Game Tech News

When AMD announced its RX 480 would launch in late June, it was virtually inevitable that Nvidia would follow suit with a midrange challenger of its own. Until now, the two companies have pursued different strategies with their 14nm refreshes — Nvidia chose to do a standard top-down refresh cycle, while AMD rolled out a midrange competitor first. The RX 480 proved to be potent competition for Nvidia’s previous-generation Maxwell products with competitive power consumption, more VRAM, and better overall performance.

Nvidia obviously wasn’t willing to risk losing sales in the larger mass market, even if its GTX 1080 and 1070 have locked down the high-end GPU space. As a result, we have the GTX 1060 — a 6GB Pascal GPU with 1,280 CUDA cores, 80 texture units, and 48 ROPS. Total memory bandwidth is 192GB/s, courtesy of a 192-bit memory bus.



Sample allocation on the GTX 1060 launch was extremely tight, which means our inbound Gigabyte sample hasn’t quite arrived yet. We’ve rounded up a number of GTX 1060 reviews from across the web, including TechSpot, TechPowerUp, THG, Hot Hardware, and Forbes. The major question on everyone’s mind: How does the GTX 1060 compare with the RX 480?

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Last week, Futuremark released Time Spy, a new DirectX 12 benchmark that takes full advantage of DX12’s features and capabilities, including asynchronous compute. While the release of a new benchmark is typically of modest interest, there’s been a great deal of confusion, uncertainty, and doubt over Time Spy’s benchmark results and what those results mean. Futuremark has since published an updated and expanded guide to how the benchmark functions and what it’s designed to do.

Much of the confusion on this topic is related to what Time Spy tests and how it implements support for asynchronous compute in DirectX 12. A graph from PC Perspective’s test results from last week will illustrate the question:




These results show performance in Time Spy at the benchmark’s default settings with asynchronous compute enabled versus disabled. AMD’s GPUs gain a significant amount of performance, with the RX 480 increasing its score by 8.5% while the R9 Nano and Fury X pick up 11.1% and 12.9% respectively. Nvidia’s Maxwell cards, in contrast, are flat.
Pascal, however, does gain some performance, with the GTX 1070 gaining 5.4% and the GTX 1080 picking up 6.8%. This stands contrary to what we’ve seen in most DX12 benchmarks to date, in which enabling async compute on Nvidia cards either led to a small performance decrease or had no impact on performance at all.

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Nvidia has been launching GPUs at a rapid-fire pace this summer. The GTX 1080 and 1070 debuted in late May and early June, the 1060 dropped earlier this week, and now the full-fledged Titan X is shipping by August 2. The new GPU was announced by Jen-Hsun Huang last night and sets a speed record for fast turnarounds between the launch of a new architecture and the debut of its top-end GPU. The first GTX Titan launched nearly a year after the first Kepler GPU, while the Titan X launched roughly six months after Maxwell.

Branding on the new GPU is a bit confusing. Previous Titan-class GPUs have used a secondary label, like Titan Black or Titan X. In this case, Nvidia is removing the “GeForce” branding on the GPU and calling it the Nvidia Titan X. This could prove confusing for customers, but it may also signal that this card is meant to straddle the line between Nvidia’s gaming and workstation divisions.

The new card is based on the GP102 GPU and will offer 3,584 CUDA cores at a base clock of 1417MHz and a boost clock of 1531MHz. While this is somewhat slower than Nvidia’s GTX 1080, which ships at 1607MHz / 1733MHz, the 40% increase in cores (the 1080 has just 2560) will more than offset the 12% decrease in clock. A new 384-bit memory bus gives the GPU 480GB/s of bandwidth — almost as much as what AMD debuted with its Fury X last year, but coupled to a far more powerful GPU.


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AMD reported its second-quarter results today and they came in extremely well, relative to the general state of the PC market. Revenue was $1.027 billion, up 23% from Q1 and 9% compared to the same period in 2015. The company’s non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) operating income was $3 million, while it recorded an $8 million loss by GAAP standards. Net income was $69 million this quarter.

The company’s overall financial position improved thanks to a number of factors. First, it recognized pre-tax gain of $150 million related to the sales of its test and packaging facilities to its new Chinese joint venture (JV). The total value of that deal was $351 million; AMD has recognized the revenue over multiple quarters.



This chart shows AMD’s segment information and overall breakdown. APU sales slipped slightly from Q1, falling to $435 million from $460 million, but were still up significantly from last year’s low of $379 million. Meanwhile, sales in AMD’s other segment — that’s basically the PS4 and Xbox One at the moment — grew 60% compared to Q1 and 5% compared to last year. Q1 tends to be the weakest quarter for console sales, but both Microsoft and Sony are going to be gearing up for the launch of the Xbox One S and (possibly) the PlayStation Neo. Equally importantly, AMD’s operating income was a much higher percentage of its revenue this quarter than a year ago — $84 million on $592 million in sales is a much better position than $27 million on $562 million in sales.

