Efficient AMD A10-6700T APU to hit Retail Next Week

AMD will soon release new APU with specifications that closely match that of the A10-6700 APU but carries a much lower TDP. The APU, which will be known as the A10-6700T, will have a TDP of just 45 W -- 20 W less than the A10-6700.

Nvidia allegedly working on dual-GPU, GK110-based GTX 790

Most of Nvidia's GeForce GPU lines of the past few years have included a dual-GPU model, and it seems the 700 series will be no exception. Sources have told VideoCardz that Nvidia is working on a new high-end graphics card, most likely the GeForce GTX 790, designed as a response to AMD's upcoming 'Hawaii' graphics cards. The GTX 790 is said to include two of Nvidia's top-end GK110 GPUs, used on the GTX Titan and GTX 780.

AMD next-gen Radeon 'Hawaii' graphics cards expected in October

AMD is reportedly preparing to mass ship their next generation high-end GPU codenamed Hawaii in October according to sources in the upstream supply chain as reported by DigiTimes. When you consider AMD is flying a number of journalists to Hawaii (no coincidence there) late next month for a “technical showcase,” this rumor quickly becomes much more credible.

6GB VGA Dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990

AMD is following up from the launch of its Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition graphics card, which sought to take the single-GPU performance crown from Nvidia’s GTX 680 late last month, with a new round of price cuts that will affect several of its mid- and high-end GCN based offerings. The move comes as gamers await AMD’s rumored launch of the dual-GPU HD 7990 later this month to take on Nvidia’s GTX 690.

The new prices will go into effect starting today. Among them, the 7970 will have it's price dropped from $479 to $429, the 7950 from $399 to $349, and the 7870 from $349 to $299. These represent a significant drop over the launch prices of $549, $449 and $399 respectively. Here’s the full breakdown:

GPU	Launch price	Spring MSRP	Summer MSRP
Radeon HD 7970	$549	$479	$429
Radeon HD 7950	$449	$399	$349
Radeon HD 7870	$349	$349	$299
Radeon HD 7850	$249	$249	~$239
Radeon HD 7770	$159	$139	~$119
Radeon HD 7750	$109	$109	~$99

As AnandTech notes, since AMD can’t control final card pricing beyond what they charge partners for parts, unofficially some of these prices, or even lower ones, were already available at retailers like Newegg -- right now a Radeon HD 7950 from MSI can be found for as low as $340, for example.

Later this month AMD is expected to launch its dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990, which will go head-to-head against the GeForce GTX 690. Specs will reportedly include two Tahiti XT (Radeon HD 7970) cores packing a total of 4096 stream processors clocked at 1 GHz, 6GB of GDDR5 memory (3GB per GPU) clocked at 1250 MHz, and the ability to drive 6-monitor Eyefinity configurations out-of-the-box.

The card will be launched in limited quantities. Judging by availability of the new 7970 GHz Edition it might take a few weeks until consumers can find AMD’s upcoming dual-GPU flagship in stores.

Graphics card overclocking record broken -- rig looks like a sci-fi movie set

Indonesian PC wizard Hazzan has broken the world record for overclocking PC graphics cards. But how do you even measure such a thing?

The scene uses the scores handed out by benchmark tool 3DMark 11, and Hazzan's 4-way SLI GTX 680 setup registered a score of P33190, which beat the previous mark by 39 points.

To reach the score, as you can see in the pics, Hazzan had to do what a lot of these serious guys have to do: namely, stand over his PC with an open bottle of liquid nitrogen and keep pouring some in every few minutes so the entire rig doesn't burst into flames. According to EXP, his entire rig reads as follows:

The platform included Core i7-3930K processor (oc'ed to 5784MHz), 8GB quad-channel GSkill DDR3 memory (oc'ed to 2480MHz), Antec High Current Pro 1200W power supply, ASUS Rampage IV Extreme mobo and ASUS GTX 680 DirectCU II graphics card，the CPU and graphics adopted liquid nitrogen cooling.

Hazzan broke the record over the weekend at the ROG Absolute Zero Extreme OC event, where some of the most insane pictures of personal computers I have ever seen were taken.

Torvalds blasts Nvidia over Linux support, gives them the middle finger during speech

Linus Torvalds, the driving force behind the Linux kernel, used a recent question and answer session hosted at the end of a speech at the Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, Finland to air his thoughts on Nvidia and its lack of Linux GPU driver support, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.

While taking questions from the audience, around the 48-minute mark in the video below, a woman explained the problems she had getting her laptop's Nvidia Optimus GPU to correctly work under Linux.  "I was expecting that Nvidia would kind of chip in and do something [but] they said flat out 'no' they're not doing any support."

