AMD Antilles samples arrive to the techpress

Antilles sample cards have arrived at the reviewers and by now they are probably doing the rounds on the test benches. The HD 6990 will feature two Cayman GPUs with 32ROPs, 96TMUs, 1536SPs,  and 2GB of 256-bit GDDR5 memory each. Since the needs to fit in the 300W PCI-SIG power limit, the clocks should be somewhat lower somewhere around 750/4600MHz (GPU/Memory).  The date of the launch and the lift of NDA  is the 8th of March,  till then the enthusiast can indulge themselves in previews and sneak peeks:

• HardOCP – Sneak Peek – Pictures
• KitGuru
• bit-tech.net

Image courtesy of HardOCP

nVIDIA Inspector 1.95.2

5 day ago Orbmu2k released version 1.95 adding Monitoring graphs (logging and saving them), Updating or Removing your startup shortcuts and a very handy feature called Multi-Display Power Saving to his great little tool for nVIDIA cards. The later should be quite useful for those with multiple displays and graphics cards with GDDR5 memory onboard, since it provides an easy workaround by manipulating power levels to avoid flickering on secondary screens.

Ironing out some minor quirks, today he released 1.95.2:

• fixed: closing mainform did not handle closing logic (settings, log) of monitoring form
• fixed: temp folder detection fails on systems with empty temp paths
• fixed: out of range error if nvapi reports incorrect usage
• possible fix: csc.exe crashes on windows shutdown and prevents from storing MDPS settings
• added: mdps now supports cards with p0 and p8 only
• added: monitoring colors customizeable via config file
• small fixes and improvements

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Sparkle announces the Calibre X570

Sparkle announced a new a GTX 570 card for their line-up, the Calibre X570. It factory overclocked to 772/1544/4212MHz (GPU/CUDA Cores/Memory) which is quite a nice speed bump from the reference clocks. Sparkle also made sure that the card remains cool and quite at these clocks by bolting on an Arctic-Cooling Accelero Xtreme on the card. The monstrous cooler features 5 heatpipes that convey heat to the fins and 3 PWM fans to provide a plethora of airflow.

Beta drivers list GTX 550 Ti and GTX 590 cards

New beta drivers support two new and up coming cards from nVIDIA. The GTX 590 will probably have two GF110 GPUs accompanied with 3GB of GDDR5 memory, while the GTX 550 Ti is based on the GF116 GPU. Interested in the specs? How does 40 TMUs, 240 CUDA Cores and 1GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit interface sound clocked around 870/1740/4000MHz (GPU/CUDA Cores/Memory)? Sounds too good to be true you say? Well it should meet certain performance levels if it wants to fill the shoes of the 768MB variant of the GTX 460. The money conscious gamers should keep an eye on this piece of hardware.

Catalyst 11.2 WHQL available

AMD made a couple of changes to the texture filtering optimizations in Catalyst AI to reduce texture shimmering in Performance and Quality (Q) settings. Now the High-Quality and Quality modes are almost the same, but the Quality mode has a new optimization that only uses trilinear filtering on mipmap level transitions while using bilinear filtering everywhere else. AMD claims this doesn’t effect the final image quality much, but offers higher performance in return.

Another new feature is the addition of Tessellation Controls for HD 5000 and HD 6000 Series cards. Tessellation Control comes with three different setting, User Setting, Application Controlled and AMD Optimized which is the default. The first obviously lets you manually control the tessellation factor used in games, the second lets the application set it. The last is what its name says, that setting will use predetermined tessellation factors per application to get the most performance without visual degradation in tessellated geometry. There were no applications profiled as of yet, so the AMD Optimized setting has no effect now.

Lastly the HD 5000 Series cards got performance improvements in Call of Duty: Black Ops and Batman Arkham Asylum and Morphological Anti-Aliasing.

AMD’s driver team also ironed out some minor quirks in HAWX, Medal of Honor, Civilization V, Dawn of War 2: Warhammer and Unigine Heaven.

Release Notes
Download – WinXP 32bit | WinXP 64bit | Vista/Win7 32bit | Vista/Win7 64bit | CAP (Win All)