AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9 3950X socket AM4 processor beats Intel's flagship 18-core processor, the Core i9-10980XE, by a staggering 24 percent at 3DMark Physics, according to a PC Perspective report citing TUM_APISAK. The 3950X is a 16-core/32-thread processor that's drop-in compatible with any motherboard that can run the Ryzen 9 3900X. The i9-10980XE is an 18-core/36-thread HEDT chip that enjoys double the memory bus width as the AMD chip, and is based on Intel's "Cascade Lake-X" silicon. The AMD processor isn't at a tangible clock-speed advantage. The 3950X has a maximum boost frequency of 4.70 GHz, while the i9-10980XE isn't much behind, at 4.60 GHz, but things differ with all-core boost.

When paired with 16 GB of dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory, the Ryzen 9 3950X powered machine scores 32,082 points in the CPU-intensive physics tests of 3DMark. In comparison, the i9-10980XE, paired with 32 GB of quad-channel DDR4-2667 memory, scores just 25,838 points as mentioned by PC Perspective. Graphics card is irrelevant to this test. It's pertinent to note here that the 3DMark physics test scales across practically any number of CPU cores/threads, and the AMD processor could be benefiting from a higher all-core boost frequency than the Intel chip. Although AMD doesn't mention a number in its specifications, the 3950X is expected to have an all-core boost frequency that's north of 4.00 GHz, as its 12-core sibling, the 3900X, already offers 4.20 GHz all-core. In contrast, the i9-10980XE has an all-core boost frequency of 3.80 GHz. This difference in boost frequency, apparently, even negates the additional 2 cores and 4 threads that the Intel chip enjoys, in what is yet another example of AMD having caught up with Intel in the IPC game.

Intel is taking big strides forward with its Gen11 integrated graphics architecture. Its performance-configured variant, the Intel Iris Plus Graphics G7, featured in the Core i7-1065G7 "Ice Lake" processor, is found to beat AMD Radeon RX Vega 10 iGPU, found in the Ryzen 7 2700U processor ("Raven Ridge"), by as much as 16 percent in 3DMark 11, a staggering 23 percent in 3DMark FireStrike 1080p. Notebook Check put the two iGPUs through these, and a few game tests to derive an initial verdict that Intel's iGPU has caught up with AMD's RX Vega 10. AMD has since updated its iGPU incrementally with the "Picasso" silicon, providing it with higher clock speeds and updated display and multimedia engines.

The machines tested here are the Lenovo Ideapad S540-14API for the AMD chip, and Lenovo Yoga C940-14IIL with the i7-1065G7. The Iris Plus G7 packs 64 Gen11 execution units, while the Radeon RX Vega 10 has 640 stream processors based on the "Vega" architecture. Over in the gaming performance, and we see the Intel iGPU 2 percent faster than the RX Vega 10 at Bioshock Infinite at 1080p, 12 percent slower at Dota 2 Reborn 1080p, and 8 percent faster at XPlane 11.11.

Reviewers should have received their Radeon "Navi" review samples by now, so it's just natural that the number of leaks is increasing. WCCFTech has spotted one such leak in the 3DMark Time Spy database. The card which is just labeled "Generic VGA" achieved a final score of 8575 points, GPU score of 8719 and 7843 CPU points, which is almost identical to WCCFTech's own comparison benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition (8901). The Vega 64 scored 7427, which leads WCCFTech to believe this must be Radeon RX 5700 XT. The result has since been removed from the 3DMark database, which also suggests it's for an unreleased product.

With PCI-Express 4.0 graphics cards and motherboards soon to arrive, UL has released their PCI Express feature test for 3DMark. This latest addition has been designed to verify the bandwidth available to the GPU over a computer's PCI Express interface. To accomplish this, the test will make bandwidth the limiting factor for performance and does so by uploading a large amount of vertex and texture data to the GPU for each frame. The end goal is to transfer enough data over the PCIe 4.0 interface to thoroughly saturate it. Once the test is complete, the end result will be a look at the average bandwidth achieved during the test.

