Microsoft announced updates to the DirectX API that would pave the way for neural rendering. Neural rendering is a concept where portions of a frame in real-time 3D graphics are drawn using a generative AI model that works in tandem with classic raster 3D graphics pipeline, along with other advancements, such as real-time ray tracing. This is different from AI-based super resolution technologies. The generative AI here is involved in rendering the input frames for a super resolution technology. One of the nuts and bolts of neural rendering is cooperative vectors, enable an information pathway between the conventional graphics pipeline and the generative AI, telling it what it's doing, what needs to be done by the AI model, and what the ground truth for the model is.

Microsoft says that its HLSL team is working with AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm to bring cross-vendor support for cooperative vectors in the DirectX ecosystem. The very first dividends of this effort will be seen in the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50-series "Blackwell" GPUs, which will use cooperative vectors to drive neural shading. "Neural shaders can be used to visualize game assets with AI, better organize geometry for improved path tracing performance and tools to create game characters with photo-realistic visuals," Microsoft says.

While Apple laptops have never really been the first stop for PC gaming, Linux is slowly shaping up to be an excellent gaming platform, largely thanks to open-source development efforts as well as work from the likes of AMD and NVIDIA, who have both put significant work into their respective Linux drivers in recent years. This makes efforts like the Asahi Linux Project all the more intriguing. Asahi Linux is a project that aims to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs—a task that has proven rather difficult, thanks to the intricacies of developing a bespoke GPU driver for Apple's custom ARM GPUs. In a recent blog post, the graphics developer behind the Asahi Linux Project showed off a number of AAA games, albeit older titles, running on an Apple M1 processor on the latest Asahi Linux build.

To run the games on Apple Silicon, Asahi Linux uses a "game playing toolkit," which relies on a number of custom graphics drivers and emulators, including tools from Valve's Proton translation layer, which ironically was also the foundation for Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. Asahi uses FEX to emulate x86 on ARM, Wine as a translation layer for Windows apps, and DXVK and vkd3d-proton for DirectX-Vulkan translation. In the blog post, the Asahi developer claims that the alpha is capable of running games like Control, The Witcher 3, and Cyberpunk 2077 at playable frame rates. Unfortunately, 60 FPS is not yet attainable in the majority of new high-fidelity games, there are a number of indie titles that run quite well on Asahi Linux, including Hollow Knight, Ghostrunner, and Portal 2.

Microsoft's Direct3D and HLSL teams have unveiled plans to integrate SPIR-V support into DirectX 12 with the upcoming release of Shader Model 7. This significant transition marks a new era in GPU programmability, as it aims to unify the intermediate representation for graphical-shader stages and compute kernels. SPIR-V, an open standard intermediate representation for graphics and compute shaders, will replace the proprietary DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) as the shader interchange format for DirectX 12. The adoption of SPIR-V is expected to ease development processes across multiple GPU runtime environments. By embracing this open standard, Microsoft aims to enhance HLSL's position as the premier language for compiling graphics and compute shaders across various devices and APIs. This transition is part of a multi-year development process, during which Microsoft will work closely with The Khronos Group and the LLVM Project. The company has joined Khronos' SPIR and Vulkan working groups to ensure smooth collaboration and rapid feature adoption.

While the transition will take several years, Microsoft is providing early notice to allow developers and partners to plan accordingly. The company will offer translation tools between SPIR-V and DXIL to facilitate a gradual transition for both application and driver developers. For those not familiar with graphics development, graphics APIs ship with virtual instruction set architectures (ISA) that abstracts standard hardware features at a higher level. As GPUs don't follow the same ISA as CPUs (x86, Arm, RISC-V), this virtual ISA is needed to define some generics in the GPU architecture and allow various APIs like DirectX and Vulkan to run. Instead of focusing support on several formats like DXIL, Microsoft is embracing the open SPIR-V standard, which will become de facto for API developers in the future, allowing focus on more features instead of constantly replicating each other's functions. While DXIL is used mainly for gaming environments, SPIR-V has adoption in high-performance computing as well, with OpenCL and SYCL. Gaming presence is also there with Vulkan API, and we expect to see SPIR-V join DirectX 12 games.

