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Report: PC Hardware Sales Eclipsed $30 Billion USD In 2016

Posted on January 23, 2017 by Rae Michelle Richards

Industry analyst firm JPR recently released a report estimating that total worldwide hardware sales eclipsed the $30 billion mark. In terms of geography  Asia lead the way with an estimated growth rate of 7% which will continue right through 2019, commanding $11.3 billion USD of the total existing market share. For those of us who are interested in the health of the PC hardware industry JPR’s publically available figures are full of interesting statistics.

2016 saw a number of new pieces of hardware released that made waves in enthusiast news circles. Arguably one of the biggest stories of the year came towards the mid-point with the launch of new Graphics Cards from both Nvidia and AMD. Team Green proved that the Geforce brand is still the place for hardcore enthusiasts looking for the bleeding edge performance with the expensive Geforce 1070 and Geforce 1080 video cards. AMD shot back just a couple of weeks later with the Polaris powered Radeon 480 which brought the performance of Nvidia’s high end last generation 9 Series cards for under $200 USD. AMD and Nvidia might not be fighting tooth and nail for power or performance anymore but their offerings certainly cover a wide variety of products at different price points.

Graphics cards aren’t the only PC hardware segment that saw innovation last year and will continue to see new products. Intel released their new 7000 series processor line, it doesn’t follow the traditional tick-tock pattern that Intel has been known but it does provide additional video encoding performance. AMD is expected to release its Ryzen platform at the Games Developer Conference late next month, the manufacturer’s first large platform update since 2013 – featuring the brand new AM4 motherboard design and enhanced performance versus the previous generation.

John Peddle, president of JPR had this to say about the upcoming launch of the Ryzen platform:

“We are also very excited about the prospects for the AMD Ryzen CPU platform and think it will be adopted at all three hardware tiers. Of course Intel CPUs currently offer superior power and value for gamers of every budget level, and their integrated graphics now rival game consoles.”

Despite JPR’s report that the PC hardware industry has eclipsed such a large sales amount reports of PC sales have been declining for several consecutive quarters – according to the Inquirer total sales were down 3.7% leading up to the Christmas season. It is an important distinction to make that JPR’s report about the industry surpassing a huge sales amount includes high end accessories like Ultra HD Monitors, gaming headsets, gaming mice and Curved Displays.

How do you feel about the state of the PC hardware industry? Sound off in the comments and let us know.

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Newly Announced Geforce Titan X Will Blow You Away & Take All Your Money

Posted on July 22, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

In a true testament to just how fast graphics card technology can evolve – Nvidia has announced the “Titan X”, based upon its brand new Pascal architecture (Not to be confused with a similarly named previous generation card). If you thought the heft Geforce 1080 was a bit overkill for anything other than impressing your friends, you haven’t met the $1200 USD TITAN X just yet. Prepare to max out your credit cards or take out a second mortgage because it is quite clear Nvidia isn’t messing around with this latest card.

So what kind of computing power does the price of a one bedroom apartment in most North American cities get you? Here are just a few of the frightening technical specs for the Geforce Titan X:

  • 11 Teraflops of Computing Power
  • 1531 MHZ Core Boost Clock Speed
  • 3584 CUDA Cores (!!! – That is more than 1000 more cores than the recently released Geforce 1080)
  • 16 GB of DDR 5 RAM
  • HDMI 2.0B, Display Port and DVI Ports (exact number of ports currently unknown).

What requires this much power? Absolutely nothing if you are playing games at 1080P (the resolution, not the card) and if you are using a Geforce 1080 (the card not the resolution) then you can expect the Titan X to surpass that cards ability to produce 50 FPS+ on 4K games on ultra settings easily. If it isn’t apparent just yet, it is quite clear that the Titan X is more of a workstation card for content creators rather than a high end prosumer graphics card.

TitanX_2

It is at this point I’d say “well how does it compare to AMD’s offerings?” But, honestly, Team Red doesn’t have anything that could possibly compare to the price point or computing power of the Titan X just yet. AMD recently launched the Radeon 480 – an excellent card, I’ve got one in my gaming rig, but that card and Nvidia’s own budget friendly Geforce 1060 are in a completely different market when compared to the Titan X. In fact the raw computing power of the Titan X along is the same as two Radeon 480 if you ran both at maximum efficiency (I’m talking about theoretical computing power with this example, not a crossfire setup).  Perhaps AMDs next set of high-end GPUS, codenamed VEGAS, will offer Geforce 1080 or Titan X levels of performance.

So will you be forking over a chunk of your mortgage / rent payment for a new graphics card? Let us know in the comments section.

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Geforce 1070 Arrives In Canada

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

The next generation of Nvidia’s flagship GPUs – the Geforce 1070 & Geforce 1080 –have been all the rage in the PC enthusiast community and are the obvious choice for those looking to be on the cutting edge. In a promotional email sent out to Canadians registered for Nvidia’s email blasts, the company informed potential users that both graphics cards were now back in stock.