UL Benchmarks via its 3DMark product have announced that they'll be introducing a new, comprehensive test that aims to test PCIe bandwidth across generations. Citing the introduction of PCIe 4.0 to the masses - soon available in the consumer market via AMD's Ryzen 3000 series release - UL wants users to be able to know what a difference this makes towards allowing for more complex games and scenarios that aren't data-constrained by PCIe 3.0.

The 3D Mark PCIe Performance Test will be made available this summer for free for 3DMark Advanced Edition and for 3DMark Professional Edition customers with a valid annual license.

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is excited to announce that 23 overclocking records in various benchmark categories were broken during the Computex 2019 time frame, including the world record for the fastest memory frequency, all using G.SKILL DDR4 memory kits built with high performance Samsung 8Gb components, the latest Intel processors, and high performance motherboards.

This week at the G.SKILL Computex booth, a new world record for fastest memory frequency was set by Toppc, a renowned professional extreme overclocker, reaching an incredible DDR4-5886MHz using the Trident Z Royal memory on a MSI MPG Z390I GAMING EDGE AC motherboard and an Intel Core i9-9900K processor. At the end of Computex 2019, the top two results for the fastest memory frequency are set by team MSI using an identical hardware setup.

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su at her 2019 Computex keynote address announced the 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processor family, which leverages the company's Zen 2 microarchitecture, and are built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication process at TSMC. Designed for the AM4 CPU socket, with backwards compatibility for older AMD 300-series and 400-series chipset motherboards, these processors are multi-chip modules of up to two 8-core "Zen 2" CPU chiplets, and a 14 nm I/O controller die that packs the dual-channel DDR4 memory controller and PCI-Express gen 4.0 root complex, along with some SoC connectivity. AMD claims an IPC increase of 15 percent over Zen 1, and higher clock speeds leveraging 7 nm, which add up to significantly higher performance over the current generation. AMD bolstered the core's FPU (floating-point unit), and doubled the cache sizes.

AMD unveiled three high-end SKUs for now, the $329 Ryzen 7 3700X, the $399 Ryzen 7 3800X, and the $499 Ryzen 9 3900X. The 3700X and 3800X are 8-core/16-thread parts with a single CPU chiplet. The 3700X is clocked at 3.60 GHz with 4.40 GHz maximum boost frequency, just 65 Watts TDP and will be beat Intel's Core i7-9700K both at gaming and productivity. The 3800X tops that with 3.90 GHz nominal, 4.50 GHz boost, 105W TDP, and beat the Core i9-9900K at gaming and productivity. AMD went a step further at launched the new Ryzen 9 brand with the 3900X, which is a 12-core/24-thread processor clocked at 3.80 GHz, which 4.60 boost, 72 MB of total cache, 105W TDP, and performance that not only beats the i9-9900K, but also the i9-9920X 12-core/24-thread HEDT processor despite two fewer memory channels. AMD focused on gaming performance with Zen 2, with wider FPU, improved branch prediction, and several micro-architectural improvements contributing to a per-core performance that's higher than Intel's. The processors go on sale on 7/7/2019.

NVIDIA today announced that it is extending DXR (DirectX Raytracing) support to several GeForce GTX graphics models beyond its GeForce RTX series. These include the GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1070, and GTX 1060 6 GB. The GTX 1060 3 GB and lower "Pascal" models don't support DXR, nor do older generations of NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA has implemented real-time raytracing on GPUs without specialized components such as RT cores or tensor cores, by essentially implementing the rendering path through shaders, in this case, CUDA cores. DXR support will be added through a new GeForce graphics driver later today.

The GPU's CUDA cores now have to calculate BVR, intersection, reflection, and refraction. The GTX 16-series chips have an edge over "Pascal" despite lacking RT cores, as the "Turing" CUDA cores support concurrent INT and FP execution, allowing more work to be done per clock. NVIDIA in a detailed presentation listed out the kinds of real-time ray-tracing effects available by the DXR API, namely reflections, shadows, advanced reflections and shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination (unbaked), and combinations of these. The company put out detailed performance numbers for a selection of GTX 10-series and GTX 16-series GPUs, and compared them to RTX 20-series SKUs that have specialized hardware for DXR.Update: Article updated with additional test data from NVIDIA.