Intel released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers today. The latest version 101.5522 WHQL brings mostly game ready support for titles like Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Starfield May Update, Wuthering Waves, and XDefiant. With the support for Starfield May Update, Intel has prepared performance improvements when the game runs on DirectX 12 API. This brings up to 8% average FPS uplift at 1080p with Ultra settings and up to 7% average FPS uplift at 1440p with High settings, which is a notable improvement coming only from the driver. You can download the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.5522 WHQL.

According to a Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024 schedule page, Microsoft is planning to present next-gen technologies with their upcoming "DirectX State of the Union Ft. Work Graphs and Introducing DirectSR" presentation. Shawn Hargreaves, Direct3D's Development Manager and Austin Kinross (PIX Developer Lead, Microsoft) are scheduled to discuss matters with representatives from NVIDIA and AMD. Wessam Bahnassi, a "20-year veteran in 3D engine design and optimization," is Team Green's Principal Engineer of Developer Technology. Rob Martin, a Fellow Software Engineer, will be representing all things Team Red—where he leads development on implementations for GPU Work Graphs. According to GDC, the intended audience will be: "graphics developers or technical directors from game studios or engine companies."

Earlier this month, an "Automatic super resolution" feature was discovered in Windows 11 Insider Preview build (24H2)—the captioned part stated: "use AI to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details," although further interface options granted usage in desktop applications as well. Initial analysis and user impressions indicated that Microsoft engineers had created a proprietary model, separate from familiar technologies: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. It is interesting to note that Team Blue is not participating in the upcoming March 21 "DirectX State of the Union" panel discussion (a sponsored session). GDC's event description states (in full): "The DirectX team will showcase the latest updates, demos, and best practices for game development with key partners from AMD and NVIDIA. Work graphs are the newest way to take full advantage of GPU hardware and parallelize workloads. Microsoft will provide a preview into DirectSR, making it easier than ever for game devs to scale super resolution support across Windows devices. Finally, dive into the latest tooling updates for PIX."

Microsoft Xbox Series X/S, their hardware refreshes, and variants, will reportedly be the company's mainstay all the way up until 2028, the company disclosed in its documents filed as part of its anti-trust lawsuit with the FTC. In a presentation slide titled "From "Zero Microsoft" to "Full Microsoft," the company explains how its next gen Xbox, scheduled for calendar year (CY) 2028, will see a full convergence of Microsoft co-developed hardware, software, and cloud compute services, into a powerful entertainment system. It elaborates on this in another slide, titled "Cohesive Hybrid Compute," where it states the company's vision to be the development of "a next generation hybrid game platform capable of leveraging the combined power of the client and cloud to deliver deeper immersion and entirely new classes of game experiences."

From the looks of it, Microsoft fully understands the creator economy that has been built over the gaming industry, and wants to develop its next-gen console to target exactly this—a single device from which people can play, stream, and create content from—something that's traditionally reserved for gaming desktop PCs. Game streamers playing on consoles usually have an entire creator PC setup handling the production and streaming side of things. Keeping this exact use-case in mind, Microsoft plans to "enable new levels of performance beyond the capabilities of the client hardware alone," by which it means that not only will the console rely on its own hardware—which could be jaw-dropping powerful as you'll see—but also leverage cloud compute services from Microsoft.

"Alan Wake II," released earlier this week, is the latest third person action adventure loaded with psychological thriller elements that call back to some of the best works of Remedy Entertainment, including "Control," "Max Payne 2," and "Alan Wake." It's also a visual feast as our performance review of the game should show you, leveraging the full spectrum of the DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set. In the run up to the release, when Remedy put out the system requirements lists for "Alan Wake II" with clear segregation for experiences with ray tracing and without; what wasn't clear was just how much the game depended on hardware support for mesh shaders, which is why its bare minimum list called for at least an NVIDIA RTX 2060 "Turing," or at least an AMD RX 6600 XT RDNA2, both of which are DirectX 12 Ultimate GPUs with hardware mesh shaders support.

