Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that realistically simulates how light rays intersect and interact with scene geometry, materials, and light sources to generate photorealistic imagery. It is widely used for film and other production rendering and is beginning to be practical for real-time applications and games. Vulkan Ray Tracing seamlessly integrates a coherent ray tracing framework into the Vulkan API, enabling a flexible merging of rasterization and ray tracing acceleration. Vulkan Ray Tracing is designed to be hardware agnostic and so can be accelerated on both existing GPU compute and dedicated ray tracing cores if available.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition. Version 20.1.2 beta is released to the main driver update channel, and adds support for the new Vulkan 1.2 graphics API. This is in comparison to the GeForce 441.99 drivers with Vulkan 1.2, which were released as a "developer beta." In addition, the drivers add optimization for "Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot." Among the two fixed issues with this releases are Unreal Engine 4 titles such as "KovaaK 2.0: The Meta," "Tetris Effect" and "Snooker 19" failing to launch with Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020; and a bug where single-display systems running Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards experience intermittent reboots when the system is left idle on the desktop.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.1.2 BetaThe change-log follows.

NVIDIA today released its first developer beta drivers that support the new Vulkan 1.2 3D graphics API. Labeled GeForce 441.99, under the R440-series, the drivers extend Vulkan 1.2 support to all NVIDIA graphics architectures going back to "Kepler." That would include GTX 600/700-series "Kepler," GTX 700/900-series "Maxwell," GTX 10-series "Pascal," and GTX 16/RTX 20-series "Turing," along with TITAN and Quadro graphics cards based on these architectures. NVIDIA states that its API support for Vulkan 1.2 is "full," including including support for timeline semaphores, descriptor indexing, buffer device address and SPIR-V 1.5 features.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 441.99 Vulkan 1.2 Developer Beta

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020.

Vulkan continues to evolve by listening to developer needs, shipping new functionality as extensions, and then consolidating extensions that receive positive developer feedback into a unified core API specification. Carefully selected API features are made optional to enable market-focused implementations. Many Vulkan 1.2 features were requested by developers to meet critical needs in their engines and applications, including: timeline semaphores for easily managed synchronization; a formal memory model to precisely define the semantics of synchronization and memory operations in different threads; descriptor indexing to enable reuse of descriptor layouts by multiple shaders; deeper support for shaders written in HLSL, and more.

Imagination Technologies announces the tenth generation of its PowerVR graphics architecture, the IMG A-Series. The fastest GPU IP ever released, IMG A-Series evolves the PowerVR GPU architecture to fulfil the graphics and compute needs of the full spectrum of next-generation devices. Designed to be "The GPU of Everything" IMG A-Series is the ultimate solution for multiple markets, from automotive, AIoT, and computing through to DTV/STB/OTT, mobile and server.

The IMG A-Series' multi-dimensional approach to performance scalability ranges from 1 pixel per clock (PPC) parts for the entry-level market right up to 2 TFLOP cores for performance devices, and beyond that to multi-core solutions for cloud applications. Dr. Ron Black, CEO, Imagination Technologies, says: "IMG A-Series is our most important GPU launch since we delivered the first mobile PowerVR GPU 15 years ago and the best GPU IP for mobile ever made. It offers the best performance over sustained time periods and at low power budgets across all markets. It really is the GPU of everything."

NVIDIA late Tuesday pushed out a Hotfix to its GeForce Software against glaring bugs that can't wait for the next driver release to be fixed. Hotfix 441.34 fixes a bug with "Red Dead Redemption 2" stalling on machines with 4-core and 6-core CPUs, when the Vulkan API is used. The drivers also fix a game crash with "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" launching in DirectX 12 mode. The rest of the driver's change-log is identical to that of the recent 441.20 WHQL drivers. Grab the hotfix from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Hotfix 441.34

NVIDIA today released the GeForce Software 441.88 WHQL drivers with a few major feature updates. To begin with, the drivers add support for the freshly minted GeForce GTX 1660 Super. NVIDIA updated NULL (NVIDIA Ultra-Low Latency), an input-lag reduction feature, with support for G-Sync. You can now use the two together to make the input latency "cost" of G-Sync practically "free." Next up, NVIDIA updated Freestyle and Ansel with support for ReShade filters, with some riders. You can't use custom ReShade filters in competitive games, but can use some official ReShade filters. Lastly, NVIDIA enhanced its Image Sharpening features to reduce its performance cost, and added support for DirectX 11 - something the competing Radeon Image Sharpening feature lacks.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Software 441.08 WHQL

The change-log follows.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of its GeForce Software suite. Version 440.97 WHQL comes game-ready for "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare," and "The Outer Worlds," including SLI support for the latter on "Turing" GPUs. SLI support is also added for "The Darwin Project." The drivers also introduce G-SYNC support for OpenGL and Vulkan games and applications.

