NVIDIA Launches GeForce GTX 1060 To Take On AMD's Radeon RX 480 (hothardware.com)

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NVIDIA Launches GeForce GTX 1060 To Take On AMD's Radeon RX 480 (hothardware.com)

Posted by msmash on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @04:00AM from the fight-for-affordable-GPUs dept.

Reader MojoKid writes: NVIDIA just launched their answer to AMD's Radeon RX 480 mainstream card today, dubbed the GeForce GTX 1060. The GP106 GPU at the heart of the GeForce GTX 1060 has roughly half of the resources of NVIDIA's current flagship GeForce GTX 1080. NVIDIA claims the GTX 1060 performs on par with a previous generation high-end GeForce GTX 980 and indeed this 120W mainstream offers an interesting mix of low-power and high-performance. The new GeForce GTX 1060 features a new Pascal derivative GPU that's somewhat smaller, called the GP106. The GP106 features 10 streaming multiprocessors (SM) with a total of 1280, single-precision CUDA cores and eight texture units. The GeForce GTX 1060 also features six 32-bit memory controllers, for 192-bits in total. GeForce GTX 1060 cards with either 6GB or 3GB of GDDR5 memory will be available and offered performance that just misses the mark set by the pricier AMD Radeon R9 Nano but often outran the 8GB Radeon RX 480. The GeForce GTX 1060 held onto its largest leads over the Radeon RX 480 in the DirectX 11 tests, though the Radeon had a clear edge in OpenCL and managed to pull ahead in Thief and in some DirectX 12 tests (like Hitman). The GeForce GTX 1060, however, consumes significantly less power than the Radeon RX 480 and is quieter too.You may also want to read PCPerspective's take on this.

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Deja vu! by fustakrakich · 2016-07-19 04:12 · Score: 2, Informative

All over again.
What is this? An Alzheimers test?

--
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
1. Re:Deja vu! by msmash · 2016-07-19 04:24 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  No, today's post sheds more insight into the GPUs, and how they fare against each other -- with benchmark numbers etc.
2. Re:Deja vu! by Vigile · 2016-07-19 05:01 · Score: 1
  
  Today's launch is for reviews, with performance results, etc. That previous post was just the "announcement".
3. Re:Deja vu! by fustakrakich · 2016-07-19 05:08 · Score: 1
  
  Would have been nice to see that specified in the summary.
  By the way, it pretty much goes without mentioning that an nvidia card runs cooler than an AMD :-)
  
  --
  “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
4. Re:Deja vu! by Gadget_Guy · 2016-07-19 05:30 · Score: 1
  
  Would have been nice to see that specified in the summary.
  One title said that the card was "announced" while the other said that it had been "launched". A pretty clear distinction right from the start. Then the summary says:
  
  The GeForce GTX 1060 held onto its largest leads over the Radeon RX 480 in the DirectX 11 tests, though the Radeon had a clear edge in OpenCL and managed to pull ahead in Thief and in some DirectX 12 tests (like Hitman).
  
  What do you think that these tests are if they aren't benchmarks?
5. Re:Deja vu! by fustakrakich · 2016-07-19 05:56 · Score: 1
  
  Ah, so then the "announcement" was really an nvidia ad? Do they really need that much front page exposure?
  
  --
  “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
When will VideoCards peak? by jellomizer · 2016-07-19 04:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

We had a good run From 1995-1998 with the SVGA cards that did 1024x768 with 32bit color. Then that 3D acceleration came out and buying a good video card became much more difficult.
With Displays going up to 4k we should be getting to a point where increase of resolution will not matter, And 3d performance on those displays should be quick enough.
While Mores law is in effect our bodies are not adapting as fast as the technology, so there should be a point where the Video from a computer will meet a threshold where playing such upgrade games isn't going to be important.
Much like how we don't talk much about Sound cards.