There was some confusion among gaming online forums over the requirement for hardware mesh shaders. Many people assumed that the game will not work on GPUs without mesh shader support, locking out lots of gamers. Through the course of our testing for our performance review, we learned that while it is true that "Alan Wake II" relies on hardware support for mesh shaders, the lack of this does not break gameplay. You will, however, pay a heavy performance penalty on GPUs that lack hardware mesh shader support. On such GPUs, the game is designed to show users a warning dialog box that their GPU lacks mesh shader support (screenshot below), but you can choose to ignore this warning, and go ahead to play the game. The game considers mesh shaders a "recommended GPU feature," and not a requirement. Without mesh shaders, you can expect a severe performance loss that is best illustrated with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT based on the RDNA architecture, which lacks hardware mesh shaders.

When it comes to APIs, OpenGL is something of a classic. According to the Khronos Group, OpenGL is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API. Since its launch in 1992 it has been used extensively by software developers for PCs and workstations to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics applications for markets such as CAD, content creation, entertainment, game development and virtual reality.

To date, Imagination GPUs have natively supported OpenGL up until Release 3.3 as well as OpenGL ES (the version of OpenGL for embedded systems), Vulkan (a cross-platform graphics API) and OpenCL (an API for parallel programming). However, thanks to the increasing performance of our top-end GPUs, especially with the likes of the DXT-72-2304, they present a competitive offering to the data centre and desktop (DCD) market. Indeed, we have multiple customers - including the likes of Innosilicon - choosing Imagination GPUs for the flexibility an IP solution, their scalability and their ability to offer up to 6 TFLOPS of compute.

Real-time ray tracing (RT), using Microsoft DirectX ray tracing (DXR) and Vulkan Ray Tracing, adds a new level of incredible realism to games through effects like ray-traced reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination. Ray tracing is used in many of the latest games such as The Callisto Protocol, F1 22, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Returnal to maximize graphics fidelity and deliver the ultimate visual experience.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (AMD FSR 2) is the cutting-edge temporal upscaling technology designed to produce incredible image quality and boost framerates in supported games. AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series graphics feature advanced AMD RDNA 3 compute units with 2nd generation ray tracing accelerators to help deliver incredible RT performance in games.

A Half Life 2 modder, Igor Zdrowowicz, has managed to integrate path tracing into the game - with striking results, even at an early stage in development. His project - codenamed "HL2RTX" - has been in-progress for a handful of months, and the modder has managed to integrate a ray tracing system into Valve's classic shooter (sort of) via NVIDIA's RTX Remix SDK. That package has become open source only very recently, so Zdrowowicz stated that a Portal RTX-derived binary was the tool of choice.

NVIDIA's Lightspeed Studios has already created an impressive RTX conversion of Valve's fan favorite puzzle-platform game Portal (2007), and modders have been poring over the underlying technology and update technique processes. A number of old favorites, running on past iterations of the Source Engine (DirectX 8 and 9), are getting the amateur mod community sprucing up treatment. It is posited that Zdrowowicz will have an easier time with his current conversion project, thanks to an official release of NVIDIA's RTX Remix toolkit (albeit in early access).

Microsoft has implemented two new features into its DirectX 12 API - GPU Upload Heaps and Non-Normalized sampling have been added via the latest Agility SDK 1.710.0 preview, and the former looks to be the more intriguing of the pair. The SDK preview is only accessible to developers at the present time, since its official introduction on Friday 31 March. Support has also been initiated via the latest graphics drivers issued by NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD. The Microsoft team has this to say about the preview version of GPU upload heaps feature in DirectX 12: "Historically a GPU's VRAM was inaccessible to the CPU, forcing programs to have to copy large amounts of data to the GPU via the PCI bus. Most modern GPUs have introduced VRAM resizable base address register (BAR) enabling Windows to manage the GPU VRAM in WDDM 2.0 or later."