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is excited to announce the 6th Annual OC World Cup 2019. The online qualifier competition stage will be held from March 13, 2019 until April 16, 2019 on hwbot.org. The top 9 winners of the online qualifier will be qualified to join the live competition at the G.SKILL booth during Computex 2019 week from May 29th to 31st and compete for a chunk of the $25,000 USD cash prize pool.

With the participation of top overclockers from around the world and carefully designed rules, G.SKILL OC World Cup is considered as one of the most challenging overclocking competition by professional overclockers. The G.SKILL OC World Cup consists of three rounds: Online Qualifier, Live Qualifier, and Grand Final. The top 9 winners of the Online Qualifier will receive eligibility to enter the Live Qualifier stage during Computex 2019 and demonstrate their finest LN2 extreme overclocking skills at the G.SKILL booth.

Did you see the NVIDIA keynote presentation at CES this year? For us, one of the highlights was the DLSS demo based on our 3DMark Port Royal ray tracing benchmark. Today, we're thrilled to announce that we've added this exciting new graphics technology to 3DMark in the form of a new NVIDIA DLSS feature test. This new test is available now in 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions.

3DMark feature tests are specialized tests for specific technologies. The NVIDIA DLSS feature test helps you compare performance and image quality with and without DLSS processing. The test is based on the 3DMark Port Royal ray tracing benchmark. Like many games, Port Royal uses Temporal Anti-Aliasing. TAA is a popular, state-of-the-art technique, but it can result in blurring and the loss of fine detail. DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an NVIDIA RTX technology that uses deep learning and AI to improve game performance while maintaining visual quality.

NVIDIA today released GeForce 418.81 WHQL software. The drivers add support for mobile versions of GeForce RTX 20-series GPUs. The desktop version adds optimization for 3DMark Port Royal benchmark, in addition to its DLSS (deep learning supersampling) AA setting. The drivers add or improve NVIDIA SLI support for "Anthem," "Assetto Corsa Competizione," "Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2," "Life is strange Season 2," "NBA 2K19," and "Space Hulk Tactics." CUDA version 10 is included with these drivers.

Among the issues fixed are HDR not being enabled by default in Gamestream when an HDR display is connected to the client and PC. 3D performance and frame-rate overlays accidentally appearing on Twitter UWP app is fixed. Random flickering in games with G-Sync enabled is fixed. Also fixed is a strange issue in which when a G-Sync display (one with NVIDIA G-Sync hardware) is hotplugged, and a G-Sync Compatible (read: VESA Adaptive Sync) display is connected, the right half of the G-Sync display goes blank. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 418.81 WHQL

Perhaps gliding through the tech-infused CES week, UL Corporation has just announced that the much-expected Port Royal, the world's first dedicated real-time ray tracing benchmark for gamers, is now available. Port Royal uses DirectX Raytracing to enhance reflections, shadows, and other effects that are difficult to achieve with traditional rendering techniques, and enables both performance benchmarking for cutthroat competition throughout the internet (and our own TPU forums, of course), but is also an example of what to expect from ray tracing in upcoming games - ray tracing effects running in real-time at reasonable frame rates at 2560 × 1440 resolution.

3DFX is a well-known name for most in our community, I'd wager (I don't have the data to back me up on that, but bare with me). The company is one of the highest-profile defunct companies that vied for a place in the desktop, high-performance GPU space back in the day, and brought its guns bearing on NVIDIA and then ATI. The Rampage was the last GPU ever developed by the company, and looked to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce3. That never saw the light of day, though, with the company shutting its doors before development became viable for market release.

DSOGaming has some images of some of the Rampage GPUs that survived 3DFX's closure, though, and the graphics card is shown running Max Payne, Unreal Tournament & 3DMark 2001. For those of you that ever had a 3DFX graphics card, these should bring you right down memory lane. Enjoy.

