AMD is using one of the largest digital billboards in the world to advertise an upcoming graphics card: probably the R9 390X, which is rumoured to be announced at Computex in the next few days. Amusing enough, the billboard—a monster 25,000-square-foot (2,300sqm), 10048×2368 display on Times Square—is also powered by AMD FirePro graphics cards.
The giant digital billboard, which sits between 45th and 46th street in New York City, is driven by three FirePro graphics cards in an Eyefinity setup, with a FirePro S400 Synchronization Module ensuring that each of the 18 display sections line up properly. With a resolution of 10048×2368, those three graphics cards are driving a total of 24 million pixels, or about the equivalent of three 4K monitors. It's important to note that the billboard isn't being used for gaming, though; it just displays 2D images and animations.
The billboard itself is actually a monster Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision display. Many of the world's largest displays (billboards, big screens at concerts, sports scoreboards) are made by Mitsubishi. The new one—which was originally turned on in November 2014 with Google as the first advertiser—is the largest in Times Square, at 330 feet (100 meters) by 78 feet (24 meters). It is rumoured that a four-week run on the display costs advertisers $2.5 million.
In the coming weeks, both AMD and Nvidia are expected to release new top-end graphics cards. The latest AMD rumours point to a graphics card based on a new Fiji GPU with 4GB of high-bandwidth memory. A leaked photo of the new graphics card (probably dubbed the R9 390X) seemed to show two 8-pin power connectors, which would suggest that Fiji will be a power-hungry GCN 1.3-class chip, rather than a completely new design with lower power consumption.
Nvidia is rumoured to be releasing a GTX 980 Ti, which will probably use a very similar GPU to the Titan X (the GM200), but paired with 6GB of RAM instead of the Titan X's (slightly overkill) 12GB. The main advantage of the 980 Ti will be that it costs much less than the Titan X (which is still priced at around $1000), while still netting similar levels of performance.
We should have some more in-depth coverage of both cards, as and when they are officially announced.
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