They continue to describe how the update allows the CPU to gain access to the pool of VRAM on the connected graphics card: "With the VRAM being managed by Windows, D3D now exposes the heap memory access directly to the CPU! This allows both the CPU and GPU to directly access the memory simultaneously, removing the need to copy data from the CPU to the GPU increasing performance in certain scenarios." This GPU optimization could offer many benefits in the context of computer games, since memory requirements continue to grow in line with an increase in visual sophistication and complexity.

AMD today released the latest version of its Adrenalin graphics software. Version 23.2.2 WHQL works with all GPU generations dating back to the RX 400 series. This release adds optimization for "Atomic Heart," the much awaited survival horror FPS, as well as "Company of Heroes 3." Some display corruption observed with window-switching for the Netflix app, has been fixed. Maximum video encode bitrate being limited to 100 Mbps for some applications, has been fixed. AMD Bug Report Tool pop-up or system hang on some hybrid graphics notebooks, has been fixed. An application crash noticed with "Hitman 3" with RT enabled, has been fixed. Valve Index VR headset showing a blank screen with 144 Hz on GPUs such as the RX 7900 series, has been fixed. A performance drop observed on RX 6000 series + Ryzen machines, has been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 23.2.2 WHQL

We're excited to release a new 3DMark feature test for Intel's new XeSS AI-enhanced upscaling technology. This new feature test is available in 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions. 3DMark feature tests are special tests designed to highlight specific techniques, functions, or capabilities. The Intel XeSS feature test shows you how XeSS affects performance.

The 3DMark Intel XeSS frame inspector tool helps you compare image quality with an interactive side-by-side comparison of XeSS and native-resolution rendering. Check out the images below to see an example comparison of native resolution rendering and XeSS in the new 3DMark feature test.

A part of the process of building a graphics card is designing compatibility to execute the latest graphics APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan. Today, we have confirmation that Intel's Arc Alchemist discrete graphics cards will be compatible with Vulkan's latest iteration - version 1.3. In January, Khronos, the team behind Vulkan API, released their regular two-year update to the standard. Graphics card vendors like NVIDIA and AMD announced support immediately with their drivers. Today, the Khronos website officially lists Intel Arc Alchemist mobile graphics cards as compatible with Vulkan 1.3 with Intel Arc A770M, A730M, A550M, A370M, and A350M GPUs.

At the time of writing, there is no official announcement for the desktop cards yet. However, given that the mobile SKUs are supporting the latest standard, it is extremely likely that the desktop variants will also carry the same level of support.

Chinese company Moore Threads has unveiled their MTT GPU series just 18 months after the company's establishment in 2020. The MT Unified System Architecture (MUSA) architecture is the first for any Chinese company to be developed fully domestically and includes support for DirectX, OpenCL, OpenGL, Vulkan, and CUDA. The company announced the MTT S60 and MTT S2000 single slot desktop graphics cards for gaming and server applications at a recent event. The MTT S60 is manufactured on a 12 nm node and features 2,048 MUSA cores paired with 8 GB of LPGDDR4X memory offering 6 TFLOPs of performance. The MTT S2000 is also manufactured on a 12 nm node and doubles the number of MUSA cores to 4096 paired with 32 GB of undisclosed video memory allowing it to reach 12 TFLOPs.

Moore Threads joins Intel in supporting AV1 encoding on a consumer GPU with MUSA cards featuring H.264, H.265, and AV1 encoding support in addition to H.264, H.265, AV1, VP8, and VP9 decoding. The company is also developing a physics engine dubbed Alphacore which is said to work with existing tools such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and Houdini to accelerate physics performance by 5 to 10 times. The only gaming performance shown was a simple demonstration of the MTT S60 running League of Legends at 1080p without any frame rate details.

