GPU

AMD was supposed to unveil the RX 6700 XT at CES, but the company is still not sure how to market this GPU. Word on the street is that the current test samples can easily beat the RTX 3060 12 GB models from Nvidia, and it even bests the RTX 3060 Ti in select games. However, we might not get to see these cards launched sooner than May.

Back in mid-2020, laptop OEMs explained that the inclusion of dGPUs more powerful than the RTX 2060 would not really make sense on Ryzen 4000H systems, as their performance would be limited by the 8x PCIe 3.0 lanes. However, the Ryzen 5000H systems still use only 8x PCIe 3.0 lanes, yet they come with up to an RTX 3080 dGPU option. Something is not adding up.

NVIDIA and OEMs will no longer specify whether a given Ampere Mobile GPU is a Max-Q or a Max-P variant. Ampere Mobile will be offered in a range of TGPs, and it will be the OEMs' discretion to decide which third generation Max-Q specs and TGG value should be used. This can confuse end users as a higher Watt RTX 3060 Mobile can potentially outperform a lower Watt RTX 3080 Mobile for a given workload.

NVIDIA may have got stuck into the Ampere architecture over the last few months, but it is reputedly going to have another crack at releasing Turing cards. In fact, the company and board partners will re-release the GeForce RTX 2060 and GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER for €300 and €400, respectively. If that is the case, then it would make the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER more expensive option than the GeForce RTX 3060.

A last-minute configuration change for the GA106 GPU seemed to have confused NVIDIA's add-in board (AiB) partners with respect to the RTX 3060's specifications, particularly the core clocks. We are also getting to know that the RTX 3060 may not arrive in a Founders Edition, and the render shown during NVIDIA's CES presentation was just a mockup.

China's progress with the home-grown CPUs and GPUs is relentless. The new Big Island general purpose GPUs produced by Tianshu Zhixin are able to take advantage of TSMC's 7 nm tech and provide a competitive price/performance ratio. Internal benchmarks reveal that the Big Island GPUs are not yet on par with Nvidia's A100 or AMD's Instinct MI100, but the progress is remarkable.

NVIDIA's board partners have begun announcing GeForce RTX 30 series graphics card for the Mini-ITX form factor. Currently, Gainward, MSI and Palit have announced single fan versions of the GeForce RTX 3060, which has 12 GB of VRAM. All cards offer memory clock speeds of 15 Gbps and NVIDIA's GA106-300 GPU.

Sapphire has introduced a passively-cooled version of the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, which it has called the GPRO X070. The company intends professional users to purchase the card, but it does feature four display outputs. There is also an Efficiency Mode BIOS for running the RX 5700 XT at reduced clock speeds.

Rocket Lake-S will use the Tiger Lake Xe graphics core, but it will be named as UHD Graphics 730 (24 EUs) and UHD Graphics 750 (32 EUs), according to leaked driver listings. A UHD Graphics P750 for the enterprise is also seen. Rocket Lake-S will only offer up to 32 EUs in order to accommodate the larger CPU cores.

Gigabyte has added a sort-of-new product to its graphics card range in the form of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC PRO 8G (rev 2.0). Desktop PC builders will likely be intrigued by the revisions that have been made to this RTX 3060 Ti variant, but it appears the biggest difference to the original model is a height reduction.

Tipster @TheGolox recently claimed that Samsung is working on Exynos chips for desktop. If true, this would mean that we might soon see another entrant in the ARM on PC space, alongside the Snapdragon 8cx and Apple M1.

AV1 is a video codec rated to enhance file compression compared to its current alternatives. Google has become its a major proponent, to the extent that it is now reportedly insisting that manufacturers need to have it enabled in devices with compatible SoCs if they want to use the Android 10 for TV interface.

NVIDIA appears to have silently announced a GeForce GT 1010 GPU earlier this week. The GT 1010 is a Pascal card featuring the 14 nm GP108 GPU similar to the GT 1030. The GT 1010 has only 256 CUDA cores enabled, supports 2 GB GDDR5 VRAM, and has a TDP of 30 W. Availability information is not known yet.

NVIDIA has all but confirmed that the 2021 HP Omen 15 gaming laptop will be powered by RTX 3000-series graphics. According to a clearly premature sales listing on bestbuy.com, they will comprise the RTX 3070 Max-Q hinted at in previous tips. Its latest leak puts its starting price at US$1600.

Initially supposed to hit the market in mid-2020, the DisplayPort 2.0 monitors got delayed by the global pandemic and are now expected to become available in the second half of 2021. DP 2.0 is clearly superior to HDMI 2.0, as it offers an 80 Gbps bandwidth that can support 4K resolutions @240 Hz with uncompressed HDR color depth or 16K @60Hz with DSC.

