PCPer Live! Hitman: Absolution Game Stream - Win Games and Graphics Cards!

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards | November 20, 2012 - 01:06 PM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: video, tahiti, radeon, never settle, live, hitman: absolution, amd

UPDATE: If you missed the event last night we have the full replay here for you!  Enjoy!

On November 20th on the PC Perspective Live! page we will be streaming some single player game action of the new Hitman: Absolution.  If you have never played a Hitman game before I think PC gamers will love the combination of action and stealth as well as some of the humor you'll find in the assassination attempts. 

Image from Videogamer.com

Hitman: Absolution Game Stream

5pm PT / 8pm ET - November 20th

PC Perspective Live! Page

The stream will be sponsored by AMD and its Never Settle game bundles which we previously told you about.  Depending on the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series GPU that you buy this holiday season you could get as much as $170 in gaming content including:

• FREE Sleeping Dogs
• FREE Hitman: Absolution
• FREE Far Cry 3
• 20% off Medal of Honor Warfighter

AMD's Robert Hallock (@Thracks on twitter) will be joining us via Skype to talk about the game's technology, performance considerations as well as making fun of attempts at effectively offing some fools.

Of course, just to sweeten the deal a bit we have some prizes lined up for those of you that participate in our Hitman: Absolution Game Stream:

• 2 x Sapphire FleX HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB (!!)
• 3 x Complete Never Settle Bundles (Sleeping Dogs, Hitman, Far Cry 3, 20% Off MoH)
• 5 x Sleeping Dogs keys
• 5 x Hitman: Absolution keys
• 5 x Far Cry 3 keys

Pretty nice, huh?  That's a LOT of games (as well as some Radeon graphics cards) and all you have to do to win is be present on the PC Perspective Live! Page during the event as we will announce both the content/sweepstakes method AND the winners!

Stop in on the 20th for some PC gaming fun!!

AMD Facing Even More Layoffs

Subject: Editorial, General Tech, Graphics Cards, Processors | November 17, 2012 - 04:09 PM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: layoffs, amd

Personally, I am starting to get numb to AMD restructuring news -- and that is never good.

Less than a month ago we reported on the semiconductor design company’s decision to cut 15% of their workforce. The company still has life in it and has a respectable presence in all upcoming videogame consoles along with its inclusion within many consumer laptops and desktops but it is clearly not as much life as they need.

Original rumors stated that cuts could be on the order of 10-30% which 15% would be on the lighter side of. With rumors of more cuts coming in January I wonder if this was a last minute decision to break up the layoffs into two less dramatic installments.

One of the beauties of the tech industry is the low cost of starting or turning a company around; it would be irresponsible to completely count out a player while it still has access to millions of capital. AMD is also sitting upon lots of assets which could be liquidated and their employees have ridiculous talent to be employable elsewhere. I have been noticing that most chatter about the topic is not based in concern with AMD and their employee’s future but with concern about an x86 competitor to Intel.

This is pretty much the same concern which I have been having about Windows 8: the house of cards may be standing but it is still a house of cards. We rely upon the proprietary standards which Intel and others impose upon the art, the word being used both in literal and “artisan / practical art” contexts which includes utensil applications.

Concern mounts but practically no-one grafts it to similar instabilities in other platforms.

No I am not saying abolish technology patents or anything like that: I am simply saying that this is yet another drop in the torrent of concerns with content upstream to proprietary platforms.

These issues rightfully cause alarm but are not isolated events.

GeForce GTX Call of Duty Rivalries competition ...and more

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards | November 15, 2012 - 04:05 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: nvidia, call of duty, black ops 2

NVIDIA will be celebrating the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops II by launching the first-ever “GeForce GTX Call of Duty Rivalries” competition which pits top colleges against each other in Call of Duty: Black Ops II four-person, last team standing multiplayer matches. Participants in the first round of competition include the storied rivalries of Cal vs. Stanford, USC vs. UCLA and UNC vs. NC State. Two additional wildcard colleges from any accredited college in the United States will also be chosen by the Facebook community to field teams. See details on GeForce.com or visit NVIDIA’s Facebook page on how you can walk away with a Maingear gaming rig.

In addition to the contest NVIDIA also released the GeForce 310.54 beta driver with specific benefits for players of Black Ops 2, specifically the inclusion of TXAA.

• Delivers up to 26 percent faster performance in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and up to 18% faster performance in Assassin’s Creed III.
• Provides smooth, shimmer-free graphics with NVIDIA TXAA antialiasing in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Assassin’s Creed III.
• Improves performance by up to 16% in other top games likes Battlefield 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and StarCraft II.

As always, our new driver includes new profiles for today’s top titles, increasing multi-GPU performance.

• Hawken – Added SLI profile
• Hitman: Absolution – Added SLI profile
• Natural Selection 2 – Added SLI profile
• Primal Carnage – Added SLI profile

You can grab the driver and read about all the improvements right here.