--
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by drinkypoo · 2016-07-19 04:25 · Score: 2
  
  With Displays going up to 4k we should be getting to a point where increase of resolution will not matter, And 3d performance on those displays should be quick enough.
  Quick enough for what? When we reach photorealism at dual 4k, then we can maybe talk about peaking. We're a long, long way off from that.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
2. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Mashiki · 2016-07-19 04:31 · Score: 1
  
  Likely not for awhile. And with stuff like HBM(and memory on GPU die) in the pipe, I wouldn't expect that to happen for a decade or more, especially since computer video displays are moving into 4k. The reality is, there's never enough processing, memory, or bandwidth on a video card and there's plenty of limitations on current PC's that cause issues.
  But buying a videocard became difficult? Hardly. Buy a good mid-range card for $150-200 every 5 years if you're not a hardcore gamer(though lots of games out there will be just fine 5 years down the road likely) or an enthusiast and go on your way. I expect my 7950 to get another 3 years easy with the current state of gaming and the state of development cycles. The only title that's actually hard pressed the card so far has been Witcher 3.
  
  --
  Om, nomnomnom...
3. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by avandesande · 2016-07-19 04:36 · Score: 1
  
  There is tons of stuff game designers can't put in the game because they are too processing intensive... trust me they will use up any new gpu advances.
  
  --
  love is just extroverted narcissism
4. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by tlhIngan · 2016-07-19 04:42 · Score: 1
  
  We had a good run From 1995-1998 with the SVGA cards that did 1024x768 with 32bit color. Then that 3D acceleration came out and buying a good video card became much more difficult.
  With Displays going up to 4k we should be getting to a point where increase of resolution will not matter, And 3d performance on those displays should be quick enough.
  While Mores law is in effect our bodies are not adapting as fast as the technology, so there should be a point where the Video from a computer will meet a threshold where playing such upgrade games isn't going to be important.
  Much like how we don't talk much about Sound cards.
  Not for a long while yet.
  Modern video cards can barely sustain 60fps at 4K - and usually only with simplified geometry. Given the state of PC graphics today, there will be plenty that can bog down even a top end video card. And VR demanding higher framerates is not easy yet either.
  Sound cards peaked ages ago because what they did was simple - 44.1kHz 16 bit audio is relatively trivial - the DACs are cheap and plentiful and signal wise, it's pretty slow. And processing on the CPU got quick enough that accelerators helped very little - by the time you got the accelerator loaded
  Modern video cards can't drive 8 million pixels at 60 fps rock-steady, and with more complex models and environments, they will bog down as well.
5. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by 110010001000 · 2016-07-19 04:43 · Score: 2
  
  Moores law has been dead for quite a while now. Really digital computing is reaching a dead end in itself. If you have noticed, the single thread performance of Intel CPUs is only around 20% of what they were 5 years ago. The days of exponential growth are well over. That is why they have just been adding more cores and cache and trying to improve memory technology. All the low hanging fruit has been picked.
6. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by dingleberrie · 2016-07-19 04:56 · Score: 1
  
  The other day Tim Sweeney of Epic games said we need about 40 TFLOPS to get realistic (non-human) visuals, Current generation is 5 to 10 TFLOPS.
  After that, we probably need it to run off of a AA battery.
  There's still some room to advance from where we are today.
7. Re: When will VideoCards peak? by Type44Q · 2016-07-19 05:02 · Score: 1
  
  Then that 3D acceleration came out and buying a good video card became much more difficult.
  There was a sequence of "correct" 3D cards to own which more or less went from Matrox Millenium to 3Dfx to Nvidia but if you bought wrong (Nvidia NV1, anything ATi before r300, S3, Number Nine, Voodoo4/5, etc), you were generally not a happy camper... fortunately for me, I learned my lesson early-on with "Tandy 16-color graphics" (EGA comparable but not compatible.
8. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Hadlock · 2016-07-19 05:05 · Score: 1
  
  So, what, six, ten years out? Battlefield 4 isn't photorealistic but it's definitely moving in that direction with just a few tricks.
  
