AMD fans must be salivating right now because this is some amazing news. Well, not officially. Leaked benchmarks show the AMD card which will probably be called the R9 480 beating GTX 980 in 3Dmark and falling short of the HBM powered R9 Fury.
However, some truly amazing results can be seen when the cards are CrossFired, with results approaching the newly announced Pascal card GTX 1080! The implications of this are huge, because industry experts were expecting about the same levels of performance from Polaris as we saw from Pascal.
The GTX 1060, as we posted earlier, seems to be boasting performance comparable to the GTX 970, so its rival AMD card beating the 980 is a huge advantage for AMD.
Earlier we posted about the expected announcement date and event for this card along with the next gen AMD APUs. This leak has upped the ante even further, as hype for the AMD Polaris cards increases day by day.
The very highly awaited GTX 1060 has been spotted on shipping manifests. Even though Nvidia hasn't officially confirmed any rumours about the card, the industry has been on fire with rumours and speculations. A very interesting piece of information that the manifest entry reveals is that the card is shipping with a 256 bit bus, which is double its predecessors. The bus on the GTX 960 acted as a bottleneck and this improvement will definitely boost performance, just like in the 1070 and 1080. This card is also expected to cross the VR-threshold, resulting in further ease of VR adaptation. The cheaper getting across the VR threshold seems to be getting, the more salty the prices of the VR headsets themselves start to seem. It's expected to go for around $250-$300.
The card is expected to pack in 1280 CUDA cores, down from 1920 on the GTX 1070. That points to the card giving out around 60% the performance of a GTX 1070. This would make it comparable to the GTX 970 as of now. Another exciting factor is the power consumption. Seeing the trend as we have in the Pascal cards, more graphics power for less power consumption, the 960 might have a TDP comparable to the 950 or maybe even the 750ti, although this is speculation. That 256 bus is bound to drive the consumption up a bit and it will be interesting to see how it all finally adds up.
At the Google I/O 2016 keynote, Google announced that a beta-quality Android N release is coming out, and there are three areas of focus for Android N: performance, security and productivity. Native VR support has now also been confirmed, with a new VR platform called Daydream. The name of the new Android OS was not presented during the keynote.You can suggest a name by clicking here.
Performance Google began by talking about the Vulkan graphics API. A new JIT compiler means that apps should install up to 75 percent faster, and compiler code should be reduced by 50 percent. The irritating Android is starting... dialogue box will be gone for good, thanks to this new compiler, as well. App size reduced by 50 percent, making for 75 percent faster installs.
Security Google stressed improvements in security through file-based encryption, media framework hardening and seamless updates. In particular, these seamless updates mean that your phone will download new software images in the background and prepare them for the next time you restart your device. Thanks to the file-based encryption, you also won't need to enter your device password upon restarting. Productivity Productivity is also now a focus. Google says that most people only use their seven most recent apps from the recent app drawer, so the wheel will be limited to these. There is also going to be a Clear all button, which received a rush of applause for a grateful I/O audience. By double-tapping the recent apps button, you can quickly switch to the previous app, although, on many devices, this feature was already available via a long press on the same button.
The new multi-window mode: picture in picture. Multi-window mode sees two uses folded in: the standard, split-screen view, and picture-in-picture, designed for Android TV. This latter mode lets you shrink what's on the screen to a large box in the corner of the screen and do something else in the dominant, full-screen window. Elsewhere, replying from within notifications was covered, as well as notification visibility, letting you quickly block or hide similar notifications in the future via a long press, and support for Unicode 9.0 Emoji, all features we've already looked at below. Virtual Reality
Native support for VR was also formally introduced. Daydream, a platform for mobile VR was announced, which comes with a set of specs phones have to meet in order to be compatible. Many manufacturers are making Daydream-compatible devices, including Samsung, HTC, LG, Xiaomi and Huawei. Daydream is the new Google VR platform.
