Square Enix has released the new Patch 1.1 for its Forspoken game, improving both the performance and graphics details in some segments of the game, and fixing some of the bugs. According to the patch notes, the new Patch 1.1 brings several performance optimizations to the game, and while the actual performance will vary depending on the PC hardware, Square Enix is promising as much as 30 percent improvements in performance. Square Enix says that it managed to reduce processing load in certain areas of the game and certain scenes by up to 70 percent, and has also reduced the VRAM usage, which all add to the performance improvement gain.

The new patch also brings several graphics improvements, bringing brightness and contrast (and HDR) adjustments at the start of the game. It adds some changes to lighting and ambient occlusion, improves the glare filter quality, adjusts the texture and shading for certain objects, and more. Square Enix also fixed the flicker screen issue with AMD Radeon RX 570 or RX 580 graphics cards, and other various minor issues. It also has multiple miscellaneous fixes, and some feature updates.

At the end of January, we reported on issues with Intel's i226-V 2.5 Gbps Ethernet controllers, which are used on a wide range of motherboards with both Intel and AMD CPUs, where users were having issues with stuttering and connections dropping. Intel has now released a workaround and a patch for the issue, not only for the i226, but also the i225 and the Killer E3100 2.5 Gbps network controller. What the workaround does, is disable the Energy-Efficient Ethernet mode, or EEE as it's also known as. EEE is only supposed to kick in when an Ethernet connection is idle and it's said to reduce power consumption by up to 50 percent.

However, in this case, it seems like EEE kicks in even when the Ethernet connection is active, which is causing the stuttering and connection dropouts. The patch disables EEE for all speeds above 100 Mbps, but it's also possible to disable EEE manually in the device settings in Windows. MSI is the first motherboard manufacturer to have released an updated driver on its site, but as this isn't a final solution to the problem, it's unlikely that this is the last we'll hear about the issue. Intel is apparently working on finding the root cause of the problem, but it's unclear if it's going to be possible to patch it in software or if a hardware revision is going to be required in the end.Update Mar 4th: User @lovingbenji reports that on his system this new driver version does not fix the disconnect issue.

Users of Windows 11 on "unsupported hardware" report that since the most recent Patch Tuesday (monthly) Cumulative Update, an ugly watermark message began appearing on the Windows Desktop screen for the Windows 11 22H2 Update operating system. The bottom-right corner has a permanently-overlaid message that reads "System requirements not met. Go to Settings to learn more." This is visually similar to the watermark you get when you haven't activated Windows with a valid license.

Windows Setup is designed to prevent the installation of Windows 11 on machines that don't meet its minimum system requirements, most notably, the need for a hardware Trusted Platform Module (TPM). There are ways to circumvent this hardware requirements check during setup. The latest Patch Tuesday update apparently takes a quick check on whether Windows 11 is installed on a machine that actually meets its requirements as laid by Microsoft; and if not, places the watermark message on Windows Desktop. It's important to note here, that unlike the "Activate Windows" watermark, this "System requirements not met" watermark does not impact the functionality of Windows 11, and you probably won't wake up one day to find that your machine won't boot. It seems more like a means to get people to fix their hardware requirements using an eyesore.

One of the electric vehicle driving forces in the car market, Tesla, has today announced that the company would have to issue a soft recall of a few select car models over an issue with overheating. The affected vehicles are Tesla Model 3 2022, Tesla Model S 2021-2022, Tesla Model X 2021-2022, and Tesla Model Y 2022. Tesla's infotainment system is powered by AMD Ryzen APUs, replacing the Intel Atom CPUs found in the previous models. With Ryzen APUs overheating, the infotainment system can lag or restart and sometimes cause it to get completely turned off. The problem is that the car's liquid cooling will prioritize cooling the batteries instead of the processor, causing it to overheat. Tesla issued a soft recall on these models, meaning that a regular firmware update will fix this issue.

TeslaTesla, Inc. (Tesla) is recalling certain 2021-2022 Model S, Model X, and 2022 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles operating certain firmware releases. The infotainment central processing unit (CPU) may overheat during the preparation or process of fast-charging, causing the CPU to lag or restart. A lagging or restarting CPU may prevent the center screen from displaying the rearview camera image, gear selection, windshield visibility control settings, and warning lights, increasing the risk of a crash. Tesla will perform an over-the-air (OTA) software update that will improve CPU temperature management, free of charge. Owner notification letters are expected to be mailed July 1, 2022. Owners may contact Tesla customer service at 1-877-798-3752. Tesla's number for this recall is SB-22-00-009.