Among the bugs fixed are crash-to-desktop (CTD) on FIFA 19 and FIFA 20; random flickering in "Apex Legends," CTD on "Star Wars: Battlefront II," an application crash with "Growtopia," missing objects in "Tradesmen," flickering in the character-selection screen in "World of Warcraft," a ghosting effect when moving the brush tool in Cinema 4D; a game crash with "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" in DirectX 12 mode, color corruption in "Forza 4," and problems with boosting GeForce GTX 970M. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 440.97 WHQLThe change-log follows.

AMD late Thursday released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.9.2 beta drivers. These drivers add optimization for "Borderlands 3," with up to 16 percent improvement in frame-rates compared to the older 19.9.1 drivers, as tested with a Radeon RX 5700. The drivers also introduce support for Radeon Image Sharpening on graphics cards based on the "Polaris" architecture (such as RX 580, RX 480, etc), for DirectX 12 and Vulkan games. Among the issues fixed with 19.9.2 are frame-rates getting locked to 30 with V-sync enabled on some displays with 75 Hz refresh-rate set; system instability when watching videos in a web-browser on some machines with RX 5700 series graphics cards; audio in ReLive desktop capture being corrupted; and problems with Enhanced Sync. Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.9.2The 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.

AMD today posted the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition drivers. Version 19.9.1 beta comes with day-one optimization for "Gears 5," with up to 5 percent performance improvement in the DirectX 12 mode. It also expands the Vulkan API feature-set with four new extensions, "VK_AMD_device_coherent_memory," "VK_EXT_calibrated_timestamps," "VK_EXT_line_rasterization," and "VK_EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation." Lastly, the drivers address a bug that causes GIGABYTE RGB Fusion 2.0 software to hang the system on graphics cards based on RX 5700-series GPUs. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.9.1 betaThe change-log follows.

Primate Labs, developers of the ubiquitous benchmarking application GeekBench, have announced the release of version 5 of the software. The new version brings numerous changes, and one of the most important (since if affects compatibility) is that it will only be distributed in a 64-bit version. Some under the hood changes include additions to the CPU benchmark tests (including machine learning, augmented reality, and computational photography) as well as increases in the memory footprint for tests so as to better gauge impacts of your memory subsystem on your system's performance. Also introduced are different threading models for CPU benchmarking, allowing for changes in workload attribution and the corresponding impact on CPU performance.

On the Compute side of things, GeekBench 5 now supports the Vulkan API, which joins CUDA, Metal, and OpenCL. GPU-accelerated compute for computer vision tasks such as Stereo Matching, and augmented reality tasks such as Feature Matching are also available. For iOS users, there is now a Dark Mode for the results interface. GeekBench 5 is available now, 50% off, on Primate Labs' store.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information, monitoring, and diagnostic utility. The new version 2.24.0 fixes a compatibility issue with Windows Vista in which the digital signature of the application's kernel-mode driver would spring up an error. We've also taken the opportunity to do some touch-ups, such as adding the PCI vendor ID for Dataland, some typos in the Vulkan Advanced information page; and support for a handful GPUs that include NVIDIA GeForce 305M, Quadro P620, and the Intel HD Graphics iGPU inside the Xeon E3-1265L V2. Grab it from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.24.0The change-log follows.

AMD today posted the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition. Version 19.7.3 beta comes in the nick of time with optimization for "Wolfenstein: Youngblood," with up to 13 percent higher frame-rates on offer compared to 19.7.2. The release also adds Radeon GPU Profiler and Microsoft PIX for Radeon RX 5700 series. AMD also expanded its Vulkan API support by adding six new extensions, two of which are AMD-exclusive, and four standard. These include VK_EXT_display_surface_counter, VK_AMD_pipeline_compiler_control, VK_AMD_shader_core_properties2, VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control, VK_KHR_imageless_framebuffer, and VK_KHR_variable_pointers.

Among the fixed issues are "League of Legends" failing to launch with RX 5700-series on Windows 7; RX 5700 series experiencing application crashes with DirectX 9 applications after an Express Upgrade, Windows Mixed Reality not launching with Radeon Image Sharpening enabled on RX 5700-series; out-of-sync audio with ReLive VR; incorrect Radeon Wattman power gauge values for Radeon VII; AMD Log Utility not correctly installing; performance drops with Radeon Anti-Lag; minor stutter noticed in the first few minutes of "Fotnite" gameplay on RX 5700-series; Radeon Overlay flickering over Vulkan apps with Image Sharpening enabled; and some corruption noticed when running Adobe Premier Pro 2019 benchmarks. Grab the driver from the link below.DOWNLOADS: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.7.3

The change-log follows.

