The Chinese tech press is abuzz with slides allegedly from Intel's pre-launch press-deck for the Core Ultra 2-series "Arrow Lake-S." The most sensational of these are Intel's first-party performance claims for the top Core Ultra 9 285K model. There's good news and bad news. Good news first—Intel claims to have made a big leap in energy efficiency with "Arrow Lake," and the 285K should offer gaming performance comparable to the current Core i9-14900K at around 80 W lower power draw for the processor. But then there in lies the bad news—despite claimed IPC gains for the "Lion Cove" P-core, and rumored clock speeds being on par with the "Raptor Cove" P-cores on the i9-14900K, the 285K is barely any faster than its predecessor in absolute terms.

In its first party testing, when averaged across 12 game tests, which we used Google optical translation to make out the titles of, Intel used performance numbers of the i9-14900K as the mean. The 285K beats the i9-14900K in only four games—Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, Age of Mythology Retold, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, and F1 23. It's on-par with the i9-14900K in Red Dead Redemption 2, Total War: Pharaoh, Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Rainbow Six Siege. It's slower than the i9-14900K in Far Cry 6, FF XIV, F1 24, Red Dead Redemption 2. Averaged across this bench, the Core Ultra 9 285K ends up roughly on par with the Core i9-14900K in gaming. Intel also compared the 285K to AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X, and interestingly, even the Ryzen 9 7950X3D.

NVIDIA quietly released a variant of the GeForce RTX 4070 featuring slower 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory, replacing the 21 Gbps GDDR6X that the original RTX 4070 comes with. Wccftech has access to a GALAX branded RTX 4070 GDDR6, and put it through benchmarks focused on comparing it to a regular RTX 4070. Memory type and speed are the only changes in specs, the core-configuration isn't changed, nor is the GPU clock speed. Wccftech's testing shows that the RTX 4070 GDDR6 measures within 0-1% slower than the RTX 4070 (GDDR6X) at 1080p and 1440p resolutions; while the difference between the two is about 2% at 4K Ultra HD.

Wccftech's test-bed is comprehensive, with 27 game tests, each across 3 resolutions; and 7 synthetic tests. The synthetic tests are mainly part of the 3DMark test suite, including Speed Way, Fire Strike, Time Spy, Port Royal, and their presets. Here, the RTX 4070 GDDR6 is nearly identical in performance, with a 0-0.2% delta with the RTX 4070 GDDR6X. In the game tests, performance varies by resolution. 1080p has 0-1% performance delta, with the only noteworthy outliers being "Metro Exodus" (extreme preset), where the RTX 4070 GDDR6 loses 4.2%, and "Alan Wake 2," where it loses 2.3%.

It's time to mana-fest the spirit of adventure with Square Enix's highly anticipated action role-playing game, Visions of Mana, launching today in the cloud. Members can also head to a galaxy far, far away, from the comfort of their homes, with the power of the cloud and Ubisoft's Star Wars Outlaws, with early access available on GeForce NOW. Plus, be among the first to get early access to the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Open Beta on GeForce NOW without having to wait around for downloads - early access runs Aug. 30-Sept. 4 for those who preorder the game. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will join the cloud when the full game is released Oct. 25. These triple-A titles are part of 26 titles joining the GeForce NOW library of over 2,000 games this week.

Cloudy With a Chance of Mana
Visions of Mana details a whimsical journey through the enchanting world of Mana. Step into the shoes of Val, a curious young man on an epic quest to escort his childhood friend Hina to the sacred Tree of Mana. Along the way, encounter a colorful cast of characters and face off against endearing yet formidable enemies. The game's combat system blends action and strategy for real-time battles where party members can be switched on the fly. Different party members offer unique skills, such as Val's powerful sword strikes or magical spells cast by Careena's dragon companion Ramcoh. Plus, traverse the game's expansive, semi-open world on Pikuls - adorable, rideable creatures that can also ram through enemies.