Basemark launched today GPUScore, an all-new GPU (graphics processing unit) performance benchmarking suite for a wide device range from smartphones to high-end gaming PCs. GPUScore supports all modern graphics APIs, such as Vulkan, Metal and DirectX, and operating systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS.

GPUScore will consist of three different testing suites. Today, the first one of these was launched, named Relic of Life. It is available immediately. Basemark will introduce the two other GPUScore testing suites during the following months. Relic of Life is ideal for benchmarking high-end gaming PCs' discrete graphics cards' GPUs. It requires hardware accelerated ray tracing, supports Vulkan and DirectX, and is available for both Windows and Linux. GPUScore: Relic of Life is an ideal benchmark for comparing Vulkan and DirectX accelerated ray tracing performance.

Intel's fourth-generation Core processors, codenamed Haswell, are subject to new security exploits. According to the company, a vulnerability exists inside the graphics controller of 4th generation Haswell processors, happening once the DirectX 12 API loading occurs. To fix the problem, Intel has found that disabling this API results in a fix. Starting with Intel graphics driver 15.40.44.5107 applications that run exclusively on DirectX 12 API no longer work with the following Intel Graphics Controllers: Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200/5100, HD Graphics 5000/4600/4400/4200, and Intel Pentium and Celeron Processors with Intel HD Graphics based on 4th Generation Intel Core.

"A potential security vulnerability in Intel Graphics may allow escalation of privilege on 4th Generation Intel Core processors. Intel has released a software update to mitigate this potential vulnerability. In order to mitigate the vulnerability, DirectX 12 capabilities were deprecated." says the Intel page. If a user with a Haswell processor has a specific need to run the DirectX 12 application, they can downgrade their graphics driver to version 15.40.42.5063 or older.

DirectX 12 Ultimate is the next generation for gaming graphics. It adds powerful new capabilities to DirectX 12, including DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1, Mesh Shaders, Sampler Feedback, and Variable Rate Shading (VRS). These features help game developers improve visual quality, boost frame rates, reduce loading times, and create vast, detailed worlds.

3DMark already has dedicated tests for DirectX Raytracing, Mesh Shaders, and Variable Rate Shading. Today, we're adding a Sampler Feedback feature test, making 3DMark the first publicly available application to include all four major DirectX 12 Ultimate features. Experience DirectX 12 Ultimate today, only with 3DMark! Measure performance and compare image quality on your PC with our DirectX 12 Ultimate feature tests. Each test also has an interactive mode that lets you change settings and visualizations in real time.

MSI, a world-leading gaming brand, announces the all-new AMD-powered gaming laptop, Delta 15 and the revamped Alpha 15/17, equipped with the AMD Ryzen 5000 H Series Mobile Processors and the up to latest AMD Radeon RX6700M Series Mobile Graphics. MSI continues to fulfill the diverse demand of gaming and leverage the strength in the AMD product line.

Delta 15 and Alpha 15/17 all come with the latest Radeon RX6000M Series Mobile Graphics, 1.5x faster performance compared to previous generations AMD graphics. * Powered by the AMD Radeon RX 6700M, Delta 15 provides ultra-high frame rates, while the Alpha 15/17, equipped with the AMD Radeon RX 6600M, delivers 1080p gaming at max settings.

NVIDIA has announced that they are partnering with Valve to bring its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) graphics technology to Linux via Steam Proton. This will allow Linux gamers with an RTX GPU to take advantage of the AI tool to improve their framerates in games through Steam. Proton is an open-source tool from Valve which allows Windows games to be run on Linux, the tool is built into the Linux Steam Client Beta. This news comes after AMD announced their open-source DLSS competitor FidelityFX Super Resolution which supports AMD, and NVIDIA graphics cards.

