Do you really need a high end graphics card?
Forget the high-end stuff, the mid-range is where it’s at. There’s never been a better time to drop £200 on a new graphics card. Allow us to explain why it’s time to upgrade.
AMD and Nvidia have recently released new mid-range graphics cards, devices that are specifically designed and priced to hit the most profitable segment of the graphics market. They’re both remarkably powerful pieces of silicon.
We’ve certainly not seen anything quite as capable hit this price point, and it could tempt a few more people than usual to part with what seems like a lot of money for a mid-range pixel-pusher.
Opening old wounds
It’s not just about the cards, though. There was more than a little political manoeuvring from AMD and Nvidia in order to get them both out into the high street. Initially, AMD was to have brought its Radeon HD 4890 out first, at the beginning of April, but it’s telling that Nvidia then quickly shunted its own release forward to coincide with the competition’s launch.
That will definitely not have pleased AMD. AMD could spin this as good news, of course: it certainly means that Nvidia is definitely taking it seriously as a threat now. Not so in the days after the release of the fantastic GeForce G80 GPU and the terrible failure, much later on, of AMD’s R600 chip. Nvidia built up a seemingly unassailable lead throughout the 8 and 9 series cards – but then came the 48xx series from AMD, and with it a new philosophy.
The firm changed its focus to concentrate on elegant, affordable chips for the low-and mid-range that were still scalable enough to deploy in powerful single PCB, multi-GPU configurations. The resulting 4870×2 card showed AMD’s competition how to do multi-GPU properly, forcing Nvidia to produce large, power-hungry and expensive – though fantastically fast – chips in order to maintain the high-end of the market.
With AMD’s cheaper 4850 and 4870 cards happily occupying the profitable mid-range, Nvidia has obviously had to make a serious effort with this latest launch. Hence the rejigged release schedule. Both cards are revised versions of existing chip architectures, the 4890 being basically an overclocked 4870 with a redesign on the component side.
It’s clear from looking at the fattened capacitors on this latest board that it’s ripe for further overclocking, and the stock chip offers a fair amount of headroom for the serial tweakers.
The same can be said of the GTX 275, the result of a mating between the GTX 260 and GTX 285 cards. The odd 448-bit memory bus is still there from the 260, but the power of the 285 has been replicated in this much cheaper card and Zotac’s tweaks have reaped tangible benefits in terms of its performance.
It’s strange – given that the GTX 285 was such an expensive luxury – that it was the one of the few cards that generated some money for Nvidia. The company will need to sell plenty of the GTX 275, though, as it can’t be making much money on each card with the still-expensive GT200 GPU continuing to beat at its core.
Luckily for Nvidia, the price point, power and bundled extras of the new card mean that it’s got my vote: AMD’s rival can’t quite match the PhysX tech and implementation. With both cards humming away on our test bench, it’s clear that bringing the launch date forward was an excellent move for Nvidia.
Ion 2 Said to Double Ion’s Graphics Power
You may already have heard that nVidia will be supporting VIA Nano CPUs with Ion 2 but you may not have heard the latest rumour, originating from Fudzilla, that the updated platform will feature notably more graphics power than its predecessor.
According to Fudzilla Ion 2 will feature double the 16-shader’s offered by the 9400M graphics chip in Ion, to 32 – or possibly more – giving it a decent graphics boost. CUDA applications will also see an improvement, although as there are relatively few that I’d expect anyone working from a netbook to use on such a machine so that’s not much of a selling point. However, Windows 7 will be able to leverage GPU-acceleration so the added power Ion 2 is said to be brining may well be welcome come October.
Also notably, Ion 2 is, thanks to a die shrink, supposed to offer this increased performance without an increase in power draw. There’s also the potential that in reducing the die size of Ion 2, nVidia will be able to bump the price down a little and, as such, make its platform that bit more tempting to manufacturers and consumers alike.
Ion2 is expected to launch before the year is out, so we should only be waiting a few months to see if this speculation carries any weight.
Link: Fudzilla.
Asus EAH4870X2 – Worlds Fastest Graphic cards with 2G Memory
Asus today introduced the graphical solution for the latest generation of AMD dual RV770XT GPUs – the Asus EAH4870X2/HTDI/2G – equipped with double GPUs and a massive 2G of on-board memory. The Asus EAH4870X2 TOP will be released soon with impressive performance results to provide superb gaming performance; and both the Asus EAH4870X2 TOP/HTDI/2G and EAH4870X2/HTDI/2G are slated to be upgraded soon – with both cards being equipped with a specially designed fansink for efficient heat dissipation.The Asus EAH4870X2 Series brings the power of graphical “supercomputing” to gamers – setting a new standard for visual computing. With the new TeraScale graphics engine and CrossFireX technology, immersive, cinematic gaming experiences will redefine gameplay and take HD gaming to a brand new level. With the Asus EAH4870X2 Series, users will also be able to watch Blu-ray movies and play HD content with incredible visual fidelity and breakthrough efficiency – all without compromising performance.