According to the discovery made by @ghost_motley on X/Twitter, we have information that MSI is starting to roll out BIOS updates to accommodate Intel's Application Optimization called APO shortly. This update, however, comes with significant restrictions. Intel APO, designed to enhance performance, is exclusively compatible with 14th Gen Intel CPUs, leaving owners of previous-generation Intel processors, mainly the closely comparable 13th Gen, without this benefit. Intel's APO is an extension of its Dynamic Tuning Technology (DTT) specifically for gaming. It is available on select 14th Gen Core processors like the i9-14900K/KF, enhancing workload distribution across hardware resources like P-cores and optimizing them for peak frequencies.

As noted, the current rollout of Intel APO support is limited, namely to the Intel Core i7-14700K, i7-14700KF, i9-14900K, and i9-14900KF, excluding the Core i5 series. This omission is significant given APO's focus on boosting gaming performance, a feature that would be highly beneficial to Core i5 users. However, the feature is currently supported by only two games: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Metro Exodus. The frame rate improvements in Rainbow can be as high as 13% while also boosting Metro Exodus FPS by 16%. Whether we will see more APO-optimized games or not, owners of MSI motherboards have received their updates and are ready to enjoy the FPS increase.

"Join us on March 30th at 8 A.M. Pacific Time to see Intel Arc graphics take center stage and get a first look at our new discrete graphics for laptops." - is the statement that Intel posted on its website regarding the launch of its upcoming Arc Alchemist GPUs for laptops. While we await the final reveal of the desktop Arc Alchemist graphics cards, it looks like team blue will give us a very first look at Arc discrete graphics cards for laptops. Regarding the performance numbers, Intel's Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group, posted a quick performance claim stating that the Intel Arc A370M mobile GPU will feature two-fold performance improvement over integrated GPU designs found in Intel Core i7-12700H processor.

Lisa PearceWhat performance can we expect from the first product to make it to market, the Intel Arc A370M?
The first Intel Arc discrete graphics products to enter the mobile market will enable up to a 2X improvement in graphics performance vs. integrated graphics alone while maintaining similar form factors.
2x performance claim based on average FPS at 1080p Medium with Metro Exodus (DX12) as of March 3, 2022 as the beginning of the disclosure. Intel Arc system: Intel Core i7-12700H processor 14C/20T, 32 GB 4800Mhz system memory, Intel Arc A370M graphics, Windows 11 Pro v10.0.22000, Preproduction driver as of March 2022, total system TDP 40 W. Intel Core system: Intel Core i71280P 14C/20T, 32 GB 4800 MHz system memory, Iris Xe integrated graphics, Windows 11 Pro 21H2 22000.493, Driver version 30.0.101.1029, total system TDP 28 W.

Amazon announced its Luna game streaming service as a competitor to Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud back in 2020. Amazon is now launching the service for Prime members with a free seven-day trial available from June 21st. This is the first time the service will be offered to those without an early access invite and will cost 5.99 USD per month after the trial has expired. The Luna game library includes titles from Capcom, 505 Games, and Team 17 with some highlights including Control, GRID, and Metro Exodus. Ubisoft games will also be offered however they are separate from the base library and cost 15 USD per month. Amazon is also offering the Luna controller for the first time with a limited 30% discount bringing the cost to 48.99 USD.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 466.27 WHQL adds optimization for Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition. This includes additional raytraced effects, and support for DLSS 2.1. Optimization is also added for Mass Effect Legendary Edition and Resident Evil Village. The drivers also add support for the DirectX 12 Agility SDK, and Shader Model 6.6.