AMD Announced today that it will hold a press conference and live webcast on the 1st of June at Computex regarding the Polaris GPUs and the 7th Gen APUs. The event will be held in Computex Taipei in Taiwan. Speakers include AMD’s President and CEO Lisa Su as well as AMD’s head of the Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri in addition to the company’s head of the CPU & APU side of the business, Jim Anderson.
This is the first time AMD has published any news about the highly anticipated Polaris GPUs, the anticipation for which is at an all time high now that Nvidia has officially launched the GTX 1080 and 1070 and the cards will hit the markets later this month.
A real-time video webcast of the event will be accessible on AMD’s Computex page (www.amd.com/computex) and on AMD’s Investor Relations home page (ir.amd.com). A replay of the webcast can be accessed a few hours after the conclusion of the live event on both pages and will be available there for one year after the event.
AMD GPUs have seen an uplift in sales and an increased market share continuously through the later part of 2015 and the start of 2016. It is expected that AMD will follow a release strategy contrary to Nvidia's and release information about their mid to low end cards initially, later followed by their high-end powerhouses. As of now, no information about the AMD cards is available. As far as performance gains are concerned, the same levels as Pascal cards are expected, although we all are hoping for something amazing. The APUs will skip the aging FM2+ and AM3 sockets for an all new AM4 socket for it's chips. A socket that these chips will share with AMD’s hotly anticipated high-performance Summit Ridge family of CPUs. Summit Ridge is AMD’s upcoming FX family of enthusiast/high-end desktop CPUs featuring AMD’s brand new high performance x86 CPU core “Zen”, the development of which was spearheaded by the legendary CPU architect Jim Keller.
The summit ridge and Zen platforms are very eagerly being awaited all over the world as right now the pretty old FX chips and their brothers are the only alternative to the costlier Intel CPUs, with Intel eating a huge chunk of the market share. Author: Ishaan Singh
The rumour mill went into overdrive yesterday as the 'leaked' slide below spread through the internet like wildfire, apparently stating one of The new Kings of Gaming, i.e. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 specifications. Since then, PCWorld has confirmed the rumours. These indeed, are the specifications of the best bang-for-the-buck GeForce GTX 1070.
The discussions and rumours about the possible 1070 specifications have been a hot topic ever since the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080/1070 were revealed at the Austin, Texas event. We got the 1080 details but all Nvidia teased about the 970 successor, GTX 1070, was that it has 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM and current-gen gaming beast GTX Titan X comparable performance, which stunned many. Nvidia launched hours ago the GTX 1070 official page on their site, and you can find the specifications on it here. The GTX 1070 is going to harbour the following specs, which are extremely impressive upon comparison with its predecessor, the GTX 970.
16nm GP104 silicon, with 7.2 billion transistors
1,920 CUDA cores, 15 out of 20 Streaming Multiprocessors enabled on the GP104 silicon
120 TMUs, 64 ROPs
256-bit GDDR5 memory, 8GB
1,683MHz max GPU boost core clock frequency
6.75 TFLOP/s single-precision floating point performance
150W TDP, single 8-pin PCIe power connector
3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b
2-way SLI with SLI HB bridge support
These specifications show us great power and performance delivery skills of this card while having a mere 150W TDP. We still have to wait to see how it actually performs in the real world conditions.
NVIDIA showcased a new technology named ANSEL along with the next-generation PASCAL based GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070 launch on 6th May. So what is this new technology so hyped about ? ANSEL is the new in-game Photography tool which would be implemented in the future upcoming games and game updates by the the developers which would help the Gamers and in-Game photographers take undeniably excellent screenshots from any angle, in any size and the quality they dream of ! According to NVIDIA,
Game photography is undeniably a new art form - screenshots can be posed and framed, and those with a great eye will select the best scenes and most beautiful vistas, just as a real world photographer would. The very best screenshots from famous game photographers like Duncan Harris, James Pollock, Leonardo Sang and Joshua Taylor are shown in exhibitions, printed and framed, and admired by millions of gamers online.
