Leading global motherboard manufacturer, ASRock, has successively released software based on Microsoft Windows 10/11 and Canonical Ubuntu Linux platforms since the end of last year, which can help users quickly download, install and configure artificial intelligence software. After receiving great response from the market, ASRock has revealed the 2024 Q1 update of AI QuickSet today, adding two new artificial intelligence (AI) tools, Whisper Desktop and AudioCraft, allowing users of ASRock AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards to experience more diverse artificial intelligence (AI) applications!

ASRock AI QuickSet software tool 1.2.4 Windows version supports Microsoft Windows 10/11 64-bit operating system, while Linux version 1.1.6 supports Canonical Ubuntu 22.04.4 Desktop (64-bit) operating system, through ASRock AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards and AMD ROCm software platform provide powerful computing capabilities to support a variety of well-known artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The 1.2.4 Windows version supports image generation tools such as DirectML Shark and Stable Diffusion web UI, as well as the newly added Whisper Desktop speech recognition tool; and the 1.1.6 Linux version supports Image/Manga Translator, Stable Diffusion CLI & web UI image generation tool, and Text generation web UI Llama 2 text generation tool using Meta Llama 2 language model, Ultralytics YOLOv8 object recognition tool, and the newly added AudioCraft audio generation tool.

We're excited to announce we're expanding our AI Inference benchmark offerings with the UL Procyon AI Image Generation Benchmark, coming Monday, 25th March. AI has the potential to be one of the most significant new technologies hitting the mainstream this decade, and many industry leaders are competing to deliver the best AI Inference performance through their hardware. Last year, we launched the first of our Procyon AI Inference Benchmarks for Windows, which measured AI Inference performance with a workload using Computer Vision.

The upcoming UL Procyon AI Image Generation Benchmark provides a consistent, accurate and understandable workload for measuring the AI performance of high-end hardware, built with input from members of the industry to ensure fair and comparable results across all supported hardware.

AMD's first generation XDNA-based Neural Processing Unit (NPU) arrived last year, as an onboard aspect of their "Phoenix" Ryzen 7040 mobile processor series, followed many months later by Intel's similarly NPU-laden Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" generation. It was recently revealed that a Windows 11 DirectML preview grants preliminary support for Core Ultra NPUs—Microsoft's software engineering department seems to be prioritizing Intel AI tech. Team Red has already released XDNA on desktop platforms—with its Ryzen 8000G APU family—and the "Hawk Point" 8040 series is nearing a retail launch, but these processors (plus 7040) remain unsupported by Microsoft's DirectML API. An interesting AMD community blog entry was posted two weeks—news outlets have been slow to pick up on its relevance.

Intel NPU activity can be monitored in Windows Task Manager (see screenshot below), and an upcoming update will add competing AMD parts to the mix. Joel Hruska's Team Red community blog post reveals that NPU monitoring for Ryzen 8040 series processors is due soon: " As AI PCs become more popular, there's a growing need for system monitoring tools that can track the performance of the new NPUs (Neural Processing Units) available on select Ryzen 8040 Series mobile processors. A neural processing unit - also sometimes referred to an integrated or on-die AI engine -- can improve battery life by offloading AI tasks that would otherwise be performed on the CPU or GPU. AMD has been working with Microsoft to enable MCDM (Microsoft Compute Driver Model) infrastructure on the AMD NPU (Neural Processing Unit)-enabled Ryzen 8040 Series of mobile processors. MCDM is a derivative of Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) that is targeting non-GPU, compute devices, such as the NPU. MCDM enables NPUs to make use of the existing GPU device management infrastructure, including scheduling, power management, memory management, and performance debugging with tools such as the Task Manager. MCDM serves as a fundamental layer, ensuring the smooth execution of AI workloads on NPU devices."

Chad Pralle, Principle Technical Program Manager at Microsoft's Windows AI NPU division has introduced the DirectML 1.13.1 and ONNX Runtime 1.17 APIs—this appears to be a collaborative effort—Samsung was roped in to some degree, according to Microsoft's announcement and a recent Team Blue blog entry. Pralle and his team are suitably proud of this joint effort that involved open source models: "we are excited to announce developer preview support for NPU acceleration in DirectML, the machine learning platform API for Windows. This developer preview enables support for a subset of models on new Windows 11 devices with Intel Core Ultra processors with Intel AI boost."