The drivers also confirm the existence of a new hardware revision of the GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB graphics card, which will be generally available from mid-May, 2021. These cards will require at least GeForce 466.24. The revision will likely come with a different device ID from the original RTX 3060 12 GB, and will re-engage the hash-rate limiter. Read more about this card in our article from earlier this week, here. A handful bugs were also fixed. These include performance issues related to NVIDIA Reflex and Rainbow Six Siege; an artificial FPS cap when V-Sync is off on displays connected via HDMI 2.1; and an application crash with RigidGems Prepar3D. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 466.27 WHQL

4A Games is one of those rare developers that seemingly gives more to its fans and game-owners than it takes. The company has just announced they're readying a new, Enhanced Edition version of Metro Exodus - receiving significant graphical updates that are mostly focused on added raytracing capabilities. The new version of the game will be made available for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles - but carries additional features in the all-powerful PC version, including Ray Traced Reflections (which will not be included in the console version) as well as support for NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0, the best iteration of the technology so far.

According to the developer, the engine changes are so substantial that they couldn't push it as a simple update/game patch - the entire game has had to be recompiled to allow for the seamless integration of the new features. 4A Games announced that the new, Enhanced Edition, which will be available later this year, will be available for all Metro Exodus owners as a free, additional download. The new version makes such extensive usage of raytracing - every light source is now raytraced, per-pixel-raytraced global illumination, and a plethora of other changes you can see in the feature comparative below - that the company is now listing a raytracing-capable GPU (whether AMD or NVIDIA) as the minimum requirement. Now if only one could find decent raytracing graphics cards readily available...

Intel at a January 11, 2021 online media event (which we live-blogged here) revealed more information about its 11th Generation Core "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processor family. These chips succeed the 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake-S," and are built on the same Socket LGA1200 package, retaining backwards compatibility with Intel 400-series chipset motherboards with firmware updates; and native support with the upcoming Intel 500-series chipset motherboards. Intel in its media event confirmed that the top Core i9-11900K is an 8-core/16-thread processor, which will deliver the highest PC gaming performance possible when it comes out.

In its media event, Intel revealed a side-by-side comparison of the i9-11900K with a machine powered by the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core processor, where it's shown offering a mostly mid-single-digit-percentage performance lead over the AMD chip. In the "Metro Exodus" benchmark prominently highlighted in the Intel event, the i9-11900K is shown offering an average frame-rate of 156.54 FPS compared to 147.43 FPS of the 5900X (a 6.17% gain). VideoCardz tweeted a leaked Intel presentation slide with many more game test results where Intel compared the two chips. Intel's play with marketing "Rocket Lake-S" to gamers and PC enthusiasts will hence ride on the back of gaming performance leadership, and future-proofing against the new wave of productivity apps that leverage AI deep-learning, as "Rocket Lake-S" features DLBoost VNNI extensions that accelerate deep-learning neural-net building, training, and AI inference performance.

Intel has apparently taken the CES opportunity to showcase its upcoming Rocket Lake-S CPU in gaming against one of AMD's best mainstream CPUs, packing 12 cores - although the specific model remains undisclosed. Geeknetics shared screen-grabs from the demo, done inside Metro Exodus, where the undisclosed Intel 8-core Rocket Lake-S is shown achieving higher average frame-rates compared to the AMD solution (an average of 156.54 FPS for Intel, against 147.43 FPS for AMD). The CPUs were paired with an NVIDIA RTX 3080 graphics card - and in case you're wondering whether NVIDIA's Resizable BAR capabilities have been activated for this Rocket Lake-S system, no information on that was available at time of writing (the question is raised since Intel has already announced support for the feature with NVIDIA GPUs on Tiger Lake-H).

It's only tomorrow that reviewers will take the lids off AMD's latest and greatest Navi-powered graphics cards, but it's hard to keep a secret such as this... well... secret. Case in point: Videocardz has accessed some leaked slides from the presentation AMD has given to its partners, and these shed some light on what raytracing performance users can expect from AMD's RX 6800 XT, the card that's meant to bring the fight to NVIDIA's RTX 3080 graphics card. AMD's RDNA2 features support for hardware-accelerated raytracing from the get go, with every CU receiving on additional hardware piece: a Ray Accelerator. As such, the RX 6800 XT, with its 72 enabled CUs, features 72 Ray Accelerators; the RX 6800, with its 60 CUs, features 60 of these Ray Accelerators.