  --
  moox. for a new generation.
9. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by fustakrakich · 2016-07-19 05:10 · Score: 1
  
  When we reach photorealism at dual 4k, then we can maybe talk about peaking. We're a long, long way off from that.
  That, and the petabytes of storage and RAM needed to store all that for a 30 second video
  
  --
  “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
10. Re: When will VideoCards peak? by Type44Q · 2016-07-19 05:11 · Score: 2
  
  When we reach photorealism at dual 4k, then we can maybe talk about peaking.
  When a single mobile GPU can drive a pair of small 8Ã--8k 120hz stereoscopic displays, then we can maybe talk about peaking. :)
11. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by greenfruitsalad · 2016-07-19 05:33 · Score: 2
  
  exactly. even if we increased the processing power of graphics cards 20 fold right now, we still wouldn't even have real-time raytracing of inanimate scenes. let alone trees with moving leaves, human hair or people wearing realistically looking fabric (of fur).
12. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Gordo_1 · 2016-07-19 05:34 · Score: 1
  
  VR will be pushing dual 4k @ 90+fps in less than 5 years most likely. At that point, I think we'll be close to the threshold you speak of.
13. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Gadget_Guy · 2016-07-19 05:50 · Score: 1
  
  Moores law has been dead for quite a while now.
  You have misunderstood what Moore's law is about. It is simply about the number of transistors doubling in integrated circuits every year (later revised to every two years). It is not about single threaded performance in CPUs.
  
  That is why they have just been adding more cores and cache and trying to improve memory technology.
  How do you think they add more cores and cache into CPUs if not by increasing the number of transistors? You have just described Moore's law in action!
  Moore's law has been around for decades; which only slightly longer than the predictions that the law is dying.
14. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by by+(1706743) · 2016-07-19 05:51 · Score: 2
  
  ...44.1kHz 16 bit audio is relatively trivial...
  So, is is there an analogous specification for video cards? The 44.1kHz @ 16bit is pretty easily justified (Nyquist–Shannon + reasonable dynamic range). Can a visual equivalent be easily justified? That is to say, at sort of "eye limited" (retina, in Apple lingo) resolution and field of view, how many polygons can be said to make up the human perception of reality, and what sort of graphics processing muscle would be required to drive this?
  
  I of course have no idea, just wondering out loud. Just trying to approach OP's question in a pseudo-scientific fashion.
15. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by arth1 · 2016-07-19 05:57 · Score: 1
  
  We had a good run From 1995-1998 with the SVGA cards that did 1024x768 with 32bit color. Then that 3D acceleration came out and buying a good video card became much more difficult.
  And for all this time, I have been hoping for a split, where the display card is decoupled from the acceleration card, and talking with an open bus standard.
  And I also like to see a return to analog video output. No pixels - that's the property of the software and not the rendering medium. Higher quality analog can display higher fidelity.
  Much like how we don't talk much about Sound cards.
  Joe Schmoe doesn't care about sound anymore. Gone are symphonic rock through HiFi systems with discrete components and large floor standing speakers. Instead, Joe wants rhythm compressed down to four bits or less, played through a single bluetooth speaker.
  But enthusiasts still buy sound cards, or external D/A converter amps, and use speakers that can actually push enough air without distorting the sound.
16. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by ShooterNeo · 2016-07-19 06:00 · Score: 2
  
  As it so happens, the demands of VR headsets mean that video cards available now are nowhere NEAR adequate. As a poster south of me says, you need at LEAST dual 4k - one for each eye - and fovea tracking - and at LEAST 90 FPS. All the time. With minimal latency.
  Believe it or not, but not even the most expensive GPU money can buy - heck, not even unreleased GPUs that Nvidia has in Tesla cards (they are "released" but you can't use em as a graphics card) - is anywhere close to being able to push this kind of resolution and framerate at a low latency.
  It literally cannot be done with current chip construction. Maybe with a 4 or 8 GPU solution.
17. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by drinkypoo · 2016-07-19 06:13 · Score: 1
  
