It seems that someone at Intel forgot to press "post" on the company's promised day-0 driver update for one of this year's most anticipated games - Elden Ring. The company previously announced a partnership with Elden Ring developer FromSoftware in the development of an updated driver that wold give Intel-based Elden Ring players streamlined performance and a (hopefully) bug-free experience when it comes to graphics rendering. But Elden Ring's launch day of February 24th has come and gone - and Intel is mum on where exactly its updated driver lies. For now, the latest available Intel graphics driver stands at version 101.1121 - released in November last year.

It may be the case that the driver development hit an unexpected snag, or perhaps Intel has simply opted to delay the driver's launch until there are actually some discrete-level graphics cards available for purchase - the company's initial Arc Alchemist lineup is expected to be announced and launched later this month. That would make sense - especially considering how a driver update this close to release might include some interesting data on the upcoming graphics cards that could be pursued by data miners. Even so, it doesn't seem like a good PR move for Intel to have loudly promised an updated driver and then fail to release it - especially as Intel's uphill battle in the discrete GPU market is just beginning. Perhaps the driver developers are having too much fun with the critically and consumer-acclaimed latest installment from FromSoftware?

From 2020 to 2025, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12-inch equivalent wafer capacity at the world's top ten foundries will be approximately 10% with the majority of these companies focusing on 12-inch capacity expansion, which will see a CAGR of approximately 13.2%, according to TrendForce's research. In terms of 8-inch wafers, due to factors such as difficult to obtain equipment and whether capacity expansion is cost-effective, most fabs can only expand production slightly by means of capacity optimization, equating to a CAGR of only 3.3%. In terms of demand, the products primarily derived from 8-inch wafers, PMIC and Power Discrete, are driven by demand for electric vehicles, 5G smartphones, and servers. Stocking momentum has not fallen off, resulting in a serious shortage of 8-inch wafer production capacity that has festered since 2H19. Therefore, in order to mitigate competition for 8-inch capacity, a trend of shifting certain products to 12-inch production has gradually emerged. However, if shortages in overall 8-inch capacity is to be effectively alleviated, it is still necessary to wait for a large number of mainstream products to migrate to 12-inch production. The timeframe for this migration is estimated to be close to 2H23 into 2024.

Mesh shader is a relatively new concept of a programmable geometric shading pipeline, which promises to simplify the whole graphics rendering pipeline organization. NVIDIA introduced this concept with Turing back in 2018, and AMD joined with RDNA2. Today, thanks to the finds of Phoronix, we have gathered information that Intel's DG2 GPU will carry support for mesh shaders and bring it under Vulkan API. For starters, the difference between mesh/task and traditional graphics rendering pipeline is that the mesh edition is much simpler and offers higher scalability, bandwidth reduction, and greater flexibility in the design of mesh topology and graphics work. In Vulkan, the current mesh shader state is NVIDIA's contribution called the VK_NV_mesh_shader extension. The below docs explain it in greater detail:

Vulkan API documentationThis extension provides a new mechanism allowing applications to generate collections of geometric primitives via programmable mesh shading. It is an alternative to the existing programmable primitive shading pipeline, which relied on generating input primitives by a fixed function assembler as well as fixed function vertex fetch.

There are new programmable shader types—the task and mesh shader—to generate these collections to be processed by fixed-function primitive assembly and rasterization logic. When task and mesh shaders are dispatched, they replace the core pre-rasterization stages, including vertex array attribute fetching, vertex shader processing, tessellation, and geometry shader processing.

Among the broad range of new game titles getting support, we are in for a surprise. NVIDIA yesterday announced a feature list of its upcoming game-ready GeForce driver scheduled for public release on January 14th. According to the new blog post on NVIDIA's website, the forthcoming game-ready driver release will feature an AI-enhanced version of Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), available in GeForce drivers for a while. The new AI-powered tech is, what the company calls, Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution or DLDSR shortly. It uses neural networks that require fewer input pixels and produces stunning image quality on your monitor.

