Tag Archives: Graphics processing unit

Technology

Nvidia Investigates Melting PC Graphics Card Power Cables

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Image: Smith Collection / Gado / Contributor / Kotaku (Getty Images)

Perhaps the over-sized, power-hungry, and highly-priced 4000-series graphics cards from Nvidia are a bit too hot of a product right now. After one user posted photos of their charred 12-volt, high power (12VHPWR) connector on Reddit, Nvidia responded with an investigation into at least two cases.

Yesterday, Reddit user reggie_gakil shared photos of a freshly seared cable and power connector on their RTX 4090 graphics card, titled “RTX 4090 Adapter burned” with a caption that reads “IDK [how] it happened but it smelled badly and I saw smoke.” Though the card reportedly still works, reggie_gakil was not alone. Another Reddit user began their reply with, “You aren’t the only one. This happened to me today as well.” This follows reports that PCI-SIG, the consortium that sets standards for PCI, PCI-X, and PCI-Express connections (the ones used in said graphics cards), was aware of potential “safety issues under certain conditions.” According to The Verge, Nvidia is now investigating these cases.

In a statement to Kotaku, Nvidia said it is “in contact with the first owner and will be reaching out to the other for additional information.”

With the increased power draw of these new graphics cards and new ATX power standards that have raised eyebrows, this might not be so much of a surprise. Indeed, YouTube channels like JayzTwoCents are doing a bit of an “I told you so” victory lap.

The 12VHPWR cable is DANGEROUS! But NVIDIA doesn’t agree…

As mentioned in JayzTwoCents’ video, Brandon Bell, senior technical marketing manager for Geforce at Nvidia dismissed early fears over unsafe power cables as “issues that don’t exist” and that “it all just works, man.” While the results of Nvidia’s investigation have yet to determine if the initial Reddit post that sparked alarm is an outlier, there’s certainly cause for concern.

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Nvidia’s competitor, AMD, also responded to reggie_gakill’s melted-cable story. AMD Radeon’s senior vice president replied to a Tweet staying that “the Radeon RX 6000 series and upcoming RDNA 3 GPUs will not use [the 12VHPWR] connector.”



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Technology

EVGA, Big Graphics Card Maker, Has Messy Breakup With Nvidia

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Times have been tough.
Image: Kotaku / San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers (Getty Images)

And now for something that no one saw coming: EVGA, one of the most prominent third-party PC graphics card manufacturers, and a favorite brand among PC gamers for quality parts and reliable warranties backed by solid customer service, is terminating its longtime relationship with Nvidia. What’s more, the company reportedly said that it won’t be pursuing partnerships with competing silicon giants like AMD or Intel, either. It seems like EVGA is just done with GPUs.

Kotaku has reached out to EVGA for comment.

News of EVGA’s seemingly sudden decision to stop manufacturing GPUs broke via the popular YouTubers GamersNexus and Jayztwocents. Personalities from both channels say that they were invited to a private meeting with EVGA staff, including CEO Andrew Han. In the meeting, EVGA reportedly laid out its desire and intention to break away from Nvidia, citing multiple frustrations with the partnership.

These sore spots mostly concern what Han describes as Nvidia’s reluctance to share essential information about its products with partners until that same information is made available to the public, often onstage at a press conference; that it believes Nvidia is undercutting partners like EVGA by selling its own “Founders’ Edition” cards at a lower price; and a sense among partners that Nvidia just doesn’t value their patronage.

GamersNexus has a very thorough breakdown of the meeting and this news in its video.

GamersNexus

EVGA’s most senior management made its decision to break away from Nvidia back in April, but kept the decision strictly confidential. Though EVGA, a company that is so often known and valued for great GPUs and reliable customer service, is leaving the GPU market, the company reportedly intends to stay in business. However, it won’t be expanding into new product categories, GamersNexus reports. And while the company does make and sell other PC components such as motherboards, cases, and power supplies, the loss of the GPU side of its business is likely to pose challenges for its 280 worldwide staffers.