Although they have different colors and frequencies (minor factory overclocks, of course), the two new ZOTAC video cards that use the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 as foundation stay within the 170 W TDP value of the reference design. Thankfully, since these are (almost) low-end parts, finding them should not be a problem.

EVGA and ZOTAC have followed ASUS in increasing the price of their NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series custom cards. The changes range from 4% to 23%, which correlate to price increases of between US$70 and US$350. Overall, prices hikes average 10% across over 30 cards.

According to AMD and NVIDIA, there will not be an uptick in GPU availability for a few months yet. Stock levels of the GeForce RTX 30 series will remain 'lean' until at least May, according to NVIDIA, while AMD believes that things will improve once the impact of COVID lessens.

XMG has announced that the 2021 iterations of its PRO and NEO 15/17 laptops will have new, slim cases in addition to new specs. The NEO 15 and 17 also boasts fresh Ryzen 9 5900HX or 7 5800H AMD platforms, while the PROs stick with a Core i7 processor so as to be among the first on the market to combine RTX 3000 graphics with Thunderbolt 3.

NVIDIA has introduced a new member to the RTX 30 family, the RTX 3060 12 GB. The RTX 3060 is intended at those who are looking to upgrade from a GTX 1060-class card and features 3,584 CUDA cores, 12 GB of GDDR6 192-bit memory, and will be the first RTX 30 card to support resizable BAR. The RTX 3060 12 GB will be available in late February starting from US$329.

The latest iteration of the 15.6-inch Acer Predator Helios 300 could easily be mistaken for the last. However, the OEM asserts that it is rated for even smoother gameplay thanks to its new GPU and display option. Can these new specs help it blow the cobwebs of 2020 away?

Chinese electric automaker NIO announced that its latest electric vehicle ET7 will use NVIDIA Drive Orin SoC for AI-assisted driving. The ET7 will use Orin in a cluster of four to form the Adam supercomputer, which is capable of processing 8 GB of data from the vehicle's 33 sensors each second. The ET7 is certified to meet ISO 26262 ASIL-D safety standards and will ship in 2022.

NVIDIA plans to release Ampere-based graphics cards with Ultra branding, of which the RTX 3060 Ultra may be the first. The first leak of the RTX 3060 Ultra confirms that it will have 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM and that it should arrive later this month.

The RTX 3080 Max-P would only be a few percent faster than the RTX 3060 Ti desktop GPU, since it appears to be limited to 115 W TGP by default. On the other hand, the 80 W RTX 3080 Max-Q would be as fast as the GTX 1080 Ti desktop model, and 74% slower than the RTX 3080 desktop GPU.

It has been reported that AMD will launch the Radeon RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT graphics cards by the end of March. Apparently, both parts will feature 12 GB of GDDR6 memory and utilize Navi 22 GPUs. However, rival Nvidia appears to have a busy few months planned with rumors of numerous new GeForce RTX 30 series cards springing up.

DG2 refers to second-gen discrete graphics solutions from Intel, said to launch in the first half of 2021 (1H2021) at the earliest. It is rumored to have an increased execution unit (EU) count compared to its Xe Max predecessor. According to code allegedly found in a new driver from the OEM, this may indeed be the case.

Asus has revealed that a wide range of its premium graphics cards and motherboards have had their prices increased. For example, the Asus ROG Strix Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 White OC Edition Gaming card now costs over US$2,100, and the ROG Strix LC AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT that was US$899.99 at launch is now priced at US$1,079.99.

NVIDIA may distill-down RTX features to the x050 series with the GA107-based RTX 3050 GPU. A Lenovo PSREF page for the Legion R5 desktop PC confirms RTX 3050, RTX 3050 Ti, and RTX 3060 12 GB offerings are on the anvil in addition to several Turing and also an AMD Radeon RX 5500 option.

Geekbench listings of the upcoming Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo GX551QS and HP Omen 15 laptops featuring RTX 3080 Mobile and RTX 3070 Mobile GPUs, respectively confirm some of the specs of these mobile Ampere parts that we've already known so far. The RTX 3080 Mobile is a complete GA104 GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores. The RTX 3070 Mobile is also a GA104 part but with 5,120 CUDA cores.

New AMD variants viz. XTXH, XLE, and Nashira Point have been discovered on the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) website. It is not yet clear whether these are Navi 21 or Navi 22 parts. However, the XTXH variant could potentially be a Navi 21 GPU with HBM2(E) memory support.

It has been rumored that Nvidia is working on even more Ampere-based graphics cards to join the growing GeForce RTX 30 series. Although the names for the two new parts are not currently known, it has been suggested that they could be the GeForce RTX 3070 Super and GeForce RTX 3080 Super cards.

