Pascal has mobilized, officially launching in notebooks today. The GTX 1080, 1070, and 1060 full desktop GPUs will be available in Pascal notebooks, similar to the GTX 980 non-M launch from last year. Those earlier 980 laptops were a bit of an experiment, from what nVidia's laptop team told us, and led to wider implementation of the line-up for Pascal.

We had an opportunity to perform preliminary benchmarks using some of our usual test suite while at the London unveil event, including frametime analysis (1% / 0.1% lows) with Shadow of Mordor. Testing was conducted using the exact same settings as we use in our own benchmarks, and we used some of our own software to validate that results were clean.

Before getting to preliminary GTX 1080 & GTX 1070 notebook FPS benchmarks on the Clevo P775 and MSI GT62, we'll run through laptop overclocking, specification differences in the GTX 1070, and 120Hz display updates. Note also that we've got at least three notebooks on the way for testing, and will be publishing reviews through the month. Our own initial benchmarks are further down.

We recruited Libor “Buildzoid” Sadilek of Actually Hardcore Overclocking to assist in our latest coverage of AMD's RX 460 GPUs. The full review of the Sapphire RX 460 Nitro is located here, with a tear-down of the card over here. Today, we're focusing on the electrical component quality of the Sapphire RX 460 Nitro VRM, along with PCB quality in general.

The Sapphire RX 460 Nitro uses an overpowered VRM, but the cost of the end product is not necessarily offset by this. We'll see if prices stabilize as stock becomes more prevalent, though. NVidia and AMD have both been selling out of stock in short order with their new architectures.

This coverage is entirely video driven. You can find the video embedded below, but be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel for future “specials” like this one.

The theoretical end of AMD's Polaris desktop GPU line has just begun shipment, and that's in the form of the RX 460. Back at the pre-Computex press event, AMD informed us that the Polaris line would primarily consist of two GPUs on the Polaris architecture – Polaris 10 & 11 – and that three cards would ship on this platform. Two of the three have already shipped and been reviewed, including the ~$240 RX 480 8GB cards (review here) and ~$180-$200 RX 470 cards (review here). The next architecture will be Vega, in a position to potentially be the first consumer GPU to use HBM2.

Today, we're looking at Polaris 11 in the RX 460. The review sample received is Sapphire's RX 460 Nitro 4GB card, pre-overclocked to 1250MHz. The RX 460, like the 470, is a “partner card,” which means that no reference model will be sold by AMD for rebrand by its partners. AMD has set the MSRP to $110 for the RX 460, but partners will vary widely depending on VRAM capacity (2GB or 4GB), cooler design, pre-overclocks, and component selection. At time of writing, we did not have a list of AIB partner prices and cards available.

As always, we'll be reviewing the Sapphire RX 460 4GB with extensive thermal testing, FPS testing in Overwatch, DOTA2, GTA V, and more, and overclock testing. Be sure to check page 1 for our new PCB analysis and cooler discussion, alongside the in-depth architecture information.

Our thermal benchmarking has expanded to the point that the tests form our most comprehensive section of any review. For this content, we dig deep into endurance testing with nVidia's just-launched GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition card, comparing it to the MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X. The validation testing yields interesting results, particularly with regard to potential throttle points and dips in clock-rate. More on that in a bit.

Today marks the launch of the GTX 1060 ($250-$300), announced about ten days ago. The GTX 1060 fills the mid-range of the market as a 6GB solution on the 16nm FinFET process node debuted in Pascal, and that's done with GP106.

Our GTX 1060 Founders Edition & MSI 1060 Gaming X review looks at FPS (particularly vs. the 1070 and RX 480), Vulkan & Dx12 performance, thermals, noise, power, and overclocking results.

New video cards are coming out furiously and bringing with them new manufacturing processes and better price-to-performance ratios.

One of newest memory technologies on the market is HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), introduced on the R9 Fury X. HBM stacks 4 memory dies atop an interposer (packaged on the substrate) to get higher density modules, while also bringing down power consumption and reducing physical transaction distance. HBM is not located on the GPU die itself, but is on the GPU package – much closer than PCB-bound GDDR5/5X memory modules.

AMD's RX 480 launch introduces the Polaris architecture to the world, arranging an alliterative architecture assortment from both GPU vendors (Pascal, if you're curious, is the other). This is AMD's answer to the largest market segment, shipping in 4GB and 8GB variants that are priced at $200 and $240, respectively.

During the RX 480 press briefing, AMD strongly defended its stance on maturing and tuning its architectures to extract the maximum possible performance prior to an architectural shift. “We don't have a billion dollars to spend on a single architecture,” said AMD SVP & Chief Architect Raja Koduri, clearly referencing nVidia's boastful Order of 10 unveil. Koduri went on to praise his team for doing an “amazing job with existing products,” but welcomed the arrival of a new 14nm FinFET process node to usurp the long-standing ubiquity of 28nm planar process.

The AMD RX 480 8GB is on the bench for review today. In this RX 480 8GB review, we benchmark framerate (FPS) & frametime performance, overclocking, thermals, clockrate vs. time endurance, fan RPMs, and noise levels.