NVIDIAOur January 14th Game Ready Driver updates the NVIDIA DSR feature with AI. DLDSR (Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution) renders a game at higher, more detailed resolution before intelligently shrinking the result back down to the resolution of your monitor. This downsampling method improves image quality by enhancing detail, smoothing edges, and reducing shimmering.

DLDSR improves upon DSR by adding an AI network that requires fewer input pixels, making the image quality of DLDSR 2.25X comparable to that of DSR 4X, but with higher performance. DLDSR works in most games on GeForce RTX GPUs, thanks to their Tensor Cores.

The Federal Trade Commission today sued to block U.S. chip supplier Nvidia Corp.'s $40 billion acquisition of U.K. chip design provider Arm Ltd. Semiconductor chips power the computers and technologies that are essential to our modern economy and society. The proposed vertical deal would give one of the largest chip companies control over the computing technology and designs that rival firms rely on to develop their own competing chips. The FTC's complaint alleges that the combined firm would have the means and incentive to stifle innovative next-generation technologies, including those used to run datacenters and driver-assistance systems in cars.

"The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip conglomerate from stifling the innovation pipeline for next-generation technologies," said FTC Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova. "Tomorrow's technologies depend on preserving today's competitive, cutting-edge chip markets. This proposed deal would distort Arm's incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia's rivals. The FTC's lawsuit should send a strong signal that we will act aggressively to protect our critical infrastructure markets from illegal vertical mergers that have far-reaching and damaging effects on future innovations."

Microsoft and AMD on Thursday released software updates that fix the two performance issues affecting AMD Ryzen processors with Windows 11. The two issues were abnormally high L3 cache latency, and a broken "Preferred Cores" system. The companies had assessed that the issues impact performance of Ryzen processors on Windows 11 by as much as 15%.

The two issues are fixed in separate methods. The L3 cache latency bug is improved through a Windows Update patch, which has been released now as an Update Preview (an Update Preview is not a "beta," but a software update released ahead of its designated "patch Tuesday"). The Update Preview is chronicled under KB5006746, and Windows 11 systems updated with this, get their OS build version set as "build 22000.282." The next update restores the Preferred Cores mechanism that leverages UEFI-CPPC2. This update comes in the form of an AMD Chipset Software update. You'll need to download and install both of the following:

DOWNLOAD: Windows 11 October 21, 2021 Update Preview KB5006746 | AMD Chipset Driver Software 3.10.08.506

Rambus, today announced it is now sampling its 5600 MT/s 2nd-generation RCD chip to the major DDR5 memory module (RDIMM) suppliers. This new level of performance represents a 17% increase in data rate over the first-generation 4800 MT/s Rambus DDR5 RCD. With key innovations, Rambus is able to deliver 5600 MT/s performance at lower latency and power while optimizing timing parameters for improved RDIMM margins.

"Advanced workloads are driving an insatiable demand for greater memory bandwidth," said Shane Rau, research vice president, Computing Semiconductors at IDC. "It's essential that DDR5 ecosystem players like Rambus continue to raise the bar on performance to meet the rapidly rising needs of data center applications."

NVIDIA has today launched its 496.13 game-ready WHQL GeForce graphics driver with many improvements and changes. Starting with the naming, the company has jumped from the 472.12 WHQL version released on September 20th to the 496.xx naming released today. Such a significant increase in version naming is uncommon, and makes us wonder why the company decided to do it, probably in preparation for the Windows 11 branch of their drivers, which uses version 500.

Starting from release 496.13, NVIDIA has also removed support for Windows 8.1, Windows 8 and Windows 7. The last driver to support these operating systems is 472.12. This makes some sense, since between this release and today, Microsoft has launched their Windows 11 operating system. NVIDIA also trimmed more fat by removing support for the Kepler architecture, which was launched in 2012 and included models like GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GTX 780, GTX 770, GTX 760, GT 740, GT 730, GTX 690, GTX 680, GTX 670, GTX 660 Ti, GTX 660, GTX 650 Ti and GTX 630.

