GPU

Much was made of NVIDIA's apparent decision to block Hardware Unboxed from having access to GPU review samples. The company has already done an about-turn on the matter though, possibly because of the outcry from reviewers and fans.

Asus has revealed its ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card with the appropriate tagline “a liquid-cooled leviathan”. The impressive-looking part takes the RX 6900 XT from AMD and throws in abundant customizable RGB lighting, a 240 mm external radiator, and enough cables for a PC builder to shake a stick at.

Due to its limited TGP, the RTX 3070 laptop GPU appears to lag behind the desktop-grade RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 models. However, the upcoming Ampere-based mobile GPU shows strong performance gains over the Turing models, as it is almost 100% faster than the RTX 2070 Max-Q and RTX 2080 Max-Q. It also almost matches the RTX 2080 Ti desktop-grade GPU.

The GeForce RTX 3050 and GeForce RTX 3060 will be based on different GPUs, according to updated PCI IDs. Apparently, the RTX 3050 could be the only card to utilise the GA107 GPU, while NVIDIA will use its GA106 GPU for the GeForce RTX 3060.

NVIDIA has 8 GB and 16 GB editions of the GeForce RTX 3070 mobile in development, PCI IDs have confirmed. Expectedly, there will be Max-P and Max-Q versions of the GA104-M based GeForce RTX 3070, as there will be for the GeForce RTX 3060. The latter will be based on the GA106M GPU.

Another hint of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has been seen online. This time, the card has been added to the PCI ID repository, seemingly confirming that NVIDIA has based it on the company's GA102 GPU. The RTX 3080 Ti is thought to have up to 10,496 CUDA cores, 20 GB of GDDR6X VRAM and a 320 W TDP.

This card features a shorter but taller PCB that should be within the 180 mm length limit for small form-factor builds like the Intel NUC 9 kits. It features only an 8-pin power connector, yet it can still be overclocked above the reference clocks on the Founders' Edition model.

We had a brief time exploring the vast expanse of Cyberpunk 2077's Night City in full visual glory on a Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 GPU at 1440p and 4K resolutions. The game is perfectly playable without fancy ray tracing effects. However, without DLSS, expect frames in the single digits at 4K with RT on the RTX 3070.

AMD is reportedly discontinuing production of reference Radeon RX 6000 cards, which means that many gamers will never be able to own a Made by AMD Big Navi card. The current quantity of reference cards in circulation are a one-off release and further RX 6000 cards will only be made by AMD's AiB partners.

New RTX 30 series cards will be pouring onto the market soon, according to Manli. The board partner has registered the RTX 3050, RTX 3060, RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti with the EEC, just a month or so away from another expected NVIDIA hardware announcement. These four cards would take the RTX 30 product stack up to eight, but an RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3080 20 GB could be on the way too.

The AMD Radeon RX 6700M series will have larger dies than the RX 5700 XT, according to a new report. Expected to be built on Navi 22 GPUs, the RX 6700M series will do battle with the mobile forms of the RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 from early next year. RX 6700M cards may offer up to 40 Compute Units and 12 GB of VRAM.

The new AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card has been popping up in various reviews, and in one particularly grueling test the Navi 21 part showed off its exemplary average power consumption in gaming. The RX 6900 XT consumed more than 50 W less than the rival Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 FE and 25-30 W less than the RTX 3080 FE.

NVIDIA has announced that four new game titles coming this month will bring support for DLSS enabling all GeForce RTX GPUs to play them at 4K at 60 fps and above. Also, Minecraft with RTX is now coming out of beta and will include full path tracing and DLSS compatibility along with a built-in ray tracing benchmark. NVIDIA also claimed that the GeForce RTX platform is the best for playing Cyberpunk 2077.

Global shortage of GDDR6 is a dominant factor in the supply shortages being faced by AMD Radeon RX 5000, RX 6000, NVIDIA RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti GPUs with the situation likely to improve only around February 2021. The RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards with GDDR6X memory are somewhat less-impacted, but limited production from Samsung Foundry means that their availability is questionable at least till end of Q3 2020.

A future PS5 Pro console with a dual-CPU, dual-GPU implementation and with more RAM and storage could be in the works, if recent patent findings are to be considered. The patent envisages several dual CPU/GPU designs with the aim of distributing independent workloads to each cluster. Reports are also coming in that Sony may launch a PS5 Lite some time in H2 2021 to overcome availability issues of the current PS5 console.

An interesting Slug text-rendering test comparison has demonstrated how well the PlayStation 5 can deal with heavy processing workloads. The PS5 managed to produce a complex Royal font pixel fillrate of 4.5 gigapixels/s (GeForce RTX 2080: 3.1 gigapixels/s) and took just 0.33 ms to render all the pixels on a 4K screen with a “typical font”.

