GeForce RTX is the perfect balance between a gaming GPU and accelerator for their work, and personally I can’t wait to get my hands on the RTX 2060 to accelerate our video edits.

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Nvidia teases their upcoming graphics card, drops the GTX branding for RTX

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It looks like Nvidia is all geared up to release their new workstation and consumer graphics cards. At the same time, it looks like they will be dropping the GTX name in favour of a new branding for these cards.

The company recently released a video teasing a new card and it also had subtle hints that gave us more information on what they are calling these cards as well as the launch location. A sharp-eyed Reddit user managed to catch the hints in the video and the user was nice enough to list down these hints and what they mean. The video showed gaming chat rooms with odd usernames which were part of the hints:

RoyTeX
 – RTX

Not_11
 – Not 1100-series

Mac-20 and Eight-Tee
 – 2080

Lastly, there were coordinates in the video (50.968495, 7.014026) which points to a location in Cologne, where Nvidia will be hosting their GeForce Gaming Celebration even happening on 20 August 2018.

It looks like the company is dropping the GTX branding for RTX which points towards their new Ray Tracing technology which the company claims will change the visuals of games drastically. We will be covering the event as soon as it happens, so stay tuned.

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NVIDIA Tegra chips to power 2015 Honda Vehicles

242

As cars get more advanced with better engine power and fuel economy, there’s a little necessity to up the game a little in tech. Alright, we are not talking about NVIDIA Tegra processors replacing the engines of your brand new Honda, but rather the other way round, the graphics chipmaker has had its NVIDIA Tegra mobile SoC powering Honda’s 2015 vehicle line up’s infotainment system, these new vehicles include the 2015 Honda Civic, Civic Tourer, and CR-V.

Honda is the 19th automaker to utilize NVIDIA’s technology to power vehicle infotainment systems, the infotainment systems will apparently run on Android, which we believe it will be a forked one where you won’t be able to download apps like you do on your usual Android devices. Sadly, you won’t be seeing Android L running on Honda’s infotainment system but rather a rather old Android 4.0.4 ICS, which is still reasonably better than some automotive makers that are still using Android 2.3 or even lower Android versions.

Honda Connect is the name for its infotainment system, which will feature a 7-inch capacitive display for satellite navigation, music listening and vehicle information, there will be some region specific apps being installed as well. Just as you know, there are already 6 million cars with NVIDIA processors on the road today so that’s an incredible amount, the company plans to have its mobile processors integrated into more vehicle makes in the next 5 years.


NVIDIA TITAN X GPU: Ready for beautiful explosions?

302

The annual
Game Developers Conference (GDC)
opened on March 4th with a big bang, with
Weta Digital
,
Epic Games
,
Oculus
and NVIDIA unveiled this morning with an extraordinary virtual reality experience called “Thief in the Shadows”. Sound familiar? That’s because Thief in the Shadows is from the movie The Hobbit. The product of a unique collaboration has brought the most advanced GPU ever built, the GeForce GTX TITAN X, which was unveiled by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in a surprise guest-appearance alongside Epic Games’ CEO and founder, Tim Sweeney at the Epic Games keynote. Tim announced that the VR capabilities using Maxwell technologies, pushing the response time boundaries as well as low-persistence that can cause motion sickness if went unchecked.

“Thief in the Shadows” was created by Weta Digital, the talent behind the Hobbit movies. The demo was used leveraging Oculus’ “Crescent Bay” prototype as well as the muscle of a TITAN X GPU. 90 frames have never been so beautiful — so close to your face — using Unreal Engine 4 technology.

“When you come face-to-face with an enormous dragon that experience has to be believable, visceral and emotional,” “NVIDIA’s new TITAN X GPUs provide the platform to deliver exactly that.”

— Alasdair Coull, Head of R&D, Weta Digital

“‘Thief in the Shadows’ would not exist without NVIDIA’s support and amazing hardware,” “Together with Unreal Engine 4 and Oculus Crescent Bay, these three pieces of technology place the viewer inside a virtual world of unparalleled detail and action.”

— Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder, Epic Games

The TITAN X has 12GB VRAM and has a density of eight billion transistors. The Maxwell architecture that NVIDIA recently released is set to contend with the latest and greatest from AMD, who have yet to respond. The TITAN X was brandished with a host incredible GeForce-powered VR demos, which NVIDIA has unveild alongside their VR Direct software, supporting VR SLI and asynchronous time warp (ATW). TITAN Xs in SLI may seem like overkill but when you consider running two displays within a VR helmet at the highest resolution possible, NVIDIA VR SLI is here to destroy boundaries and unlock the best graphics performance available.

A little more on what ATW is, it is a technique for reducing persistence by adjusting the image based on head-tracking unput. The NVIDIA drivers will provide API for GPU scheduling controls for effective implementation.

Here’s what people had to say about CRYENGINE’S VR Demo Reactions at GDC 2015:

A few days back, on March 4th when NVIDIA opened up their PhysX Code to Unreal Engine 4 developers, which means we will finally be able to see some amazing PhysX technology alongside the Maxwell architecture. I don’t know about you guys, but PhysX is awesome, this is Epic Games’ implementation of PhysX with the power and beauty of Unreal Engine 4 (This animation was rendered in real time, not a prerecording):

Here are some other amazing implementations of PhysX and why I am such a die-hard NVIDIA/ASUS fan boy.

Personally, I do not have the cash or money to grab a TITAN X or even see any logical explanation on why I would want one. As a competitive who just needs smooth frames and acceptable quality, a GTX 960 would suffice for my everyday fragging needs. But, after seeing that “Kite” demo, it makes want to sell my kidney for a rig with the TITAN X in it. There need not be any logical explanation to get one, the only reason you need is the joy of experiencing such beauty in such fluidity at insane resolutions. You may never need to leave the house ever again.

For more information, head on over to
NVIDIA’s newsroom
.


NVIDIA unveils new Quadro workstation graphics based on Pascal

297

As with every new architecture release, NVIDIA updates the rest of its GPU family and the Pascal architecture has now been implemented on its desktop Quadro workstation GPU, the company has unveiled the Quadro P6000 and P5000, these two workstation GPUs come with huge amount of CUDA cores and memory for graphics rendering work. The flagship P6000 for instance, comes with 24GB of GDDR5X memory, 3840 CUDA Cores and produces 12 TFLOPs of compute power, yet it merely takes up maximum of 250W of power, the Maxwell based M6000 predecessor has 3072 CUDA cores and 7 TFLOPs of compute power, so that is quite a significant upgrade.

The Quadro workstation GPU has always been meant for working on graphics intensive applications rather than gaming, while these new GPUs still run games fine if you really want to, you would be paying for a huge premium over a GeForce GPU for its graphics rendering capabilities, NVIDIA states that the new Quadro GPUs will bring a whole new level of performance and innovative capabilities to power visual computing on the desktop, in VR, or on-the-go, which users should be able to get the graphics rendering work done faster than ever. NVIDIA haven’t got a release date yet for the new Quadro GPUs, but do keep tabs on OEMs such as Dell and HP, they might probably be the first to feature these cards in their workstations.

SOURCE:
 NVIDIA

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NVIDIA unveils the GeForce GTX 950 GPU made for MOBA gaming

448

When it comes to lag free MOBA gaming and an affordable solution, NVIDIA has that solution covered with the introduction of its latest GPU, the GeForce GTX 950 GPU based on the advanced Maxwell chipset is now official, it comes with improved performance, extremely low power consumption and advanced graphical features such as NVIDIA GameWorks and DirectX 12.

On the technical side of things, the GTX 950 is based on the GM206 chip, which has a base clock frequency of
1024MHz

and a boost clock of 1188MHz, it sports 768 CUDA cores with 48 texture units available for texture processing, a 128-bit memory interface with a 6.6GHz memory clock speed, outfitted with 32ROPs and 2GB of GDDR5 memory, the GPU is also made to support up to four displays at up to 5K (5120×3200) resolution and comes with HDMI 2.0 support.

MOBA Games such as DOTA 2, Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends will be able to take advantage of the GeForce GTX 950’s pipeline to reduce input latency all thanks to the GPU’s higher performance speed and pre-rendering techniques. With the help of NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience platform, gamers will no longer need to worry about in-game graphics setting as there will be a new MOBA optimisation feature to enable its ‘high FPS low latency’ feature, which is achieved by setting the maximum pre-rendered frames to 1. On a side note, the experience is best achieved with a 144Hz refresh rate monitor.

