GPU

The Ultra Quality preset is mentioned in the UE5 documentation, but it is unclear how it differs from the Quality preset or when exactly it is going to be activated for end-users. The latest UE5 build also features a new 2.2.9.0 DLSS version that apparently comes with worse image quality compared to version 2.2.6.0.

This is the A77 core variant and it still lags behind the Apple A14 by almost 150 points. There should be an A78 variant that could dethrone the A14; however, Apple is ready to launch the A15 this fall, so the Exynos supremacy will be short-lived.

LG announced support for Dolby Vision at the launch of TVs such as the 2021 OLED C1- and G1-series. Now, the OEM has released the firmware that activates this spec on these devices. Moreover, the feature works with HDR at 4K/120Hz for certain gaming platforms, thus potentially elevating the experience on the systems in question.

A Geekbench OpenCL entry has come to light showing an Xe-DG2 GPU with 256 EUs in combination with a 14-core Alder Lake processor. The DG2-256 GPU seems to have scored 18,450 points in the test, which puts it in the same ballpark as an NVIDIA GTX 1050. Another DG2 entry with 96 EUs was also spotted, possibly an iGPU in the Alder Lake SoC.

According to the latest insider info relayed through RedGamingTech, Intel will not be able to ready the DG2 gaming GPUs in desktop form this year. Instead, Intel will be focusing on releasing laptop-grade DG2 GPUs, as these are much more stable at lower voltages / frequencies and it is also easier to supply this sort of chips together with mobile CPUs to laptop integrator partners. Top performance in this case would only match a desktop RTX 3060 Ti.

One year ago, Zhaoxin was announcing its intentions to enter the discrete gaming GPU market with a 70 W TGP 28 nm model releasing some time in 2021. From what we can see in the pictures released by Glenfly, Zhaoxin already has some working engineering samples, but Chinese sources are now claiming that these particular models have been cancelled. Could be because of the unsatisfactory performance.

Previous leaks were already suggesting that the RDNA3 GPUs should be more than twice as fast as the current RX 6800 XT models thanks to the multi-chip module approach, but fresh rumors now claim that the impressive raster and ray tracing performance of the RDNA3 is also enabled through a massive increase in Infinity Cache memory capacity.

Finding AMD or NVIDIA's latest desktop graphics cards at reasonable prices has been almost impossible since their launch. Not only has their scarcity pushed prices to insane levels, but it has also inflated the re-sale value of older cards. Thankfully, the prices of AMD Radeon RX 6000 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series cards are now starting to come down.

Three hundred lucky gamers will be able to play Doom Eternal in all of its ray-traced glory thanks to the Doom Eternal GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Demon Slayer Bundle. It costs US$1,450 and gets you a copy of the game, a graphics card and a host of other goodies. Unfortunately, only people based in North America, Europe and Australia can participate in the raffle.

NVIDIA has announced a few updates to DLSS just in time for AMD's FSR-related announcements tomorrow. NVIDIA said that several new titles will be offering DLSS support in the coming weeks. DLSS plugins are already available for popular game engines, and Vulkan titles running on Linux via Proton will also get DLSS enhancements from tomorrow.

AMD quietly released its liquid-cooled RX 6900XT LC to Indian system integrators. Some resellers appear to have 6900 XT LC stock which they’re selling without a system for an incredible US$3007.

AMD's mobile Radeon mRDNA 2 graphics is reportedly a bit faster than the upcoming ARM Mali GPU in peak performance, and the performance is higher than the latest Mali GPU even if subjected to a 30% performance drop under throttling. Samsung and AMD will likely unveil the new SoC in July. We are also hearing that Google has also signed the contract with AMD for mRDNA 2.

The cut-down version of the high-end DG2-512 is clocked at 1.8 GHz max and is only 5% slower than the RTX 3070 or 8% slower than the RX 6700 XT. This means that the 512 EU variant could indeed compete with the RTX 3080 and RX 6800, as posited in previous leaks. Additionally, the leak reveals that the 128 EU variant is 12% faster than the Nvidia GTX 1650, although it is unclear what testing suite was used.

No official release notes for now, but some reddit folks already managed to port the updated files to games that already support DLSS and noticed no fps performance increase. However, the new version does fix some visual artifacts and further improves image quality. Rainbow Six Siege is supposed to get an fps boost of up to 50% in 4K, but the implementation is not that good as HUD elements are displayed at rendering resolution instead of native resolution.

Only two AAA games among the 7 launch titles, but there are more coming soon. Also, the list of companies and publishers includes big names such as Capcom, EA & Frostbite, Gearbox Publishing, Valve, My.Games, Ubisoft and Warner Bros. Games.

The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti desktop graphics card has been put through its paces in Unreal Engine 4.26. Puget Systems tested the RTX 3080 Ti in numerous benchmarks and found it to be almost on par with the more-expensive RTX 3090 in instances where VRAM didn’t count. However, emission levels suffered from such performance.

