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

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

AMD has released its latest version of AMD Software Adrenalin drivers, version 24.8.1 WHQL. The latest drivers update adds game optimizations for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Open Beta, Concord, FINAL FANTASY XVI, and Star Wars Outlaws, as well as expands HYPR-Tune support. It also adds Anti-Lag 2 support for Ghost of Tsushima DIRECTOR'S CUT and adds support and optimizations for Amuse 2.1 with FLUX.1 model on select Radeon, Radeon PRO and Ryzen AI series products.

AMD also fixed several issues seen with previous drivers, including intermittent application crash or driver timeout in Black Myth: Wukong, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess on some Radeon RX 6600 and 6700 series GPUs, and Pacific Drive or KINGDOM HEARTS -HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX-. It also fixes artifacts in games like Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales or Rust, improves "Optimizing Shaders" time when launching Forza Motorsport, and fixes issues with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings for some OpenGL applications. There are also several known issues, and AMD also issued an important note that it is working with the developers of Star Wars Outlaws to address an intermittent corruption issue that occurs after changing certain in-game graphics settings, which can now be resolved by relaunching the game.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 24.8.1 WHQL

Award-winning embedded solutions provider AAEON (stock code: 6579) has announced the launch of the RICO-MX8P, an NXP i.MX 8M Plus-powered fanless single-board built on the Pico-ITX Plus form factor. Utilizing the i.MX 8M Plus, the RICO-MX8P leverages a platform comprised of a quad-core Arm Cortex -A53 processor, a secondary core Arm Cortex M7, and an optional Neural Processing Unit (NPU) offering up to 2.3 TOPS of inference performance.

Equipped with an integrated Vivante GC7000 UltraLite 3D GPU, a dedicated VPU, MIPI DSI interface, and an HDMI 2.0 port, it is clear AAEON is positioning the RICO-MX8P as a candidate for multimedia applications, with digital signage, smart kiosk, and interactive Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising earmarked as potential uses. Further benefits to such use are evident from the board's support for APIs like OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan, and OpenCL 1.2, alongside its multiformat encoding and decoding capabilities.

While we are all used to having a system with a CPU, GPU, and, recently, NPU—X-Silicon Inc. (XSi), a startup founded by former Silicon Valley veterans—has unveiled an interesting RISC-V processor that can simultaneously handle CPU, GPU, and NPU workloads in a chip. This innovative chip architecture, which will be open-source, aims to provide a flexible and efficient solution for a wide range of applications, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, automotive systems, and IoT devices. The new microprocessor combines a RISC-V CPU core with vector capabilities and GPU acceleration into a single chip, creating a versatile all-in-one processor. By integrating the functionality of a CPU and GPU into a single core, X-Silicon's design offers several advantages over traditional architectures. The chip utilizes the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) for both CPU and GPU operations, running a single instruction stream. This approach promises lower memory footprint execution and improved efficiency, as there is no need to copy data between separate CPU and GPU memory spaces.

Called the C-GPU architecture, X-Silicon uses RISC-V Vector Core, which has 16 32-bit FPUs and a Scaler ALU for processing regular integers as well as floating point instructions. A unified instruction decoder feeds the cores, which are connected to a thread scheduler, texture unit, rasterizer, clipping engine, neural engine, and pixel processors. All is fed into a frame buffer, which feeds the video engine for video output. The setup of the cores allows the users to program each core individually for HPC, AI, video, or graphics workloads. Without software, there is no usable chip, which prompts X-Silicon to work on OpenGL ES, Vulkan, Mesa, and OpenCL APIs. Additionally, the company plans to release a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for direct chip programming. According to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry has been seeking an open-standard GPU that is flexible and scalable enough to support various markets. X-Silicon's CPU/GPU hybrid chip aims to address this need by providing manufacturers with a single, open-chip design that can handle any desired workload. The XSi gave no timeline, but it has plans to distribute the IP to OEMs and hyperscalers, so the first silicon is still away.