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GamersNexus’ Steve Burke reports that EVGA is looking to reallocate staff to different projects to keep everyone employed. The company laid off 20 percent of its Taiwan employees earlier this year, and now several people whose jobs solely revolved around GPU manufacturing and development don’t have an obvious job to perform.

While EVGA will continue to sell RTX 30-series cards, it expects to run out of stock by the end of the year, and will be hanging on to an additional stock to service warranties and repairs. EVGA’s pledging to honor warranties for existing customers of those cards.

Today is a bittersweet day for PC gamers, as EVGA’s presence in the GPU arena will be sorely missed. On the flip side, the crypto-mining craze that has plagued the industry by buying up countless cards for mining rigs seems to be coming to an end. The prominent crypto Ethereum has finally, finally moved away from the GPU-hungry “proof of work” algorithms that contributed to the virtual decimation of available GPU stock over the last two years. As you’ve probably noticed, GPUs are once again available to buy and pricing has finally started to fall back to Earth. With the Ethereum switch, hopefully that trend will only accelerate.

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Technology

Cryptocurrency Miners Are Selling Off GPUs For Cheaper

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Photo: Joby Sessions / PC Gamer Magazine/ Future (Getty Images)

The crypto market is continuing to fall, which has led a ton of miners to exit the market or to downscale their operations, thus finding themselves in possession of valuable computer components that they now no longer need. Some such miners, many from China and South Asia (where electricity is cheaper), are now taking that hardware and dumping it on e-commerce websites. As a result, GPUs that usually go for $500 to $600 are selling for around half that price on the secondhand market.

As noted by PC Gamer, GPUs are suddenly flooding the market, a trend likely driven by several factors. The major one is how cryptocurrency prices have been plummeting since this winter. Now that it seems like the market won’t make a turnaround anytime soon, miners are jumping ship. And these aren’t pristine, out-of-the-box GeForce RTX 3060s that they’re selling. These graphics cards have been used to mine crypto, which uses tons of electricity. Buyers have found that these RTX 3060s were cheap for a reason—many of them are defective after prolonged use. So the common wisdom seems to be that you shouldn’t be too eager to score some used GPUs from an unknown buyer.

However, there’s been some contention in the tech community about how degraded these graphics cards really are. PC World claims that buying a used graphics card from an experienced miner beats buying one from a gamer (who tends to “overclock” their GPUs). Tech YouTuber Linus Sebastian tested some mining GPUs on camera and found that the used graphics cards can still perform well—if they were carefully maintained by their previous owner. So if you must buy a GPU from a miner who wasted a ton of electricity on speculative currency, then you should at least find a reputable seller. Good luck with that, by the way.

If you ask me, I think it’s funnier to let miners languish with a bunch of expensive graphics cards that they can’t even get rid of. It is annoying, though, that Nvidia benefited hugely from the crypto boom, so much so, in fact, that the company got hit by a federal fine for trying to hide how crypto boosted its profits. Hey, at least this crypto nightmare is finally over *knocks on wood* and we’ll all no doubt be seeing far more reasonable graphics card prices very, very soon.

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Technology

Valve Fixed Elden Ring Stuttering Just For The Steam Deck

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Image: Valve | Kotaku

While I guess I’m one of the lucky ones, with my performance having been pretty good so far, there are a lot of people out there having problems trying to play Elden Ring on the PC. Those playing on Valve’s Steam Deck are not among them.

Stuttering has been a huge issue for PC players since the game’s launch, even after an update, and many suspected this was down to the way the game compiled shaders, or in this case, how it doesn’t do it very well (not that Elden Ring is alone here, google “compile shaders PC” and you’ll find a ton of games suffering performance hits and a case of the stutters).

This doesn’t happen on consoles because, with fixed hardware (as in, everyone’s console is exactly the same, and doesn’t have the infinite component variations present on PC), it can be done ahead of time instead of every time you fire a game up, as so often happens with a PC game. The Steam Deck, while being a PC, is also a piece of fixed hardware, so can enjoy the same benefits, provided Valve is able to implement them.