Screen Shot 2016-06-10 at 4.19.30 PM

Based upon Nvidia’s Pascal architecture the 10-series offers up 3 times the performance of the previous generation 900 series cards. Both the 1070 and 1080 are VR Ready but they also give a significant boost to existing titles like CD Projeckt Red’s The Witcher III and Square Enix’s Rise of The Tomb Raider.

All of this power comes at a cost, of course, the Geforce 1070 is priced around $449 CDN, so I suppose it isn’t for the faint of heart or those whose wallet might be hugely impacted by the price-point. Check out Nvidia’s official website for more information on Canadian vendors for this card. Surely Nvidia will have a huge presence at this years E3.

Screen Shot 2016-06-10 at 4.22.24 PM

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NVIDIA Opens Up CES Keynote With Self Driving Car Announcements

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Today at their CES press event NVIDIA opened up their discussion of upcoming technologies with their recent investments in self driving cars. A special computer developed by NVIDIA called the NVIDIA Drive PX2 is powered by a 12 CPU-core system that is liquid cooled and contains the companies upcoming Pascal GPU.

NVIDIA is billing their self driving car initiative as something that will revolutionize society by spurring urban re-design, more accessibility to transportation and reduced number of fatalities. Jim-Hsun Huang called humans the weakest link in the driving equation. NVIDIA is trying to position themselves as a provider of the systems that will power the future of self-driving car.

According to Mr.Huang there will be two different theories behind self-driving car concepts:

  • The car as a virtual driver – The car is equipped with sensors and offers advice to the human operator
  • Driver-less car: On board computer handles all of the driving, no human operator needed.

During the presentation Mr.Huang also discussed the recent development with artificial intelligence and the concept of “deep learning” – the ability for software to find details on its own based upon past “experiences”. NVIDIA’s GPUs powered by the CUDA core is used in a number of A.I Neuro-Net projects like IBM’s Watson. By using GPU technology the processing of deep learning has leaped 20% – 40%.Read More

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GeForce Experience Beta update adds new options

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

Nvidia has updated its GeForce Experience to add screen shots, editing, and capture tools in to it. Though I think at this point the horse is out of the barn and well, competently gone from the farm. Nvidia has been known for their “stable” drivers for the majority of their company existence, and the Geforce experience is basically a bloated piece of spyware which constantly searches for updates you don’t really need, and now it can stream and take screen shots!

There have been a number of entries in to the streaming field recently, and why not its quite profitable. Im not really suprised to see Nvidia entering the market, and im sure there are some technical arguments for using a capture software directly off of your cards manufacturer’s website, but can it beat OBS?

Screenshot capture comes in addition to the existing video capture feature. You can edit and upload your screenshots without leaving the game. One cool thing is that Nvidia has partnered with Imgur to enable image uploading with resolutions up to 4K. You will of course need to share your Imgur log in details with Nvidia

Nvida streaming

For the streaming crowd  Nvidia has included the ability to stream with a custom overlay, and there’s now an on-screen viewer count which is enabled via an option in the Overlays section of Experience. That is pretty neat, as prior to this I do not belive there has been a tool to easily do this. Additionally, in order to improve your stream’s quality, you can now select your nearest Twitch server to make the most out of your upload speed.

if you want to try it out you can grab it here If you use it and think its better than OBS leave a comment because im still not sold on the idea of using anything branded with Nvidia to stream.

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Nvidia Announces Their Own Handheld

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Les Major

In surprising news from Nvidia’s CES press conference, the graphics card maker will be releasing a handheld that is not only running on Android, but can also stream PC content right to the devices 720p 5″ display (which is also a touchscreen). Code-named Nvidia Shield  boasts a camshell design that seems to close down with the area above the screen resting on the controllers dual joysticks. The handheld is based on the new Tegra 4 mobile chip and should last for 5-10 hours of battery life. It also features a MicroSD slot, micro USB, and an HDMI output.

The big draw seems to be the PC gaming focus which Nvidia shared would work well with Steam’s Big Picture mode to navigate the store without having to go back to your PC. There is no price point released yet.

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MechWarrior Online Community Day and Centurion Mech Announced

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Daniel Shannon

Mechwarrior Online Developers Piranha Games have been very busy this week. First, they released a video showcasing the upcoming free-to-play game’s latest Mech, the Centurion. This medium sized Mech is sort of like the T-34 of Mechs, boasting a good mix of speed, armor, and firepower. You can watch the video with some pretty gameplay footage below.

[youtube id=”3m24i6iTeyc” width=”600″ height=”350″]

Additionally, Piranha games, Nvidia, and Infinite Game Publishing (the publisher of Mechwarrior online),  are hosting a MechWarrior Online Community Day in Santa Clara, California at 5 p.m. on July 27th. The event, an invitation only affair, will let the chosen few join the developers for drunken debauchery, beer, pizza, and some Mechwarrior Online lanning. There will be a tournament, prizes, and chances to play around with unrevealed Mechs as well as the newfangled Razer Blade laptop. Read on to see how you can score an invite to this event.

Read More

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