HWiNFO v7.73-5370 Beta was released yesterday—the newly updated version includes a fully integrated On-Screen Display (OSD) feature. In the past, users have had to rely on external tools—for example; RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS)—to get vital information displayed on their monitor(s) of choice. Martin, HWiNFO's main author, revealed that this new addition is based on a Team Blue toolset—his February 13 official forum post stated: "(this) feature is based on Intel PresentMon and allows showing any value as a text or graph (with multiple values). Position, text font, size, weight and colors can be individually defined. It should work with any engine like DirectX 11, 12, OpenGL, Vulkan. The OSD is automatically placed over the most graphics intensive application currently running but it can also be manually targeted." Five days later he followed up with further information—HWInfo64's new OSD is "available in HWiNFO64 only," therefore making it incompatible with Windows XP. Similarly, MSI's Afterburner 4.6.6 Beta landed a week and a bit ago, without support for Microsoft's 2001-vintage operating system.

Martin reckons that the change could affect Windows Vista users: "Use legacy HWiNFO32 on these systems. We don't anticipate that these systems will benefit from 64-bit applications, nor require support of latest HWiNFO64 versions. So the impact of this (sad) limitation should be minimal. In case there will be a reasonable demand for new versions of HWiNFO64 on XP64 it's still possible to build such versions (without OSD support), but currently we don't expect to make such extra effort." Additionally, the popular monitoring application's latest upgrade brings enhanced sensor monitoring for ASUS NUC systems, improved health monitoring on a selection of NVMe drives (connected via Intel RST), and enhanced sensor monitoring on the ASUS TUF GAMING Z790-PRO WIFI motherboard model.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the latest roadmap milestone for Vulkan, the cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. The Vulkan roadmap targets the "immersive graphics" market, made up of mid- to high-end smartphones, tablets, laptops, consoles, and desktop devices. The Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone captures a set of capabilities that are expected to be supported in new products for that market, beginning in 2024. The roadmap specification provides a significant increase in functionality for the targeted devices and sets the evolutionary direction of the API, including both new hardware capabilities and improvements to the programming model for Vulkan developers.

Vulkan Roadmap 2024 is the second milestone release on the Vulkan Roadmap. Products that support it must be Vulkan 1.3 conformant and support the extensions and capabilities defined in both the 2022 and 2024 Roadmap specifications. Vulkan roadmap specifications use the Vulkan Profile mechanism to help developers build portable Vulkan applications; roadmap requirements are expressed in machine-readable JSON files, and tooling in the Vulkan SDK auto-generates code that makes it easy for developers to query for and enable profile support in their applications.

Moore Threads latest driver update, 230.40.0.1, is a noteworthy advancement, bringing many improvements and new features, most significantly introducing OpenGL 3.3 support. This inclusion is crucial, as this API was previously incompatible with MTT S70 and S80 GPUs, highlighting MTT's commitment to broadening user experience across various platforms and games. Moreover, the update offers substantial performance enhancements, with notable increases in frame rates in popular games. Valorant supposedly gets a 40% FPS improvement at 1080p, while Project CARS brings a 10% increase. Game engines such as CryEngine v5.7 also receive a 40% performance uplift. However, the release of only percentage improvements without specific framerate values calls for measured optimism, as the tangible impact on playability is yet to be assessed.

Equally important in this update is the emphasis on stability, with many popular titles seeing enhancements for a smoother and more reliable gaming experience. This focus underscores MTT's dedication to maintaining a robust and stable gaming environment on the Windows 10 operating system. Integrating 20 fixes and ongoing resolutions to existing issues mark this update as crucial for users aiming for a refined and seamless experience in graphics-intensive applications and games. The amalgamation of enhanced compatibility, heightened performance, and bolstered stability in this update is pivotal for users looking to maximize graphic and gaming capabilities.