The RX 6800 XT was tested in five titles: Battlefield V, Call of Duty MW, Crysis Remastered, Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. At 1440p resolution with Ultra Settings and DXR options enabled according to the game, AMD claims an RX 6800 XT paired with their Ryzen 9 5900X can deliver an average of 70 FPS on Battlefield V; 95 FPS on Call of Duty MW; 90 FPS in Crysis Remastered; 67 FPS in Metro Exodus; and 82 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. These results are, obviously, not comparable to our own results in previous NVIDIA RTX reviews; there's just too many variables in the system to make that a worthwhile comparison. You'll just have to wait for our own review in our normalized test bench so you can see where exactly does AMD's latest stand against NVIDIA.

The 9.75 TFLOPs figure in the leaked specifications slide of the Radeon RX 5700 XT "Navi" graphics card from earlier today got many guessing if AMD is essentially putting RX Vega-level performance into a GPU that sips a fraction of its power. It turns out that AMD's claim of the RX 5700 XT being faster than the GeForce RTX 2070 wasn't just specific to the odd super-optimized game title, but a whole selection of games, many of which some with GameWorks varnish, some of which even support NVIDIA RTX.

AMD's [leaked] performance slide for the Radeon RX 5700 XT sees the card beat the RTX 2070 in "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey," "Battlefield V," "CoD: Black Ops 4," "Far Cry: New Dawn," "Metro Exodus," Tom Clancy's "The Division 2," "The Witcher 3," and Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon: Wildlands." The card is also striking distance behind the RTX 2070 at "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," and Sid Meier's "Civilisation 6." All games in this slide are tested at 1440p resolution, with in-game settings maxed out (although we're waiting to read the Endnotes on whether "max out" in NVIDIA's context means turning on RTX on some of these games). The RX 5070 XT beats the RTX 2070 by as much as 22 percent in "Battlefield V," and 15 percent in "Metro Exodus," and is claimed to be within single-digit percentage ahead of the RTX 2070. There's another picture of the RX 5070 XT reference board in this slide, and unless we're mistaken, we spy two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. We'll learn more about this card in a few hours from now.

NVIDIA today announced that it is extending DXR (DirectX Raytracing) support to several GeForce GTX graphics models beyond its GeForce RTX series. These include the GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1070, and GTX 1060 6 GB. The GTX 1060 3 GB and lower "Pascal" models don't support DXR, nor do older generations of NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA has implemented real-time raytracing on GPUs without specialized components such as RT cores or tensor cores, by essentially implementing the rendering path through shaders, in this case, CUDA cores. DXR support will be added through a new GeForce graphics driver later today.

The GPU's CUDA cores now have to calculate BVR, intersection, reflection, and refraction. The GTX 16-series chips have an edge over "Pascal" despite lacking RT cores, as the "Turing" CUDA cores support concurrent INT and FP execution, allowing more work to be done per clock. NVIDIA in a detailed presentation listed out the kinds of real-time ray-tracing effects available by the DXR API, namely reflections, shadows, advanced reflections and shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination (unbaked), and combinations of these. The company put out detailed performance numbers for a selection of GTX 10-series and GTX 16-series GPUs, and compared them to RTX 20-series SKUs that have specialized hardware for DXR.Update: Article updated with additional test data from NVIDIA.

NVIDIA had their customary GTC keynote ending mere minutes ago, and it was one of the longer keynotes clocking in at nearly three hours in length. There were some fascinating demos and features shown off, especially in the realm of robotics and machine learning, as well as new hardware as it pertains to AI and cars with the all-new Jetson Nano. It would be fair to say, however, that the vast majority of the keynote was targeting developers and researchers, as usually is the case at GTC. However, something came up in between which caught us by surprise, and no doubt is a pleasant update to most of us here on TechPowerUp.