The GTX 1080's epochal launch all but overshadowed its cut-down counterpart – that is, until the price was unveiled. NVidia's GTX 1070 is promised at an initial $450 price-point for the Founders Edition (explained here), or an MSRP of $380 for board partner models. The GTX 1070 replaces nVidia's GTX 970 in the vertical, but promises superior performance to previous high-end models like the 980 and 980 Ti; we'll validate those claims in our testing below, following an initial architecture overview.

The GeForce GTX 1070 ($450) uses a Pascal GP104-200 chip. The architecture is identical to the GTX 1080 and its GP104-400 GPU, but cuts-down on SM presence (and core count) to create a mid-range version of the new 16nm FinFET architecture. This new node from TSMC is nearly half the size of Maxwell's 28nm Planar process, and switches the company over to FinFET transistor architecture for reduced power leakage and overall improved performance-per-watt efficiency. The trend is symptomatic of an industry trending toward ever-smaller devices with a greater concern on the power envelope, and has been reflected in nVidia's architectures since Fermi (GTX 400 series running notoriously hot) and AMD's since Fiji (sort of – Polaris claims to make a bigger push in this direction). On the CPU side, Intel has been driving this trend for several generations now, its 10nm process making promises to further extend mobile device endurance and transistor density.

All the pyrotechnics in the world couldn't match the gasconade with which GPU & CPU vendors announce their new architectures. You'd halfway expect this promulgation of multipliers and gains and reductions (but only where smaller is better) to mark the end-times for humankind; surely, if some device were crafted to the standards by which it were announced, The Aliens would descend upon us.

But, every now and then, those bombastic announcements have something behind them – there's substance there, and potential for an adequately exciting piece of technology. NVidia's debut of consumer-grade Pascal architecture initializes with GP104, the first of its non-Accelerator cards to host the new 16nm FinFET process node from TSMC. That GPU lands on the GTX 1080 Founders Edition video card first, later to be disseminated through AIB partners with custom cooling or PCB solutions. If the Founders Edition nomenclature confuses you, don't let it – it's a replacement for nVidia's old “Reference” card naming, as we described here.

Anticipation is high for GP104's improvements over Maxwell, particularly in the area of asynchronous compute and command queuing. As the industry pushes ever into DirectX 12 and Vulkan, compute preemption and dynamic task management become the gatekeepers to performance advancements in these new APIs. It also means that LDA & AFR start getting pushed out as frames become more interdependent with post-FX, and so suddenly there are implications for multi-card configurations that point toward increasingly less optimization support going forward.

Our nVidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition review benchmarks the card's FPS performance, thermals, noise levels, and overclocking vs. the 980 Ti, 980, Fury X, and 390X. This nearing-10,000-word review lays-out the architecture from an SM level, talks asynchronous compute changes in Pascal / GTX 1080, provides a quick “how to” primer for overclocking the GTX 1080, and talks simultaneous multi-projection. We've got thermal throttle analysis that's new, too, and we're excited to show it.

The Founders Edition version of the GTX 1080 costs $700, though MSRP for AIBs starts at $600. We expect to see that market fill-in over the next few months. Public availability begins on May 27.

First, the embedded video review and specs table:

A frame's arrival on the display is predicated on an unseen pipeline of command processing within the GPU. The game's engine calls the shots and dictates what's happening instant-to-instant, and the GPU is tasked with drawing the triangles and geometry, textures, rendering lighting, post-processing effects, and dispatching the packaged frame to the display.

The process repeats dozens of times per second – ideally 60 or higher, as in 60 FPS – and is only feasible by joint efforts by GPU vendors (IHVs) and engine, tools, and game developers (ISVs). The canonical view of game graphics rendering can be thought of as starting with the geometry pipeline, where the 3-dimensional model is created. Eventually, lighting gets applied to the scene, textures and post-processing is applied, and the scene is compiled and “shipped” for the gamer's viewing. We'll walk through the GPU rendering and game graphics pipeline in this “how it works” article, with detailed information provided by nVidia Director of Technical Marketing Tom Petersen.

The Order of 10 puzzle preempted a forthcoming event that we'll be covering, publicly disclosed as occurring on May 6 at 9PM EST. Although nVidia has not technically, officially laid claim to the “#OrderOf10” puzzle, the countdown timer happens to expire precisely when nVidia's yet-undetailed Twitch.tv streaming event will kick-off. UPDATE: View our GTX 1080 & GTX 1070 coverage here.

And that full day of decoding mysteries led us to brush-up on nVidia's “Pascal” architecture, revealed years ago and announced at this year's GTC as hitting volume production. The first Pascal chip publicly known to enter production is the GP100, found on the Tesla P100 scientific and computational accelerator card. GP100 is the “Big GPU” for this generation of nVidia devices, measuring in at an intimidating 610mm^2 die size, and stands as the trailhead for imminent derivatives of the GPU architecture. Those derivatives will invariably include gaming-targeted devices – something for which the P100 is not remotely targeted – in the GeForce GTX lineup.

This article dives deep into NVIDIA's new Pascal architecture. We'll talk streaming multiprocessor layout, memory subsystems and HBM1 vs. HBM2, L1 & L2 Cache, unified memory, GDMA, and more.

As for the live-streamed event tonight, we're hoping that it'll offer us some official names for the rumored “GTX 1000” series (e.g. GTX 1080, GTX 1070, GTX 1060 Ti), but we really don't know for certain what's being unveiled. We will be covering that event tonight in full detail, whatever it may involve. Be sure to check the site and YouTube channel for updates as they're released live.