Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware box news corner decent week of news has just passed some interesting stuff has happened in a few cool product launches April can be a bit slow as we grind our way to Computex at the end of next month but there are some interesting goodies in here so well let's get on with it one of the most recent releases from this week is invidious new GPU driver that unlocks ray-tracing for owners of Pascal ensuring gtx graphics cards driver version for 2531 is now available and provided you have at least a geforce gtx 1066 gigabyte or faster you'll be able to use various ray-traced effects in games such as battlefield 5 shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus in video first announced support for ray tracing on Pascal last month and the driver has arrived as promised but to go along with the release NVIDIA has also delivered a series of benchmarks to show how Pasco GPUs stack up compared to current cheering r-tx GPUs with the company's RT cause for proper ray tracing acceleration the general thing we're looking through these charts is that in the best-case scenario according to Nvidia at least the GTX 1080i performs a little below the r-tx 2060 with ray tracing enabled with DL SS not factored in however as you increase the number of ray tracing effects and the intensity of those effects the RT X 360 pulls even further ahead for example the 2060 is pretty close to the 1080 to iron shadow of the Tomb Raider with RT X shadows but in Metro Exodus with global illumination the RT x 2060 is well ahead in the atomic heart demo with both reflections and shadows the 1080 jaw is only half as fast as the RT X 2060 it's also interesting to see the truing gtx 1660 perform above the gtx 1070 across most of the charts with ray tracing disabled the gtx 1070 is generally the faster card via said that Turing's ability to run FP and int instructions simultaneously does give truing gtx cards a performance advantage over pascal which does not have that ability although naturally true in GTX still falls well behind Turing RT X I guess it's also impressive to see that yes having the RT cords in the design does seem to be more efficient than brute-forcing ray-tracing on more cooter cause for example the gtx 1080i with its GP 102 GPU is 471 square millimeters whereas the RT x 2070 with tu 106 is a little smaller at 445 square millimeters however the RT x 2070 is significantly faster and ray-tracing according to invidious numbers there is a different process note involved here as well but generally this does show that for ray-tracing specifically including those caused was better than adding simply more cuda cores of course this data should be taken with a grain of salt because it comes straight from nvidia and naturally they do have an incentive to make their art X cards look better than their older offering so people upgrade in fact even just releasing this drivers support for ray tracing or Pascal seems to be designed to encourage upgrades owners of Pascal cards can now see just how horribly that GPS will perform while knowing that performance will be a lot better on an r/t X card if you can't see how bad the performance is for yourself it can be bit easier to dismiss our hardware is to run ray tracing but now you might get a bit of envy when you can't run these games with every effect cranked up to the maximum we'll have our own investigation - Pascal ray tracing in the coming days so look out for that to see where the Pascal can perform any better than nvidia is showing here in related news Nvidia also released three new ray tracing demos that you can try out either on Pascal or ensuring we have the Star Wars reflection demo + demos for upcoming games justest an atomic heart both justice and atomic art combined ray traced shadows and reflections for more ray tracing than we've seen in currently released games Intel's Core I $9.99 90 X II is now on sale sawed off this monster CPU that sits atop Intel skylake extra fresh lineup was previously supposed to be an auction only product for EMS and other system builders well it seems that at least one system builder and retailer who bought some of these CPUs has decided to sell it as a standalone CPU in addition to building pcs with the chip inside case qing-ge have put up the 9990 XE for 3,000 euros which puts it at aus pricing of around 2800 US dollars this is a lot to pay for this sort of CPU however it does offer the highest single core frequencies and the highest base clocks of any of Intel's h EDT processes it does only have 14 cause as opposed to 18 in the ninth 980 XE but it trades a 3 gigahertz base clock and 4.5 gigahertz turbo in the 1980 XE from a 4 gigahertz base clock and 5 gigahertz boost in the 9990 XE depending on your workload the extra frequency of this course is important especially for something like gaming which isn't normally suited to hed t CPUs of course at this price I don't imagine too many gamers will be rushing out to drop nearly $3,000 on it given most people will be fine with a 9900 K at a fraction of the price it will also be interesting to see how popular the CPU is or how sought after it becomes relative to both the 99 