Many of us would love to take similar screenshots, and try as we might we simply can't work around the limitations of traditional game capture - views and camera angles can't be changed, enemies continue to attack, and you can only capture a generic shot with the HUD visible.
Professional game photographers are able to overcome these limitations with exclusive access to developers' internal game builds, custom tools built specially for their work, and the very best computer hardware.
That changes now however with the introduction of NVIDIA Ansel, a revolutionary, accessible game capture tool built in cooperation with leading game developers.
Simply put, Ansel enables you to make and capture your own unique and personally-framed screenshots via an easy-to-use user interface, on NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics cards.
Within Ansel there are numerous functions, features and modes, detailed below, that help you take amazing screenshots.
Free Camera - Compose Your Shot, Anywhere, From Any Angle
Start your game photography career by activating Ansel, at which time the game will be paused, and a freecam enabled, allowing you to compose your scene and take unlimited high-quality shots until you achieve that perfect image. In other words, you can escape the confines of a game’s first or third person camera and take a screenshot from any angle, until you have the perfect shot.
Roll, zoom, and reposition - do whatever you like to achieve the perfect game photo that real-life photographers may only get once in a lifetime. With this functionality Ansel instantly overcomes the limitations of traditional game capture, enabling you to capture any type of screenshot you can imagine.
Game developers, of course, will have the ability to restrict camera movement in multi-player games so Ansel users don’t gain an unfair advantage through use of the feature.
Super Resolution - Capture Every Detail With Gigapixel Images
Once you’ve positioned and framed your shot, simply select “High Resolution” in the Ansel in-game overlay and you can capture screenshots tens of thousands of pixels in size. Ordinarily this would be impossible given the resources required to capture such a high resolution screenshot, but by using the CUDA Cores present on NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs we can render and save these screenshots with ease via an in-game overlay.
These super resolution screenshots can be viewed in Irfanview and other applications, and shared online via file sharing sites, forums, or any other service that supports the uploading of large files.
But why would you want to capture screenshots at super resolutions tens of thousands of pixels in size? Well, the resulting screenshot is almost entirely free of aliasing, detail is significantly sharper and clear, crops of any part of the screenshot are at maximum fidelity levels, and screenshots can be downsampled to lower resolutions for wall prints, posters, or super high-quality desktop wallpapers.
By saving at such a high resolution you can view incredible amounts of detail in games - take The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt screenshot below, for instance. In that image, Geralt of Rivia’s eye is less than a pixel in size, yet we can zoom in and see his eye and entire face in full detail. Below Geralt is another room that players pass through at the start of the game - by zooming in there we can read the words in the books in full detail.
Download the original 46080x25920, 1.7GB screenshot here.
Post-Process Filters - Adjust The Look & Mood Of Your Favorite Games
If you want to tweak the look, feel and mood of your screenshot before saving, Ansel includes brightness, vignette, sketch, color enhancer, and special FX options for tweaking the image. Moreover, Ansel allows users to create and share their own special FX filters, as they currently do for ReShade and other post-process applications.
OpenEXR Capture - Capture In The Widest Color Spectrum For HDR Images & Color Tweaking
If you're equipped with a HDR TV or monitor, you can export Ansel screenshots in the OpenEXR format, enabling you to view High Dynamic Range Super Resolution screenshots at the highest possible fidelity.
Alternatively, export in OpenEXR to enable in-depth Photoshopping - great for users who wish to further adjust the look of their screenshot captures.
360 Capture - Snap 360-Degree Panorama Photos In Mono and Stereo For Desktop & Virtual Reality Applications
360 degree video, Google Cardboard, and Virtual Reality are all in the news right now - 360 degree film and photo capture solutions are being sold by leading firms, and the results enjoyed by millions of people on YouTube, Google Photos, and other services. Additionally, there are tens of millions of high resolution phones are compatible with Google's entry-level Google Cardboard VR solution, and Virtual Reality headsets from HTC, Oculus VR and Samsung are all on sale.