Further on in Microsoft's introductory piece, Samsung Electronics is announced as a key launch partner—Hwang-Yoon Shim, VP and Head of New Computing H/W R&D Group stated that: "NPUs are emerging as a critical resource for broadly delivering efficient machine learning experiences to users, and Windows DirectML is one of the most efficient ways for Samsung's developers to make those experiences for Windows." Microsoft notes that NPU support in DirectML is still "a work in progress," but Pralle and his colleagues are eager to receive user feedback from the testing community. It is currently "only compatible with a subset of machine learning models, some models may not run at all or may have high latency or low accuracy." They hope to implement improvements in the near future. The release is limited to modern Team Blue hardware, so NPU-onboard AMD devices are excluded at this point in time, naturally.

Even as CPU vendors are working to mainstream accelerated AI for client PCs, and Microsoft setting the pace for more AI in everyday applications with Windows 11 23H2 Update; NVIDIA is out there reminding you that every GeForce RTX GPU is an AI accelerator. This is thanks to its Tensor cores, and the SIMD muscle of the ubiquitous CUDA cores. NVIDIA has been making these for over 5 years now, and has an install base of over 100 million. The company is hence focusing on bring generative AI acceleration to more client- and enthusiast relevant use-cases, such as large language models.

NVIDIA at the Microsoft Ignite event announced new optimizations, models, and resources to bring accelerated AI to everyone with an NVIDIA GPU that meets the hardware requirements. To begin with, the company introduced an update to TensorRT-LLM for Windows, a library that leverages NVIDIA RTX architecture for accelerating large language models (LLMs). The new TensorRT-LLM version 0.6.0 will release later this month, and improve LLM inference performance by up to 5 times in terms of tokens per second, when compared to the initial release of TensorRT-LLM from October 2023. In addition, TensorRT-LLM 0.6.0 will introduce support for popular LLMs, including Mistral 7B and Nemtron-3 8B. Accelerating these two will require a GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" or 40-series "Ada" GPU with at least 8 GB of main memory.

Microsoft seems to be throwing its hat in the image upscale battle that's currently raging between NVIDIA and AMD. The company has added two new job openings to its careers page: one for a Senior Software Engineer and another for a Principal Software Engineer for Graphics. Those job openings would be quite innocent by themselves; however, once we cut through the chaff, it becomes clear that the Senior Software Engineer is expected to "implement machine learning algorithms in graphics software to delight millions of gamers," while working closely with "partners" to develop software for "future machine learning hardware" - partners here could be first-party titles or even the hardware providers themselves (read, AMD). AMD themselves have touted a DirectML upscaling solution back when they first introduced their FidelityFX program - and FSR clearly isn't it.

It is interesting how Microsoft posted these job openings in June 30th - a few days after AMD's reveal of their FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) solution for all graphics cards - and which Microsoft themselves confirmed would be implemented in the Xbox product stack, where applicable. Of course, that there is one solution available already does not mean companies should rest on their laurels - AMD is surely at work on improving its FSR tech as we speak, and Microsoft has seen the advantages on having a pure ML-powered image upscaling solution thanks to NVIDIA's DLSS. Whether Microsoft's solution with DirectML will improve on DLSS as it exists at time of launch (if ever) is, of course, unknowable at this point.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the tiny-yet-mighty software that gives you information, monitoring, and diagnostics of your PC graphics subsystem. Version 2.39.0 adds support for the Gen12 Xe LP integrated graphics solution found with Intel 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake" processors. GPU-Z also has the ability to tell the new "Navi 21 XTXH" Radeon RX 6900 XT variant, from the standard RX 6900 XT. Support is also added for NVIDIA RTX 3060 Mobile, RTX 3050 Ti Mobile, RTX 3050 Mobile, RTX A5000, T500, CMP 30HX, CMP 40HX, CMP 90HX; and AMD Radeon Pro W5500M, and Barco MXRT 4700.