Which in this case they have. Here’s Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais showing off the Steam Deck version’s improvements last month in a preview build of an optimisation fix that is now live for all users:

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As Griffais tells Eurogamer,

On the Linux/Proton side, we have a pretty extensive shader pre-caching system with multiple levels of source-level and binary cache representations pre-seeded and shared across users. On the Deck, we take this to the next level, since we have a unique GPU/driver combination to target, and the majority of the shaders that you run locally are actually pre-built on servers in our infrastructure. When the game is trying to issue a shader compile through its graphics API of choice, those are usually skipped, as we find the pre-compiled cache entry on disk.

That said, it turns out shader compiling wasn’t the main issue here, as was originally thought. Instead, Graffais says it was actually down to:

Shader pipeline-driven stutter isn’t the majority of the big hitches we’ve seen in that game. The recent example we’ve highlighted has more to do with the game creating many thousand resources such as command buffers at certain spots, which was making our memory manager go into overdrive trying to handle it. We cache such allocations more aggressively now, which seems to have helped a ton.

Who could have guessed that one of this handheld PC’s biggest surprise strengths would be the fact it was basically built like a console. Anyway if you want get really into the technical stuff behind this, Eurogamer and Digital Foundry put a video together explaining the nitty gritty here. And if you’re currently playing on PC and still having problems, a fan-made fix turned up overnight that might help.

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Technology

RTX 3060 Is the First Nvidia Graphics Card to Get Resizable BAR

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Image: Nvidia

Those who were able to purchase one of Nvidia’s new RTX 3060 graphics cards yesterday now have access to the company’s long-awaited Resizable BAR support, which is the feature PC users can enable at the BIOS-level to let the CPU and GPU talk directly to one another. This is a big deal, because that instantly helps boost game frame rates.

Support for this feature rolled out with Nvidia’s latest driver update yesterday, but only affects the RTX 3060 at this time. Nvidia said Resizable BAR support for the rest of the 30-series crew will follow in late March.

However, like AMD’s Smart Access Memory (SAM), which is just another way of saying Resizable BAR, compatibility is limited to specific CPUs and motherboards. Not everyone with an RTX 3060 will be able to enable the feature just yet.

At the moment, Nvidia’s Resizable BAR is only compatible with AMD 500-series chipsets and AMD 400-series chipsets on motherboards with AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000-series CPU support. Additionally, you’ll need to have an AMD Ryzen 5000-series processor to use Resizable BAR with an Nvidia graphics card. It’s not compatible with older AMD processors at the moment.

On the Intel side, compatibility includes 400-series chipsets, as well as all 11th-gen chipsets available as of Feb. 25. However, because Nvidia has been working closely with Intel to get this up and running, it seems likely that Resizable BAR will be ready to go whenever Intel releases its 11th-gen desktop CPUs and the next chipset generation; Nvidia lists the 11th-gen Core i9, i7, and i5 as being compatible, as well as Core i9, i7, i5, and i3 10th-gen CPUs.

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Resizable BAR will also be compatible with motherboards from all major manufacturers, including Asus, ASRock, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI. Nvidia did not say which ones specifically, but each manufacturer would have more information on their websites. Considering that 400-series chipsets are compatible, all 400-series motherboards should be compatible as well (Z490, H470, B460, and H410), but each manufacturer could decide to only enable it on certain models. Always best to double check!

I wouldn’t hold your breath for Resizable BAR to come to 300-series Intel chipsets anytime soon, either. That chipset, which supports 8th and 9th-gen CPUs, will reach its end of life by January 2022, so it’s likely Intel won’t focus on compatibility for that generation.

RTX 30-series gaming laptops also support resizable bar with Intel and AMD processors. Again, you’ll need to check with the laptop manufacturer to see if it’s supported on a certain model. The MSI GP66 Leopard, for instance, does support it.

But even if your PC checks off all those boxes, you won’t see a frame rate boost in every game, as is the case with AMD’s SAM. Right now, there are only a handful of games that support Resizable BAR with an Nvidia GPU, which include Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Borderlands 3, Metro Exodus, and several others.

As always, don’t forget to update your drivers, BIOS, and VBIOS so this new feature will actually work on your supported PC.

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