ATX II with its increased core count and mere $2,000 price as well as Intel's new 28 core h EDT cpu the 0w 31 75 X which is around the same price at $3,000 TSM C's 5 nanometer technology is on track the company has completed development on the necessary tools for 5 nanometers and is moving into the RISC production stage with high volume production expected to be on track for 2020 TSM CS 5 nanometers which the company is calling either con-5 FF or just n5 is using their second-generation extreme ultraviolet lithography tools the first one with these tools has been used for the upcoming seven animator plus node TSMC have also given a few preliminary performance metrics for five nanometers compared to their current seven nanometer node we're not going to get a huge jump like the transition from 60 nanometers to 7 animators but TSMC are expecting a 45% reduction in area as well as either a 20% reduction in power consumption at the same performance or a 50% increase in performance at the same power consumption level with seven nanometer plus sitting about halfway between seven animators and five nanometers we're going to get a gradual improvement over the next few years from the sort of technology next up we have the official announcement of a OCS AG 35 3 Series headlined by the AG 3 5 3 ucg now if you've been paying close attention to the display market and remember some of these terrible product names the AG 353 ucg was actually first announced around a year ago as part of an videos ultra wired chasing HDR lineup this panel is meant 34:40 by 1440 VA 200 Hertz maximum refresh rate and has full proper HDR support in fact it wasn't just last year that we first heard about these displays at Computex 2017 we first saw models from ASA and a soos were which were subsequently delayed until the end of 2018 and today still aren't available so it's been a long process for these particular panels in any case AUC is finally ready to release the AG through 5-3 you see G onto the market saying it will be coming in June 2019 at an undisclosed price although TFT central believe this launch date will end up around September or October at the end of it with the price of 1,800 to 2200 euros that is very expensive but this is a super high-end juicing HDR panel with display HDR 1000 if ocation it's essentially meant to be an ultra wide equivalent to the 4k 144 Hertz Jason Ketchum monitors we've already seen in addition to the AG 3 5 3 u cg a you see has announced there will be a free sync two variants hopefully with identical specs including a crucial 512 own full array local dimming backlight I'd be disappointed if that backlight was exclusive to the g-sync HDR model but you never know as for the competing ASA predator X 35 and soos rog swift PG 35 VQ still no word on when those models will be available but you'd think it would be around the same time as the AOC Morel for around that 2,000 euro or more price tag couple more quick monitor stories I wanted to bang through before the end of this news corner one is that a suit is unveiled its first mini LED monitors these are designed to be professional-grade monitors rather than gaming monitors and they're such pack a 4k resolution at 60 Hertz and reproduce 97% of the DCI p3 spectrum and come with a whole bunch of creative specific features but the cool thing about these mini LED designs is in the HDR capabilities the larger 32 inch PA 32 ucx has 1,000 local dimming zones more than most current LCDs of this size the 27-inch model has 576 zones as well again very impressive for a monitor both can do 1200 nits of peak brightness so they can get display hgr 1000 certification now before you get confused mini LED is not the same as laughs crew led micro LED is a tech the basically allows for per pixel local dimming with LCD technology similar to an OLED this tech is still years away mini LED is a stepping stone on the way there it's a new backlight technology and it allows for these high zone count local dimming arrays hopefully we see them in gaming grade monitors soon we also have news of an 8k 120 Hertz display from sharp with HDR capabilities including 800 nits of peak brightness it's a 32 inch panel using XO technology not many other details were disclosed but still a cool look at what is coming in the next few years final story for the week we have a few leaks for the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 as expected this is a short card without a power connector which indicates the card will draw less than 75 watts of power this ZOTAC card is a dual slot design with hdmi displayport and DVI connectors while the console gain wood and power that have leaked have just HDMI and DVI all these cards come with 4 gigabytes of gddr5 memory and are expected to feature Nvidia stirring T u 1 1 7 GPU if you're getting full leaks like this it shouldn't be too long until the 1650 hit store shelves will be very interesting to see where it ends up performance wise that's it for this week's news corner as always you can subscribe to get the segment in your inbox every Friday consider subscribing to us on patreon to get access to our exclusive discord community and monthly live streams I'll catch you in the next one