Today HP Inc. introduced the EliteOne 800 G8 All-in-One (AiO) for more engaging collaboration and meaningful connections in hybrid work environments. HP also announced new commercial desktop PCs. People want to make personal connections - whether with eye contact, body language, or clear and crisp audio. With 32% of office employees expected to work from home in the foreseeable future and 26% expected to split their time between home and office technology that helps bridge the physical distance between team members and coworkers is critical.

"The pandemic has given us a fresh perspective on not only the importance of the PC, but better insight into how we collaborate, stay connected, and elevate the way we work at home and in the office," said Andy Rhodes, Global Head of Commercial Systems and Display Solutions at HP. "Our premium desktop portfolio enables authentic and meaningful collaboration experiences and optimal productivity in new work environments." Purpose built for collaborating and connecting with others, the sleek HP EliteOne 800 G8 All-in-One drives productivity and elevates your style of working in your home or at the office.

Oh the irony! Hacking was a very viable way to develop your character and play Cyberpunk 2077, but CD Projekt RED did not think their 2021 would be made worse due to an IRL hack. Not only did they lose out invaluable source code to hackers, but said hackers also sold the codes in a move that jeopardizes the structural integrity of a video game developer. You could make jokes about the 90's meme letter the hackers sent to the company, however they clearly don't see the humor in this situation as this has taken up resources which otherwise were meant to go towards patching Cyberpunk 2077- especially on older gen consoles.

CD Projekt RED took to twitter earlier today to inform us that the patch is delayed, as many speculated, but also that the additional time will also contribute towards increasing the scope of the patch beyond earlier updates. Indeed, in a situation where they simply can't seem to catch a break, perhaps transparency and downplaying expectations would have been the way to go. As it stands, the public feedback to this news is a gentle reminder to the sane TPU reader to keep social media and public comments at arm's length to maintain said sanity. We sympathize with CD Projekt RED and hope that they come out better to do better by their paying customers alike.

As it stands, Cyberpunk 2077 is the game many either love or love to hate. The game launched last December 10th after three delays to a great reception of the PC platform - and a good one on current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X|S - but was a fiasco on last-gen consoles and their mid-life refreshes to such an extent that Sony removed the game from their digital store. A great deal of digital ink has already been written on CD Projekt Red's handling of the situation, and it could - really could - have been handled better.

Now, CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwiński has released a 5-minute video where he approaches Cyberpunk 2077's release state; assumes, alongside the direction, full responsibility for the state of the game; and doubles-down on CD Projekt Red's commitment to improve the Cyberpunk 2077 experience. he doesn't go into too much detail as to how and why things went awry, but says that a smattering of management decisions led to today's situation. And considering the current situation, plans for post-launch DLC (akin to those that happened with The Witcher 3, which featured new armor, weapons, haircuts, missions, and a New Game + mode) will be arriving slightly later than predicted, so as to allow the team to fully focus on straightening out the games' rough patches.

As a world-leading motherboards brand, MSI commits to deliver gamers and creators genuine pleasure, and will keep moving. BIOS update is always an exhilarating news for most users, so MSI keeps announcing relative news for our users. From this week, MSI will release AMD AGESA COMBO PI V2 1.1.0.0 Patch D BIOS for all AMD 400-series motherboards and it is expected to be completely uploaded before the end of 2020.

All AMD 400-Series Motherboards Comprehensively Support Ryzen 5000 CPU with AMD AGESA COMBO PI V2 1.1.0.0 Patch D
The purpose to keep releasing BIOS update is not only for increasing motherboards performance but also for better compatibilities. After AMD launches Ryzen 5000 CPU, most are inquisitive about whether Ryzen 5000 CPU is compatible with AMD previous platforms. MSI realizes that users are eager to enhance their motherboards with the latest CPU; therefore, we are determined to offer AGESA 1.1.0.0 Patch D for all AMD 400-series motherboards. With AGESA 1.1.0.0 Patch D, your 400-series motherboards can support Ryzen 5000 CPU and achieve its true performance. Since there are some technical issues on AGESA 1.1.8.0, it will not be released. Thus, AGESA 1.1.0.0. Patch D is the finest choice to update your motherboards.