The driving force behind revisting Radeon and GeForce cards

Subject: Graphics Cards | November 15, 2012 - 01:43 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: amd, nvidia, catalyst, forceware

We have seen quite a few driver updates since the release of cards like the HD 7970 GHz Edition and the GTX 680 which inspired [H]ard|OCP to revisit the performance of these cards in several games.  Some results were not surprising, the two top cards have historically run neck and neck in performance and price and that remains true now.  There was a definite loser however, the performance of the GTX 660 Ti matches that of the HD7870 but the price is similar to the much faster HD7950.  Check out the full results here.

"With the recent release of new beta drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA, and the upping of clocks by AMD, significant performance gains have been claimed by both parties for current generation video cards. We will investigate with a 6-way roundup comparison to see if we can crown a champion."

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

Graphics Cards

• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 4GB @ Legion Hardware
• Sparkle Calibre X680 Captain @ Kitguru
• ASUS HD 7970 3GB Matrix Platinum Edition Review @ Hardware Canucks
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB @ eTeknix
• MSI GEFORCE GTX 660 HAWK 2GB @ Tweaktown
• Call Of Duty Black Ops II VGA Graphics performance with 21 cards @ Guru of 3D
• A Look at NVIDIA's Kepler-based Tesla K-Series GPU Accelerators @ Techgage
• ASUS GeForce GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II TOP @ Guru of 3D
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Review @ Neoseeker
• Benchmarking NVIDIA's R310 Linux Driver Improvements @ Phoronix
• Clock-For-Clock, Nouveau Can Compete With NVIDIA's Driver @ Phoronix
• HIS Radeon HD 7750 IceQ X Turbo 1 GB @ techPowerUp
• AMD FirePro W5000 Professional Graphics Card Review @ Legit Reviews
• HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition & 7950 IceQ X² Boost Clock @ Legion Hardware
• Sapphire HD 7770 FleX @ TechwareLabs
• Asus Matrix HD 7970 Platinum 3GB @ eTeknix

AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 7 - CoD Black Ops Edition

Subject: Graphics Cards | November 13, 2012 - 06:02 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

When AMD promised to move off of a monthly release schedule for their Catalyst Control Center and drivers, we didn't think that would mean we would see multiple releases from them every month.  If you count the beta versions then that is exactly what is happening, today the release of the 12.11 Beta 7 driver is available on their beta driver page.   We have listed the improvements offered by previous versions of the 12.11 Beta driver and they are quite impressive, this particular version adds one more to the list of improvements.  Players of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 should be grabbing this driver as the improvement is specific to the CrossFire compatibility of that game.  AMD does not specify a percentage increase but they do state you will see much better performance on CrossFire systems, especially if you are playing at 2560 x 1600 and above ... which you really should be if you are running a CrossFire system.  It has all the previous benefits as well, so if you've been holding off on upgrading your graphics driver, this might be a good excuse to do so.

AMD Launches Dual Tahiti FirePro S10000 Graphics Card

Subject: Graphics Cards | November 13, 2012 - 04:15 PM | Tim Verry
Tagged: tahiti, HPC, gpgpu, firepro s10000, firepro

On Monday, AMD launched its latest graphics card aimed at the server and workstation market. Called the AMD FirePro S10000 (for clarity, that’s FirePro S10,000), it is a dual GPU Tahiti graphics card that offers up some impressive performance numbers.

No, unfortunately, this is not the (at this point) mythical dual-7970 AMD HD 7990 graphics card. Rather, the FirePro S10,000 is essentially two Radeon 7950 GPUs on a single PCB along with 6 GB of GDDR5 memory. Specifications on the card include 3,584 stream processors, a GPU clock speed of 825 MHz, and 6 GB GDDR5 with a total of 480 GB/s of memory bandwidth. That is 1,792 stream processors and 3 GB of memory per GPU. Interestingly, this is a dual slot card with an active cooler. At 375W, a passive cooler is just not possible in a form factor necessary to fit into a server rack. Therefore, AMD has equipped the FirePro S10,000 GPGPU card with a triple fan cooler reminiscant of the setup PowerColor uses on its custom (2x7970) Devil 13, but not as large. The FirePro card has three red fans (shrouded by a black cover) over a heatpipe and aluminum fin heatsink. The card does include display outputs for workstation uses including one DVI and four mini DisplayPort ports.