Select PC builders are mentioning the availability of the RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled, but none of them specify the actual costs, so they might charge some ridiculous prices for around 10% performance uplift coming from overcharged specs such as boost clocks of up to 2435 MHz, 18 Gbps GDDR6 RAM and TPB bumped to 330 W.

Lenovo is now offering an upgraded ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 with 11th gen Core and Xeon options along with NVIDIA RTX A5000 graphics. The ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 features a 17.3-inch IPS display that is available in UHD and FHD variants. Prices for the ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 start from US$1,779.

Lenovo has launched the ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 with internal upgrades over the 2020 version. The 2021 ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 continues to offer the GPU in a daughter board and comes in several configuration options including Intel 11th gen Core and Xeon GPUs, NVIDIA RTX A5000 graphics, and UHD displays in both OLED and IPS variants.

The Radeon RX 6600M is actually faster than the RTX 3060 in raster-heavy tests, but overall, it is as fast as the Nvidia card in 3DMark. It also falls behind by up to 13% in 1440p games and is significantly slower in ray tracing games. This SKU will no doubt be ignored by crypto miners as it is slower than the previous gen RX 5600M model.

A report out of China has stated that Nvidia will drastically cut the supply of GeForce RTX 2060 cards to bolster production efforts in regard to the Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series of boards. Gamers around the world have struggled to get their hands on Nvidia’s latest and greatest, so this purported plan will be welcomed by many.

NVIDIA released a low-key update on its plans for end-of-lifing cards based on the Kepler architecture. According to a new post on NVIDIA's support site, Kepler cards like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti will no longer receive driver updates from August 2021 onwards.

Games could see up to 28% fps improvements with faster RAM kits, but the average is around 10% at 1080p max settings or 15% for 1080p low settings. The absence of a MUX switch raises the performance gap to 33% in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, so we might want to wait for the more expensive versions that allow us to disable the iGPU.

Nostalgic about GPUs from the past few decades? This museum has everything from the console and arcade boards of the '80s, ISA cards, 3DFX SLI setups, the first true GPU - the GeForce 256 from Nvidia, pre-AMD ATI dual-GPU beasts and even separate sections dedicated to the Chinese e-sport scene sponsored by Colorful iGame or VR and high-end racing simulators.

Dell may be up to its CUDA core cannibalizing shenanigans again. A cursory glance at the Dell G15 listing tells us that its CUDA core count is set at 3,584 instead of 3,840. One could have dismissed it as an error had it not been for Dell's recent Alienware m15 R5 debacle. Update: The GeForce 3060 on the Dell G15 has the correct number of CUDA cores

The revamped W-series now includes the WS76/66 and WE76 high-end models with up to an i9-11980HK CPU, up to 64 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and a choice between the RTX A5000 or A3000 professional GPUs plus screens up to 4K. These models also include PCIe 4.0 support and a Thunderbolt 4 connector, while the WF76/66 models do not, and also support only up to an i7-11800H CPU with RTX A2000 or T1200 and 1080p screens.

The AMD Radeon Pro W6800 has surfaced on the Geekbench 5 OpenCL database. The Radon Pro W6800 is based on the same Navi 21 GPU as the consumer Radeon RX 6800 but offers 32 GB RAM and, apparently, much higher clocks. The OpenCL results of the Radeon Pro W6800 show significant improvements over the W5700 series and seem to be on par with an NVIDIA Quadro GV100.

Lenovo will be offering new Legion 5 models with Ryzen 5 5600H and Radeon RX 6600M in Germany at prices starting from €1,299. However, this pricing is significantly higher than a Ryzen 7 5800H and RTX 3060 Laptop GPU configuration at €1,249 indicating that Legion 5 models with NVIDIA GPUs could offer a better price-to-performance ratio.

A cryptocurrency miner has confirmed that Nvidia's hash rate limiter works as intended on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Hash rates for Altcoins such as Ethereum Classic, Ergo, and RavenCoin appear to be significantly lower, too.

The slower RAM gimps the gaming performance by up to 20% on the Asus model, while the missing MUX switch is further limiting the potential that should match models equipped with RTX 3080 mobile dGPUs. Similar RAM problems can also be encountered on the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. However, the Lenovo Legion 7 AMD features faster RAM, so this is not really just another conspiracy against AMD.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti has made its debut on benchmarking websites. The RTX 3070 Ti competes with the RTX 2080 Ti and Radeon RX 6800 XT, which are more expensive than NVIDIA's latest effort. The RTX 3070 Ti appears to be worse value for money than the RTX 3070, though.

Several Alienware m15 R5 laptops are apparently reporting just 4,608 CUDA cores for the RTX 3070 Laptop GPU instead of 5,120. Apart from the CUDA cores, even the clocks, TMUs, and pixel fillrates are being reported to be lower than normal leading to performance loss. Currently, a possible workaround is to flash the VBIOS from an m15 R4 that seems to restore the correct values and performance.