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It’s the last weekend before Microsoft releases Windows 10, which means that any of you planning to take advantage of the new operating system had best be moving to do so soon. Come July 29, the new operating system will cost significantly more and if Microsoft has plans to offer it for free again, it hasn’t been willing to share them.
When Microsoft announced Windows 10 back in January 2015, Satya Nadella described the operating system’s goal as follows:

“We want to move from people needing Windows, to choosing Windows, to loving Windows,” he said. “That is our goal.”
One might think this was nothing but meaningless feel-good talk from the CEO, but Nadella has said it multiple times since. It’s a phrase that’s popped up at Build ’15 and again last month, when Microsoft declared that it was making changes to the overly pushy, malware-like behavior that GWX.exe had recently adopted. This week, on Microsoft’s conference call, Nadella repeated it once more. “We continue to pursue our goal of moving people from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows,” Nadella said. “In two weeks, we will launch Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which takes a significant step forward in security.”

We’ve talked a lot about Windows 10 over the past 12 months, from its gaming performance and privacy concerns to the new features of Windows 10’s Anniversary Update. Nadella’s continued reference to persuading customers to fall in love with Windows suggests this question is also fair game, even if it’s much harder to measure.

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Every now and then, the rumor mill gets a big one really, really wrong. For over a year, conventional wisdom has predicted that AMD would win the Nintendo NX contract and cement its hold on the console industry. Rumors that Nvidia had sniped the win began surfacing several months ago, and now Eurogamer has seemingly confirmed them with input from multiple sources. Nintendo’s NX will be powered by Tegra — and if Eurogamer’s resources are accurate, we now know more about both the console hardware and the underlying SoC.

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Less than three years ago, Microsoft launched the Xbox One at $500. Ahead of its first major refresh, the company has cut the price on the existing bulky model to just $249. That’s a significant drop for the platform just a few months after its last round of price cuts, and it makes the Xbox One a compelling option for the right kind of customer.

While this is hardly the first time Microsoft has performed a midstream refresh, these kinds of price cuts are unprecedented, particularly on this kind of timeline. The Xbox 360 debuted in two configurations: A $399 Premium system with a 20GB HDD and a $299 “Core” system with no internal storage at $299. Microsoft introduced and end-of-life’d a number of Xbox 360 SKUs over the system’s lifetime, but never slashed prices this deeply — the closest it came was with the Xbox 360 Arcade, which launched in October 2007 at $279 and was discontinued in June 2010 with a final price of $150.

Slashing prices this quickly — this is the Xbox One’s third price cut since E3 — is probably a sign that Microsoft wants to clear the SKU out and rapidly refill it from the upcoming Xbox One S, an updated platform with 4K output support and high dynamic range display support, as well with a 2TB HDD and a $399 SKU price. A 1TB and 500GB version of the console will be available for $349 and $299 respectively.

Is the Xbox One a good deal at $249?

I’m a PC gamer, not a console aficionado, but the original Xbox One is pretty darn attractive at just $250. It’s now cheaper than the Wii U, yet significantly more powerful than that system. While it’s not as fast as the PlayStation 4, there’s a solid library of titles available for the Xbox One, and a fairly extensive group of Xbox 360 games available through emulation. Reports on the quality of that emulation have come back positive as well.



Sure, Scorpion is smaller. But size isn’t everything.


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For the past two months, AMD and Nvidia have been launching new GPU families and pushing fresh hardware into market. While this makes for interesting reviews, it’s not worth much if consumers can’t actually buy the hardware they’re reading about.

We’ve swept the Internet in the US and even checked some relative sales figures in Europe, courtesy of mindfactory.de. Let’s see how AMD and Nvidia rank — and whether or not the hardware they’ve launched is actually on sale. We’ve used the website NowInStock.net for this analysis, which performs minute-by-minute inventory checks on websites. We’ve seen its contents vary while putting this article together, so don’t be surprised if the totals don’t exactly match our own. Trends, however, are easy to spot.

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In late June, AMD launched its new RX 480, a midrange $200 — $240 GPU with both 8GB and 4GB RAM loadouts. Today, the company is taking the lid off its entry-level follow-ups: The RX 470 and RX 460. These GPUs will target the $150 and $100 price brackets, respectively, and complete AMD’s Polaris refresh cycle (as far as we know, anyway).
When AMD announced Polaris, it made a number of claims about delivering up to 2.8x improved performance-per-watt. The RX 480 was a huge leap over its predecessors, but its performance per watt was only about 1.73x better than the R9 270X. The RX 470 is the GPU AMD claims will actually deliver on its previous power promise.



With a cut-down number of compute cores, lower RAM clock, and lower base frequency, the RX 470 could potentially deliver the efficiency gains AMD is targeting, while still substantially outperforming the old R9 270X. The 270X has 1,280 cores, 80 texture units, and 32 ROPS, while the RX 470 has 2,048 compute cores, 128 texture units, and 32 ROPS — a substantial increase on all fronts. Board memory bandwidth is 18% higher and AMD’s improved delta color compression should further boost performance.

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Back when Nvidia unveiled its second-generation Maxwell architecture, it delivered a huge improvement in performance-per-watt, all while keeping the same 28nm process node that powered its previous GPU architecture, codenamed Kepler. While the company shared some details on how Maxwell improved on Kepler, including a larger L2 cache, improved memory efficiency and a new Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) configuration, it played a number of cards extremely close to its chest.

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