Compared to the GTX 650, the GTX 950 three times of performance improvements with an efficient 90W TDP that requires a 6-pin power input. When we asked NVIDIA on why they weren’t comparing it with the GTX 750, officials answered that the new GTX 950 isn’t targeted at GTX 750 users as the latter would not see a significant difference in performance improvements and they should be upgrading to higher performance cards such as the GTX 970 or GTX 980 to be able to see much value.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 is available immediately from major OEMs such as ASUS, Gigabyte, Palit, MSI and ZOTAC starting from a suggested retail price of $159 (RM657), which is the most affordable GeForce GTX 900 series line up at the moment. We hope to receive a unit of the GTX 950 for review soon so stay tuned.

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Nvidia unveils the GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti

456

After being on the
receiving end

of leaks
, Nvidia has finally come clean with the latest entries into the GTX 10 series, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti.

Both the GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti are based on the GP107 GPU design, and as the monikers indicate, the GTX 1050 Ti is the one that has a bit more power behind it. In terms of numbers, the GTX 1050 will come with 640 CUDA cores, 2GB of GDDR5 memory, and a TDP of 75W. For the GTX 1050 Ti, this card will have 768 CUDA cores, 4GB of GDDR5 memory, as well as a TDP of 75W.

Interestingly, both the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti’s TDP rating means that it is powerful enough to run straight off the board, negating the need for a PCI-e power connector. That said, cards made from Nvidia partners will still require additional power to facilitate its custom coolers as well as overclocking. Much like the GTX 1060, both the 1050 cards will not be supporting SLi.

Performance-wise, the GTX 1050 is stated to be three times more powerful than the GTX 750. According to the benchmark results provided by Nvidia, the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti will be targeting the mid to high settings in games.

The GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti will have a recommended retail price of USD109 (RM457) and USD139 (RM583) respectively. Both cards will be available on the 25th of October. Unfortunately, neither cards will be getting the Founders Edition treatment, so partner boards are the way to go with the GTX 1050.

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NVIDIA wants gamers to Play the Future with its groundbreaking graphics technology

346

Having a gaming GPU isn’t just all about having the fastest performance nor the most power saving hardware, NVIDIA has just showed off the power of its GeForce GTX 980Ti graphics card last week in Singapore on how it could make stunning graphics quality and particles in games while not compromising in performance, the company’s new GPU will be powering the new Batman Arkham Knight game.

During the event, partners, dealers and medias were reminded by the company’s successful GameWorks API that developers could use to create more immersive and stunning graphics in games. For instance, HairWorks renders every strand of human hair or animal fur rather than just a single texture, Hybrid Ray Traced Shadows renders and produces natural shadows caused by lighting and with the help of NVIDIA PCSS (percentage closer soft shadows), shadows on subjects and the terrain are smoother than ever. Last but not the least, the GeForce GTX 900 series cards are Windows 10 and DirectX 12 ready.

NVIDIA has also taken the opportunity to introduce its G-SYNC notebooks in its regional event, in which we have also checked it out back in COMPUTEX 2015, these laptops from Aorus by GIGABYTE, ASUS, Clevo, Aftershock and MSI are one of the first notebooks to come with a 75Hz refresh rate display that delivers a lag free gaming experience.

If you haven’t checked out our GeForce GTX 980Ti review, head on
this link
 and you’ll find out why this is a pretty sick gaming graphics made for serious gamers.

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NVIDIA will be ending graphics card driver support for 32-bit systems

409

If you are using an NVIDIA graphics card and are on a 32-bit operating system, we have some bad news for you. The company has just announced that by the end of April, support for 32-bit systems will end and users will have to get an upgrade in order to get driver updates for their cards.

If you are a gamer, then you are probably already using a 64-bit version of Windows. If that’s the case, you have nothing to worry about. However, if you are on 32-bit Windows, you and a good number of people will not be able to update your drivers, which will bring about two problems. The first is that your graphics card will not be optimized for the latest games and will not benefit from the performance boost of older games. The second is that you will not be protected from any exploits or security breaches that might affect your graphics card.

Support for cards in both the GTX-series and Fermi are the cards that will stop receiving support. Systems that will be affected by this decision are 32-bit versions of Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Linux and FreeBSD. Make sure you update your Windows to 64-bit before the end of April.