  Most people don't need that much power,
  
  The question was not whether most people need that much power, the question was when can we talk about GPUs peaking, and the answer is not any time soon. Also, you're wrong about resolution. Anyone would benefit from a 4k monitor, if their apps are properly designed and they can make use of it. Smoother text is easier on the eyes.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
18. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by mestar · 2016-07-19 06:18 · Score: 1
  
  "Moores law has been dead for quite a while now.
  You have misunderstood what Moore's law is about. It is simply about the number of transistors doubling in integrated circuits every year (later revised to every two years). It is not about single threaded performance in CPUs."
  Oh boy, here we go again, another Moore's law explainer.
  So, try to understand that the Moore's law got well known because of all the speed that your precious count brought.
  Nobody cares about the transistor counts, people upgraded because in about a year, your computer got twice as fast. This effect was known as a "Moore's law".
  How long are you going to be sticking to the technicality of the transistor count? Are you aware that meanings of words can change over time?
  Do you call your electronic computer only "a computer". Do you have a person sitting below your desk? Because a computer was a person that did calculations. That's why old farts sometime insisted on calling them "electronic computers".
  So, yes, Moore's law surely is about the single thread performance.
19. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Lonewolf666 · 2016-07-19 06:34 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Well, lets do a bit of math then to figure it out.
  According to https://www.nde-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/PenetrantTest/Introduction/visualacuity.htm, 20/20 vision is
  
  the ability to resolve a spatial pattern separated by a visual angle of one minute of arc
  
  Lets take that as a given for the sake of the argument, and assume that we want just enough dpi on our screen that one pixel shows up at a visual angle of one minute of arc. So the screen can just match the resolution of the eye.
  Lets also assume that the largest screen we might ever want is as wide as the viewing distance from our eyes to the center of the screen. Think a 32'' screen on your desk, at arms length away, or a 100'' screen 2-3 meters away in your living room.
  Then the viewing angle at the left/right edge of the screen is arctan (0.5) = 26.6 degrees and the total viewing angle from left to right is 53.2Â.
  The requirement of one pixel = one minute of arc translates to 60 pixel per degree and to a horizontal screen resolution of 3192 pixel. A bit less than the 4K resolution that is already on the market. I haven't watched 4K material yet, but I found that WQHD (2560x1440 pixels) on a good monitor is already pushing the limit of my eyesight.
  So I guess 3840x2160 will end up being the "44.1kHz 16 bit of video". Most people won't really see the difference when the resolution is pushed higher.
  
  --
  C - the footgun of programming languages
20. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Yvan256 · 2016-07-19 06:39 · Score: 1
  
  Are we really a long, long way from that? Let's not forget that only two decades ago, the top videogames looked like this.
  Is it really that far-fetched to think that we're only a decade or two away from photorealist, stereoscopic 4K gaming with 120fps per display?
21. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Yvan256 · 2016-07-19 06:41 · Score: 1
  
  or people wearing realistically looking fabric (of fur).
  I'm all for realistically looking anthropomorphic characters (Miqo'te), but your comment is leaning a bit too far on the furry cosplay side...
22. Re: When will VideoCards peak? by Yvan256 · 2016-07-19 06:45 · Score: 1
  
  At least your Tandy had that 3-voice synth IC, as opposed to those of us on EGA systems stuck with a crappy monophonic* speaker.
  * yes, I know about digital audio via the PC speaker. But it took a lot of CPU to do that and it sounded like crap on top of a high-pitched whine.
23. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Yvan256 · 2016-07-19 06:49 · Score: 1
  
  Where do you get "2000 pixels per mm" exactly? I've got something 3D-printed right in front of me with 200 microns layers and I can only see the layers because of the light reflection.
  2000 per mm means 0.0005 millimeters, which is insanely tiny as far as our eyes are concerned.
24. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by SuiteSisterMary · 2016-07-19 07:31 · Score: 1
  
  Right, so, you yern for the days of an ATI Mach64 for 2d video, a pair of 3dfx Voodoo2s in SLI, and a Aureal A3d sound card, or a SB32 with WaveBlaster2 daughterboard.
  Those were, indeed, good times, though some of it was through the rosy glasses of nostalgia.
  