AMD is claiming 1.48 TFLOPS in double precision work and 5.91 TFLOPS in single precision workloads. Those are impressive numbers, and the card even manages to beat NVIDIA’s new Tesla K20X with big Kepler GK110 and the company’s dual GPU GK104 Tesla K10 by notable margins. Additionally, the new FirePro S10000 manages to beat its FirePro 9000 predecessor handily. The S9000 in comparison is rated at 0.806 TFLOPS for double precision calculations and 3.23 TFLOPS on single precision work. The S9000 is a single GPU card equivalent to the Radeon 7950 on the consumer side of things with 1,792 shader cores. AMD has essentially taken two S9000 cards and put them on a single PCB, and managed to get almost twice the potential performance without needing twice the power.

Efficiency and calculations per watt were numbers that AMD did not dive too much into, but the company did share that the new FirePro S10000 achieves 3.94 GLOPS/W. AMD compares this to NVIDIA’s dual GPU (Fermi-based) Tesla M2090 at 2.96 GFLOPS/W. Unfortunately, NVIDIA has not shared a single GPU GFLOPS/W rating on its new K20X cards.

Other features of the AMD FirePro S10000 include support for OpenCL, Microsoft RemoteFX, Direct GPU pass-through, and (shared) virtualized graphics. AMD envisions businesses using these FirePro cards to provide GPU hardware acceleration for virtualized desktops and thin clients. With Xen Server, multiple users are able to tap into the hardware acceleration offered by the FirePro S10000 to speed up desktop and speed up programs that support it.

Operating systems in particular have begun tapping into GPU acceleration to speed up the user interface and run things like the Aero desktop in Windows 7. High end software for workstations also have a high GPU acceleration adoption rate, so there are benefits to be had, and AMD is continuing to offer it with its latest FirePro card.

AMD is offering up a card that can be used for a mix of compute or graphics output, making them an interesting choice for workstations. The FirePro S10000’s major fault lies with a 375W TDP, and while the peak performance is respectable it is going to use more power while provided that compute muscle.

The cards are available now with an MSRP of $3,599. It is neat to finally see AMD come out with a dual GPU card with Tahiti chips, and it will be interesting to see what kind of design wins the company is able to get for its beastly FirePro S10000.

AMD's new FirePro S10000 sports two GPUs

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards | November 13, 2012 - 01:17 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: amd, Intel, firepro, firepro s10000, HPC, Xeon Phi, 3120A, 5110P, Knight's Corner

AMD's new Tahiti based FirePro S10000 sports a little more than just a GPU upgrade it sports two GPU updates as this is a dual GPU card.  According to The Register it should run about $3,600 and need 375W to perform, numbers which make it a more efficient card than the S9000 even though it needs significantly more cash and power to run.  It is a 2 slot card, a necessity in the server and workstation world and while it does not support CrossFire it does support EyeFinity with its DVI port and four Mini DisplayPorts.

The Register also got some news about Xeon Phi, Intel's answer to the HPC cards on offer from AMD and Intel.  Knights Corner is the evolution of Larrabee into an actual product, in this case two 62 core cards though not all of the cores are active. The passively cooled 5110P has 60 cores running at 1.053GHz, while the 3120A has 57 cores clocked slightly higher at 1.1GHz and sports a fan.  Both cards produce just over a teraflop of double precision floating point math, compared to the 1.48 teraflops offered by AMD's S10000 or the 1.3 offered by the Tesla K20x. Check out more on these coprocessors at The Register.

"With the FirePro S10000, not only is the GPU geared down to 825MHz, but the memory is similarly downshifted to 5GHz. The memory interface is 384-bit wide on each GPU, with two blocks of GDDR5 memory yielding a total of 6GB. (This could be a little skinny on the memory for some HPC workloads, given that the S9000 card has 6GB of memory for one Tahiti GPU.) Each GPU can access 240GB/sec of memory bandwidth linking to each 3GB chunk of GDDR5 memory.

Because the card is double-stuffed, it can deliver a very impressive 5.91 teraflops SP and 1.48 teraflops DP in peak floating point oomph."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

• The TR Podcast 123: Incremental improvements
• Microsoft Makes Direct X 11.1 a Windows 8 Exclusive @ Slashdot
• Random Linux Commands to Make Google Talk, Fix Wifi, Find Duplicate Files, and More @ Linux.com
• Microsoft Surface RT may only achieve 60% of forecasted sales @ DigiTimes
• Windows chief Steven Sinofsky leaves Microsoft @ The Inquirer
• Fedora 'Spherical Cow' delayed by bugs, Secure Boot @ The Register
• Microsoft rolls out always-on Skype for Windows Phone 8 @ The Register
• Gaming in Windows 8 vs Windows 7: what's the difference in performance? @ Hardware.info
• Windows 7 vs Windows 8 – The Definitive Performance Guide @ hardCOREware
• How to Change the Start Screen Background in Windows 8 @ TechSpot
• TP-Link TL-WDR3600 and WDR4300 review: two shades of black @ Hardware.info
• Win 1 El'Druin ARPG Gaming Mouse, 2 Hellion Gaming Mice and 1 Aegis Gaming Pad @ NikKTech