Asus EAH4870X2 – Worlds Fastest Graphic cards with 2G Memory
Asus today introduced the graphical solution for the latest generation of AMD dual RV770XT GPUs – the Asus EAH4870X2/HTDI/2G – equipped with double GPUs and a massive 2G of on-board memory. The Asus EAH4870X2 TOP will be released soon with impressive performance results to provide superb gaming performance; and both the Asus EAH4870X2 TOP/HTDI/2G and EAH4870X2/HTDI/2G are slated to be upgraded soon – with both cards being equipped with a specially designed fansink for efficient heat dissipation.The Asus EAH4870X2 Series brings the power of graphical “supercomputing” to gamers – setting a new standard for visual computing. With the new TeraScale graphics engine and CrossFireX technology, immersive, cinematic gaming experiences will redefine gameplay and take HD gaming to a brand new level. With the Asus EAH4870X2 Series, users will also be able to watch Blu-ray movies and play HD content with incredible visual fidelity and breakthrough efficiency – all without compromising performance.
Asus EAH4870X2 – Worlds Fastest Graphic cards with 2G Memory
Asus today introduced the graphical solution for the latest generation of AMD dual RV770XT GPUs – the Asus EAH4870X2/HTDI/2G – equipped with double GPUs and a massive 2G of on-board memory. The Asus EAH4870X2 TOP will be released soon with impressive performance results to provide superb gaming performance; and both the Asus EAH4870X2 TOP/HTDI/2G and EAH4870X2/HTDI/2G are slated to be upgraded soon – with both cards being equipped with a specially designed fansink for efficient heat dissipation.The Asus EAH4870X2 Series brings the power of graphical “supercomputing” to gamers – setting a new standard for visual computing. With the new TeraScale graphics engine and CrossFireX technology, immersive, cinematic gaming experiences will redefine gameplay and take HD gaming to a brand new level. With the Asus EAH4870X2 Series, users will also be able to watch Blu-ray movies and play HD content with incredible visual fidelity and breakthrough efficiency – all without compromising performance.
Intel Larrabee graphics card details emerge
AMD and Nvidia naturally say Intel’s graphics chips will not be able to outperform their own. They point out flaws, such as the fact that Intel will be using software to do a lot of the rendering. Besides the performance challenge, Intel is also needs to match the manufacturing cost and power consumption of current GPUs.
Larrabee’s main selling point is that it is x86, and many programmers know how to take advantage of that technology.
Sourced from the Wall Street Journal; original article “Intel to Offer Details Of Chip Technology” by Don Clark
Intel Larrabee graphics card details emerge
AMD and Nvidia naturally say Intel’s graphics chips will not be able to outperform their own. They point out flaws, such as the fact that Intel will be using software to do a lot of the rendering. Besides the performance challenge, Intel is also needs to match the manufacturing cost and power consumption of current GPUs.
Larrabee’s main selling point is that it is x86, and many programmers know how to take advantage of that technology.
Sourced from the Wall Street Journal; original article “Intel to Offer Details Of Chip Technology” by Don Clark
AMD Fusion details leaked: 40/32 nm, dual-core CPU, RV800 graphics
It appears that AMD’s engineers in Dresden, Markham and Sunnyvale have been making lots of trips to little island of Formosa lately – the home of contract manufacturer TSMC, which will be producing Fusion CPUs. Our sources indicated that both companies are quite busy laying out the productions scenarios of AMD’s first CPU+GPU chip.
The first Fusion processor is code-named Shrike, which will, if our sources are right, consist of a dual-core Phenom CPU and an ATI RV800 GPU core. This news is actually a big surprise, as Shrike was originally rumored to debut as a combination of a dual-core Kuma CPU and a RV710-based graphics unit. A few more quarters of development time gave AMD time to continue working on a low-end RV800-based core to be integrated with Fusion. RV800 chips will be DirectX 10.1 compliant and are expected to deliver a bit more than just a 55 nm-40 nm dieshrink.
While Shrike will debut as a 40 nm chip, the processor is scheduled to transition to 32 nm at the beginning of 2010 – not much later than Intel will introduce 32 nm – and serve as a stop-gap before the next-gen CPU core, code-named “Bulldozer” arrives. The Bulldozer-based chip, code-named “Falcon”, will debut with TSMC’s 32nm SOI process, instead of the originally planned 45 nm.
As Fusion is shaping up right, we should expect the chip be become the first half-node CPU (between 45 and 32 nm) in a very long time.
AMD Fusion details leaked: 40/32 nm, dual-core CPU, RV800 graphics
It appears that AMD’s engineers in Dresden, Markham and Sunnyvale have been making lots of trips to little island of Formosa lately – the home of contract manufacturer TSMC, which will be producing Fusion CPUs. Our sources indicated that both companies are quite busy laying out the productions scenarios of AMD’s first CPU+GPU chip.
The first Fusion processor is code-named Shrike, which will, if our sources are right, consist of a dual-core Phenom CPU and an ATI RV800 GPU core. This news is actually a big surprise, as Shrike was originally rumored to debut as a combination of a dual-core Kuma CPU and a RV710-based graphics unit. A few more quarters of development time gave AMD time to continue working on a low-end RV800-based core to be integrated with Fusion. RV800 chips will be DirectX 10.1 compliant and are expected to deliver a bit more than just a 55 nm-40 nm dieshrink.
While Shrike will debut as a 40 nm chip, the processor is scheduled to transition to 32 nm at the beginning of 2010 – not much later than Intel will introduce 32 nm – and serve as a stop-gap before the next-gen CPU core, code-named “Bulldozer” arrives. The Bulldozer-based chip, code-named “Falcon”, will debut with TSMC’s 32nm SOI process, instead of the originally planned 45 nm.
As Fusion is shaping up right, we should expect the chip be become the first half-node CPU (between 45 and 32 nm) in a very long time.
NVIDIA announces new GeForce GPUs
Specification (9500G):