  --
  Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
25. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by drinkypoo · 2016-07-19 07:34 · Score: 1
  
  And for all this time, I have been hoping for a split, where the display card is decoupled from the acceleration card, and talking with an open bus standard.
  What do you think you would gain there? Not having to buy the video connectors repeatedly? They're a pretty small portion of the price.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
26. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by MachineShedFred · 2016-07-19 07:55 · Score: 1
  
  Sound cards, at their core, are just creating analog frequencies from a digital source. This is a well understood mature technology, so there's not much to do there except reducing distortion and improving snr.
  GPUs however, still have a scale issue - simplistically, the more pixels you drive, the more horsepower you need in the GPU. If we would have stayed at 1024x768 then the GPUs we have today would be massive overkill. But we didn't - a 4k display has more pixels than 10 1024x768 displays, and we're doing far more math per pixel now then we were in 2001 with that bitchin dual Voodoo2 setup doing SLI. And we're not slowing down on the scale either - Apple already has 5k displays in iMacs, and you may have noticed that practically all manufacturers are stuffing more pixels per inch into even small devices in order to get better quality displays - all of this requires far more GPU power to work.
  
  --
  Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
27. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by arth1 · 2016-07-19 08:37 · Score: 1
  
  What do you think you would gain there? Not having to buy the video connectors repeatedly? They're a pretty small portion of the price.
  Being able to add just the (and all the) connectors you need, and be able to get higher quality DA components if you want. Be able to not pay for accelerated 3d if you don't need it. Be able to pay for better accelerated 3d if you need it. Have completely independent video cards for different functions. Be able to run a game on one display and my e-mail on another, simultaneously, because I get back the true multihead support that the young whippersnappers ripped out from Linux in the early 2000s. Run 16 displays for a wall display without eight PCs. And so on and so on.
  An "everything but the kitchen sink" approach is always going to be a jack of all trades, and master of none. I don't put up with it for audio, so why should I for video? Choice is good, and discrete components offer that.
28. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by drinkypoo · 2016-07-19 09:38 · Score: 1
  
  Being able to add just the (and all the) connectors you need, and be able to get higher quality DA components if you want.
  Not that anyone uses analog output any more, but they tend to have a wicked high-speed RAMDAC on there for that minuscule portion of the market still using CRTs now that we have things like LCDs with adaptive sync.
  
  Be able to not pay for accelerated 3d if you don't need it.
  It's a tiny portion of the price at the low end.
  
  Be able to pay for better accelerated 3d if you need it.
  You can already do that.
  
  Have completely independent video cards for different functions.
  You can do that, too! You can even install an Nvidia card just for PhysX, and do graphics on an AMD card! Or you can use a card just for GPGPU.
  
  Be able to run a game on one display and my e-mail on another, simultaneously, because I get back the true multihead support that the young whippersnappers ripped out from Linux in the early 2000s.
  I'm able to do that on Windows, heh.
  
  An "everything but the kitchen sink" approach is always going to be a jack of all trades, and master of none. I don't put up with it for audio, so why should I for video? Choice is good, and discrete components offer that.
  Most of us are using "integrated" audio and have no problem with it. And if we need more or different audio, we just buy it. I have especially-isolated USB connectors on my board, so I could plug in a USB sound card (I have an old M-Audio Mobile Pre USB, for example) and use that, and ignore the onboard audio, or use them both for different functions.
  
  Choice is good, and discrete components offer that.
  Well, you can already do most of the stuff you want to do... on Windows
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
29. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by TeknoHog · 2016-07-19 09:56 · Score: 1
  
  And for all this time, I have been hoping for a split, where the display card is decoupled from the acceleration card, and talking with an open bus standard.
  I'm not sure if this is economically feasible, but it sure is a nice idea. A lot of my GPU usage is spent on rendering and computing, not just direct display, and I hate the idea of paying extra for components I never use. OTOH, every mechanical connector comes with a lot of overhead, not to mention potential for wear and damage. The first integrated circuits were conceived to avoid solder/connector issues, not so much miniaturization.
  
