The latest patch for Halo Infinite has introduced an undesired side effect for a select portion of its PC platform playerbase. Changes to minimum system specification requirements were not clarified by 343 Industries in their patch notes, but it appears that the game now refuses to launch for owners of older GPU hardware. A limit of 4 GB of VRAM has been listed as the bare minimum since Halo Infinite's launch in late 2021, with the AMD Radeon RX 570 and Nvidia GTX GeForce 1050 Ti cards representing the entry level GPU tier, basic versions of both were fitted with 4 GB of VRAM as standard.

Apparently users running the GTX 1060 3 GB model were able to launch and play the game just fine prior to the latest patch, due to it being more powerful than the entry level cards, but now it seems that the advertised hard VRAM limit has finally gone into full effect. The weaker RX 570 and GTX 1050 Ti cards are still capable of running Halo Infinite after the introduction of season 3 content, but a technically superior piece of hardware cannot, which is unfortunate for owners of the GTX 1060 3 GB model who want to play Halo Infinite in its current state.

Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist lineup of discrete graphics cards generates a lot of attention from consumers. Leaks of these cards' performance and detailed specifications appear more and more as we enter the countdown to the launch day, which is sometime in Q1 of this year. Today, we managed to see a slide from @9950pro on Twitter that shows the laptop memory configuration of Intel's DG2 GPU. As the picture suggests, we can see that the top-end SKU1 with 512 EUs supports a 16 GB capacity of GDDR6 memory that runs at 16 Gbps speeds. The memory runs on a 256-bit bus and generates 512 GB/s bandwidth while having eight VRAM modules present.

When it comes to SKU2, which is a variant with 384 EUs, this configuration supports six VRAM modules on a 192-bit bus, running at 16 Gbps speeds. They generate a total capacity of 12 GBs and a bandwidth of 384 GB/s. We have SKU3 DG2 GPU going down the stack, featuring 256 EUs, four VRAM modules on a 128-bit bus, 8 GB capacity, and a 256 GB/s bandwidth. And last but not least, the smallest DG2 variants come in the form of SKU4 and SKU5, feating 128 EUs and 96 EUs, respectively. Intel envisions these lower-end SKUs with two VRAM modules on a 64-bit bus, and this time slower GDDR6 memory running at 14 Gbps. They are paired with 4 GB of total capacity, and the total bandwidth comes down to 112 GB/s.

Some of our readers may well remember Qimonda, at one time the second largest DRAM memory producer. The company produced various DDR, DDR2, and DDR3 memory products, before eventually going bankrupt in 2009. Its bankruptcy led to its purchase by Inspur Group, a Chinese multinational information technology company headquartered in Jinan, Shandong, China. Using IP form its Qimonda acquisition, the company has now led its Xi'an UnilC subsidiary to become the first Chinese DDR4 producer, with full in-house development of the technology. On which process technology is anyone's guess; that's not being clearly marketed by the company, but it almost certainly isn't a top-of-the-line production process.

Xi'an UniIC's DDR4 lineup includes 4 GB and 8 GB SO-DIMMs, 4 GB and 8 GB UDIMMs as well as a 4 GB UDIMM with ECC, all rated for data transfer rate of 2133 MT/s with CL15 15-15 timings at 1.2 V, which isn't too far away - at least in voltage - from current DDR4 technology. These modules are built with Xi'an UnilC's 4 Gb DDR4 chips. While not overly impressive spec-wise, this news is important in at least two ways: first, it means there's a Chinese company that can leverage its own production for DDR4 memory chips, which will likely start to expand in China's hungry memory market before it starts exporting; second, that the entry of another DDR4 manufacturer into the game will certainly increase the amount of DDR4 memory put into circulation, alleviating China's needs to import memory, and thus leading to increased stock around the world for what should lead, hopefully, to lower DDR4 pricing (eventually, of course).