The first details of the GeForce RTX 3080 mobile have appeared online. Not only do they offer an insight into what to expect from high-end gaming laptops next year, but they also raise the question about the continued existence of merely a 10 GB edition of the desktop variant of the RTX 3080.

AMD could be offering several Navi 23 and Navi 24 mobile GPUs with a sub-100 W TGP target to power gaming laptops next year. Navi 23 may be offered in three TGP variants topping at 90 W while Navi 24 will come in two SKUs — one with a cTGP up to 50 W and another, a low-power variant at 25 W TGP.

It is quite ironic how AMD's Smart Access Memory (aka Resizable BAR) could help Intel and Nvidia regain some lost market shares. AMD offered to help its competitors with the Resizable BAR feature, yet Team Red may have hit a stone wall with the SAM support for Ryzen 3000 and older Zen-based CPUs. On the other hand, Intel-based motherboards supporting 6-year-old CPUs from the Haswell era have no problem benefiting from the Resizable BAR feature, and Nvidia is soon adding support for it, as well.

NVIDIA was thought to have killed off the 20 GB version of the RTX 3080, but MSI suggests that may not be the case. To date, the board partner has registered the RTX 3080 20 GB under its Suprim, Sea Hawk, Gaming Trio, Aero and Ventus series.

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is almost here, and it has shown that it can pretty much match NVIDIA's best efforts in Ashes of the Singularity. The RX 6900 XT gets within 3 FPS of the GeForce RTX 3090, despite being a third cheaper than NVIDIA's premier card.

The five new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti-based video cards by Asus cover all areas of desktop gaming, from the "hold nothing back" design of the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3060 Ti all the way down to the Dual GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Mini, a card that has been customized to be used in SFF enthusiast systems.

Although apparently slower than both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 by 19% and 4%, the upcoming AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (apparently a reference design board was used in the tests) is around 13% faster than the RX 6800 XT and no less than 35% faster than the RX 6800. However, it seems like the retail version will be faster.

The RTX 3060 Ti is only the start of the RTX 3060 family, according to NVIDIA. Announced via a blog post, NVIDIA is expected to bring at least the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 mobile to market from early next year. The company has also published its official benchmark results for the RTX 3060 Ti, which compares the cards against the RTX 2060 SUPER and RTX 2080 SUPER.

NVIDIA has announced the first GPU in the RTX 3060 family, the RTX 3060 Ti for US$399. The RTX 3060 Ti effectively replaces the RTX 2060 Super but is slated to offer more performance than the RTX 2080 Super at lower power draws. The RTX 3060 Ti will be available as a Founders Edition card from NVIDIA and as custom AiB cards from December 2 worldwide.

The release of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is right around the corner, and the upcoming GA104 is already flexing its muscles in CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan benchmarks. The RTX 3060 Ti comfortably beats out the RTX 2080 SUPER across the three tests and is a match for the AMD Radeon RX 6800. The RTX 3060 Ti is not far off the RTX 3070, either.

A set of AIB BIOSes accessed by Igorslab indicate that board partner Radeon RX 6700 XT could leverage the 7nm process to hit significantly higher clocks than existing Big Navi cards, meaning near-3 GHz overclocks on air cooling could become a reality.

AMD is struggling to fulfill orders for the new Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 desktop graphics cards. A leaked delivery situation form that allegedly comes from the Danish retailer Proshop details the dire straits Team Red appears to be in terms of delivering the RX 6800 XT and RX 6000. Just 0.47% of customers can expect to receive a Navi 21 card.

CD Projekt Red is running a competition for a single customised RTX 3080, but the regional restriction leaves us hoping that competitions for a similar design might be run in other markets.

The 12-pin power connector may have been removed from the RTX 3070 Founders Edition. The card remains out of stock in most countries, but NVIDIA has tweeted a marketing photo clearly showing the card with the conventional 8-pin connector.

Select X470 and B450 motherboards from ASRock and Gigabyte are already getting beta BIOS versions supporting the Ryzen 5000 CPUs with SAM function. MSI and Asus are also offering unofficial BIOS updates for testers. However, these are not stable versions by any means, so users are advised to wait for the official AGESA V2 1.1.0.0 BIOS releasing in January.

All those scalpers we have been hearing about may actually turn out to be crypto miners hoarding the new RTX 3000 cards for Ethereum mining farms. Analysts somehow discovered that Nvidia has already sold $175 million worth of RTX 3000 cards and most of these sales were made directly to crypto miners.