  And I also like to see a return to analog video output. No pixels - that's the property of the software and not the rendering medium. Higher quality analog can display higher fidelity.
  It's a somewhat interesting idea, especially considering the audio analogy (pun intended) -- pixels would be just samples of the underlying "real" picture. The problem is finding a real, working, decent analog display; even CRTs have their phosphors arranged in pixels, and they come with a bunch of problems of their own.
  However, if you want to continue with the audio analogy, it's much better to keep the digital pixel format for as long as possible. A modern analog display should have its own converter, much like the current displays with their electronics. Maybe you can consider DP/DVI/HDMI as the portable interface between accelerators and displays.
  As a mathematical graphic artist, though, I'd like to see a vector display. Let me define the coordinates of points to an arbitrary precision, but don't give me any of that ugly analog blur (unless I ask for it, as a special effect).
  
  --
  Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
30. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by 110010001000 · 2016-07-19 11:01 · Score: 1
  
  I know what Moores law is. It is dead. The law is double every two years PER SQ/INCH. That hasn't happened. You don't know what you are talking about. I didn't say that was the sole cause of single thread performance not increasing much, but it is a big contributor. There are only a few ways to get better single thread performance and increasing transistor count it is biggest way historically. Idiot.
31. Re: When will VideoCards peak? by 110010001000 · 2016-07-19 11:13 · Score: 1
  
  Moores law doesn't work that way. The 760 has 3.5B transistors and it is older than the 960. Moores law is dead. We won't see any doubling of transistor count per sq/inch anymore.
32. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by mobby_6kl · 2016-07-19 12:02 · Score: 1
  
  The progress is definitely slowing down, however. Far Cry was released in 2004 and looked amazing at the time. Crysis came out just three years later and was clearly a whole new level. That was 2007, or almost ten years ago. It still looks very, very good by todan's stanards, if not quite top notch. Crysis 3 is three years old now, and while it's a moderate improvement over 1/2, not much, if anything, surpassed it yet, certainly not to a degree that Crysis improved on Far Cry.
  Hopefully it's been mostly an issue of consoles holding everyone back, but I'm not quite so sure any more. Processors are barely getting any faster, AMD's new cards are basically last-gen level of performance and efficiency, and Nvidia's, while a noticeable improvement, took two years to update.
  Still, we'll probably hit that mark since it's not that far off. A 1080 can hit 50-60fps at 4k in most games, and simultaneous re-projection should enable stereoscopy at minimal cost. For VR, foveated rendering would also cut down on effective resolution significantly.
  So we'd need double or triple performance, at least, with significant improvements to graphical engines and tech. Back in the day this would've taken a couple of years at most, but this is still doable within a decade.
33. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by GrahamCox · 2016-07-19 14:20 · Score: 1
  
  Not for a while yet. Even when the video resolution has reached "good enough for everybody", there's the next push: hardware accelerated physics. At the moment physics models are necessarily crude, which is why things never quite behave the way you think they ought to. Physics is amenable to massively parallel scaling, just as graphics has been. When we can model physics at the macro-atomic level, video cards will be done.
34. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Pulzar · 2016-07-19 14:52 · Score: 1
  
  Nobody cares about the transistor counts, people upgraded because in about a year, your computer got twice as fast. This effect was known as a "Moore's law".
  Just because you, your grandma, and CNN's tech section editor misunderstood something for a while, doesn't make it right.
  