UL Benchmarks released more information on pricing and availability of its upcoming addition to the 3DMark benchmark suite, named "Port Royal." The company revealed that the benchmark will officially launch on January 8, 2019. The Port Royal upgrade will cost existing 3DMark paid (Advanced and Professional) users USD $2.99. 3DMark Advanced purchased from January 8th onward at $29.99 will include Port Royal. 3DMark Port Royal is an extreme-segment 3D graphics benchmark leveraging DirectX 12 and DirectX Raytracing (DXR). UL Benchmarks stated that Port Royal was developed with inputs from industry giants including NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Microsoft.

Port Royal is the name of the latest component of UL Benchmarks 3DMark. Designed to take advantage of the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, this benchmark features an extreme poly-count test-scene with real-time ray-traced elements. Screengrabs of the benchmark depict spacecraft entering and leaving mirrored spheres suspended within a planet's atmosphere, which appear to be docks. It's also a shout out to of a number of space-sims such as "Star Citizen," which could up their production in the future by introducing ray-tracing. The benchmark will debut at the GALAX GOC Grand Final on December 8, where the first public run will be powered by a GALAX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti HOF graphics card. It will start selling in January 2019.

With update 2.6.6174, released today, 3DMark now includes a new benchmark dubbed Night Raid. This latest addition to the popular 3DMark suite offers DX12 performance testing for laptops, tablets and other devices with integrated graphics. It also offers full support for ARM based processors in the latest always-connected PCs running Microsoft's Windows 10 on ARM. Users running 3DMark Basic Edition which is free will have access to this latest addition upon installing the update.

The Night Raid benchmark continues the trend of offering two graphics tests and a CPU test. While not as visually stunning as previous entries this is to be expected considering it is targeted at integrated graphics processors and entry level systems. Even so, it makes use of numerous graphical features with graphics test 1 including; dynamic reflections, ambient occlusion, and deferred rendering. Graphics test 2 features; tessellation, complex particle systems and depth of field effects with forward-rendering. Finally, the CPU test will measures performance through a combination of physics simulation, occlusion culling, and procedural generation.

UL Benchmarks de-listed several popular Huawei devices from its database over proof of cheating in its benchmarks. Over the month, it was found that several of Huawei's devices, such as P20 Pro, Nova 3, and Play; overclocked their SoCs while ignoring all power and thermal limits, to achieve high benchmark scores, when it detected that a popular benchmark such as 3DMark, was being run. To bust this, UL Benchmarks tested the three devices with "cloaked" benchmarks, or "private benchmarks" as they call it. These apps are identical in almost every way to 3DMark, but lack the identification or branding that lets Huawei devices know when to overclock themselves to cheat the test.

The results were startling. When the devices have no clue that a popular benchmark is being run (or if has no way of telling that 3DMark is being run), it chugs along at its "normal" speed, which is 35% to 36% lower. The rules that bind device manufacturers from advertising UL's 3DMark scores explicitly state that the device must not detect the app and optimize its hardware on the fly to ace the test. Huawei responded to UL by stating that it will unlock a new "performance mode" to users that lets them elevate their SoCs to the same high clocks for any application.

Some of the first benchmark numbers of Intel's upcoming 8-core/16-thread socket LGA1151 processor, the Core i9-9900K, surfaced, from Thai professional overclocker TUM APISAK. A 3DMark database submission sees the processor score 10,719 points in the CPU tests, with an overall score of 9,862 points, when paired with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. According to WCCFTech, the CPU score is about 2,500 points higher than the 6-core/12-thread Core i7-8700K, and about 1,500 points higher than the 8-core/16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 2700X. The tested processor features 8 cores, 16 threads, a nominal clock of 3.10 GHz, and boost frequency of 5.00 GHz, as measured by 3DMark's internal SysInfo module. Intel is expected to launch the Core i9-9900K on 1st August, 2018.