With Ansel you can create screenshots for these services and devices, with full 360 degree stereo views - simply select the 360゜ you wish to use in Ansel, and follow the instructions on our NVIDIA Ansel technology page to share and view the images on the web, in Google Cardboard, and in Virtual Reality headsets. It's that easy
For Cardboard users, we've released the NVIDIA VR Viewer bundled with Ansel 360 Capture screenshots that you can view today. Download the app and check it out! To view some 360゜images click here NVIDIA's Ansel, A Revolutionary Game Photography Tool, Coming Soon
Our revolutionary Ansel technology is coming soon to a number of top games, including The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Epic Games' Fortnite, Paragon and Unreal Tournament, Cyan Worlds' Obduction, Thekla’s The Witness, Boss Key Productions’ Lawbreakers, Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, and the highly-anticipated No Man’s Sky from Hello Games. So this was all about NVIDIA's latest in-game Photography software with the help of which you can pursue a career in in-gem Photography, if you get enough paid though ! Leave us a comment below on what's your views on this ! Author : Anushk Keshri Rastogi
Nvidia launched their latest flagship Graphics card in 1000 series today. As per the leaks of the heat spreaders and the graphics card shroud were, which we covered before, the latest addition to the Green Team are The GTX 1080 and The GTX 1070 based on the new Pascal architecture. A per Nvidia GTX 1080 will be available for public worldwide on May 27th and GTX 1070 would be available on June 10th, that is in a month's time yes !
The new GTX 1080 is based on the FinFET architecture that provides massive increase in transistor density well maintaining the amazing performance per watt power usage. Watch the official Video here :
Nvidia Announces GTX 1080 for $599 USD
The latest flagship addition and the next-generation Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 is the next chapter in high-end performance gaming graphics cards. Featuring the latest Pascal architecture designed by Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 1080 will allow gamers to play 4K and VR contents at a much improved Graphics Quality and FPS when compared to the current generation graphics cards.
The performance of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 is mindblowing ! Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun mentioned at the announcement that the GeForce GTX 1080 is not only faster than one GTX 980 but it also crushes away two GTX 980s in SLI setup !
Also when compared to the GrForce GTX Titan X, which is a 8 billion transistor and 3072 CUDA Cores with 12 GB GDDR5 memory monster, the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 is a whole lot faster ! Which means this new performance monster beats the crap out of GeForce GTX 980Ti and GeForce GTX Titan X at just 180W power consumption.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 features the GP104 GPU (GP104-400-A1) core which comprises of 2560 CUDA cores. NVIDIA’s FinFET architecture allows significant increase in clock frequency increase. The GeForce GTX 1080 was shown clocking in at 2.1 GHz clock speeds on air cooling. The actual clock speed are maintained at 1607 MHz base and 1733 MHz boost but the FinFET architecture allows for extreme overclocking as demoed at the event. The chip features 8 GB of next generation of GDDR5X memory featured across 256-bit bus and clocked at 10 GB/s. This leads to a total bandwidth of 320 GB/s.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 draws just 180W TDP powered by only a single 8-pin power connector, one of the most power efficient GPU architecture ever designed for enthusiast level gaming. The display output ports for the card includes Display Port 1.4, HDMI 2.0b and Duallink DVI which means that it is capable of support to all next-gen displays with new standards.
The GPU cooler was also seen as a symbol of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX products but NVIDIA had been running the same GPU cooler for years. Cards based on Kepler GPUs and even the latest Titan X used a slightly modified version. But after two generations of NVIDIA GeForce cards, NVIDIA has finally built the updated version of the NVTTM design that features a bold and aggressive look.
Designed with the same magnesium alloy metal used on the original cooler, the GTX 1080 cooler design takes things ahead with better cooling and acoustics. This solution provides 67C temperatures in gaming at an insane clock speed of 2.1 GHz.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 launches on 27th May in both reference variants for $599 US and founders edition for $699 US. Expect custom models to be unveiled at Computex 2016 from various NVIDIA partners. Author : Anushk Keshri Rastogi
