Prissy Little Chloe

An Unexpected Blow to AMD's RX480  Launching their own 'Titan Killers' this year - the GTX 1080 and 1070 - Nvidia aims to further push the envelope, by conquering the RX480. With its Pascal architecture, the 1060 is roughly half the performance (and price) of the graphics giant GTX 1080, starting at only $250 US. Under the Hood The 1060 boasts a 16nm GP106 GPU, sporting 1280 CUDA cores - from the 1920 cores of the 1070 and 2048 of the 1080. While it is far less than the 2048 of the Maxwell GTX 980, the New VR-Ready card is claimed by Nvidia to be more powerful due to architectural improvements, coupled with faster GPU performance and memory clocks. Up Against the RX480 How the 1060 fares conclusively against the 480, will be more than marketing benchmarks in the next week or so when the card officially launches on the 19th, but for now it's far to say the GTX 1060 dethrones AMD's mid-range tyrant. That is, by about 15% says Nvidia - and in ...

Breaking Records Not Banks AMD's brand new Polaris architecture graphics technology sports boosts in efficiency, performance, value -- especially with VR.  AMD aims to hit breakthrough pricing with the Radeon RX480 - starting at only $199, it meets the demands of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.  HardOCP 's crowns the RX480 as the new king of 1080p gaming and calls it a "giant generational leap from its R9 380X predecessor".  The Tech Report  proves the RX480's performance to be on a par with Nvidia's more expensive GTX 970, boasting that "a performance jump like this hasn't happened around this price point for a long, long time, and it's quite welcome."  AnandTech 's advises to spend an extra $40 for the Radeon RX480 with 8GB of VRAM. The RX480 reference card by AMD is based on a standard 'blower' design and come in 4GB GDDR5, and a more expensive 8GB VRAM varieties.  If you go for the more future-pro...

Get much for an extra $50? Take the NVidia GTX 960, for example. This mid-range card offers 2 GB and 4 GB versions, respectively -- at about a $50 discrepancy between the two cards. That being what the cost of a whole new game, for some, this makes the world of difference.     GTA V A memory-hungry game to the fullest; where the more vRAM, the better. That is, the 970's 3.5 GB is just about the bare minimum, to run this game at max, 60 FPS. The 960's 4 GB are not fully taken advantage of on the lower GM206 Maxwell architecture. Therefore any additional vRAM here would be best for a more constant frame rate, with less dips and stutters between lowest and highest framerate. While this can be easily rectified with vSync enabled - you do get about 3-5 FPS higher on the four GB model of the GTX 960. You can enable far more advanced graphics options in GTA V with 4 or more GB of vRAM - namely ancillary settings like higher population density, depth of view,...

3 years of waiting - 3 months of Xbox jealousy Many of you on PC will know our first AAA game of the year is Square Enix's Rise of the Tomb Raider -- and let me just say this game is gorgeous . I preordered it a few days ago (for those wondering if that was a good idea, I have a post on that), preloaded it and played it at the strike of noon. Maxed-out the settings immediately -- which you can very well do on am Nvidia 960 or 970. If you have a 980, 980 ti or Titan X -- then beast; but definitely play this on the Nvidia 9-series if you're team green. For those on ATI AMD, I feel sorry for you. Even though Lara's hair will look just as good. When I launched the first level -- a snowy disaster zone -- I felt like taking a plunge off the cliff for fun, just like the original -- and Halo of course. The physics are fantastic, by the way. The flurries fell so naturally and the footprint tracks in the crisp, white snow are better than Arkham Origins and Battlefro...