  --
  Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
35. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Blaskowicz · 2016-07-19 15:50 · Score: 1
  
  The idea is to have video output flow arbitrarily. Imagine adding more outputs on a card for your integrated graphics, without needing to go dual GPU ; or on the contrary, have two different GPU, one for Windows and one for Linux but just one set of outputs. So that you don't need to fiddle with a KVM switch, dual input monitors and their menus, be stuck with one or two Linux monitors next to one Windows monitor (all fixed), etc.
  There are some existing technologies that do something like that but in specific use cases : laptops with Intel + nvidia (etc.) GPUs, DMA_BUF in GPL open source linux drivers (no idea what it's actually used for in the real world), USB 3 to video output adapters, GPU that output to their H264 or H265 encoder (then stuff happens on a network), Xbox with special hardware for compositing of Metro apps (whatever you call them) with game output - the latter is something that all happens on the same, single physical chip.
  What if you've got a near future PC, where hardware can just send and receive compressed Displayport over PCIe 4.0, and it's somehow easily supported (by layers of crap like software, drivers, multiple vendors, hypervisors..).
  Blends with video inputs too.
36. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by by+(1706743) · 2016-07-19 16:20 · Score: 1
  
  Nice. I was thinking more in terms of computational power required for arbitrary photo-realistic graphics at this resolution. I'm not even sure if that's a well-posed question, though. But perhaps one could decide the minimum size of a polygon/size of textures required/etc., and come up with some heuristic argument for theoretical GPU requirements that could provide an imperceptibly high frame rate at the "44.1kHz/16bit video" resolution/bitdepth, displaying an arbitrarily complex (up to the limit of human perception) scene.
  
  I like and agree with your calculation, up to (perhaps?) a factor of two due to ol' Nyquist–Shannon and whatnot (e.g., human hearing is often quoted as good to 20kHz, but we require twice that or ~40kHz due to sampling). Also, the human eye has a phenomenal dynamic range, so the bitdepth might need to pretty high, although the full dynamic range is only realized over a very slow timescale I think (we can see just fine in the sunlight at ~1kW/m^2 illumination, but we can also see object outlines at night when an entire room is lit only by an LED pushing 100 mW).
37. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Blaskowicz · 2016-07-19 16:27 · Score: 1
  
  For that matter, make a 16/10 21" CRT with HDMI etc. inputs and I'd be very interested. With 1920x1200 85Hz for some stuff, 1440x900 120Hz for other stuff (like most casual desktop usage), 1920x1080 60Hz works if you plug in random crap, 1024x768 or 1280x1024 with black bars for the odd thing, etc.
  It would be trivial technologically wise (except for concerns of "lost technology") and there would be something of a market already with nostalgia gamers, fringe LCD haters and old fucks, what have you. But in these times, you can't have anything different.
  Even with LCD monitors, there's more choice lately but you can't get a monitor that's 16/10 and high refresh, or 16/10 and big, or all three at once. (nor even a 27" 1080p at 144Hz)
38. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by TeknoHog · 2016-07-19 21:08 · Score: 1
  
  But in these times, you can't have anything different. Even with LCD monitors, there's more choice lately but you can't get a monitor that's 16/10 and high refresh, or 16/10 and big, or all three at once. (nor even a 27" 1080p at 144Hz)
  It's silly that the HD video/movie craze forced computer users to the same widescreen format, as if computers were all about watching movies. I recently got a couple of 1280x1024s for next to nothing, as my math exhibitions work best in near-square formats. OTOH, 16:9 is nice for a stage backdrop projection.
  
  --
  Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
39. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by greenfruitsalad · 2016-07-19 21:31 · Score: 1
  
  s/of fur/or fur
40. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by Shirley+Marquez · 2016-07-20 06:58 · Score: 1
  
  Analog video output would only help if there were also a return to analog video display devices. I don't see CRTs or any other analog display device returning in the foreseeable future. Digital output is better for controlling displays that are inherently digital, such as LCD and OLED panels and DLP projectors.
41. Re:When will VideoCards peak? by arth1 · 2016-07-23 14:54 · Score: 1
  
  Fidelity to what? You still have to store the visual information digitally if it's coming from a computer.
  You sound like one of those vinyl purists who romanticizes the 'golden age' before digital, and forgets how crappy it actually used to sound.
  You sound like a kid that has never worked with compression algorithms, vectors and interpolation.
  Why do you think you can stream an MP4 and get it to look good in 1080p? It's certainly not because they stream the full digital signal, tailored to your pixel resolution.
  The tyranny of pixels is falling. With high resolution displays, it becomes a problem and not a solution. Scalable graphics with physical and relative measurements is the future. Including protocols for sending this type of information to a display. Something analogue signals are good for, because they scale without staircasing and other artifacts.
But what about the DPC latency? by mrraptor98 · 2016-07-19 04:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

