PC World New Zealand
Confirmed: Nvidia taps the GTX 1050 Ti to battle graphics card shortages
We explain why it s a smart move. Credit: Brad Chacos/IDG
The rumors are true: Nvidia is supplementing the sky-high demand for GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards by releasing stock of older GPUs to board partners, who can then use those to craft new hardware. It’s a smart solution for the frustrating graphics card market we’re currently mired in.
“There have been a lot of rumors recently about Nvidia releasing more GPUs to AIBs from older generations the [GeForce] RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti were specifically mentioned,” I asked an Nvidia spokesperson via email. “Can you comment on whether there’s any truth to that?”
AMD s CPU share jumped 3% on February 3, 2021, 7:05 12 comments
What just happened? Valve has released its Steam Hardware Survey results for January. In the area of graphics cards, we see that more Ampere products are starting to appear in gamers’ machines, with the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3060 Ti now on the list. AMD, meanwhile, has regained the CPU share it lost in December.
Steam’s latest monthly hardware survey shows that the GTX 1060 remains the number one GPU. It’s been the most popular among the platform’s users since it knocked the GTX 750 Ti off the top spot in January 2018. The number of machines rocking the Pascal card has been declining for months, but its 9.75 percent share keeps the GTX 1060 on top.
Mostly thanks to AMD s processor shortages on February 3, 2021, 8:33 68 comments
What just happened? We’ve been hearing for a while now that AMD is continuing to chip away at Intel’s dominance of the CPU market, but according to a new report, the trend reversed in Q4 when Chipzilla gained market share for the first time in three years.
Mercury Research’s results for the fourth quarter of 2020 show that AMD lost some of its x86 market share despite having a good year overall. In desktop, the company fell from 20.1 percent in the previous quarter to 19.3 percent.
AMD is unlikely to be too concerned about the findings. Its QoQ desktop CPU share might have been down 0.8 percent, but the Q4 result was still a full percentage point higher than the same period in 2019. Moreover, YoY revenue was up 50 percent the company recorded record financial results last year.
Founded in 1993, Nvidia is a youngster when compared to other semiconductor companies. However, its impact on the world of technology has been vast. According to the Steam Hardware Survey, over 80 percent of users have an Nvidia graphics card in their gaming system, while Passmark says over 60 percent of users have an Nvidia product.
There was a lot of work involved in getting to that level, and while the company’s first chip in 1995, the NV1 seemed like a brilliant product offering video and 3D acceleration, a built-in sound card, and a gamepad port, its reliance on quadratic texture mapping rather than triangle polygon rendering meant that Nvidia dropped the ball on its big debut. Lesson learned as the chips that followed included some surefire hits. Let’s take a look.