Version 2.39.0 also improves in several areas. The integrated screenshot feature is refreshed to better capture the window area. The XML dump is made more usable, with information that includes BIOS UEFI support, WHQL status, Driver Date, DXR, DirectML, OpenGL and Resizable BAR. The video memory utilization sensor is disabled on TCC mode-enabled NVIDIA GPUs. A number of minor issues were also fixed, related to Resizable BAR detection, clock readings on AMD RDNA2 mobile GPUs, a bug with OpenGL detection on certain systems, memory clock readings on certain legacy GPUs, BIOS date readings on legacy GPUs, etc. Grab it from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.39.0The change-log follows.

AMD, via its CVP & GM at AMD Radeon Scott Herkelman, confirmed in video with PCWorld that the company's counterpart to NVIDIA's DLSS technology - which he defines as the most important piece of software currently in development from a graphics perspective - is coming along nicely. Launch of the technology is currently planned for later this year. Scott Herkelman further confirmed that there is still a lot of work to do on the technology before it's ready for prime time, but in the meantime, it has an official acronym: FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution). If you're unfamiliar with DLSS, it's essentially an NVIDIA-locked, proprietary upscaling algorithm that has been implemented in a number of games now, which leverages Machine Learning hardware capabilities (tensor cores) to upscale a game with minimal impact to visual quality. It's important because it allows for much higher performance in even the latest, most demanding titles - especially when they implement raytracing.

As has been the case with AMD, its standing on upscaling technologies defends a multiplatform, compatible approach that only demands implementation of open standards to run in users' systems. The idea is to achieve the broadest possible spectrum of game developers and gamers, with tight, seamless integration with the usual game development workflow. This is done mostly via taking advantage of Microsoft's DirectML implementation that's baked straight into DX 12.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the popular graphics sub-system information and diagnostic utility. Version 2.35.0 adds support for new GPUs, and fixes a number of bugs. To begin with, GPU-Z adds support for AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs based on the "Navi 21" silicon. Support is also added for Intel DG1 GPU. BIOS extraction and upload for NVIDIA's RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs has finally been introduced. Memory size reporting on the RTX 3090 has been fixed. The latest Windows 10 Insider Build (20231.1000) made some changes to DirectML, which caused GPU-Z to report it as unavailable, this has been fixed.

TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.35.0 also makes various improvements to fake GPU detection for cards based on NVIDIA GT216 and GT218 ASICs. Hardware detection for AMD Radeon Pro 5600M based on "Navi 12" has been fixed. Among the other GPUs for which support was added with this release are NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core PCIe, Intel UHD Gen9.5 graphics on the i5-10200H, and Radeon HD 8210E and Barco MXRT-6700. Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.35.0The change-log follows.

AMD late Thursday released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 graphics drivers. Version 20.7.1 beta adds optimization for "Disintegration." The software also introduces an improved AMD Bug Report Tool. A number of bugs were fixed with this release including stuttering observed on machines running RX 5000 series GPUs with Radeon Replay enabled; "Vega" based graphics cards experiencing performance loss with Performance Metrics enabled; an error switching between apps while previewing your stream; custom fan- and clock- tuning settings not applying in Radeon Performance tuning tab or retaining after reboot; and display resolution failing to stretch with display scaling enabled in CS:GO. Bugs related to Valorant, DOTA2, and DOOM Eternal were also fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.7.1 Beta

Microsoft is preparing to add the DirectX API support to WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The latest Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 will virtualize DirectX to Linux applications running on top of it. WSL is a translation layer for Linux apps to run on top of Windows. Unlike Wine, which attempts to translate Direct3D commands to OpenGL, what Microsoft is proposing is a real DirectX interface for apps in WSL, which can essentially talk to hardware (the host's kernel-mode GPU driver) directly.

To this effect, Microsoft introduced the Linux-edition of DXGkrnl, a new kernel-mode driver for Linux that talks to the DXGkrnl driver of the Windows host. With this, Microsoft is promising to expose the full Direct3D 12, DxCore, and DirectML. It will also serve as a conduit for third party APIs, such as OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and CUDA. Microsoft expects to release this feature-packed WSL out with WDDM 2.9 (so a future version of Windows 10).

