Posts Tagged Under: gpus

NVIDIA, DirectX 12, and Asynchronous Compute: Don’t Panic Yet

Ashes of the Singularity: the game to bring NVIDIA cards to their knees?

Ashes of the Singularity: The game to bring NVIDIA cards to their knees?

Monday was a terrifying day to browse the web as the owner of an NVIDIA graphics card. News hit early this week that the company’s latest series of Maxwell GPUs, the GTX 900-series, could have a design flaw that compromises performance compared to AMD graphics cards when performing asynchronous compute in DirectX 12.

In short: A few weeks ago, Oxide Games released a benchmark demo of an upcoming game called Ashes of the Singularity, the first demo for DirectX 12, the soon-to-come update to Microsoft’s popular gaming API. Many Ashes benchmark reviews found that while NVIDIA graphics cards ran the game quite well with DirectX 11, AMD cards showed an enormous performance jump when upgrading to DX 12. NVIDIA cards, on the other hand, showed no performance improvements with DX 12, and in some cases, actually took a slight hit to performance compared to running the game with DX 11.

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GTX 950 Launched at $160, Added to Very Good Tier

GTX 950

This week, NVIDIA launched the smallest member of its Maxwell GPU family, the GTX 950. Launch prices range from $160 to $170, depending on manufacturer, landing the 950 firmly in the ‘mid-tier’ GPU category.

After examining early reviews, we have added the new card to the Very Good tier on the U.S. parts list. Looking at its competition, it beats the AMD’s $150 R7 370 and matches the performance of AMD’s slightly pricier R7 270X.

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AMD Refreshes 200 Series of Graphics Cards as 300 Series

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Finally, AMD has released its new 300 series of graphics cards, with 5 cards available as of June 18th: The Radeon R7 360, R7 370, R9 380, R9 390 and R9 390X.

If you take the time to view benchmarks and read through reviews (linked below), you will find that AMD did not really release any new cards in the 300 series, but has only refreshed the 200 series. They have taken the same GPUs from the 200 series, slightly raised the clock speeds (by ~5%), and added slightly faster RAM. The result is very similar performance to the 200 series.

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Graphics Cards: What Do the Numbers Mean?

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Bigger is always better, right?  When it comes to your graphics card, this isn’t always the case.  Both AMD and NVIDIA use easily marketable combinations of letters and numbers to identify their GPUs, but this does not mean that the numbers are easy to understand. This article will explain the subtle nuances in the names of performance graphics cards.

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