Looks like Nvidia is playing the prudent game and is not touching any smartphone chips before completing the ARM acquisition. Its current solution for Android and iOS devices is the GeForce Now cloud gaming service, allowing AMD and Samsung to be first to market with the upcoming Exynos SoC that integrates an RDNA2 GPU later this year.

This move might not surprise too many, but it does show that Nvidia can still be caught off guard by AMD, even when Team Red announced the arrival of the mobile RDNA 2 dGPUs half a year ago. On top of this, AMD might not even come up with a decent supply of RX 6000M dGPUs due to the ongoing chip shortages.

Leaked ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 specifications indicate quite a massive internal upgrade for Lenovo's multimedia flagship laptop. The specs indicate Intel Tiger Lake-H CPU and, for the first time, NVIDIA Ampere RTX 30 Super Laptop GPU options. The ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 is also slated to offer a slimmer chassis, 16:10 2.5K and 4K display options, 90 Whr battery, FHD webcam, backlit keyboard with 1.5 mm key travel, and more.

Intel's graphics chief Raja Koduri showed off the Xe-HPG DG2 512 EU GPU on Twitter indicating that now it's software engineering's turn to optimize performance in benchmarks and games. Raja also clarified to a query that Intel is indeed looking into considering AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technique in the interest of ISVs.

NVIDIA is bringing its DLSS image upscaling technology to Linux users via Proton. This will enable supported games on Linux to leverage the Tensor cores on RTX GPUs for AI-based supersampling. NVIDIA said that DLSS will be enabled for Vulkan games this month followed by DirectX titles in the fall.

This new NUC goes into beast mode with an 8-liter enclosure that can fit full-size GPUs plus a PSU. It also supports 45 W Intel Tiger Lake-H CPUs including the HK overclockable models, but apparently only supports air coolers, so it might get some TGP restrictions. Nevertheless, it also comes with a NUC 11 Extreme Compute Unit that includes features such as PCIe 4.0, Optane Memory, 2x Thunderbolt 4.0 connectors and even a 10 Gb NIC.

What has been only a rumor so far is finally official: AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed during her Computex 2021 keynote speech that the next-gen Exynos SoC will feature a custom AMD RDNA 2 architecture with ray tracing and variable rate shading. More details about this upcoming 5G chip will surface later this year.

NVIDIA kicked off its Computex 2021 keynote with a slew of gaming announcements and has officially launched the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti GPUs for US$599 and US$1,199 MSRP, respectively. The company also showed off a Doom Eternal demo running on the RTX 3080 Ti at 4K with RTX on and confirmed that RTX features are coming to several current and upcoming games in the coming weeks.

AMD offered some details on its much anticipated FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technique, which is pegged as a competitor to NVIDIA's popular DLSS technology. AMD FSR will be a part of GPUOpen and will offer four quality presets that work with almost all modern GPUs on the market. AMD demoed the technology with Godfall running on the Radeon RX 6800 XT and also on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060.

AMD has unveiled the RDNA 2-based RX 6000M mobile GPUs for gaming laptops to take on the competition from NVIDIA Ampere Laptop GPUs. The RX 6000M lineup includes the RX 6800M, RX 6700M, and the RX 6600M designed to target 100 fps+ gaming at 1080p and 1440p. AMD is also introducing the AMD Advantage Design Framework, which is a collaborative effort with OEMs to introduce performance standardization in AMD gaming laptops.

A Czech webstore now offers what is claimed as the recently-launched Asus ROG Zephyrus M16; then again, the new listing contains specs that are considerable downgrades on what the OEM announced while debuting this machine. For example, this apparent M16 leak involves the Core i7-11800H processor, as opposed to the i9-11900H on official product pages.

NVIDIA is expected to announce the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti on May 31, its latest GA102-based graphics card. A leak has not only confirmed that NVIDIA plans to sell a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition, but it has also provided a hands-on look at its design.

Chinese testers note that the new GA106-302 chips featuring the LHR limiter included with the new RTX 3060 cards provides the same gaming performance as the original versions, but effectively halves the Ethereum mining performance in half. The same is apparently true for the upcoming RTX 3080 Ti cards.

We now know the final specs for the reference RTX 3080 Ti cards, including the base and boost clocks, VRAM specs and TGP. Performance should be very close to an RTX 3090, but the first Ashes of the Singularity tests do not seem to support this.

NVIDIA is seemingly only a few days away from announcing the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, but marketing renders of two Gigabyte cards have already leaked. The renders confirm that the GA104-based card has GDDR6X VRAM, an improvement on the RTX 3070. The RTX 3070 Ti may nearly match the RTX 3080's power consumption, too.