Thanks to the latest report from Phoronix, we know that Intel is working on supporting the latest "Xe2" graphics architecture for their upcoming Lunar Lake processors. Today, the latest enablement comes in the Mesa Linux drivers. By employing a new technique that allows for importing prior-generation XML files within the Intel Mesa driver code, Intel engineers have managed to streamline the overall file size. This is significant not just for the efficiency it brings but also because it signifies the beginning of work on enabling Xe2 graphics support. It suggests a thoughtful approach to building upon existing architectures, making it easier to adapt and evolve the software support for each new generation of Intel graphics.

Even though we are at the early stage and Lunar Lake is far away, the progress on Xe2 doesn't stop at Mesa driver changes. There is already some work at the kernel level, and new merge requests for draft compiler changes and shader compiler patches have also been spotted. This proactive development strategy positions Intel well in offering robust open-source graphics support for Linux, and it sends a strong signal to the developer community about Intel's dedication to the platform. After the Linux kernel driver works, this Mesa driver will enable better OpenGL/Vulkan API compatibility, so Lunar Lake arrives with proper software support.

Ampere Computing, known for its Altra (Max) and upcoming AmpereOne families of AArch64 server processors tailored for data centers, has released a guide for enthusiasts on running Steam for Linux on these ARM64 processors. This includes using Steam Play (Proton) to play Windows games on these Linux-powered servers. Over the summer, Ampere Computing introduced a GitHub repository detailing the process of running Steam for Linux on their AArch64 platforms, including Steam Play/Proton. While the guide is primarily designed for Ampere Altra/Altra Max and AmpereOne hardware, it can be adapted for other 64-bit Arm platforms. However, a powerful processor is essential to appreciate the gaming experience truly. Additionally, for the 3D OpenGL/Vulkan graphics to function optimally, an Ampere workstation system is more suitable than a headless server.

The guide recommends the Ampere Altra Developer platform paired with an NVIDIA RTX A6000 series graphics card, which supports AArch64 proprietary drivers. The guide uses Box86 and Box64 to run Steam x86 binaries and other x86/x86-64 games for emulation. While there are other options like FEX-Emu and Hangover to enhance the Linux binary experience on AArch64, Box86/Box64 is the preferred choice for gaming on Ampere workstations, as indicated by its mention in Ampere Computing's Once the AArch64 Linux graphics drivers are accelerated and Box86/Box64 emulation is set up, users can install Steam for Linux. By activating Proton within Steam, it becomes feasible to play Windows-exclusive x86/x86-64 games on Ampere AArch64 workstations or server processors. However, the guide doesn't provide insights into the performance of such a configuration.

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

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

Support for AMD's Smart Access Memory and the overarching Resizable BAR technologies has been removed from the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver as of today's Mesa 22.3.7 release. The comment in the announcement simply reads, "Disable Smart Access Memory because CPU access has large overhead." The nail in the coffin seems to have been this bug ticket submitted last month for the game Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1, in which the user reported the game running oddly slow on their RX 6600 while previously they had no issues on the much older R9 380. The solution provided was to simply disable ReBAR/SAM either with radeonsi_disable_sam=true or via UEFI. In the comments of the ticket lead RadeonSI developer Marek Olšák states, "We've never tested SAM with radeonsi, and it's not necessary there."

Apparently the performance advantages weren't panning out for RadeonSI, and since direct optimizations of these features was not a primary goal the decision was made to cut them out. Attempts to optimize SAM with RadeonSI date as far back as December 2020 and Mesa 21.0, but support for SAM under Linux goes further back. None of the changes to RadeonSI will affect other drivers such as RADV, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver, and this code change is limited to only the RadeonSI OpenGL driver.

AMD on Tuesday released the AMD Software Adrenalin 22.7.1 drivers, which include several major updates to the feature-set. To begin with, AMD has significantly updated its OpenGL ICD (installable client driver), which can have an incredible 79 percent increase in frame-rates at 4K with "Fabulous" settings, as measured on the flagship RX 6950 XT, and up to 75 percent, as measured on the entry-level RX 6400. Also debuting is AMD Noise Suppression, a new feature that lets you clear out your voice-calls and in-game voice-chats. The software leverages AI to filter out background noises that don't identify as the prominent foreground speech. Radeon Super Resolution support has been extended to RX 5000 series and RX 6000 series GPUs running on Ryzen processor notebooks with Hybrid graphics setups.

Besides these, Adrenalin 22.7.1 adds optimization for "Swordsman Remake," support for Radeon Boost plus VRS with "Elden Ring," "Resident Evil VIII," and "Valorant." The drivers improve support for Windows 11 22H2 Update, and Agility SDK 1.602 and 1.607. A few more Vulkan API extensions are added with this release. Among the handful issues fixed are lower-than-expected F@H performance on RX 6000 series, Auto Undervolt disabling idle-fan-stop; "Hitman 3" freezing when switching between windows in exclusive fullscreen mode; blurry web video upscaling on certain RX 6000 series cards, and Enhanced Sync locking framerates to 15 FPS with video playback on extended monitors.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 22.7.1

An AMD engineering sample CPU with the model name 100-000000593-20_Y has appeared in a couple of graphics rendering tests, paired with an NVIDIA RTX A4000 GPU. The CPU appears to be a 6-core Ryzen 7000-series chip that was fitted to a Gigabyte X670E Aorus Master motherboard. Based on the leaked information that was dug up by @TUM_APISAK, it has a clock speed of 4.4 GHz, but little else is known about the CPU. Basemark might not be the most widely used test out there and both the tests that were run, were GPU rendering tests. However, courtesy of @harukaze5719, we have some graphs comparing the alleged Ryzen 7000-series CPU with a Ryzen 9 5950X which is using the same GPU.

The first test is an OpenGL test where the 6-core CPU beats the 16-core CPU by a not insignificant 9.5 percent overall, but by more than 11 percent when it comes to the minimum frame rate in the benchmark. This is a significant performance lead, although in the Vulcan test, the difference is somewhat smaller with a 7 percent lead for the 6-core CPU. It's unclear how well these tests scale with more CPU cores, so we wouldn't read too much into either of these benchmark results, but it seems like AMD's Zen 4 architecture will deliver on what AMD has promised based on these early tests. We've independently verified that the numbers are in the ballpark of the engineering samples that AMD's partners have today, which means that these numbers haven't been faked in any way. Keep in mind that AMD is still working on its AM5 platform and it's still early days. We understand that AMD has recently fixed a few platform bugs that would've been showstoppers if AMD had launched the AM5 platform with them still present.

AMD for long has been perceived as lagging behind NVIDIA in OpenGL API graphics performance, as is evident in synthetic benchmarks that let you choose between various APIs, such as DirectX 11, DirectX 12, Vulkan, and OpenGL. It's being reported that the company has made a technical breakthrough that could significantly improve OpenGL application performance, bringing Radeon GPUs on par with GeForce in GL applications. Besides a few old games, several productivity applications continue to use OpenGL, such as Adobe Creative Cloud suite; as well as certain 3D renderers.

AMD is incorporating its OpenGL performance enhancement in drivers bound for Windows 11 22H2 (the major release bound for the second half of 2022). With this release, Microsoft is debuting WDDM 3.1, and AMD is already out with a Preview driver meant for Windows Insiders, bearing version 31.0.12000.20010. A quick Unigine Valley benchmark run with the OpenGL renderer reveals an incredible 49.5% increase in frame-rates, bringing the RX 6800 XT sample to performance-levels you'd expect from the RTX 3080. An identical 49.5% frame-rate increase was seen in Unigine Superposition.

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

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

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

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

Online tracking of users happens when 3rd party services collect information about various people and use that to help identify them in the sea of other online persons. This collection of specific information is often called "fingerprinting," and attackers usually exploit it to gain user information. Today, researchers have announced that they managed to use WebGL (Web Graphics Library) to their advantage and create a unique fingerprint for every GPU out there to track users online. This exploit works because every piece of silicon has its own variations and unique characteristics when manufactured, just like each human has a unique fingerprint. Even among the exact processor models, silicon differences make each product distinct. That is the reason why you can not overclock every processor to the same frequency, and binning exists.

What would happen if someone were to precisely explore the differences in GPUs and use those differences to identify online users by those characteristics? This is exactly what researchers that created DrawnApart thought of. Using WebGL, they run a GPU workload that identifies more than 176 measurements across 16 data collection places. This is done using vertex operations in GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language), where workloads are prevented from random distribution on the network of processing units. DrawnApart can measure and record the time to complete vertex renders, record the exact route that the rendering took, handle stall functions, and much more. This enables the framework to give off unique combinations of data turned into fingerprints of GPUs, which can be exploited online. Below you can see the data trace recording of two GPUs (same models) showing variations.

Chinese company Innosilicon Technology has recently announced their Fenghua No.1 high-performance server graphics card. The card features a dual-fan cooling design with HDMI 2.1 and Embedded DisplayPort 1.4 video connectors. The card will utilize a PCIe 4.0 connector and features GDDR6X memory developed by Innosilicon Technology with potential speeds of 21 Gbps. We have seen announcements from Chinese companies with similar products in the past but this recent announcement is the first to include support for a variety of graphics APIs including DirectX. The press release from the company didn't specify the DirectX version supported but also noted that the card will support OpenGL, OpenGLES, OpenCL, and Vulkan which will enable VR, AR, and AI applications.

AMD announced the AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPU, built with the latest AMD RDNA 2 architecture which delivers high-performance GPU acceleration for today's demanding cloud workloads including immersive AAA game experiences, intensive 3D workloads and modern office productivity applications at scale in the cloud.

With its innovative GPU-partitioning capabilities, multi-stream hardware accelerated encoders and 32 GB GDDR6 memory, the AMD Radeon PRO V620 offers dedicated GPU resources that scale to multiple graphics users, helping ensure cost-effective graphics acceleration for a range of workloads. Built using the same GPU architecture that powers the latest generation game consoles and PC game experiences, the AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPU is also designed to develop and deliver immersive AAA game experiences.

The Chinese Electronics company Jingjia Micro have recently completed the tapeout of their JM9 GPU series almost 2 years after they first announced the lineup. The JM9 series will consist of two GPUs with the entry-level JM9231 targeting GTX 1050 performance while the higher-end JM9271 aims for the GTX 1080. The JM9231 is stated to feature a clock speed above 1.5 GHz, 8 GB of GDDR5 memory, and will provide 2 TFLOPS of performance within a 150 W TDP through a PCIe Gen3 x16 interface. The JM9271 increases the clock speed to above 1.8 GHz and is paired with 16 GB of HBM memory which should offer 8 TFLOPS of single-precision performance to rival the GTX 1080. The card manages to do this within a TDP package of 200 W and also includes PCIe Gen4 x16 support. The two cards both support HDMI 2.0 in addition to DisplayPort 1.3 for the JM9231 and DisplayPort 1.4 for the JM9271.

While the JM9271 may target GTX 1080 performance it only features OpenGL and OpenCL API support lacking DirectX or Vulkan compatibility greatly reducing its use for gaming. The cards were originally expected to be available in 2020 but after various delays they are now ready to enter production. These products are highly unlikely to make their way outside of the Chinese mainland and if they did we wouldn't expect them to have much impact on the global market.

Matrox is pleased to announce that the Matrox D-Series D1450 multi-display graphics card is now shipping. Purpose-built to power next-generation video walls, this new single-slot, quad-4K HDMI graphics card enables OEMs, system integrators, and AV installers to easily combine multiple D1450 boards to quickly deploy high-density-output video walls of up 16 synchronized 4K displays. Along with a rich assortment of video wall software and developer tools for advanced custom control and application development, D1450 is ideal for a broad range of commercial and critical 24/7 applications, including control rooms, enterprises, industries, government, military, digital signage, broadcast, and more.
Advanced capabilities

Backed by innovative technology and deep industry expertise, D1450 delivers exceptional video and graphics performance on up to four 4K HDMI monitors from a single-slot card. OEMs, system integrators, and AV professionals can easily add—and synchronize—displays by framelocking up to four D-Series cards via board-to-board framelock cables. In addition, D1450 offers HDCP support to display copy-protected content, as well as Microsoft DirectX 12 and OpenGL support to run the latest professional applications.

Matrox is pleased to announce that the Matrox D-Series D1480 multi-display graphics card is now shipping. Purpose-built to power next-generation video walls, this new single-slot graphics card supports up to four 4Kp60 DisplayPort monitors and can be combined to drive a high-density-output video wall of up 16 synchronized 4K displays. Along with a rich assortment of video wall software and developer tools, the D1480 card enables OEMs, system integrators, and AV installers to deploy high-performance display walls for a broad range of commercial and critical 24/7 applications, including control rooms, enterprises, industries, government, military, digital signage, broadcast, and more.

Backed by innovative technology and deep industry expertise, D1480 delivers exceptional video and graphics performance on up to four 4K DisplayPort monitors from a single-slot card. OEMs, system integrators, and AV professionals can easily add—and synchronize—displays by framelocking up to four D-Series cards via board-to-board framelock cables. In addition, D1480 offers HDCP support to display copy-protected content, as well as Microsoft DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5, and OpenCL 1.2 support to run the latest professional applications.

Microsoft is preparing to add the DirectX API support to WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The latest Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 will virtualize DirectX to Linux applications running on top of it. WSL is a translation layer for Linux apps to run on top of Windows. Unlike Wine, which attempts to translate Direct3D commands to OpenGL, what Microsoft is proposing is a real DirectX interface for apps in WSL, which can essentially talk to hardware (the host's kernel-mode GPU driver) directly.

To this effect, Microsoft introduced the Linux-edition of DXGkrnl, a new kernel-mode driver for Linux that talks to the DXGkrnl driver of the Windows host. With this, Microsoft is promising to expose the full Direct3D 12, DxCore, and DirectML. It will also serve as a conduit for third party APIs, such as OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and CUDA. Microsoft expects to release this feature-packed WSL out with WDDM 2.9 (so a future version of Windows 10).

Matrox is pleased to announce Matrox D-Series, a new family of next-generation, multi-display graphics cards designed to power video walls in commercial and critical 24/7 environments. These new single-slot graphics cards drive up to four 4Kp60 displays and can be easily combined to output up to 16 x 4K monitors for high-density video walls in control rooms, enterprises, industries, government, military, pro A/V, digital signage, security, and more. Matrox D-Series graphics cards will be in action at ISE 2020 (booth 11-D120).

Leveraging a custom-built NVIDIA Quadro embedded GPU, D-Series delivers smooth video playback and graphics performance on up to four high-resolution HDMI or DisplayPort displays. OEMs, system integrators, and AV installers can also combine up to four D-Series cards via board-to-board framelock cables, to drive up to sixteen synchronized 4K displays. In addition, D-Series offers HDCP support for playback of protected audio and video content, as well as Microsoft DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5, and OpenCL 1.2 support to run the latest professional applications.

Imagination Technologies announces the tenth generation of its PowerVR graphics architecture, the IMG A-Series. The fastest GPU IP ever released, IMG A-Series evolves the PowerVR GPU architecture to fulfil the graphics and compute needs of the full spectrum of next-generation devices. Designed to be "The GPU of Everything" IMG A-Series is the ultimate solution for multiple markets, from automotive, AIoT, and computing through to DTV/STB/OTT, mobile and server.

The IMG A-Series' multi-dimensional approach to performance scalability ranges from 1 pixel per clock (PPC) parts for the entry-level market right up to 2 TFLOP cores for performance devices, and beyond that to multi-core solutions for cloud applications. Dr. Ron Black, CEO, Imagination Technologies, says: "IMG A-Series is our most important GPU launch since we delivered the first mobile PowerVR GPU 15 years ago and the best GPU IP for mobile ever made. It offers the best performance over sustained time periods and at low power budgets across all markets. It really is the GPU of everything."