Video Cards

Source: PC Perspective

NVIDIA has been pushing for WHQL certification for their drivers, but sometimes issues slip through QA, both at Microsoft and their own, internal team(s). Sometimes these issues will be fixed in a future release, but sometimes they push out a “HotFix” driver immediately. This is often great for people who experience the problems, but they should not be installed otherwise.

In this case, GeForce Hotfix driver 361.60 fixes two issues. One is listed as “install & clocking related issues,” which refers to the GPU memory clock. According to Manuel Guzman of NVIDIA, some games and software was not causing the driver to fully wake the memory clock to a high-performance state. The other issue is “Crashes in Photoshop & Illustrator,” which fixes blue screen issues in both software, and possibly other programs that use the GPU in similar ways. I’ve never seen GeForce Driver 361.43 cause a BSOD in Photoshop, but I am a few versions behind with CS5.5.

Download links are available at NVIDIA Support, but unaffected users should just wait for an official driver in case the patch causes other issues, due to its minimal QA.

Source: AnandTech

This week AMD has pushed out their first video driver release of the year, Crimson 16.1 Hotfix. Between this latest hotfix and their previous Crimson update, AMD is making a solid showing, as the company has assembled rather sizable quantity of bug fixes for only a month’s work.

Crimson 16.1 Hotfix brings AMD’s drivers to version 15.301.1201, and contains several fixes for multiple games, including Fallout 4, Star Wars Battlefront, and Just Cause 3. Also mentioned in AMD’s release notes are a number of display-related fixes, with some FreeSync issues addressed and several Eyefinity setup/configuration edge case issues taken care of. And though none of us have encountered this issue with prior drivers, AMD notes that frame rate target control support has been tweaked to be more consistent – just be sure to disable V-Sync.

As always, those interested in reading more or installing the updated hotfix drivers for AMD’s desktop, mobile, and integrated GPUs can find them either under the driver update section in Radeon Settings or on AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson Edition download page.

Author: Grady McKinney @ HardOCP

On our test bench today is the XFX R9 380X Double Dissipation XXX OC 4GB video card. It features the latest Ghost Thermal 3.0 cooling technology from XFX and a factory overclock. We will compare it to the ASUS STRIX GTX 960 DCU II OC 4GB in a battle of the $229 price point video cards to determine the better overall value.

Read The Review Here

Author: Grady McKinney @ HardOCP

In this evaluation we have a custom built Radeon R9 390 video card, the ASUS R9 390 STRIX DirectCU III 8GB. It features a factory overclock and the DirectCU III cooling system, alongside STRIX technology for silent gaming. We will compare it to a custom NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 video card, both using the highest overclock we achieved.

Read The Review Here

Source: Legit Reviews

Months ago NVIDIA promised GeForce video card owners that were using the Fermi GPU that Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) version 2.0 support would be coming in 2015. This is a big deal for many Fermi owners as they have patiently been waiting for mixed WDDM support and the other Windows 10 features. Windows 10 includes WDDM 2.0, which is designed to dramatically reduce workload on the kernel-mode driver for GPUs that support virtual memory addressing, to allow multithreading parallelism in the user-mode driver and result in lower CPU utilization.

The new NVIDIA GeForce 361.43 WHQL Drivers along with the Windows 10 November Update will now allow Fermi GPU owners to use WDDM 2.0 in single GPU configurations. For mixed-GPU configurations (Fermi being used in the same system with Kepler or Maxwell GPUs) you’ll be able to use WDDM 2.0 for the very first time. For those that are running Fermi GPUs in SLI, you are still stuck on WDDM 1.3.

Other than Fermi WDDM 2.0 support, the GeForce 361.43 WHQL drivers has support for GameWorks VR 1.1 including VR SLI support for OpenGL applications and support for the latest Oculus SDK. If you want the latest drivers for the best VR gaming experience, look no further.

You can download the new GeForce 361.43 WHQL drivers from GeForce Experience and GeForce.com.

Source: techPowerUp!

AMD released the WHQL-signed version of Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.11.1 as the new 15.12 WHQL. It addresses a variety of game-specific issues, including rendering errors on Star Wars: Battlefront; bugs on Fallout 4; texture-compression issues with Just Cause 3; poor CrossFire performance with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. It also addresses a critical issue in which the driver would either spool fan-speeds all the way up to 100% on load, or lock them down at 30%, causing certain GPUs to overheat. A variety of bugs specific to the Radeon Settings app were also addressed.

You can download the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.12 WHQL here.

Source: techPowerUp!

NVIDIA today released its latest GeForce “Game Ready” drivers, which usually precede major game title launches. The new version 359.06 WHQL driver adds optimizations for the week’s two big releases – Just Cause 3, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. These include SLI profiles on games that support it, and GeForce Experience optimal settings. The rest of its feature-set is consistent with Release 359 series drivers.

You can download the new GeForce 359.06 WHQL drivers from GeForce Experience and GeForce.com.

Source: techPowerUp!

AMD has released Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.11.1 Update. A follow up to last week’s major release, version 15.11.1 addresses a major issue with driver-level VGA fan speed control, which saw the driver either crank fan-speeds up to 100%, or lock them down to 30%, causing GPUs to overheat. In addition, the driver addresses several game-specific bugs related to Just Cause 3, Fallout 4, Star Wars: Battlefront, and Call of Duty Black Ops III.

You can download the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.11.1 Update here.

By Hilbert Hagedoorn @ GURU3D

In this review we test the GeForce GTX 980 Ti with the longest name evah! The new GeForce GTX 980 Ti Extreme Gaming WaterForce GPU review from Gigabyte. This product impresses by design as it comes in an all custom design with liquid cooling in the form of an AIO LCS kit. The result is a card that offers excellent game rendering performance at silent noise levels.

Read The Review Here

AMD today released its completely reimagined graphics software suite, Radeon Software Crimson Edition, giving users an exceptional new user experience, 12 new or enhanced features, up to 20 percent more graphics performance, adjustability that can nearly double generational energy efficiency, and rock-solid stability across the full spectrum of AMD graphics products. The release is the first from the Radeon Technologies Group, which recently announced a renewed focus on software placing it on par with hardware initiatives.

Radeon Software Crimson Edition includes:

• Radeon Settings – A new, streamlined user interface: Engineered to get the best performance on AMD graphics hardware, the user-friendly and feature-rich Radeon Settings is lightning fast, starting up 10 times faster and initializing displays 3 times faster than the AMD Catalyst™ driver. It also offers a more intuitive navigation, a new game manager, new overdrive, and new video, display and AMD Eyefinity technology sections letting users easily apply game settings, adjust performance settings, and apply various features and configurations to their computing experience.
• 12 new or enhanced features: A wide range of new and augmented capabilities help ensure that users enjoy the best experience possible across gaming, video and productivity applications.
• Supercharged performance and energy efficiency: Radeon Software Crimson Edition enables up to 33 percent faster game load times5, up to 20 percent more game performance, and up to 1.8 times more energy efficiency capability than its predecessor which can increasing system performance-per-watt by as much as 23 percent.
• First public support of AMD LiquidVR™ technology: GCN’s Asynchronous Compute Engine helps to dramatically improve frames per second (FPS), responsiveness and latency in Virtual Reality applications for an exceptionally smooth gaming experience on all GCN-based hardware.
• Seamless stability: With twice the number of test cases across 15 percent more system configurations than AMD Catalyst™ Omega, and the implementation of a huge number of community-driven requests, Radeon Software Crimson Edition delivers exceptional stability across a range of experiences.

Radeon Software Crimson Edition is available for free download today at http://support.amd.com/en-us/download.