COLORFUL reveals its new iGame GeForce RTX 3090 Neptune OC-V – with an all-in-one (AIO) liquid closed-loop cooler (CLC).
The company is using a beefy 26-phase (14 + 8 + 4) VRM solution that chews power down from its 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors, while COLORFUL has factory overclocked GPU speeds of up to 1755MHz boost (1695MHz reference) and stock 19.5Gbps GDDR6X memory.
The CLC itself keeps the GA102 GPU, GDDR6X memory chips, and VRM cool — with a 240mm x 120mm radiator that COLORFUL dons with ARGB LED illuminated fans on the card and AIO radiator.
At launch Cyberpunk 2077 supports DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs, but the latter is only reserved for Google Stadia, a cloud gaming platform. Meanwhile, Valve developers have been working on their Proton software, a compatibility layer that allows Linux operating systems to run Microsoft DirectX games through Steam.
CD Projekt Red’s game has a lot of graphics issues even running natively on Windows. Being playable through Proton does not solve those issues, in fact, it introduces even more problems. According to ProtonDB, a community-driven database dedicated to the software, Cyberpunk 2077 is playable, but depending on the hardware, it has numerous audio and graphics issues.
Valve recently updated Proton to support Cyberpunk 2077 but only for Radeon graphics cards. However, users report that with GeForce 455 drivers, the game is also playable on NVIDIA hardware.
For many users the game would not even start, some observe missing texture or blocky shadows. Overall, the game is buggy, not optimized and it will either not work at all or offer poor performance. Yet some lucky users were able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux and made videos that we attached below.
There is still a long way before the game will offer a good experience on Linux, but judging from how other Windows games looked on Linux at launch, it is definitely better, and to some degree playable.
GPU manufacturers need to upgrade their Linux drivers and Proton needs better compatibility with the graphics cards.
AMD’s RX 6900 XT has been spotted in its first leaked game benchmark (ahead of its imminent launch), and although this Ashes of the Singularity result might seem worrying on the face of it – being essentially identical to the existing 6800 XT – it’s really nothing to get concerned about.
AMD’s RX 6900 XT has been spotted in its first leaked game benchmark (ahead of its imminent launch), and although this Ashes of the Singularity result might seem worrying on the face of it – being essentially identical to the existing 6800 XT – it’s really nothing to get concerned about.
Before we get into the reasons why this particular result is a very wonky representation of how the power of Big Navi GPUs might stack up, let’s first look at the score achieved, as unearthed by Tum_Apisak on Twitter.
As you can see, at 1080p (Full HD) resolution with ‘crazy’ graphics details, when paired with an Intel Core i7-8700K processor, the 6900 XT managed a score of 10,100 and an average frame rate of 102.1 fps.
The thing is that AMD’s 6800 XT achieved a pretty much identical result in Ashes of the Singularity, which could lead you to the conclusion that the 6900 XT flagship isn’t going to be worth the extra money.
However, the problem is that at 1080p, the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark is very much CPU-bound. In other words, the speed of the 8700K processor is bottlenecking the potential of the GPU, so both the 6800 and 6900 XT cards appear to give the same performance.
Of course, that won’t be the case when we see a full range of benchmarks, although admittedly, the 6900 XT is built very much along the same lines as the 6800 XT, which is why folks might worry when they see a benchmark that appears to indicate little difference between the respective cards.
Remember that the 6900 XT runs with the same clock speeds, memory configuration, and power usage as the 6800 XT – the only meaningful difference being that it has 80 CUs (Compute Units) compared to the 72 CUs of the 6800 XT. Of course, that will make a difference… but as mentioned, the worry for some folks is that it won’t make all that much of a difference, particularly not given the increase in asking price for the 6900 XT.
The flagship AMD graphics card will retail at $999 (around £750, AU$1,350), compared to $649 (around £490, AU$880) for the 6800 XT, so there’s quite a premium there (if you can buy any of these graphics cards at all, given that it seems to be pretty much inevitable that the 6900 XT will face the same stock problems as the previous Big Navi launches).
Although it should also be noted that one other potential strength for the 6900 XT is when it comes to overclocking, where the flagship GPU could offer more headroom, and potential for tweaking to higher clocks and therefore better performance still.
As ever, time will tell, and as the RX 6900 XT launches tomorrow, on December 8, we won’t have long to find out for sure. We might also see third-party variants of the 6900 XT before too long, even though AMD hasn’t officially announced that it has given the go-ahead for these custom cards, which could push performance further with impressive factory overclocks (but they’ll have heftier price tags, too).