AMD could be offering multi-chip module (MCM) designs in GPUs in the near future. A patent filed in 2019 details how an MCM design can help lower costs and improve yields. Since most GPU-bound programs work best with monolithic cores, AMD's patent describes how the MCM design can be made oblivious to the CPU thereby alleviating the need to rewrite code to take advantage of this design.

A Dutch company called SKIKK has started offering gaming laptops with mobile variants of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080. The entry-level device costs €1,699 (US$2,087) and features an RTX 3060 GPU with an Intel Core i7-10875H CPU. Delivery for the SKIKK GeForce 30 Series laptops is expected to start in Q1 2021.

We ran several synthetic GPU benchmarks in our Asus VivoBook Flip 14 TP470 review unit and found that Intel's new Xe Max dGPU offers perceivable gains over the similar Xe Graphics G7 with 96 EUs and the GeForce GTX 1050 while being significantly faster than a GeForce MX350. Xe Max also seems to offer large gains compared to the Radeon RX Vega 8 in Renoir APUs. However, Intel looks to be playing catch-up with the pre-sample MX450 numbers in our database.

Specs of NVIDIA's Ampere successor codenamed Lovelace seem to be already available and all signs point to a monster of a GPU. Going by initial rumors, it seems that the AD102 GPU will have 2x the number of GPCs compared to Turing and a 71% higher CUDA core count compared to Ampere, which seemingly yields nearly 66 TFLOPs of FP32 horsepower.

MSI has started rolling out a new AGESA update for its B550 and X570 motherboards, enabling Resizable BAR support for older Ryzen systems, as well as NVIDIA Ampere GPUs.

The blog CoreTeks claims to have sifted the release notes for AMD's latest firmware patches for some nuggets of potential gold on this company's upcoming high-performance GPUs and APUs. They include at least 1 Rembrandt variant, as well as the successor to the MI100 Instinct. They are thought to be based on the Zen3 and RDNA 3 IPs respectively.

Both ASUS and MSI are apparently working on bringing Smart Access Memory (or Resizable BAR) to a wider range of hardware configurations than Big Navi and Ryzen 5000. We're now seeing SAM on B450 boards and on systems with Ryzen 3000 and NVIDIA GPUs.

NVIDIA has unveiled its plans for CES 2021. The company will make an announcement on January 12 at 09:00 PST. Rumour has it that NVIDIA plans to bulk out its RTX 30 series with new desktop cards like the RTX 3060, along with its first foray into Ampere-based laptop graphics cards.

The GS76 Stealth could be one of the first gaming laptops to feature the Tiger Lake-H processors coupled with the mobile RTX 3000 GPUs. Apart from the redesigned chassis, the GS76 could also get a 360 Hz screen (still in validation process) and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity. MSI is also introducing a new E16 Flip convertible to the Summit lineup. This one comes with carbon fiber chassis and integrates Tiger Lake-U plus Nvidia GTX GPUs.

An Acer Swift SF314-43 laptop has been discovered on Geekbench being tested for its graphics prowess with the help of an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U, which is from the upcoming Zen 2-based Lucienne family. It seems the Radeon iGPU component is capable of hitting a maximum clock of 1.80 GHz, which will be handy for some casual gaming on the Ryzen 5000 laptop.

FinalWire has added support for the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti in the latest stable update of AIDA64 Extreme. However, the utility also now supports the GeForce RTX 3050, GeForce RTX 3060, GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, all of which NVIDIA is yet to announce.

Despite the production problems and shortages, Nvidia is planning for new RTX 3000 releases in early 2021. Previously believed to launch in January, the RTX 3080 20 GB version that is essentially an RTX 3090 with 4 less GB of VRAM should land in mid to late February, according to new reports. Nvidia is instead pushing the lower-mid-range RTX 3060 cards with 12 GB for an early January release.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 series, and the AMD Ryzen 5000 range have all fallen victim to scalping activities, with an analysis report detailing just how much profit scalpers are making from these new GPUs and CPUs. Sales of just the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 have raked in over US$8 million profit for scalpers and eBay.

Gigabyte has just held a launch event for its AORUS brand of products where the prices for its AMD Radeon RX 6800 Series-based boards were revealed. Unfortunately for gamers, there seems to be a high premium between Gigabyte’s prices and the MSRPs offered up by AMD, with the AORUS Radeon RX 6800 XT Master board costing a hefty US$899.

Studio Wildcard recently announced a sequel to ARK: Survival Evolved, Ark 2, set to release on PC and next-generation consoles, at The Game Awards. While the dinosaur-hunting survival game was a surprising candidate for the sequel treatment, Vin Diesel's starring role in the trailer was even more unexpected.

It is possible to believe in real-time ray tracing while also at the same time acknowledging that the RTX 3000-series GPUs have, basically, no place in that future.