Initial benchmarks look lower than the RX 480 and the price higher [with actual retail availability no better]. When you add the DPC latency issues, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. I actually have a GTX 1070 I'm sending back now just because i don't want to deal with possible Nvidia DPC hell.
It will only be competition if you can find it by 110010001000 · 2016-07-19 04:41 · Score: 1

The GTX 1080 and 1070 have been consistently out if stock.
1. Re:It will only be competition if you can find it by Lonewolf666 · 2016-07-19 05:56 · Score: 1
  
  Depending on how urgent the replacement is, waiting a few more weeks might make sense. The first manufacturer designs should soon appear, with a few improvements over the reference design.
  PC Games Hardware has a short hands-on test of the XFX Radeon RX 480 (http://www.pcgameshardware.de/AMD-Radeon-RX-4808G-Grafikkarte-264637/Videos/XFX-RX-480-Black-Edition-Test-1202095/) which shows better cooling and an 8-pin power connector that can officially handle 150W, thus solving the problem with the reference design violating the official power limit on the 6 pin connector.
  
  --
  C - the footgun of programming languages
2. Re:It will only be competition if you can find it by Qzukk · 2016-07-19 07:13 · Score: 1
  
  I'm curious. How does VGA passthrough work with virtualization? Is the host treated as a headless server while the one guest the VGA card is assigned to gets a display? Does the VGA card get reset and handed back to the host when that particular guest is shut down?
  Or do you have two video cards/monitors, one for the host and one for the guest? In that case, do you also have a separate keyboard/mouse for this guest? If not, how does the keyboard/mouse input get assigned to the guest? (Synergy?)
  
  --
  If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
3. Re:It will only be competition if you can find it by waryishe · 2016-07-19 08:39 · Score: 1
  
  It needs 2 Video cards. One for host. One for guest. Keyboard and mouse is usually shared but you can do dedicated pass through of those things as well as usb peripherals if you want. I can report that the oculus works fine in a vm with vga pass through. On my setup, I use both monitors for linux and then when i want to start up a game I boot a vm of windows 7 and switch one of the monitors inputs over to it. The performance is roughly the same as native. Since I play with v-sync on and have a fairly powerful graphics card for gaming, I can't tell a difference between native and vm. But when turning off v-sync, I do notice a 5-8% drop in frame rate. I feel it's worth it since i do everything in linux and it was a pain to duel boot. But, it's not for everyone.
The elephant i by edxwelch · 2016-07-19 05:05 · Score: 2

Well, it doesn't look too good for AMD. Their "super efficient" RX 480 uses much more power than the 1060 and is slower.
On the bright side is the price of the 480 is only $200 (well, eventually it will be ;) ) and also AMD's version of aync compute works far better than Pascal (see: http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gef... and http://www.eurogamer.net/artic... )
1. Re:The elephant i by Freedom+Bug · 2016-07-19 06:13 · Score: 2
  
  The 1060 is faster the 480 in old games. However newer games will use technologies like asynchronous DX12 and Vulkan. Ashes of the Singularity and Hitman are good examples of the former, and the Vulkan build of Doom is a good example of the latter.
  The 480 is faster than the 1060 in those 3 games. Doom/Vulkan is a *lot* faster on the 480.
2. Re:The elephant i by edxwelch · 2016-07-19 06:32 · Score: 1
  
  I think you'll find though that the 480 is only faster if the game makes use of async compute.
  Having said that async compute is shaping up to be a very important feature.
Doesn't sound like a great value by Early+Six+Digit+UID · 2016-07-19 08:17 · Score: 1

Linus Tech Tips did a video review (YouTube Link) and it sounds like the RX480 is a much better value. I'm surprised, but pleased to see AMD doing well. It would be nice if nvidia had some competition at all price points.