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NVIDIA will nerf RTX 3060, and introduce special cards for crypto mining

783

NVIDIA
announced
 earlier in the day that they would be reducing the performance of the upcoming
 RTX 3060 GPU
. The purpose: to deter folks Ethereum miners from buying up all units of the much-anticipated card.

To be more specific, the cards will just be less efficient for mining cryptocurrency by reducing its hash rate for Ethereum mining by 50 percent. The card will still be just as potent when it comes to running games.

To address an increasingly larger crypto mining customer base, NVIDIA is also offering a new Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) cards that offer optimized efficiency for that purpose, but won’t actually handle graphics. NVIDIA claims that the introduction of CMP will not impact the availability of their GeForce GPUs.

Here’s to hoping these cards actually see the light and day and prove enough for miners to stop hogging gaming GPUs. The RTX 3060 is priced from
 $329
 (about RM1,330) and should arrive this February 25.

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Nvidia will reveal the GTX1080 Ti on the 28th of February

299

What’s better than a single graphics card related event? Two graphics card related events! Nvidia is obviously not going to let AMD hog the spotlight with its Vega graphics cards as the company will reveal the GTX1080 Ti on the 28th of February as well.

Just recently, Nvidia added a countdown clock to its GeForce website that slowly ticks down towards the 28th of February. While that in itself doesn’t outright state that the GTX 1080 Ti will indeed be behind the countdown, VideoCardz has discovered mentions of the GTX1080 Ti hidden in the countdown clock’s source code. If you’re looking to find the source code yourself right now, it appears that Nvidia has since removed mentions of the card from the code.

With Nvidia also holding its own graphics card event on the 28th of February, it be interesting to see who’s going to come out on top in this “graphics card conference wars.” Whatever the case, GDC 2017 is looking to be mighty interesting this year.

Source:
VideoCardz
,
GeForce

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Nvidia will settle the GTX 970 false advertising lawsuit

335

Remember how the GTX 970 was advertised as having 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, but it eventually turns out that the card only came with 3.5GB of RAM? Well, the class action lawsuit that was filed against Nvidia for this issue has been completed, and Nvidia has agreed to a preliminary settlement.

Nvidia’s decision to settle the lawsuit means that the company will be paying USD30 to individual buyers of the GTX 970 card. Furthermore, Nvidia will also be covering USD1.3 million in lawyer’s fees. Those who are entitled to the USD30 settlement is limited to U.S. residents or entities that purchased a GTX 970 in the U.S. from the defendants, their partners or their authorized retailers prior to August 24, 2016. In other words, unless you bought your GTX 970 from the U.S., you’re probably not going to get the payment.

Graphics card manufacturers such as Asus, EVGA and Gigabyte were also named in the lawsuit, so it appears that they might be required to come out with some form of compensation as well.

Source:
Polygon
,
Top Class Actions

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Nvidia's 3GB GTX 1060 is now available

326

Back in July, we’ve reported about how Nvidia was rumoured to be repackaging the 3GB version of the GTX 1060 as the GTX 1050 instead. It turns out those rumours are false, as Nvidia has announced that the 3GB GTX 1060 is now available for purchase.

In terms of specifications, the difference between the 3GB card and the 6GB card is rather minimal. Apart from the obvious VRAM difference, the 3GB card will carry only 1152 CUDA Cores, as opposed to the 6GB card’s 1280 CUDA Cores. Besides that, everything else is largely the same, from the card’s core and boost clock, to the memory clock speed, and even the card’s TDP.

Needless to say, the 3GB GTX 1060 will also have a different price tag. The 3GB card will have a suggested retail price of USD 199 (RM 798), which is USD 50 cheaper than the 6GB GTX 1060’s USD 249 (RM 999) price tag.

Source:
Anandtech

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NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX980 unveiled-increased power, graphics quality and supports VR gaming

236

NVIDIA has unveiled its most powerful gaming graphics card yet in its regional briefing, the GeForce GTX980 now punches more horsepower under its hood and introduces a great amount of features to boost gaming graphics quality.

The GeForce GTX 980 is the world’s fastest GPU, yet with a TDP of just 165W, it’s also the most efficient. This remarkable combination of performance and energy efficiency is all made possible thanks to NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture. Maxwell GPUs have been designed to deliver 2x the performance/watt of prior generation GeForce GPUs.

