Weekly Hardware News: NVIDIA Pascal at 16-32GB HBM, R9 Fury Overvolting

Joining us for this weekend's hardware news recap is Lyndell Chase, a new host for GN's weekend news segments and forthcoming feature videos. We couldn't have picked a more news-packed week to introduce a new co-host: AMD launched the R9 380X (reviewed), nVidia posted a Pascal update and virtual reality push, overvolting support was added for the Fury GPUs, and AC Syndicate / Battlefront launched.

The R9 380X was clearly the biggest news item of the week, something we spent a considerable amount of hours testing and reviewing. We remarked that the R9 380X would be a good buy at its price-point, proving a direct challenge to nVidia's GTX 960 mainstay. The rest of the news – Pascal especially – is all worth paying attention to, even if it's a little way out.

Here's the video recap!

AMD R9 380X Launched

The AMD R9 380X is a fully-enabled Tonga GPU – the same as the one in the R9 285 and R9 380 – and hosts 2048 cores against the 380's 1792 cores. The 380X is on GCN 1.2, offers full Dx12 support, and uses AMD's color compression technology. The R9 380X is priced at $230, but AIB pre-overclocked options will be closer to $240.

NVidia Pascal Details Revealed

NVidia's Pascal architecture is slated to support up to 16GB of HBM v2, the follow-up to what is found on AMD's Fury X, and can technically allow for 32GB HBM (depending on yield and production from Samsung, Hynix, et al). HBM v2 has a throughput of 1TB/s, a substantial lead over all other current consumer GPU bandwidth measurements. Pascal is on TSMC's 16nm FinFET process node and is expected in 2016.

NVidia DesignWorks VR & GameWorks VR

“Team Green” has officially removed DesignWorks and GameWorks VR packages from beta, and has begun rolling them out to developers in the games industry. The graphics company claims that these solutions will assist in performance improvements by upwards of 50%, a boon considering AMD's native architectural support of VR gaming.

Sapphire TriXX Utility Adds Overvolting

AMD AIB Sapphire has added software support for GPU core overvolting in their “TriXX” program. This allows more full utilization of the AMD Fury GPU overclocking headroom, as the native offering is sorely limited in max OC.

AMD Bundles Star Wars Battlefront with R9 Fury

The AMD R9 Fury – not the Fury X or R9 Nano – will now include copies of Star Wars Battlefront with new GPU sales. The bundle extends through January 31, 2016, and codes must be redeemed before February 29, 2016 to unlock the game.

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Editorial, Co-Host: Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke.
Co-Host: Lyndell Chase.
Production: Keegan Gallick.