Asked what his thoughts on the matter were, Torvalds responded: "Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers. And that's really sad because Nvidia tries to sell a lot of chips into the Android market. And Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with."

However, Torvalds -- who has a history of speaking his mind -- didn't stop at that. "So, Nvidia, f*** you," he stated whilst gesturing with his middle finger to the camera, much to the applause of the audience. "I think it's really sad when you sell hardware and use Linux and you are being really difficult about it. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying that other companies are perfect either."

His point is in reference to Nvidia's Tegra line, which runs on the Linux-based Android OS. Nvidia announced back in March that it would begin open-source support for Linux, but Torvalds' comments on Thursday would suggest things have improved little despite the public commitment to changing the situation.

Prior to this, the company had been so unwilling to provide assistance that the Linux community reverse-engineering its GPU drivers to provide an open source alternative that was less buggy for users of the OS.

Nvidia's GeForce 304.48 beta offers up to 18% more performance

Nvidia has released new beta drivers offering GeForce 400, 500 and 600 series owners up to 18% more performance depending on the title and settings. In a blog post, Nvidia published some of its own tests in which the GTX 680 saw a 17.6% boost over last month's 301.42 WHQL release in Batman: Arkham City, 12.4% in Dragon Age 2, 9.8% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and 4% in Lost Planet 2 when running the games on high or max settings. A 5.8% to 15% bump was recorded with a second GTX 680 in SLI.

As a second example, Nvidia shared the GTX 560's results when shifting to the beta drivers, including 14% more performance in Arkham City, 6.7% in Lost Plane 2 and 5.5% in Dragon Age 2. When paired with another GTX 560, the combo delivers 11.9% more frames in Arkham City, 5.2% in Battlefield 3, 6.1% in Dragon Age 2, 4% in Lost Planet 2, 5.3% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and 7.9% in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Nvidia's article provides more information about how each game was configured.

The beta release also fixes a bug in Shogun 2: Total War that reduced frame rates by up to 60%, another that caused intermittent vsync stuttering with GTX 600 series cards as well as a bug that prevented some overclocked cards from running at their higher clocks. Nvidia has also added or improved a handful of new SLI and 3D Vision profiles for games including Torchlight II, Tribes: Ascend, F1 2011, Planetside 2, Borderlands 2, Mass Effect 3, Max Payne 3, Street Fighter X Tekken, and The Walking Dead.

Download GeForce 304.48 Beta (release notes -- read the download pages, no PDF available)

Desktop: Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Mobile: Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Download GeForce 302.80 WHQL (release notes)

Desktop: Windows 8 32-bit | Windows 8 64-bit

Mobile: Windows 8 32-bit | Windows 8 64-bit

Download GeForce 301.42 WHQL (release notes)

Desktop: Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Mobile: Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Meanwhile, Diablo III, L.A. Noire, Rayman Origins, and The Secret World have gained antialiasing support in the Nvidia Control Panel, and Star Wars: The Old Republic's ambient occlusion can be set in the Nvidia Control Panel. FXAA, Nvidia's antialiasing solution, has been disabled in Windows programs like Media Player and Movie Maker. Although FXAA has been well-received, its effects were being applied to Windows applications when set to run globally, making text difficult or impossible to read.

AMD announces Radeon HD 7970, claims fastest GPU title

AMD has officially announced its first ever 28nm-based graphics card: the Radeon HD 7970. The first member of the 'Southern Islands' GPU family is based on the 'Tahiti' core and utilizes a fresh architecture AMD refers to as "Graphics Core Next." The latter introduces a non-VLIW SIMD engine and is claimed to deliver a big improvement in performance per square millimeter of GPU space over the prior generation.

Spec-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 packs 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Units, 32 ROPs, a core clock of 925 MHz, a 384-bit memory interface, and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5500 MHz. It has the highest transistor count of any GPU yet at 4.31 billion and offers massive improvements over the previous single-GPU flagship -- 3.79TFLOPs of theoretical computing performance compared to 2.7TFLOPs for the Radeon HD 6970, and 264GB/sec of memory bandwidth over the 176GB/sec of the 6970.

Cards in the 7900 series can make full use of the newest and speediest PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 x16 bus interface, though they will retain backwards compatibility with both 1.0 and 2.0 standards.

Other enhancements include PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power technologies, which allow for higher performance levels while maximizing power efficiencies, App Acceleration to improve HD video playback and general performance, and an update to AMD's Eyefinity technology that brings new monitor configurations (up to 5-by-1 landscape and portrait with  2560 x 1600 monitors), flexible bezel compensation, stereoscopic 3D support across three displays and support for up to five independent audio streams.