The XFX Speedster MERC319 AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT BLACK features a dual-BIOS design with overclocked speeds of up to 1925 MHz (base clock), 2110 MHz (game clock), and 2360 MHz (boost speed), all alongside 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. Sadly, this new graphics card is not in stock yet, but it should become available soon.

Early 3DMark results for the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti have made their way online, a week before its expected announcement. The results show NVIDIA's upcoming budget Ampere card offering 88% of the performance of the RTX 3070 at an expected 79% of the price.

There is a possibility of Apple enabling eGPU support via Thunderbolt 3 in M1-powered Macs with a future update to macOS 11. At the moment, eGPUs seem to be recognized by macOS 11 Big Sur, but they don't seem to provide any hardware acceleration due to lack of driver support.

The first Radeon RX 6900 XT from a board partner is here and is by ASRock. The card is merely a reference AMD design by another name though, with no ASRock branding or customisations to speak of. Custom RX 6900 XT cards should arrive after December 8, if there are any.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has been benchmarked in Ashes of the Singularity on the Crazy_1080p and Crazy_4K presets. Inevitably, people have been drawing comparisons between the RTX 3060 Ti and AMD's latest cards, and it does not lok good for NVIDIA's upcoming budget offering. The Radeon RX 6800 outperforms the RTX 3060 Ti across both presets, and by quite a margin.

AMD may have an answer to the RTX 3060 Ti, along with other budget cards from NVIDIA. Apparently, AMD is gearing to release the RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT, which will both use its Navi 22 GPUs. The cards will have 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM too and may arrive as early as January 2021.

Gigabyte has finally taken the lid off its new AORUS Gaming Boxes, confirming that they will feature NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. While both high-end Ampere GPUs will be held back by the performance limitations of Thunderbolt 3, the new AORUS Gaming Boxes are the first eGPUs with water cooling.

ASUS has registered multiple Radeon RX 6900 SKUs with the EEC in Russia, raising the possibility of AMD announcing a cheaper alternative to the RX 6900 XT. The RX 6900 has been listed seven times, all with 16 GB of VRAM. If it is an error, then the listing should mean that ASUS is planning to release plenty of RX 6900 XT SKUs, at the very least.

NVIDIA's next-generation mobile GPUs will be arriving from January 2021 and with AMD Ryzen 5000H series APUs, according to a new report. Apparently, NVIDIA has targeted a starting price of US$999 for RTX 3060-powered laptops and US$1,299 for RTX 3070 ones. Meanwhile, the RTX 3080 laptops will start at US$1,999. Intel Tiger Lake-H laptops with NVIDIA GPUs will be available, too.

AMD's 7nm Big Navi architecture continues to impress with strong overclock scaling. Overclocker Takukuo managed to push the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT to a remarkable 2.8 GHz under LN2, just 10 percent short of the world record for GPU clock speeds.

A board partner has revealed almost all the specifications of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which is supposedly due for release on December 2. The card will offer 4,864 CUDA cores on NVIDIA's GA104-200-A1 GPU, along with 8 GB of VRAM and a 448 GB/s memory bandwidth. The RTX 3060 Ti is expected to launch for US$399.

The release of the RTX 3060 Ti is believed to be a few weeks away, but the card has already been benchmarked on Geekbench. The upcoming Ampere card averaged a score of 326,396 in OpenCL, putting it 10% behind the RTX 3070. Geekbench has seemingly confirmed several of the specifications of the RTX 3060 Ti, too.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition has made a photographic debut in a handful of images that show the Ampere graphics card from the front and rear, and even the Nvidia-branded packaging makes an appearance. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, which is expected to launch on December 2, looks identical to the RTX 3070 Founders Edition.

AMD's Scott Herkelman hinted that the company is working to offer an open implementation of super-sampling in partnership with Intel and NVIDIA that works across PCs and consoles unlike NVIDIA's proprietary DLSS. He also said that ray tracing performance of current Radeon RX 6000 cards will improve with time. Further, Frank Azor added that AMD will look into the possibility of enabling Smart Memory Access with non-500-series chipsets as well.

Priced at US$1,999.99, EVGA's flagship product GeForce RTX 3090 KINGPIN Hybrid targets extreme overclockers and it should be accompanied by the Hydro Copper variant as well, which doesn't have a price yet. The list of features includes a triple-BIOS design with pre-configured OC and LN2 profiles, PROBEIT support, and much more.

Nvidia reported nice growth figures in its Q3 2020 earnings call, but things might not look that good for Q4. Team Green is now estimating that the RTX 3000 supply shortages could continue well into 2021, and this problem may also impact AMD with its newly launched RX 6800 / XT cards.