Update 15:57 UTC: Added confirmation from NVIDIADownload NVIDIA GeForce Graphics Drivers 496.13 WHQL.

ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) today announced an all-new gaming peripherals lineup that channels the minimalist feel of monochrome through a striking Moonlight White color scheme. The ROG Strix Scope NX TKL 80%, tenkeyless mechanical RGB gaming keyboard, ROG Strix Impact II ambidextrous gaming mouse, ROG Strix Go Core gaming headset and ROG Cetra II Core in-ear gaming headphones are all now available in North America in this stunning colorway.

ROG has a long history of weaving Aura Sync into a huge ecosystem of devices to let gamers shine a light on their personalities through their gear - but many players also seek a minimalist look. That's why the ROG color palette is expanding to include the Moonlight White series, providing a commanding counterpart to the signature red-and-black color scheme.

AMD today released the latest version of their Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers, guaranteeing the best possible experience for AMD GPU users. The latest driver revision introduces support for World War Z: Aftermath, and Amazon's New World MMORPG. Besides that initial game release support, the drivers also deliver an up to 13% performance improvement in Diablo II: Resurrected. This performance increase seems to solve a rendering bottleneck experienced with the RX 6700 XT graphics card at 4K resolution, with Very High settings enabled.

AMD also fixed four outstanding issues with this driver release. The CPU Additional Metrics section within the Performance tab should now show up for all users; compatibility error messages when trying to load a previously saved tuning profile should no longer appear; water should no longer spontaneously evaporate in Hitman III for RX 6000 series users; CPU Auto Overclock in Radeon Software should no longer be absent for users sporting an AMD 5000 series CPU alongside an RX 6000 series graphics card. Check after the break for the list of outstanding issues; as always, you can grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.9.2

Apos Audio is an audio retailer based out of California, and got in touch with us to let us know of the Caspian—the brand's first set of headphones. It came about as a collaboration with Soundnews and Kennerton Audio. Using the ~$1000 Kennerton Vali as the base, the Caspian gets a tweaked sound signature and different design while managing to cut down the price by half. It uses a 50 mm dynamic driver, natural oak ear cups, and oval-shaped ergonomic sheepskin ear pads. Pre-orders are now up for those interested, and further information straight from the company is seen past the break. I especially like the "How it's made" page, but that may just be the engineer in me speaking.

NVIDIA has today decided to update the company's game-ready graphics drivers with the release of 471.68 WHQL. In the latest installment of the GeForce drivers, NVIDIA is bringing some much-needed support for the latest games. That includes the launch of Psychonauts 2, Naraka: Bladepoint, and Back 4 Blood Open Beta. These new games are now supported and are expected to be played on all GPUs from 3000 series to the older 500 series. As Naraka: Bladepoint game features NVIDIA's latest DLSS and Reflex technologies, this driver version is here to support it. Alongside game support, the new driver also adds support for seven new G-SYNC displays listed below. For a full list of changes, including bug fixes, please see the aforementioned list.Download NVIDIA GeForce 471.68 WHQL Graphics Drivers.

Anecdotal reports of fixed idle power consumption for AMD's graphics cards are filling the internet following the release of their latest Radeon drivers, version 21.6.1. Besides introducing support for FSR (which we have already tested with a new special image comparison code from our resident W1zzard with great results), users are reporting reduced power consumption on idle or low-intensity workloads - something that we had already covered in our latest AMD reviews, which showcased higher power consumption compared to NVIDIA.

Users are reporting drops from around 30 W to ~8 W - nothing to scoff at, and getting AMD's offerings in line with NVIDIA's on that particular metric. While this remains anecdotal evidence for now, rest assured that we will be testing these new drivers so as to definitely claim an improvement (or the absence of it).

NVIDIA today released their latest GeForce drivers, which keep your GPU of choice ticking with the least amount of problems possible - in theory. Version 466.47 WHQL of the GeForce drivers are Game Ready for Days Gone, one of the latest PlayStation exclusives to make the jump towards your gaming PC. The release notes also indicate that this particular driver is the base one for correct operation for GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 TI graphics cards with LHR (low-hash-rate), which ship starting late May, 2021. Read on after the break for the full list of fixed and known issues, and as always, follow the link below to download these drivers straight from our TPU host.Download: NVIDIA GeForce 466.47 WHQL Drivers

AMD today released the latest version of their Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition drivers. Version 21.5.2 features support for the impending release of Days Gone. It also adds support for Microsoft's Direct X 12 Velocity SDK - meant to make it easier and faster for game developers to implement Direct X 12 features onto their development pipeline.

The new drivers also feature support for Shader Model 6.6. This particular revision for Microsoft's Shader Model implements expanded atomic operations (64-bit), dynamic resource binding, derivatives and samples in compute shaders, packed 8-bit computations, and wave size. Read on after the break for fixed issues, and remaining issues that AMD is aware of. Follow the link below towards our very own download section.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.5.2 Beta

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the global leader in specialty semiconductor manufacturing, and Bosch will partner to develop and manufacture next-generation automotive radar technology.

Bosch chose GF as its partner to develop a mmWave automotive radar system-on-chip (SoC) for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) applications, manufactured using GF's 22FDX RF solution. ADAS applications help drivers stay safe by keeping a vehicle in the correct lane, warning of collisions, initiating emergency braking, assisting with parking, and more.

Yesterday NVIDIA announced the company's first Crypto Mining Processor (CPM) that serves the purpose of having a dedicated processor only for mining with no video outputs. Alongside the new processors, the company has also announced that in the next driver update the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU will get Etherium mining performance halved, limiting the use of this GPU SKU by miners. However, up until now, we have thought that NVIDIA is limiting the mining performance of this card by simply having a driver detect if crypto mining algorithms are in place and limit the performance. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. According to Bryan Del Rizzo, director of global PR for GeForce, more things are working behind the driver.

According to Mr. Del Rizzo: "It's not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter." This means that essentially, NVIDIA can find any way to cripple the mining hash rate even if you didn't update your driver version. At the same time, according to Kopite7Kimi, we are possibly expecting to see NVIDIA relaunch its existing SKUs under a different ID, which would feature a built-in anti-crypto mining algorithm. What the company does remains to be seen.

While I was messing around with an older SSD test system (not benchmarking anything) I wondered why the machine's performance was SO sluggish with the NVIDIA card I just installed. Windows startup, desktop, Internet, everything in Windows would just be incredibly slow. This is an old dual-core machine, but it ran perfectly fine with the AMD Radeon card I used before.At first I blamed NVIDIA, but when I opened Task Manager I noticed one of my cores sitting at 100%—that can't be right.Digging a bit further into this, it looks like RadeonSettings.exe is using one processor core at maximum 100% CPU load. Ugh, but there is no AMD graphics card installed right now.

NVIDIA today released the GeForce 457.30 WHQL drivers. The drivers come "game ready" (optimized) for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Godfall. The SLI profile for Black Desert has also been updated. The drivers also add G-Sync support for the Acer CP3271U V, Asus XG27AQ, MSI MAG274QR and Xiaomi Mi 245 HF monitors.

Among the bugs fixed with this release are a drop in performance during gameplay for Warzone; a laptop-only error where the internal panel flashes upon resume from sleep mode or from display off; and a bug specific for Ampere, in a G-SYNC, HDR, Dual-head 8K display environment where the display screen goes black. Get the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 457.30 WHQL

In the anticipation of the AMD Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs launch based on Zen 3 architecture, AMD has just released the updated drivers for its chipsets. Covering a wide selection ranging from B350, A320, X370, X399, B450, X470, X570, B550, and TRX40 Chipset, the updated chipset drivers include some bug fixes and new features. Now there is an updated power plan for AMD Ryzen CPUs that coordinate with chipsets, which means that AMD engineers have developed a new plan for Windows 10 OS which provides the best performance and power usage. You can check out the fixes listed below and you can go to the download link to install the new drivers.Download: AMD Ryzen Chipset Driver 2.10.13.408.

Discovering vulnerabilities in software is not an easy thing to do. There are many use cases and states that need to be tested to see a possible vulnerability. Still, security researchers know how to find those and they usually report it to the company that made the software. Today, AMD has disclosed that there is a vulnerability present in the company graphics driver powering the GPUs and making them work on systems. Called CreateAllocation (CVE-2020-12911), the vulnerability is marked with a score of 7.1 in the CVSSv3 test results, meaning that it is not a top priority, however, it still represents a big problem.

"A denial-of-service vulnerability exists in the D3DKMTCreateAllocation handler functionality of AMD ATIKMDAG.SYS 26.20.15029.27017. A specially crafted D3DKMTCreateAllocation API request can cause an out-of-bounds read and denial of service (BSOD). This vulnerability can be triggered from a guest account, " says the report about the vulnerability. AMD states that a temporary fix is implemented by simply restarting your computer if a BSOD happens. The company also declares that "confidential information and long-term system functionality are not impacted". AMD plans to release a fix for this software problem sometime in 2021 with the new driver release. You can read more about it here.

NVIDIA has today released the latest iteration of its Game Ready driver with the version number 456.55. Marked as a WHQL release, the driver is supposedly going to bring new advancements to the stability of the latest GeForce RTX 3000 series Ampere graphics cards. While the release notes don't officially mention anything on how it improves, it is already confirmed by a few Redditors that the new driver removes crashed experienced with the past version 456.38. In the latest revision, the support has been added for NVIDIA Reflex in Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, as well as support for Star Wars: Squadrons game. Below is the link to the driver download page redirecting to NVIDIA's site, and in no time the TechPowerUp download page will be updated as well.DOWNLOAD:NVIDIA GeForce 456.55 WHQL Game Ready Drivers

The change-log follows:

NVIDIA has recently released GeForce Hotfix Driver Version 451.85 which fixes various issues in the latest 451.67 WHQL Game Ready drivers. This hotfix brings stability improvements to Shadow of the Tomb Raider when running in DirectX 12 mode with Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling enabled, texture corruption fixes in Death Stranding with GeForce GTX 16/RTX 20 series GPUs, and performance fixes to Forza Motorsport 7. The new hotfix also adds G-Sync Compatibility for the Samsung 27" Odyssey G7 gaming monitor.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Hotfix Driver Version 451.85

Experience matters. And with NVIDIA Quadro Experience—a new application for Quadro GPUs—professionals across industries can boost their creativity and increase their productivity like never before.

Quadro Experience, available now, helps professionals simplify time-consuming tasks, streamline workflows and ensure your favorite applications always have the latest updates. NVIDIA Quadro Experience makes sharing content easier by providing screen capture and desktop recording in 4K, so teams can easily upload content and even broadcast their work directly from their desktop or laptop.

NVIDIA has today launched the latest version of its "Game Ready" graphics driver lineup with the 446.14 WHQL drivers. This release brings mostly performance optimizations and bug fixes for the video game Valorant. In addition to these performance optimizations and fixes, optimal support for Minecraft Dungeons, Disintegration, and Crucible is included. An important new feature update is the inclusion of Variable Rate Supersampling (VRSS) support for Onward. NVIDIA has also fixed driver installation issues on Colorful GeForce GTX 1650 that may have bugged some users of the cards. For the full list of fixes please check out the list below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 446.14 WHQL