Maxwell introduces a major speed bump in its Memory Clock and Bandwidth from the previous Kepler chipset and NVIDIA has included much more CUDA cores on the GeForce GTX980 this time, which results in producing extremely beautiful graphics yet with increased performance.

MFAA (Multi-Frame Sampled Anti Aliasing) is also introduced to further enhance gaming graphics detail, which combines multiple AA sample positions to produce a result that looks like higher quality anti-aliasing but with better performance.

GeForce GPUs will also support Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), bringing the crispness of higher resolutions like 4K to gamers’ existing displays. The GeForce ecosystem also remains the most innovative, with features like ShadowPlay, which now supports recording at resolutions up to 4K at 60 fps.

For game developers, NVIDIA has also introduced the GameWorks SDK to further enhance graphics quality for their games to make full potential of the new GeForce GPUs. Developers will be able to make their games look more realistic with features such as HairWorks and PhysX particles.

The greatest hit feature would be the VR Direct, GeForce GPUs will be able to perform on virtual reality gaming at a low 25ms response time. We were being treated to the Oculus Rift and it’s pretty responsive, the 3D graphical effect is stunning and you won’t feel dizzy at all thanks to its extremely fast response time.

The new GeForce GTX980 and GTX970 GPUs ships now, expect them to pop up at local retail stores already but you certainly won’t be able to do virtual reality yet.


Nvidia's GTX 1050 Ti specifications supposedly leaked

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It appears that the GTX 1050 is following the GTX 1080’s footsteps as rumours are going around that the GTX 1050 will be receiving a Ti version as well.

According to Benchlife, it appears that the GTX 1050 will come with the Pascal GP107-400 GPU. It will have a CUDA core count of 786, which is a 140 core increase over the base GTX 1050. Apart from the CUDA core count, the GTX 1050 Ti will also come with 4GB of VRAM. Curiously, the base clock and boost clock of the GTX 1050 Ti appears to be lower than the standard GTX 1050, sporting a base clock of 1290 MHz and 1382 MHz. For comparison, the GTX 1050 will have a base clock and boost clock of 1354 MHz and 1455 MHz respectively.

Nvidia is expected to launch both the GTX 1050 Ti mid-October, while the GTX 1050 itself will launch in late-October. As Nvidia has not officially announce either cards, no prices were given for both cards at the moment.

Source:
BenchLife

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NVIDIA's IRay technology brings virtual environments to life with photorealism

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2016 seems to be the happening year for virtual reality and various technologies along the same line. With CES and MWC over, VR still shows no signs of slowing down in terms of development by multiple manufacturers worldwide. Last week, Microsoft announced at its Build keynote that HoloLens will start shipping out to developers. This time around, NVIDIA is joining the ranks of those who have made use of such technology, introducing the IRay.

Imagine putting on a VR headset and find yourself in a house which you’re planning to purchase, or viewing a vehicle’s interior, all in photorealism glory. NVIDIA’s IRay technology is able to create interactive virtual worlds with unparalleled fidelity. With the technology, users can create and simulate photorealistic virtual environments.

NVIDIA achieves photorealism with IRay technology by simulating the physical behavior of light and materials. Through that, the results reflect real-world behaviors, making users experience and immerse in a near life-like environment through their own eyes just by strapping on a VR headset. What do you think of NVIDIA’s development of IRay technology? Let us know your thoughts at the comments section below!

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NVIDIA’s Jetson Xavier is about to drive autonomous cars and robots to the next level

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At NVIDIA’s COMPUTEX press conference today, apart from learning the growth of the PC gaming market, NVIDIA President and CEO Jensen Huang covered the topic of autonomous learning and showed off the Jetson Xavier, which is going to be NVIDIA’s next big effort in powering autonomous robots and driving, the Jetson Xavier comprises of a Volta Tensor 8-Core GPU, dual NVDLA deep learning accelerators, an image processor, a video processor and a vision processor.

In terms of compute power, the Jetson Xavier is capable of managing over 30 trillion operations per second, which Jensen claims it to be even more powerful than a Titan Xp and a $10,000 workstation, while only requiring an impressively low 30W power output to operate properly. In the event, an impressive video demo of how the Xavier SoC is going to help improve the accuracy of autonomous driving and robotic operations were shown to the audience, which looks pretty convincing.

Developers interested in developing apps and robotics with the Jetsen Xavier can purchase the devkit starting August with a price tag of $1,299 (RM5,164).

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