It's a big day for us. Today, we are looking back on 20 years as Futuremark and looking forward to our first day as UL, a name we now share with our parent company. To mark the beginning of this new chapter in our story, I'm happy to announce that we are running a week-long sale on Steam. From now until next Monday, you can save 75% on our 3DMark, VRMark, and PCMark 10 benchmarks. Or save even more when you buy them together in our benchmark bundle.

Futuremark set a date for its re-branding to align with its parent company UL. April 23, 2018 is when Futuremark products and services will be sold under the new branding scheme. Futuremark became part of UL in 2014. UL is an independent, global company with more than 10,000 professionals in 40 countries. UL offers a wide range of testing, inspection, auditing, and certification services and solutions to help customers, purchasers and policymakers manage risk and complexity in modern markets. A set of FAQs associated with the change are answered below.

News of an upcoming AMD RX 500X series sprung like wildfire yesterday, as users and publications alike tried to quench a thirst for some more GPU solutions from the red camp. However, if recent leaked numbers and information from 3D Mark prove correct, it seems the RX 500X series will likely bring some disappointments to those who were hoping for a refined, Vega-imbued AMD Polaris redesign, or simply push for better clocks and power/performance ratios under a new manufacturing process.

DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is a new feature in DirectX 12 that opens the door to a new class of real-time graphics techniques for games. We were thrilled to join Microsoft onstage for the announcement, which we followed with a presentation of our own work in developing practical real-time applications for this exciting new tech.

Accurate real-time reflections with DirectX Raytracing
Rendering accurate reflections in real-time is difficult. There are many challenges and limitations when using the existing methods. For the past few months, we've been exploring ways of combining DirectX Raytracing with existing methods to solve some of these challenges. While much of our presentation went deep into the math for our solution, I would like to show you some examples of our new technique in action.

Futuremark today released 3DMark v2.4.4254 update (includes the "Time Spy" DirectX 12 benchmark). The latest version forces hardware monitoring information to be sent to Futuremark for validation of scores (and not just a general hardware and drivers probe). It also corrects a rare crash noticed when the system returns unexpected values for video memory amounts. The splash-screen has been restored. The installer is now available in Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Grab the update from the link below.DOWNLOAD: 3DMark v2.4.4254

Ahead of its February 12 launch, various models of AMD Ryzen "Raven Ridge" APUs, in both their notebook and desktop iterations, were put through 3DMark, which is perhaps the best way to put AMD's combination of its latest CPU and GPU architectures, to the test. Pictures also surfaced on Reddit, of the PIB boxes of the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G, highlighting their "silver band" demarcation from the rest of the Ryzen processor lineup. This silver band features prominent Radeon Vega graphics branding, indicating that the model is a "Raven Ridge" APU.

Armed with 704 "Vega" stream processors spread across 11 NGCUs, the Radeon Vega 11 integrated graphics core of the Ryzen 5 2400G is AMD's fastest integrated graphics solution by far. It's also the fastest integrated graphics solution fully integrated with the CPU silicon (unlike, for example, the Core i7-8705G being a multi-chip module). The entire Ryzen "Raven Ridge" APU lineup was put through 3DMark 11 "Performance" preset, by someone with access to all of them. The 2400G leads the pack with 5,162 points, and a graphics score of 5,042 points. The 2200G, which features 512 stream processors, and lacks SMT, manages 4,151 points, with 3,950 points graphics score. The 2400G scores somewhere between the desktop RX 550 and the RX 560, which makes it possible for you to run "Player Unknown's Battlegrounds" at 900p or even 1080p with some details dialed down.

Futuremark, the developer of the world's most widely used benchmarking software, today announced a new partnership with Newegg, the leading tech-focused e-retailer in North America. The partnership sees Newegg complement its comprehensive selection of PC components and complete systems with Futuremark's popular 3DMark, VRMark and PCMark 10 benchmarks. It's a winning combination: everything you need to build and benchmark a new PC in one place.

Newegg has long been the preferred destination for tech-savvy PC users when buying or building a new PC or upgrading individual components. Futuremark benchmark tests have helped millions of people test, compare and understand PC performance. Now for the first time, PC enthusiasts can buy Futuremark benchmarks from the same place they buy their components and accessories.