Following AMD's claims on software-based real-time ray tracing in games, and Crytek's Neon Noir real-time ray tracing demo for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, it makes sense in hindsight that NVIDIA would allow rudimentary DXR ray tracing support to older hardware that do not support RT cores. In particular, an upcoming drivers update next month will allow DXR support for 10-series Pascal-microarchitecture graphics cards (GTX 1060 6 GB and higher), as well as the newly announced GTX 16-series Turing-microarchitecture GPUs (GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Ti). The announcement comes with a caveat letting people know to not expect RTX support (think lower number of ray traces, and possibly no secondary/tertiary effects), and this DXR mode will only be supported in Unity and Unreal game engines for now. More to come, with details past the break.

NVIDIA has updated their RTX game bundle, which offers users games whenever they purchase an elligible RTX graphics card. The bundle previously offered wither Anthem or Battlefield V, for gamers who purchased the RTX 2060 or 2070 graphics card; and both games for buyers of the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. Now, gamers who purchase NVIDIA's highest-performacne graphics cards also get to take Metro Exodus home, and buyers of the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 can now choose that game over the others.

There are news reports going around today about how physical sales of Bioware's Anthem is much worse than their previous title, Mass Effect Andromeda. Nearly all these reports are using the two UK sales metrics, as of February 23, to make this claim, stating that Anthem sold less than 50% the physical copies relative of ME Andromeda. This is a story no doubt, but not big enough to where people are claiming this to be the end of the studio by itself. For one, ME Andromeda had the luxury of being the new entry into the massively popular Mass Effect franchise, which many were desperate for more. Secondly, Anthem is a predominantly online game released in 2019 wherein such games tend to get more digital sales- especially on Origin for PC.

The good news for Anthem (and also EA as well as Bioware) is the game still topped both charts, as seen in the images below courtesy Metro UK. It sold more physical copies compared the other new entries last week- Far Cry: New Dawn and Metro Exodus- in the UK, which tends to be representative of the entire physical sales world too. Indeed, Anthem on the two major consoles were individually also the best sellers too, so there remains hope for the game. Despite mediocre reviews and interest online, perhaps this will be enough for continued support of the game post-release, and for Bioware to get enough momentum to push out more games in the future, and ideally more, better single-player games too.

We reported earlier this month how Steam users were resorting to review bombing of the previous game entries in the Metro franchise, mostly driven by Deep Silver/Koch Media's decision to take Metro Exodus over to the Epic Games Store for a timed exclusive. 4A developers commented on how this could impact further game development on the PC platform, and that ended up being more kindling to the fire despite some language communication gaps in play. Metro Exodus has since launched, and has been getting reviews from the media and players alike, with the former mostly agreeing it is a good game, but not necessarily as good as the previous entries were. The latter, however, is where things got interesting- especially on Steam.

For those who were able to add the game to their Steam library before it got moved, and there are a lot of those too given Metro Exodus rose to the top spot of best selling titles once that news broke, the game appears to be more than satisfactory at first glance. While many were expecting users to review bomb the title negatively again, the current status of the game on Steam is "Very Positive" as far as user reviews go. Discussions have been mostly on point as well, until you dig deeper. The most helpful reviews, as rated by other Steam users, are really just a dig at the Epic Games Store, with language used that is less mature than the game rating itself. Newer reviews continue to do the same, so perhaps this was an attempt by many to appease the game publisher by leaving positive reviews of the game, but still making it more about the Epic Games store than the game itself. Not the best way to go about things, but it is still better than review bombing the game.

New game releases with newly-revamped Denuvo protection, and new cracked versions of those games - all in less than five days after release. For now, only Metro Exodus is cracked, though the fact that Far Cry New Dawn makes use of the same version does little to inspire confidence in its continued resistance. The tale is becoming older and older, and the question in most anyone's mind is whether there is actually any financial incentive for developers/publishers to go after Denuvo's protections against cheaper option, because it seems that Denuvo is failing to guarantee even that brief time-window that is always brought about when it comes to new game releases.