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information and diagnostic utility. Version 2.30.0 introduces several new feature- and stability updates, and adds support for new GPUs. To begin with, support is added for AMD Radeon RX 590 GME, Radeon Pro W5500, Pro V7350x2, FirePro 2260, and Instinct MI25 MxGPU; Intel UHD (Core i5-10210Y), and a rare GeForce GTS 450 Rev 2. TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.30.0 introduces support for reporting hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling in Windows 10 20H1 in the Advanced tab. The tab now also has the ability to show WDDM 2.7, Shader Model 6.6, DirectX Mesh Shaders, and DXR tier 1.1. A workaround for the DirectML detection on Windows 10 19041 built has been added. Graphics driver registry path is now displayed in the General section of the Advanced tab.

In the Sensors tab, the NVIDIA VDDC sensor has been renamed to "GPU voltage," and AMD's "GPU only power draw" sensor to "GPU chip-only power draw" to clarify that the sensor only measures the power draw of the GPU package and not the whole graphics card. AMD "Renoir" based processors and their iGPUs now show up as 7 nm. Windows Basic Display driver now no longer reports its status as WHQL or Beta. A crash during DirectX 12 detection has been fixed.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.30.0

The change-log follows.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the definitive graphics subsystem information, diagnostic, and monitoring utility. Version 2.25.0 adds several new features, support for more GPUs, and fixes various bugs. To begin with, you'll notice that the main screen displays a second row of APIs supported by your graphics card. These include Vulkan, DirectX Raytracing, DirectML, and OpenGL. The last one in particular help you figure out if your graphics drivers have been supplied by Microsoft of your computer's OEM (and lack OpenGL or Vulkan ICDs). Among the new GPUs supported are Quadro P2200, Quadro RTX 4000 Mobile, Quadro T1000 Mobile; AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200, Barco MXRT 7600, 780E Graphics, HD 8330E; and Intel Gen11 "Ice Lake."

With GPU-Z 2.25.0, we've improved AMD Radeon "Navi" support even further, by making the clock-speed measurement more accurate, and displaying base, gaming, and boost clocks in the "Advanced" tab. A workaround is added for the AMD bug that causes fan-speeds to lock when idle fan-stop is engaged on custom-design "Navi" graphics cards; and a faulty "65535 RPM" fan-speed reading for "Navi." A BSOD caused in QEMU/KVM machines by MSR register access has also been fixed. Grab it from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.25.0The change-log follows.

A report via PCGamesN places AMD's stance on NVIDIA's DLSS as a rather decided one: the company stands for further development of SMAA (Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing) and TAA (Temporal Antialising) solutions on current, open frameworks, which, according to AMD's director of marketing, Sasa Marinkovic, "(...) are going to be widely implemented in today's games, and that run exceptionally well on Radeon VII", instead of investing in yet another proprietary solution. While AMD pointed out that DLSS' market penetration was a low one, that's not the main issue of contention. In fact, AMD decides to go head-on against NVIDIA's own technical presentations, comparing DLSS' image quality and performance benefits against a native-resolution, TAA-enhanced image - they say that SMAA and TAA can work equally as well without "the image artefacts caused by the upscaling and harsh sharpening of DLSS."

Of course, AMD may only be speaking from the point of view of a competitor that has no competing solution. However, company representatives said that they could, in theory, develop something along the lines of DLSS via a GPGPU framework - a task for which AMD's architectures are usually extremely well-suited. But AMD seems to take the eyes of its DLSS-defusing moves, however, as AMD's Nish Neelalojanan, a Gaming division exec, talks about potential DLSS-like implementations across "Some of the other broader available frameworks, like WindowsML and DirectML", and that these are "something we [AMD] are actively looking at optimizing… At some of the previous shows we've shown some of the upscaling, some of the filters available with WindowsML, running really well with some of our Radeon cards." So whether it's an actual image-quality philosophy, or just a competing technology's TTM (time to market) one, only AMD knows.