NVIDIANVIDIA, Valve, and the Linux gaming community are collaborating to bring NVIDIA DLSS to Proton - Linux gamers will be able to use the dedicated AI cores on GeForce RTX GPUs to boost frame rates for their favorite Windows Games running on the Linux operating system. Support for Vulkan titles is coming this month with DirectX support coming in the Fall.

Capcom, the Japanese video game maker, has today announced specification requirements for its upcoming Resident Evil Village PC game, needed to play the game at certain resolutions/graphics presets. Starting with the minimum settings, Capcom is thinking of 1080p 60 FPS gaming. To achieve that you need at least an Intel Core i5-7500 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 processor paired with 8 GB of RAM. The minimum specification also requires a DirectX 12 capable GPU, with 4 GB of VRAM, just like NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 560. The company notes that using this configuration, framerate may drop below 60 FPS during heavy loads. If you want to use raytracing, which is now also present in the game engine, you must switch to at least NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT.

The recommended specification of course requires much beefier hardware compared to the minimum specification. If you want to have a steady 1080p 60 FPS experience without frame drops, Capcom recommends an Intel Core i7 8700 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor, paired with 16 GB of RAM, and a GPU like an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700. However, if you want the raytracing feature you need a better GPU. To achieve a 4K resolution with 60 FPS and raytracing turned on, the GPU needs a bump to at least an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 or AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. You can check out the game requirements in greater detail below.

DirectX 12 Ultimate adds powerful new features and capabilities to DirectX 12 including DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1, Mesh Shaders, Sampler Feedback, and Variable Rate Shading (VRS). After DirectX 12 Ultimate was announced, we started adding new tests to 3DMark to show how games can benefit from these new features. Our latest addition is the 3DMark Mesh Shader feature test, a new test that shows how game developers can boost frame rates by using mesh shaders in the graphics pipeline.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers. Version 21.2.1 beta comes with optimization for "Medium," with a 9% performance increase at 4K measured using an RX 6800 XT graphics card, over the previous driver. A number of bugs and issues are also addressed. To begin with stuttering noticed on certain RX Vega series graphics cards at high refresh rates. A screen flickering observed with MSI Afterburner has been fixed. A bug that caused recording and streaming with Radeon Software, on Radeon HD 7800 series GPUs, has been fixed. A rendering error with SketchUp on RDNA GPUs has been fixed. Samsung CRG9 displays waking up from screen to black screens, has been fixed. Application crashes with "Metro Exodus" with DXR enabled, have been fixed. Video playback on other displays in a multi-display setup, during "Doom Eternal" gameplay on one of the displays, experiences stutter, which has been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.2.1

Benchmarks have a natural lifespan that ends when they no longer provide meaningful results on modern hardware. When old benchmarks are used with new hardware, the results can be skewed or limited in ways that reduce their accuracy and relevance.

After reviewing our product line, we've decided to end support for 3DMark Sky Diver, the 3DMark API Overhead feature test, PCMark 8, Servermark Media Transcode, and VRMark for Android. After January 14, 2021, these unsupported benchmarks will: No longer be sold by UL, Steam, or other app stores; no longer be guaranteed to work with UL's online services; no longer receive updates; no longer be eligible for customer support.

AMD is launching their next-generation RX 6800 series of graphics cards on November 18th, these will be the first cards from AMD featuring the new RDNA 2 architecture. To coincide with the launch of RDNA 2 in consumer graphics cards AMD is launching a new tech demo titled "Hangar 21", the new demonstration will highlight the power of RDNA 2 with real-time raytracing effects enabled by AMD FidelityFX and Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate. The "Hangar 21" tech demo will be launching on November 19th and you can view a short trailer of the tech demo down below.

AMDComing November 19, the "Hangar 21" Technology Demo Video will let you see the breakthrough AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture in action, the foundation of the AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards that power the next generation of gaming with mind-blowing visuals featuring realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections enabled by AMD FidelityFX and Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate.