NVIDIA has begun selling its compact RTX 4000 Ada Lovelace graphics card, offering GeForce RTX 3070-like performance at a mere 70 W power consumption, allowing it to fit in almost all desktop PCs. The low-profile, dual-slot board is priced higher than the RTX 4080 as it targets professional users, but it can still be used in a regular gaming computer. PNY's RTX 4000 Ada generation graphics card is the first to reach consumer shelves, currently available for $1,444 at ShopBLT, a retailer known for obtaining hardware before its competitors. The card comes with four Mini-DisplayPort connectors, so an additional mDP-DP or mDP-HDMI adapter must be factored into the cost.

The NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF Ada generation board features an AD104 GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, 20 GB of GDDR6 ECC memory, and a 160-bit interface. With a fixed boost frequency floating around 1560 MHz to reduce overall board power consumption, the GPU is rated for just 70 Watts of power. To emphasize the efficiency, this card requires no external PCIe power connector, as all the juice is fed through the PCIe slot. The GA104 graphics processor in this configuration delivers a peak FP32 performance of 19.2 TFLOPS, comparable to the GeForce RTX 3070. The 20 GB of memory makes the card more valuable for professionals and AI researchers needing compact solutions. Although the card's performance is overshadowed by the recently launched GeForce RTX 4070, the RTX 4000 SFF Ada's professional drivers, support for professional software ISVs, and additional features make it a strong contender in the semi-professional market. Availability and pricing are expected to improve in the coming weeks as the card becomes more widely accessible.More images, along with specification table, follow.

Intel's Arc Pro A40, A30, and Arc Pro A30M for laptops were announced back in August last year, these are still only available to OEMs, and it appears that Intel is not focused on driver updates for its Arc Pro series as it is for its gaming Arc series graphics card lineup. The latest Arc Pro 31.0.101.4092 WHQL driver is the first driver update in 4 months.

The previous driver was released back in December last year, and while we do not know how popular Intel Arc Pro series is, since there are currently only two desktop and one mobile graphics card, four months are still a long time between driver updates. The latest one focuses on certification for professional applications, including various Autodesk software, Siemens, Vectorworks, Dassault Systèmes Solidworks, and others. It also includes several fixes for some of those applications.

Today at the Amplify Partner Conference, HP Inc announced its latest line-up of gaming hardware and software designed to bring gamers everything they need to enjoy the games they love. The new OMEN Transcend 16 Laptop, OMEN 16 Laptop, Victus 16 Laptop, and a vast range of stunning OMEN monitors offer casual, hobbyist, lifestyle, and hardcore gamers the power and flexibility to play and work hard. To bring everything together, new enhancements in OMEN Gaming Hub offer a variety of performance and personalization features.

People everywhere seek devices that can adapt to hybrid play and work. Sixty-two percent of gamers prefer a PC that fits their entire life instead of being used for gaming only. With a billion new gamers entering the space in the last seven years and 84 percent of them using games to connect with others with similar interests, gaming devices enable access to countless games and corresponding communities.

TrendForce reports that several suppliers, such as Micron and SK hynix, have started scaling back DRAM production. The ASP of DRAM plunged 20% in 1Q23, and this price decline is predicted to slow down to 10~15% next quarter. It's uncertain whether or not demand will recover in 2H23. Therefore, the ASP of DRAM has continued to fall as inventory levels are high from the suppliers' side, and prices will only rebound if there is a significant decrease in production.

PC DRAM: Purchase quantity from buyers has fallen drastically over the past three quarters; buyers have around 9~13 weeks of PC DRAM stock remaining. Despite suppliers having already cut production in the PC DRAM segment, DDR4 8 GB module is still likely to fall by more than 10% in 2Q23. There is a possibility that PC OEMs may purchase more DRAM because prices have been down to a relatively low level, but it is still under observation whether or not this can mitigate the inventory overstock situation from the suppliers' side. TrendForce predicts the ASP of PC DRAM will fall between 10~15%.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has issued the news, via a tweet, of Raja Koduri's departure from the silicon giant. Koduri, who currently sits as Executive Vice President and Chief Architect, will be leaving the company at the end of this month. This ends a five year long tenure at Intel, where he started as Chief Architect back in 2017. He intends to form a brand new startup operation that will focus on AI-generative software for computer games. His tweeted reply to Gelsinger reads: "Thank you Pat and Intel for many cherished memories and incredible learning over the past 5 years. Will be embarking on a new chapter in my life, doing a software startup as noted below. Will have more to share in coming weeks."

Intel has been undergoing numerous internal restructures, and Koduri's AXG Graphics Unit was dissolved late last year. He was the general manager of the graphic chips division prior to its split, and returned to his previous role as Chief Architect at Intel. The company stated at the time that Koduri's new focus would be on: "growing efforts across CPU, GPU and AI, and accelerating high-priority technical programmes."

Intel Graphics today released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4148 beta comes with Game On (day-zero) optimization for Deceive Inc., and Diablo 4 (beta); and optimization for Sons of The Forest. It fixes an issue where Riftbreaker (DX12) Xbox Game Pass version exhibits a rare black line display corruption; and lower than expected performance for Resident Evil 4 Remake Chainsaw Demo (DX12). The company also took the opportunity to highlight that with recent price cuts for the Arc A750 down to $249, it offers anywhere between 54% to 76% higher performance-per-Dollar than the competing GeForce RTX 3060.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4148 beta

MediaTek, a fabless semiconductor company powering two billion devices a year, and Kontron, a leading global provider of IoT and Embedded Computer Technology (ECT), today announced that Kontron is integrating MediaTek's Genio 1200 and Genio 700 chipsets into its new modules for IoT applications.

MediaTek Genio is a complete platform stack for IoT, offering brands powerful and efficient chipsets, open platform software development kits (SDK), and a developer portal with comprehensive resources and tools. Genio chipsets are ideal for a wide variety of commercial, industrial, and retail applications that require highly responsive processing, advanced multimedia support, and multi-tasking.

AMD has released its latest Adrenalin drivers for Radeon graphics cards. With support dating back to RX 400, the latest Adrenalin 23.3.1 WHQL drivers bring a lot of improvements to the table, as well as support for Halo Infinite Ray Tracing Update and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty game. Most importantly, the new driver has a series of fixes, including intermittent driver timeout, system freeze, or BSOD, with the latest Radeon RX 7000 series. Problems in games such as Premium Gold Packs in EA SPORTS FIFA 23 and Dying Light 2 lighting effects corruption have been fixed. As far as Radeon RX 6000 series goes, this driver release manages to fix corruption in certain scenes with ray tracing enabled observed in the Returnal game. Check the list below for the entire set of changes.Download: AMD Radeon Graphics Drivers 23.3.1 WHQL here.

MSI, a world-leading laptop brand, has hold their brand new laptop virtual event MSIology: The Leap to Singularity today. Featuring the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs and up to 13th Gen Intel Core HX series processors which is now available for pre-order and early bird rewards.

MSI strives for perfection and a premium experience in the laptop lineup which comes with innovative technology breakthroughs, extremely powerful performance and aesthetic brand new design. "We have been leading the trends for high-end laptops, and it continues!" Said MSI Notebook Worldwide Sales & Marketing Director, Derek Chen.

ASUS today announced the all-new TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition, an all-AMD gaming laptop with a redesigned chassis and an incredibly immersive 16-inch display. The TUF Gaming A15, A17, F15 and F17 laptops also make a triumphant return, sporting the latest silicon from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA to power players into the next generation of gaming performance.

TUF A16 Advantage Edition announced
Built for serious gaming with subtle styling, the TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition is a sleek gaming laptop built to demolish the competition. Powered completely by AMD, the TUF Gaming A16 features up to an AMD Ryzen 9 Zen 4 processor and AMD Radeon RDNA 3 mobile graphics. "AMD and ASUS have partnered to deliver our latest 'Zen 4' and RDNA 3 technologies into the most innovative form factors," said Jason Banta, CVP and GM OEM PC. "The TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition delivers blistering gaming performance and outstanding power efficiency in a sleek portable chassis."

ASUS today announced the GeForce RTX 4080 Noctua Edition graphics card, a continuation of its collaboration with the legendary cooling company, building on the previous GeForce RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 Noctua variants. This year ASUS and Noctua have worked together to tame the power of the mighty GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card. Noctua fan-design prowess and an ASUS custom-built vapor chamber combine to create the quietest air-cooled RTX 4080 on the market.

Cool and quiet
The ASUS GeForce RTX 4080 Noctua Edition incorporates a pair of state-of-the-art Noctua NF-A12x25 fans to move air over a massive heatsink, developed in a partnership between the veteran ASUS thermal R&D team and the engineers at Noctua. The engineers successfully refined the fin density and heat pipe arrangement of the heatsink, optimizing it for the airflow characteristics of the NF-A12x25. To prioritize low noise levels, a smooth acoustic signature and high cooling performance while making room for the pair of 120 mm fans, ASUS expanded the card's total volume to occupy 4.3 slots of space. The card features a Dual BIOS switch, and Quiet mode is enabled by default to minimize noise right out of the box.

Big things are afoot at Intel's graphics chip division once again, as the company has just broken up its Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) business unit which will result in some big changes. For starters, Raja Koduri has been—what we can only refer to as—demoted, given he's back to being chief architect rather than being in charge of the AXG business unit. Some of his staff will be moved to other business units inside Intel as the AXG business unit will cease to exist. This doesn't mean Intel will stop making discrete consumer GPUs, with at least the Battlemage/Arc B-series launch still being planned to take place sometime in 2023.

At the same time, it looks like Raja Koduri will be out of action for what is likely to be at least a month since he posted on Twitter that he's had emergency back surgery while on a business trip. How this will affect his transition back to his role as chief architect is anyone's guess at this point in time. However, he will not be focusing solely on GPUs in the future, but the broader range of products that Intel offers—particularly the integration of GPU, CPU and AI architectures at Intel. We've posted an official statement from Intel after the break, which Intel provided to Tom's Hardware. We also wish Raja a speedy recovery!

With 11 days to go until the official launch of AMD's Radeon 7900-series graphics cards, PowerColor decided to share some more details about its upcoming cards. The two models appear to be the Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 XT, with both cards apparently sharing the same design and cooler. The cards appear to be at least triple-slot, but it's not entirely clear from the provided pictures. PowerColor is using a nine-blade fan design and the fans are of course kitted out with LEDs, where PowerColor is pushing what it calls an "amethyst purple" colour for this generation of Hellhound cards. The new fans are said to improve the GPU temperatures by as much as three degrees Celsius compared to the previous generation of fans.

More importantly, the cards have been given an improved backplate, as well as a larger copper plate for the heatsink, for improved cooling. The new copper plate doesn't just cover the GPU now, but also the VRAM chips. The copper plate is connected to eight 6 mm heatpipes. PowerColor also shared that it's using a 14-layer high TG PCB, which uses a two ounce copper power layer. The RX 7900 XTX is kitted out with 20 VRMs, although this appears to be straight from the AMD reference design. PowerColor appears to have implemented a dual BIOS on the card, as there's a switch for OC/Silent operation and the card also appears to have a hardware LED switch, which is nice for those that don't care about lighting up their computer like a Christmas tree. Keep in mind that this is not PowerColor's top-of-the-range card, which is the Red Devil, so we should expect more details on those cards in the future too.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the global leading motherboard, mini PC, notebook, mobile device, and smart solution provider, is proud to announce our participation at GITEX Global 2022 at the Dubai International Trade Centre HALL 4, E30, from October 10 to 14. ECS aims to showcase its latest LIVA mini PC series, AIO PCs, and motherboards for various vertical markets as well as for commercial applications.

The Mini PC Family - including the pocket-sized Q series, multi-functional Z series, and ultra-powerful One series - is ideal for smart retail, transportation, digital signage for hotels and hospital, smart conferencing for business, intelligent edge computing for AI solutions, and home computing for long-distance working and for education.

During its GTC 2022 session, NVIDIA introduced its new generation of gaming graphics cards based on the novel Ada Lovelace architecture. Dubbed NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series, it brings various updates like more CUDA cores, a new DLSS 3 version, 4th generation Tensor cores, 3rd generation Ray Tracing cores, and much more, which you can read about here. However, today, we also got a new Ada Lovelace card intended for the data center. Called the L40, NVIDIA updated its previous Ampere-based A40 design. While the NVIDIA website provides sparse, the new L40 GPU uses 48 GB GDDR6 memory with ECC error correction. Using NVLink, you can get 96GBs of VRAM. Paired with an unknown SKU, we assume that it uses AD102 with adjusted frequencies to lower the TDP and allow for passive cooling.

NVIDIA is calling this their Omniverse GPU, as it is a part of the push to separate its GPUs used for graphics and AI/HPC models. The "L" model in the current product stack is used to accelerate graphics, with display ports installed on the GPU, while the "H" models (H100) are there to accelerate HPC/AI installments where visual elements are a secondary task. This is a further separation of the entire GPU market, where the HPC/AI SKUs get their own architecture, and GPUs for graphics processing are built on a new architecture as well. You can see the specifications provided by NVIDIA below.

Intel's future Meteor Lake APUs seem to be playing catch-up to AMD's integrated graphics in more ways than one. Twitter user Coelacanth's Dream has dug up information that indicates Intel's commitment to bring ray tracing support to even its IGP (Integrated Graphics Processing) tiles. According to bits and pieces from Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) code patches, it seems to be confirmed that ray tracing support is indeed coming to the TSMC-made, 3 nm GPU tiles in Meteor Lake. The kicker here is the presence of flags that detect whether the iGPU is of the "iGFX_meteorlake" type - if so, IGC sets ray tracing support to enabled.

Puzzlingly, Intel's upscaling technology, Xe SuperSampling (XeSS) could be out of the picture - at least for now. It seems that IGC patches for the upcoming APU family still don't allow for DPAS (Dot Product Accumulate Systolic) instructions - instructions that rely on XMX (Intel Xe Matrix Extensions), the AI engines responsible for executing 128 FP16/BF16, 256 INT8, or 512 INT4/INT2 operations per clock. These low-precision operations are the soul of algorithmic supersampling technologies such as XeSS.

Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards span both gamer and creator/professional user market sector, where we witnessed Intel announce gamer and pro-vis GPU SKUs. Today, we are seeing the usage of the flagship Arc Alchemist SKU called A770 in Blender rendering with ray tracing enabled. The GPU is designed to have a DG2-512 GPU with 512 EUs, 4096 Shading Units, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, and 32 Xe cores for ray tracing, be a powerhouse for games, and handle some professional software as well. At SIGGRAPH 2022, Bob Duffy, Intel's Director of Graphics Community Engagement, showcased a system with Arc A770 GPU running Blender Cycles with ray tracing and denoising.

While we don't have any comparable data to showcase, the system managed to produce a decent rendering in Blender 3.3 LTS release, using Intel's oneAPI. The demo scene had 4,369,466 vertices, 8,702,031 edges, 4,349,606 faces, and 8,682,950 triangles, backed by ray tracing and live denoising. We are yet to see more detailed benchmarks and how the GPU fares against the competition.

Intel has today unveiled another addition to its discrete Arc Alchemist graphics card lineup, with a slight preference to the professional consumer market. Intel has prepared three models for creators and entry pro-vis solutions, called Intel Arc Pro graphics cards. All GPUs are AV1 accelerated, have ray tracing support, and are designed to handle AI acceleration inside applications like Adobe Premiere Pro. At the start, we have a small A30M mobile GPU aimed at laptop designs. It has a 3.5 TeraFLOP FP32 capability inside a configurable 35-50 Watt TDP envelope, has eight ray tracing cores, and 4 GB of GDDR6 memory. Its display output connectors depend on OEM's laptop design.

Next, we have the Arc A40 Pro discrete single-slot GPU. Having 3.5 TeraFLOPs of FP32 single-precision performance, it has eight ray tracing cores and 6 GB of GDDR6 memory. The listed maximum TDP for this model is 50 Watts. It has four mini-DP ports for video output, and it can drive two monitors at 8K 60 Hz, one at 5K 240 Hz, two at 5K 120 Hz, or four at 4K 60 Hz refresh rate. Its bigger brother, the Arc A50 Pro, is a dual-slot design with 4.8 TeraFLOPs of single-precision FP32 computing, has eight ray tracing cores, and 6 GB of GDDR6 memory as well. It has the same video output capability as the Arc A40 Pro, with a beefier cooling setup to handle the 75 Watt TDP. All software developed using the OneAPI toolkit can be accelerated using these GPUs. Intel is working with the industry to adapt professional software for Arc Pro graphics.

Graphics card prices continue to fall in China with NVIDIA & AMD holding excessive stock of RTX 3000/RX 6000 cards without enough consumers interested in buying them. The companies have resisted pressure to lower the official MSRP of these cards with most retailers now offering discounts of between 5% and 30%. The largest drops are with flagship cards such as the NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti which is now available for 9499 RMB (1415 USD) which is 38% below MSRP while the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is 4999 RMB (744 USD) a 37.5% reduction. The prices for all graphics cards are now below MSRP with drops amounting to 20% on average for NVIDIA and 19% for AMD.

Intel's upcoming family of Arc Alchemist mobile graphics cards is just around the corner, and we are already starting to spot the company's reference systems utilizing the latest dedicated graphics. Thanks to the findings of @momomo_us, we have information that Intel is readying the NUC X15 laptop reference system codenamed "Alder Country." There are two SKUs, LAPAC71G and LAPAC71H, each with similar CPU and GPU configurations. Carrying an Intel Core i7-12700H processor with 14 cores and 20 threads, the CPU is paired with either Arc A550M on the LAPAC71G SKU or Arc A730M on LAPAC71H SKU.

As a reminder, Intel already made such NUC X15 reference laptop designs with Tiger Lake processors. However, they came with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 graphics instead of Intel Arc Alchemist. Implementations of NUC X15 appeared with partners such as ADATA XPG Xenia laptop. We could expect to see more OEMs adapt Alder Country if the performance of Arc Alchemist graphics proves good.

Intel is preparing to launch its next-generation desktop platform codenamed Rocket Lake-S. According to the presentation held by Intel today in Shenzen, China, we have official information regarding some of the platform features that Raptor Lake is bringing. Starting with memory support, Raptor Lake is still carrying the transitional DDR4 and DDR5 support, as the full swing towards DDR5 is still in progress. Unlike the previous generation Alder Lake, which brought DDR5-4800 support, Raptor Lake's integrated memory controller can drive DDR5 modules with a 5600 MT/s configuration. As DDR4 support remains, it is limited to 3200 MT/s speed.

Interesting information from the leaked slide points out that support for CPU-attached NVMe storage remains PCIe Gen4. While AMD will provide an AM5 socket with CPU-attached NMVe storage on PCIe Gen5 protocol, Intel is taking a step back and holding on to Gen4. The CPU is outputting 16 PCIe Gen5 lanes on its own. Motherboard vendors for the upcoming 700-series boards for Raptor Lake can still provide a PCIe Gen5 NVMe slot; however, it will have to subtract eight Gen5 lanes from the PCI Express Graphics (PEG) slot and route them to NVMe storage. As our testing shows, this will affect GPU's performance by a few percent. AMD's upcoming AM5 platform has no such issues, as the CPU provides both the PEG and CPU-attached NVMe storage with sufficient PCIe Gen5 bandwidth.

Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics cards launched in laptop/mobile space, and everyone is wondering just how well the first generation of discrete graphics performs in actual, GPU-accelerated workloads. Tellusim Technologies, a software company located in San Diego, has managed to get ahold of a laptop featuring an Intel Arc A370M mobile graphics card and benchmark it against other competing solutions. Instead of using Vulkan API, the team decided to use D3D12 API for tests, as the Vulkan usually produces lower results on the new 12th generation graphics. With the 30.0.101.1736 driver version, this GPU was mainly tested in the standard GPU working environment like triangles and batches. Meshlet size is set to 69/169, and the job is as big as 262K Meshlets. The total amount of geometry is 20 million vertices and 40 million triangles per frame.

Using the tests such as Single DIP (drawing 81 instances with u32 indices without going to Meshlet level), Mesh Indexing (Mesh Shader emulation), MDI/ICB (Multi-Draw Indirect or Indirect Command Buffer), Mesh Shader (Mesh Shaders rendering mode) and Compute Shader (Compute Shader rasterization), the Arc GPU produced some exciting numbers, measured in millions or billions of triangles. Below, you can see the results of these tests.

Graphics card prices have been on a steady decline in the past few months, following their peak in May of last year when we saw double and triple pricing compared to the baseline MSRP value. According to the 3DCenter.org report, which tracks graphics card prices in Germany and Austria, we have information that AMD GPU prices have dipped below MSRP, while NVIDIA GPUs are very close to baseline listed prices. The report tracks Ethereum mining profitability and displays it in the yellow line. As the line is declining, so are the GPU prices. For AMD, the prices are now 8% below the 100% of MSRP. At 92%, consumers can find AMD GPUs at a slight discount. While AMD cards are slightly cheaper, NVIDIA GPUs are now at 102% of the MSRP, the lowest price point since the launch.

Rumors of NVIDIA's upcoming Ada Lovelace graphics cards keep appearing. With every new update, it seems like the total power consumption is getting bigger, and today we are getting information about different SKUs, including mobile and desktop variants. According to a well-known leaker, kopite7kimi, we have information about the power limits of the upcoming GPUs. The new RTX 40 series GPUs will feature a few initial SKUs: AD102, AD103, AD104, and AD106. Every SKU, except the top AD102, will be available as well. The first in line, AD102, is the most power-hungry SKU with a maximum power limit rating of 800 Watts. This will require multiple power connectors and a very beefy cooling solution to keep it running.

Going down the stack, we have an AD103 SKU limited to 450 Watts on desktop and 175 Watts on mobile. The AD104 chip is limited to 400 Watts on desktop, while the mobile version is still 175 Watts. Additionally, the AD106 SKU is limited to 260 Watts on desktop and 140 Watts on mobile.

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.