AnandTech tested AMD's newest card and summarizes its gaming performance and power usage like this: "Depending on the game being tested it’s anywhere between 5% and 35% faster than NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580, averaging 15% to 25% depending on the specific resolution in use. Furthermore thanks to TSMC's 28nm process power usage is upwards of 50W lower than the GTX 580, but it’s still higher than the 6970 it replaces."

The reference AMD Radeon HD 7970 card features a dual-slot cooler which uses vapor chamber technology, has CrossFireX support, and includes four display outputs: one dual-link DVI, one HDMI 1.4a and two mini DisplayPort 1.2. It'll arrive in January 9 just ahead of CES with a price tag of $549.

AMD's mid-range Radeon HD 7770 poses for the camera

Pictures of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7770 mainstream graphics card have leaked online courtesy of a forum member at Rage3D. The new card is based on the 28nm Cape Verde GPU, which is a direct replacement for Juniper, and represents the first major upgrade to the Radeon HD 5770 in two years since the last generation Radeon HD 6770 was basically a rebrand based on the same GPU core as its predecessor.

The shots were not accompanied by technical specifications but there are a few things we can take away from looking at the card. The Radeon HD 7770 looks rather similar to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460, with a dual-slot design and a large diameter fan in the middle pushing air down vertically.

The GPU itself is quite small and Fudzilla ventures to guess it should measure up at under 150mm2. The reference card includes the usual three display outputs -- DVI, HDMI and miniDisplayPort. A single 6-pin PCI-e is used to power the card, suggesting a TDP below 150W, and possibly close to 100W according to reports. There's also a single Crossfire connector for up to two-card configurations and the four GDDR5 memory chips on the exposed PCB indicate a possible 128-bit memory interface.

According to Fudzilla, the Radeon HD 7700 series is scheduled to arrive sometime around mid-February. The Cape Verde GPU powering these cards will be based on AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, while everything below the series is expected to be rebrands of the VLIW5 HD 6000 family with few minor tweaks.

AMD releases Catalyst 11.12 WHQL, 12.1 preview drivers

AMD has graced Radeon owners with two driver updates today: one with Microsoft's blessings and another for the venturesome among us. The WHQL-certified Catalyst 11.12 drivers introduce a bevy of changes, including OpenGL 4.2 support, the ability to enable AMD HD3D when using a 3x1 Landscape Eyefinity configuration, and improved Dual Graphics controls in the Vision Engine Control Center.

Judging by the release notes, 11.12 doesn't contain the speed boosts found in the 11.11c preview driver. There are a ton of bug fixes, however. Graphical anomalies and other hiccups are resolved in Dirt 2, Dirt 3, Portal 2, Shogun 2: Total War, Lost Planet 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, Tom Clancy's EndWar, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Doom 3, Crysis 2, Far Cry 2, Dragon Age 2, Homefront, Metro 2033, BioShock 2 and more.

Download Catalyst 11.12
Desktop: Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit
Mobile: Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Download Catalyst 12.1 Preview
Desktop: Windows XP 32/64-bit | Windows Vista/7 32/64-bit

If you want all the performance optimizations, features and bug fixes in Catalyst 11.11c and 11.12, you'll need the 12.1 preview release. In fact, AMD specifically recommends this version for gamers, who would otherwise be missing out. Not only does it contain all of the desired changes, but it offers a few additional perks, including an additional 10-15% speed boost in Skyrim for certain HD 6900-series configurations. Version 12.1 also delivers:

• Support for 1080p@30Hz displays via HD3D over HDMI 1.4 (up from 24Hz)
• Improved UI for adjusting video quality and color settings in the control panel
• A new control panel feature that lets you create application-specific profiles

GPU shipments up 18.4% on-year, Intel has over 60% of the market

Jon Peddie Research has released its third quarter report on the graphics market, announcing 16.7% sequential increase in shipments to 138.5 million. That's above the 10-year average of 13.9%, but still in line with seasonal expectations as vendors stock up for the holidays. Intel alone witnessed a 28.5% growth in shipments on-quarter and 36.5% on-year, which is almost entirely comprised of the embedded graphics chips inside its latest-generation desktop and mobile processors. The company has maintained its majority share of the graphics market with 60.4% slice -- up 10.1% from the previous quarter and 9.5% on-year.