If you haven't updated your AMD Radeon drivers in a while, here's one major reason to. The company secretly patched four major security vulnerabilities affecting Radeon GPUs, in its recent Adrenalin 20.1.1 drivers, with no mention of doing so in its changelog. Talos Intelligence reports four vulnerabilities, which are are chronicled under CVE-2019-5124, CVE-2019-5146, CVE-2019-5147 and CVE-2019-5183. This class of attacks exploits a vulnerability in the AMD Radeon driver file ATIDXX64.dll, which can lead to denial of service or even remote code execution. What makes things much more serious is that this attack vector can be used to exploit the host machine from a VM (tested with VMWare). It even seems possible to trigger the vulnerability from a web page, through WebGL (which allows running 3D applications on a remote website). The vulnerabilities were tested on Radeon RX 550 / 550 Series VMware Workstation 15 (15.5.0 build-14665864) with Windows 10 x64 as guest VM, but there is no reason to assume that the issue is limited to just RX 550 as the AMD shader compiler shares a common code basis for all recent DirectX 12 GPUs.

All vulnerabilities rely on a common attack vector: specially crafted shader code that exploits bugs in the shader compiler. Even though HLSL shader code looks similar to assembly, it actually is a relatively high-level language that gets optimized and compiled by the graphics driver. VMWare's graphics acceleration lets you run 3D graphics in virtual machines, by passing along rendering info to the host GPU and then funneling the output back into the VM. Since the shader code gets compiled using the graphics driver of the host OS, this creates interesting opportunities for attacks.

AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su in response to a question, spoke about 3rd generation Ryzen processor boost issue. Dr. Su was responding to a question by Mitch Steves of RBC Capital on whether she had comments on "the software side" of 3rd gen Ryzen, and articles in the press still popping up about them despite AMD's fix. This was interpreted by the AMD CEO as a question specific to the Precision Boost controversy surrounding 3rd gen Ryzen chips, in which processors would seldom/never hit the advertised maximum boost frequency. AMD tried to address this by issuing updates to its processor microcode under AGESA Combo 1.0.0.3 ABBA, distributed through motherboard BIOS updates. The new microcode is supposed to increase the maximum turbo clock-speeds for "the vast majority" of users.

In her response, Dr. Su began by stating that the company is pleased with the sales of these processors. She then mentioned that AMD is working with its motherboard partners and ODM partners to "improve the optimization of the maximum boost frequency." She notes that the issue has been "largely addressed over the last couple of weeks" (referring to 1.0.0.3 ABBA). She goes on to state that AMD sees its response to the boost issues as more of an "optimization," rather than a "major update," possibly trying to allay investor fears that AMD is firefighting a costly problem with its products. "We're going to continue to improve the platform," she adds, possibly referencing the upcoming AGESA 1.0.0.4 Patch B microcode that's beginning to ship out by motherboard vendors. The earnings call can be accessed here. The specific question can be found at 47:00.

There were many rumors about Intel's 10 nm CPUs, many of them indicating that Intel will not manufacture 10 nm CPUs for desktop users, due to the 10 nm manufacturing process being in a bad shape. Those rumors were later countered by Intel, claiming that 10 nm is doing very well on improving yields and that we will see desktop CPUs based on the new node very soon.

Thanks to the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML), we now know that support for Ice Lake desktop and server CPUs has been added. A Patch titled "Add more CPU model number for Ice Lake" has many details about variants of Ice Lake with names like Ice Lake X for server Xeon CPU, Ice Lake D for Xeon D CPUs, Ice Lake L for mobile, and regular Ice Lake for desktop series of CPUs. This confirms Intel's claims that Ice Lake is on its way to desktop and server users in the near future. Possible launch date on these CPUs would be sometime in 2020, when Xe graphics cards are launched in July/August, so Intel could bundle both processors on the same 10 nm node.

NVIDIA has found a total of five security vulnerabilities with its Windows drivers for GeForce, Quadro and Tesla lineup of graphics cards. These new security risks are labeled as very dangerous and have the potential to cause local code execution, denial of service, or escalation of privileges, unless the system is updated. Users are advised to update their Windows drivers as soon as possible in order to stay secure and avoid all of these vulnerabilities, so be sure to check your drivers for latest version. