Microsoft revealed the six variants in which its next operating system, Windows 10, will ship in. The company decided to unify the Windows 10 brand across its PC, workstation, and handheld platforms. For PCs, workstations, and tablets running x86 processors, the lineup will include the Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Pro, Windows 10 Education, and Windows 10 Enterprise.

Windows 10 Home has everything a home and small-business user could ask for (including PC gamers and enthusiasts). It will include the Edge web-browser (so your post-install waltz to Chrome or Firefox websites is a few seconds faster), Microsoft Cortana voice-based assistant, richer Bing integration, Microsoft Hello face-recognition software, and support for biometric login methods. Gamers get DirectX 12 out of the box. Users of Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 8/8.1 get a free upgrade to this edition.

At its ongoing Investor Day presentation, AMD announced that will continue to make GPUs for every segment of the market. The company is planning to leverage improvements to its Graphics CoreNext architecture for the foreseeable future, but is betting on a huge performance/Watt increase with its 2016 GPUs. The secret sauce here will be the shift to 14 nm FinFET process. It's important to note here, that AMD refrained from mentioning "14 nm," but the mention of FinFET is a reliable giveaway. AMD is expecting a 2x (100%) gain in performance/Watt over its current generation of GPUs, with the shift.

AMD's future GPUs will focus on several market inflection points, such as the arrival of CPU-efficient graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, Windows 10 pulling users from Windows 7, 4K Ultra HD displays getting more affordable (perhaps even mainstream), which it believes will help it sell enough GPUs to return to profitability. The company also announced an unnamed major design win, which will take shape in this quarter, and which will hit the markets in 2016.

NVIDIA released GeForce 352.63 Beta, a driver it recommends for all your pre-release Windows 10 testing. Tailored for WDDM 2.0 and DirectX 12, these drivers cover GeForce GPUs based on "Maxwell" and "Kepler" architectures only (GTX 900 series, GTX 700 series, and GTX 600 series only). It's still a wide selection of GPUs, which NVIDIA already announced will support DirectX 12. Grab your drivers from the links below:DOWNLOAD: GeForce 352.63 Beta for Windows 10 64-bit: Desktop Discrete GPUs | Notebook Discrete GPUs

MSI, world leading in motherboard design, debuts the first Intel Braswell based Mini-ITX ECO motherboards; the MSI N3050I ECO, N3150I ECO and N3700I ECO. With a rich feature set and all new onboard 14nm Dual & Quad Core Intel Celeron and Pentium Processor with next generation Intel HD graphics up to 2x faster, the new passively cooled MSI Braswell ECO motherboards are the perfect solution for HTPC or industrial devices. MSI's revolutionary power-saving design featured on its new ECO series motherboards, together with Intel's newly designed ultra-low power consuming SoC using only up to 6W, make these motherboards the next step in efficiency. Featuring a fully passive cooling solution, the new Braswell based ECO motherboards run cool, silent & efficient.

Futuremark is excited to introduce our new 3DMark API Overhead feature test - the world's first independent test for measuring differences in DirectX 12, DirectX 11 and Mantle API performance. It's also the very first public application to use DirectX 12 full stop. This is cutting edge stuff! Developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of our Benchmark Development Program, the 3DMark API Overhead feature test lets you compare the performance of DirectX 12, DirectX 11, and Mantle.

The purpose of the test is to compare the relative performance of different APIs on a single system, rather than the absolute performance of different systems. The API Overhead feature test is not a general-purpose GPU benchmark, and it should not be used to compare graphics cards from different vendors. (We are working on a DirectX 12 benchmark with game-like workloads, which we expect to release soon after the public launch of Windows 10.)

DOWNLOAD: Futuremark 3DMark v1.5.884

In an industry presentation on why the company is excited about Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 12 API, AMD revealed its most important feature that could impact on not only its graphics business, but also potentially revive its CPU business among gamers. DirectX 12 will make its debut with Windows 10, Microsoft's next big operating system, which will be given away as a free upgrade for _all_ current Windows 8 and Windows 7 users. The OS will come with a usable Start menu, and could lure gamers who stood their ground on Windows 7.

In its presentation, AMD touched upon two key features of the DirectX 12, starting with its most important, Multi-threaded command buffer recording; and Asynchronous compute scheduling/execution. A command buffer is a list of tasks for the CPU to execute, when drawing a 3D scene. There are some elements of 3D graphics that are still better suited for serial processing, and no single SIMD unit from any GPU architecture has managed to gain performance throughput parity with a modern CPU core. DirectX 11 and its predecessors are still largely single-threaded on the CPU, in the way it schedules command buffer.

AMD announced that it published the complete 450-page programming guide for its Mantle 3D graphics API, and the reference API itself. The two can be accessed from here. In the run up to its GDC 2015 presentation, in a blog post written by the company's top technology exec Raja Koduri, the company said it will talk about the future of Mantle in its GDC presentation. The company intends to develop, maintain and support Mantle and its eco-system, while maintaining that it will participate in the development and support of industry-standard APIs such as DirectX 12 and GLnext (the next major version of OpenGL).

AMD gave us a technical preview of its next-generation "Carrizo" APU, which is perhaps the company's biggest design leap since "Trinity." Built on the 28 nm silicon fab process, this chip offers big energy-efficiency gains over the current-generation "Kaveri" silicon, thanks to some major under-the-hood changes.

The biggest of these is the "Excavator" CPU module. 23 percent smaller in area than "Steamroller," (same 28 nm process), Excavator features a new high-density library design, which reduces die-area of the module. Most components are compacted. The floating-point scheduler is 38% smaller, fused multiply-accumulate (FMAC) units compacted by 35%, and instruction-cache controller compacted by another 35%. The "Carrizo" silicon itself uses GPU-optimized high-density metal stack, which helps with the compaction. Each "Excavator" module features two x86-64 CPU cores, which are structured much in the same way as AMD's previous three CPU core generations.

In what could be a fundamental shift in how Microsoft monetizes its flagship product, the Windows operating system, the company decided to offer its upcoming Windows 10 as a free upgrade for existing users of Windows 8.1 and Windows 7. This offer will be applicable only for the first year following Windows 10 launch (after which, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 users will have to pay to upgrade to Windows 10). Windows 10 will see the return of the Start Menu, a productive Desktop environment, and cutting-edge new API features such as DirectX 12.

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphic cards since 1997, has released a new model, the PowerColor R9 290X with an advanced frame buffer memory of 8GB. Designed to fully support future graphically demanding titles at 4k resolution, the PCS+ R9 290X 8GB GDDR5 comes packed with an 8gb memory size, as well as latest GCN architecture innovations such as DirectX 12 and Mantle API. Offering gamers an incredibly immersive HD gaming experience at unrivaled performance.

The new PCS+ model utilizes 8GB of GDDR5 memory with 2816 stream processors. The larger 8GB frame buffer caters to latest applications and games that are getting more memory intensive. Clocks speeds are 1030MHz for the core and 1375MHz for the memory, which is connected via a new high speed 512-bit memory interface delivering excellent performance. To maintain higher OC performance with stability, PowerColor uses their own exclusive Gold Power Kit, including a Digital PWM to decrease the ripple and enhance power efficiency; the PowIRstage enables the Peak Efficiency up to 93.2% and the Multi Phases Design can enhance power efficiency and stability.

AMD announced its most important GPU for the season, the Radeon R9 285. The chip is designed to compete with the GeForce GTX 760 from NVIDIA at not just performance, but also energy-efficiency, and low component costs, so AMD can price it better. Based on a brand new 28 nm silicon by the company, codenamed "Tonga," the R9 285 features 1,792 Graphics CoreNext 1.2 stream processors, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory.

AMD partners are free to come up with 4 GB variants. The card supports DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.4, and Mantle. It features new AMD innovations, such as XDMA CrossFire, TrueAudio DSP, and 4-display Eyefinity by plugging into every connector on the card (two dual-link DVI, one DisplayPort 1.2, and one HDMI 1.4a). The card draws power from a pair of 6-pin PCIe power connectors. Available now, the Radeon R9 285, from various AMD partners starts at US $249.

AMD production manager Devon Nekechuk, speaking at the company's 30 Years of Graphics event, disclosed that all AMD GPUs based on the Graphics CoreNext architecture will support DirectX 12, Microsoft's next generation multimedia API. The company is already up-to-date on the DirectX feature-level support, with support for DirectX 11.2. The company isn't drumming that up too loud, probably because it's developing an ecosystem for its own/competing AMD Mantle 3D API.

NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce GTX 880 graphics card is shaping up to be a true successor to the GTX 680. According to a Tyden.cz report, GTX 880 will be based on NVIDIA's GM204 silicon, which ranks within its product stack in the same way GK104 does to the GeForce "Kepler" family. It won't be the biggest chip based on the "Maxwell" architecture, but will have what it takes to outperform even the GK110, again, in the same way GK104 outperforms GF110. The DirectX 12-ready chip will feature an SMM (streaming multiprocessor Maxwell) SIMD design that's identical to that of the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, only there are more SMMs, spread across multiple graphics processing clusters (GPCs), probably cushioned by a large slab of cache.This is what the GTX 880 is shaping up to be.

Today, AMD announced support for Microsoft and its revamped graphics application programming interface, DirectX 12, a new "console-like" version of the graphics API that has inspired PC gaming for nearly two decades. During the Microsoft-sponsored panel, DirectX: Evolving Microsoft's Graphics Platform, AMD revealed that it will support DirectX 12 on all AMD Radeon GPUs that feature the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.

AMD will support and collaborate with Microsoft on the development of the generational advancement of the API, to continue to improve the experience for both developers and end users.

Microsoft will present its first paper on DirectX 12, its next-generation multimedia API, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), on the 20th of March, 2013. The event could include presentations by NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm. It's not clear at this point if Microsoft will release developer tools and resources on that day, or simply outline the API to spur interest. If anything, it should gently nudge today's GPU manufacturers to make their future GPU designs ready for the API. There are currently no GPU families that we know of, which support DirectX 12. AMD's current Graphics CoreNext 2.0 GPUs, such as the Radeon R9 290X, support DirectX 11.2, while NVIDIA's "Maxwell" GPUs, such as the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, feature an identical API feature-level support to their "Kepler" predecessors.