Although it has experienced a 9.9% growth in shipments -- thanks to its legion of Fusion APUs -- AMD has reportedly lost footing to Intel with a market share of 23%, down 5.9% on-quarter and flat year-over-year. Shipments of AMD's desktop and notebook Fusion chips have increased 58.4% from the last quarter. Given the rise of CPU/GPU combo chips from Intel and AMD, more computers than ever are shipping with two graphics solutions. Almost 92 million PCs shipped worldwide this quarter, up 8.8% sequentially. There were roughly 1.6 GPUs per computer in 2011, which compares to 1.15 GPUs per system a decade earlier.

Company	Mkt Share  This Qtr	Mkt Share   Last Qtr	Unit Change   Qtr-Qtr	Share Change     Qtr-Qtr	Mkt Share   Last Yr
AMD	23.0%	24.4%	9.9%	-5.9%	23.0%
Intel	60.4%	54.8%	28.5%	10.1%	55.1%
Nvidia	16.1%	20.1%	-6.2%	-19.6%	21.0%
Matrox	0.04%	0.0%	0.0%	-14.3%	0.1%
SiS	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
VIA/S3	0.5%	0.6%	-8.9%	-22.0%	0.8%
Total	100.0%	100.0%	16.7%		100.0%

Besides its low powered mobile platforms, Nvidia doesn't have a mass market embedded graphics solution to lean on and its shares slipped even further than AMD's. In the third quarter, Nvidia represented some 16.1% of the market, down 19.6% from the previous quarter and slipping some 23% from the year-ago figures. Nvidia's shipments fell 6.2% on-quarter and while its overall stats may not be as impressive as its rivals', JPR notes that the company is placing more focus on discrete graphics processors. In that realm, Nvidia currently reigns supreme, gaining 30% of the discrete market on-quarter and 10.9% on-year.

Deus Ex Human Revolution GPU & CPU Performance Test

For those unfamiliar with the Deus Ex franchise, it goes back to the year 2000 when highly hyped developer Ion Storm went on to develop a System Shock-inspired action game that combined gameplay elements of first-person shooters and role-playing games.

Deus Ex received immediate notoriety and was highly regarded, selling over 1 million copies worldwide. Given the game's success, the title was later ported to the PS2 and Mac OS platforms. A sequel called Deus Ex: Invisible War was released in 2003, however the second installment was criticized for being a dumbed down version of the original. Regardless of that, over 1 million copies were sold again, making it difficult to deny the franchise's success, which represented one of the few big wins for Ion Storm before the studio was shut down.

After many years of waiting the third installment of the Deus Ex series has finally arrived. Deus Ex: Human Revolution, is a prequel to the original game, now developed by Eidos Montreal. Like previous titles, Human Revolution contains elements of first-person shooters and role-playing games, and to gamers' pleasure it appears the game is every bit as good as its predecessors.

In other good news, we could very well have a new game capable of fully utilizing the power and features of today’s high-end graphics cards. Such games have become increasingly rare and with the exception of just a select few, most of the games we have run performance tests on this year have been shameful console ports that would struggle to max out a tablet PC.

Games such as Duke Nukem Forever and Crysis 2 were massive letdowns, while the only game that has truly impressed us recently was The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and that particular title was exclusive to the PC.

So what does Deus Ex: Human Revolution have to offer hardcore gamers? The game is said to fully implement DirectX 11 as well as other cutting edge features such FXAA, MLAA, HD3D and full support for multi-monitor AMD Eyefinity technology (up to six monitors).

The DX11 support brings about tessellation, which the developer has said was mainly used to enhance character silhouettes. Other DX11 features used includes DirectCompute enhanced Depth of Field, Blurs as well as Shader and Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion.

The developer also claimed to have significantly rewritten the game engine to take advantage of multi-core processors. Eidos went on record saying that a dual-core setup can provide up to a 70% increase in performance. As usual we'll be looking at how the game performs with a range of GPUs and how it deals with dual, quad and hexa-core processors.

Accelerate x.264 1080p movies over the GPU Guide

Watching 1080P x.264 / MKV videos completely decoded by your graphics card
An accelerating GPU Video Acceleration Guide

Yours truly is a big movie buff, I like to playback high-definition content, preferably at 1080P Full HD. But face it, to be able to decode such content in a flawless manner, you will need a lot of raw processing power.

One of my more recent dillema's is that you can playback for example BluRay content fairly easily with software like PowerDVD, assisted by the graphics processor on your graphics card. Such a great feaure, as that GPU can do marvelous things when it comes to handeling that content. The problem with 3rd party vendor software like PowerDVD is however complex, if a file format or file-container is not supported you can't play back that content assisted (accelerated or enhanchanced) by your graphics card. And that's a waste of the GPU and definitely your CPU load.

Much like MP3 was up and coming many years ago, one of the most popular formats is x.264 (not to confuse with h.264 itself). x264 is a free and open library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams.