Bethesda revealed that "Wolfenstein Youngblood" will launch a day earlier for the PC platform globally, on July 25. Console platforms PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch get the game on July 26. This prioritization of the PC platform is symbolic and underscores the vast revenue-base the platform constitutes. The PC is already Ubisoft's biggest revenue source.

A separate VentureBeat report reveals that at launch, "Youngblood" won't support real-time ray-traced eye-candy, which would be added at a later date through a patch. "We're working together with NVIDIA on that, but ray tracing won't be available at launch," said executive producer Jerk Gustafsson. "Youngblood" will be one of the first non-DirectX AAA titles to implement RTX. The game uses the Vulkan 3D API, and its RTX feature-set is exclusively NVIDIA's handiwork.

GIGABYTE, the world's leading premium gaming hardware manufacturer, today announced the launch of Radeon RX 5700 XT 8G and Radeon RX 5700 8G, the latest Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards built upon the 7 nm processor technology with new RDNA architecture and the world's first GPU to support PCI Express 4.0. With RDNA gaming architecture, GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5700 XT 8G and Radeon RX 5700 8G are equipped with 2560 and 2304 stream processors respectively and both come with 8 GB GDDR6 memory to deliver superior visual fidelity, lightning-fast performance and advanced features to power the latest AAA and eSports titles. The style of the Radeon RX 5700 XT 8G graphics card is different than before. It comes with a metal exoskeleton for heat dissipation and is fused with the reimagined contour silhouette, as well as precision-machined accents. Great gaming experiences are created by bending the rules.

The RDNA gaming architecture of Radeon RX 5700 Series is designed to power the future of PC, console, mobile and cloud-based gaming for years to come. It features a new compute unit design optimized for improved efficiency and a multi-level cache hierarchy designed to provide reduced latency, higher bandwidth and lower power. Delivering up to 1.25X higher performance-per-clock and up to 1.5X higher performance-per-watt compared to the previous-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, RDNA provides the computational horsepower to enable thrilling, immersive gaming by enhancing explosions, physics, lighting effects for fluid, high-framerate gaming experiences.

AMD today released the latest version of their Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition Drivers. The 19.6.2 Beta release offers no performance improvements however it does add support for various Vulkan extensions while simultaneously solving a few problems. These fixed issues include, Crackdown 3 experiencing application hangs on Radeon R7 370 series products, Wireless VR experiencing performance drops across various titles on some Radeon RX 400 and 500 series graphics products, and Performance Metrics Overlay failing to enable or being disabled when toggling Radeon Overlay in game just to name a few. You can grab this latest driver release from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.6.2 betaThe change-log follows.

NVIDIA plans to release their adaptation of Quake, called Quake II RTX, soon on Steam. The Quake II RTX will be free(in some cases) to play, full Quake II game, with additional features such as ray tracing. The game is using Vulkan API for its Ray Tracing capabilities and requires NVIDIA's Turing GPUs in order to play with and use all of the advanced lighting effects.

All the owners of the original Quake II on Steam will get the RTX update free of charge. However, new users will get only 3 levels to play for free and if they want more levels with multiplayer as well, they will have to purchase the original Quake II for $4.99. The game will become available on June 6th, one day from present.

Crytek have updated their development roadmap for CryEngine, adding in some of the features we discussed yesterday on our piece regarding their Neon Noir ray tracing tech demo performance. The new roadmap now places Spring 2020 as the time where both DirectX 12 and Vulkan, lower level APIs than the currently-supported DX11, will be fully integrated into the engine. Ray Tracing will be added at the same time, no doubt taking advantage of the higher performance that can be extracted from hardware through the lower level APIs.

It will be interesting to see the level of performance on CryEngine's hardware agnostic ray tracing, and whether their Spring 2020 implementation will take advantage of specialized RTX hardware - or focus on a software solution ran at varying degrees of rendering resolution according to the scene. Though with AMD's Navi being expected to incorporate some sort of hardware-based ray tracing acceleration, it's very likely software calculations will only be a fallback of the coding.

Considering your reaction, you certainly remember Crytek's Neon noir raytracing scene that we shared with you back in march. At the time, the fact that raytracing was running at such mesmerizing levels on AMD hardware was arguably the biggest part of the news piece: AMD's Vega 56 graphics card with no dedicated raytracing hardware, was pushing the raytraced scene in a confident manner. Now, Crytek have shared some details on how exactly Neon noir was rendered.

The AMD Radeon Vega 56 pushed the demo at 1080p/30 FPS, with full-resolution rendering of raytraced effects. Crytek further shared that raytracing can be rendered at half resolution compared to the rest of the scene, and that if they did so on AMD's Vega 56, they could push a 1440p resolution at 40+ FPS. The raytraced path wasn't running on any modern, lower-level API, such as DX12 or Vulkan, but rather, on a custom branch of Crytek's CryEngine, version 5.5.

I've written my fair share of articles on No Man's Sky, since the game's concept is one of the more interesting in recent years (for me; editor liberties, can we call it?). The game may have excelled more in concept than in execution, but a series of updates have brought the game close to what was promised. Now, developer Hello games has brought about an update that brings a more subtle change: the game's API has been updated from OpenGL to Vulkan. The "behind the curtains" update has brought about improved performance across the spectrum of graphics cards that support that API renderer (in particular AMD users, as the patch notes themselves spell out), and, expectedly, an easier coding time for the developers. Improved HDR support was also coded into the game. The full patch notes follow, as well as Hello Games' words on this change.

Christoph Schied reimagined the 1990s cult-classic "Quake II" with real-time ray-tracing, using the Vulkan API and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series hardware exposing the "VK_NV_ray_tracing" extension. Called "Q2VKPT," this game based on id Software's open-source Quake II code, implemented real-time path-tracing to make the lighting more physically accurate. NVIDIA expanded on Schied's work with "Quake II RTX," which is possibly the world's first game that is fully real-time ray-traced.

This NVIDIA rendition of Q2VKPT leverages NVIDIA's RTX for Vulkan to ensure all lighting, shadows, reflections, and other visual effects are ray-traced and denoised using NVIDIA's AI-accelerated denoiser. Unless it somehow scored higher-resolution texture assets from id Software, NVIDIA could also be using a GPU-accelerated upscaler to improve texture resolution. It's also possible that ambient-occlusion methods such as HBAO+ are in play to add apparent geometric detail to some of the surfaces in the game. NVIDIA hasn't made Quake II RTX public yet, although you could take the path-traced Q2VKPT for a spin. You'll need an RTX 20-series graphics card and the latest drivers.

AMD has released the latest version of their Radeon Adrenalin 2019 Drivers. Beta version 19.3.2 is a significant update as it delivers support for Tom Clancy's The Division 2 and Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm. AMD also claims up to 4% gain in regards to average performance on the Radeon VII when compared to the previously released 19.2.3 drivers. To go with the added game support and performance boost this release also supports DirectX 12 on Windows 7 for select titles. The Vulkan API also gets some love with this release with the addition of various extensions with the most notable one being the VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable extension which allows for depth clipping operations to be controlled by the application rather than the driver thus making it useful for Developers translating Direct3D content to the Vulkan API. For the full details for this release, you can check the changelog after the break.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Adrenalin Edition 19.3.2 Beta

As the leading brand in enthusiastic graphics market, Gainward proudly presents the all new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti series - Gainward GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Ghost and Gainward GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Pegasus series. Gainward's new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti series is built with the breakthrough graphics performance of the award-winning NVIDIA Turing architecture. These advanced graphics cards are designed to deliver a powerful combination of gaming innovation and next-gen graphics. With the new Turing's architecture, the gaming performance will outgo up to 1.5 times than the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. It's a blazing-fast supercharger for today's most popular games, and even faster with modern titles.

AMD pulled off a surprise at its CES 2019 keynote address, with the announcement of the Radeon VII client-segment graphics card targeted at gamers. We went hands-on with the card earlier this week. The company revealed a few more technical details of the card in its press-deck for the card. To begin with, the company talks about the immediate dividends of switching from 14 nm to 7 nm, with a reduction in die-size from 495 mm² on the "Vega 10" silicon to 331 mm² on the new "Vega 20" silicon. The company has reworked the die to feature a 4096-bit wide HBM2 memory interface, the "Vega 20" MCM now features four 32 Gbit HBM2 memory stacks, which make up the card's 16 GB of memory. The memory clock has been dialed up to 1000 MHz from 945 MHz on the RX Vega 64, which when coupled with the doubled bus-width, works out to a phenomenal 1 TB/s memory bandwidth.

We know from AMD's late-2018 announcement of the Radeon Instinct MI60 machine-learning accelerator based on the same silicon that "Vega 20" features a total of 64 NGCUs (next-generation compute units). To carve out the Radeon VII, AMD disabled 4 of these, resulting in an NGCU count of 60, which is halfway between the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64, resulting in a stream-processor count of 3,840. The reduced NGCU count could help AMD harvest the TSMC-built 7 nm GPU die better. AMD is attempting to make up the vast 44 percent performance gap between the RX Vega 64 and the GeForce RTX 2080 with a combination of factors.