Most Denuvo-protected games have been cracked in less than a week after release, and things haven't been improving for some time now. Whether or not it makes sense to keep a team of software engineers working on such a product is also a question that would be well-posed to Denuvo. But not only Denuvo and its DRM solutions are falling short, since it seems that Microsoft's own UWP-protected Crackdown 3, which finally released after a very early 2015 reveal, has also been cracked.

NVIDIA, in a blog post/Q&A on its DLSS technology, promised implementation and image quality improvements on its Metro Exodus rendition of the technology. If you'll remember, AMD recently vouched for other, non-proprietary ways of achieving desired quality of AA technology across resolutions such as TAA and SMAA, saying that DLSS introduces "(...) image artefacts caused by the upscaling and harsh sharpening." NVIDIA in its blog post has dissected DLSS in its implementation, also clarifying some lingering questions on the technology and its resolution limitations that some us here at TPU had already wondered about.

The blog post describes some of the limitations in DLSS technology, and why exactly image quality issues might be popping out here and there in titles. As we knew from NVIDIA's initial RTX press briefing, DLSS basically works on top of an NVIDIA neural network. Titled the NGX, it processes millions of frames from a single game at varying resolutions, with DLSS, and compares it to a given "ground truth image" - the highest quality possible output sans any shenanigans, generated from just pure raw processing power. The objective is to train the network towards generating this image without the performance cost. This DLSS model is then made available for NVIDIA's client to download and to be run at your local RTX graphics card level, which is why DLSS image quality can be improved with time. And it also helps explain why closed implementations of the technology, such as 3D Mark's Port Royal benchmark, show such incredible image quality scenarios compared to, say, Metro Exodus - there is a very, very limited number of frames that the neural network needs to process towards achieving the best image quality.Forumites: This is an Editorial

The drama surrounding Metro Exodus continues unabated. Deep Silver which has ownership over the IP, was the one that decided to pull Metro Exodus from Steam in favor of a 1-year timed exclusivity deal on the Epic Games Store. If you've been following the drama thus far this is all public information. Furthermore, it was speculated that this move was made at the very last minute considering other retailers were originally advertising preorders as being Steam keys for quite some time right up until the news of the digital platform switch broke. Lending more credence to the fact this was a disruptive switch at the last minute is the physical packaging which was not altered for the game's launch and instead has a sticker covering the Steam logo. Truly for such an outstanding game, the mess of its launch should be remembered as a great example of how not to release a game.

"Metro Exodus" is the week's big AAA PC launch, and the latest entry to the post-apocalyptic horror-survival shooter franchise by 4A Games. The Ukrainian studio recently pulled the game from Steam and made it an exclusive with rival DRM platform Epic Games, in pursuit of a higher revenue-share. This invited inexplicable hatred from Steam users, who appear to have review-bombed the game on review ratings aggregator Metacritic.

Metacritic presents averages of reviews by media publications and user-reviews side-by-side. This is vital as it helps uninformed or undecided gamers know if a game is overrated by the media. In case of "Exodus," Much of the 0-rated user-reviews include lines that criticize the game's non-availability on Steam or its withdrawal from the platform. The Metacritic review-bombing is the latest episode in a long saga of animosity between Steam users and "Exodus" developer 4A Games. 4A Games did initially solicit pre-orders for the game on Steam, and abruptly stopped its sales late-January. Those who had pre-ordered would continue to receive the game and its updates. 4A muddied the waters further by responding to initial criticism from Steam users by threatening to desert the PC platform as a whole, inviting more bile from some really angry gamers. The game received "generally positive" reviews from professional game reviewers.

For those who got lucky enough to pre-order Metro Exodus on Steam before its defection to the Epic Games store are now able to pre-load the title in preparation for its launch. It will require 51 GB of storage space, so if your connection is a bit slower, you'll be waiting a while for it to download, which means the Steam pre-load period quite beneficial. For those that bought the title elsewhere and have to go through the Epic Game store, you will have to wait for the official launch since the platform does not currently support preloading of soon to be released games. This will likely make those with slower connections a bit irked since it means they will be waiting even longer to play the title come release day.

The fact Metro Exodus was pulled from Steam but can still be preloaded on the platform, while the Epic Game store will force users to wait will likely just add to the drama and controversy. However, if you step away for a moment and focus on the game itself one thing remains breathtakingly clear, the game is quite astonishing in regards to the graphics, even with RTX disabled. You can take a closer look for yourself in our performance analysis of Metro Exodus.

AMD today made available the latest version of their Radeon software drivers, Adrenalin Edition 19.2.2, for supported graphics solutions. This brings with it support for the recently released Radeon VII graphics card, in addition to equally new and upcoming game titles including Metro Exodus, Far Cry New Dawn, the Civ VI: Gathering Storm expansion, and Crackdown 3. More pleasing to many users no doubt will be the large list of fixed issues, including a timely Alt + Tab shortcut on a DisplayPort monitor and plenty of bug fixes related to Radeon Wattman as it pertains to the Radeon VII. The drivers are up for download at the link below, hosted directly on TechPowerUp for your convenience, and the full change log is available past the break for those interested.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.2.2

TechPowerUp readers today were greeted to our PC port analysis of Metro Exodus, which also contained a dedicated section on NVIDIA RTX and DLSS technologies. The former brings in real-time ray tracing support to an already graphically-intensive game, and the latter attempts to assuage the performance hit via NVIDIA's new proprietary alternative to more-traditional anti-aliasing. There was definitely a bump in performance from DLSS when enabled, however we also noted some head-scratching limitations on when and how it can even be enabled, depending on the in-game resolution and RTX GPU employed. We then set about testing DLSS on Battlefield V, which was also available from today, and it was then that we noticed a trend.

Take Metro Exodus first, with the relevant notes in the first image below. DLSS can only be turned on for a specific combination of RTX GPUs ranging from the RTX 2060 to the RTX 2080 Ti, but NVIDIA appear to be limiting users to a class-based system. Users with the RTX 2060, for example, can't even use DLSS at 4K and, more egregiously, owners of the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti can not enjoy RTX and DLSS simultaneously at the most popular in-game resolution of 1920x1080, which would be useful to reach high FPS rates on 144 Hz monitors. Battlefield V has a similar, and yet even more divided system wherein the gaming flagship RTX 2080 Ti can not be used with RTX and DLSS at even 1440p, as seen in the second image below. This brought us back to Final Fantasy XV's own DLSS implementation last year, which was all or nothing at 4K resolution only. What could have prompted NVIDIA to carry this out? We speculate further past the break.

Update 2: February 5th, 2019: A post on TwitLonger from the official @MetroVideoGame handle has looked to bring a more positive outlook to this whole scenario, in an attempt to bridge the gap between a lone developer's sentiment and the entire 4A Games studio. The post follows:

The recent decision to move Metro Exodus from Steam to the Epic Game Store was made by Koch Media / Deep Silver alone.

The recent comments made by a member of the 4A Games development team do not reflect Deep Silver's or 4A Games' view on the future of the franchise. They do reflect the hurt and disappointment of a passionate individual who has seen what was previously nothing but positive goodwill towards his work turn to controversy due to a business decision he had no control over. We respectfully ask that any and all valid feedback over this decision is directed at Koch Media / Deep Silver, and not the developers at 4A Games.

The future release strategy of the Metro series lies with Koch Media / Deep Silver. Our decision to partner with Epic Games was based on the goal of investing in the future of the series and our development partner at 4A Games. We have every intention of continuing this franchise, and a PC version will always be at the heart of our plans.