The x.264 format is often synonym with Matroska MKV, a media file container which often embeds that x.264 content, a much admired container format for media files. Especially the 1920x1080p movies often have some form of h.264 encoding dropped within the x.264 format. As a result, you'll need a very beefy PC with powerful processor to be able to playback such movies, error free without frames dropping and nasty stuttersm as PowerDVD or other PureVideo HD supporting software by itself will not support it.

There is a way though. Today we are going to open up and investigate this topic, we'll show you how you can accelerate x.264 content nearly 100% accelerated and post processed (enhanced) with nothing other than your graphics card.

Why use a graphics card you might ask ? Well, first off, there are many software solutions at hand, the fantastic ffdshow, which is an open source DirectShow decoding filter with excellent image quality. But for it to be able to handle 1080p, you will need fairly decent hardware, especially if you flick on filters like image sharpening. Another option is to purchase CoreAVC, which is a codec that allows extremely efficient x.264 playback, assisted by your (preferably) multi-core processor. CoreAVC is extraordinary, however on bigger HD TVs you'll notice that this codec forfeits a little on image quality.

Running into CPU (system) bottlenecks or forfeiting on image quality is not something we should accept in the year 2009, especially when we have modern graphics cards that could easily handle this content.

Companies like ATI and NVIDIA have been evangelizing that their graphics cards are the best thing invented since the wheel was discovered, especially for that high-definition content playback. See, the graphics processors in your (reasonably modern) graphics card have excellent decoding, accelerating and post-processing (enhance image quality) functionality as they have dedicated core logic built in to the GPU to do exactly that.

ATI Radeon cards starting at series 3000 for example have the a UVD HD (Universal Video Decoder) engine embedded in the GPU. It's a small piece of core logic designed to handle smooth high-definition movie/content playback.

The same can be said for GeForce graphics cards starting at series 8000. GeForce series 8000 (GTX 320|640 and prior excluded) and newer have an updated version of the PureVideo (VP2) engine, allowing high-quality high-definition content playback.

But here's the thing, while both formats are really good, they do not support anything that is not officially supported by 3rd party vendor software like PowerDVD and WinDVD. As a result your hands are tied and you are extremely limited in utilizing UVD and Purevideo only for DVDs, WMV(HD) and Blu-ray disks. And we feel that poses an issue, as the other 80% of the content out there thus can not take advantage of these HD processing video engines.

As a result, you must use some sort of codec or filter forcing the decoding, acceleration and post processing processes over the CPU, and that CPU load will be tremendously high and certain image quality enhancements [can or] will be lost. Decoding and accelerating media content over the CPU is intensive, expensive and not at all optimal.

I believe in the evolution of new and open standards. XVID, DIVX, h.264. VC-1 and now x.264/MKV need native support.

What would have happened if we would have never embraced the MP3 format for example ?

What the majority of us would like to see ...

My personal vision of a Home Theater PC (HTPC) is using software like using Media Center and a remote control (point, click and play), then sit back, watch and enjoy 1080P high definition content, whatever the file container format is.

MKV and x.264 filter transcoded content has got to be the biggest and best open file container format available on the web. It is a revolutionary format, but is just not supported natively by your graphics card, forcing you to revert back to software like FFDSHOW or CoreAVC. Meanwhile you have GPU in your PC picking it's nose, while that GPU easily could handle the entire decoding processes, with very small use of system resources and power consumption.

There is however a way to get x.264 working in a nice symbiosis with your graphics card. And though it's not as charming as having a remote control in your hands and starting up that movie with Media Center, it is a great way to watch high definition x.264 content, accelerated and enhanced by your GPU.

Nvidia delays dual-GPU GTX 590 to beat Antilles

With AMD's flagship single-GPU Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 cards due arrive sometime this quarter, one has to expect that Nvidia is preparing a new premium offering -- and one would be right, says Fudzilla. The GeForce-maker is readying a graphics card (possibly branded the GTX 590) with two GF110 GPUs strapped onboard, and it could appear "very soon."

According to unnamed sources, Nvidia partners are practically ready to roll, and the company could launch its dual-GPU product before the end of 2010. Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen. Word has it that Nvidia is waiting for AMD to ship its dual-chip solution, the Radeon HD 6990 (codenamed Antilles), which is on track for the first quarter of next year.


Nvidia currently holds the crown for single-GPU performance with its GeForce GTX 580, and it seems the company wants to ensure a dominate position in the dual-GPU market as well. By delaying the GTX 590 until after the Radeon HD 6990 arrives, it's suggested that Nvidia will have an opportunity tweak its contender before shoving it into the ring.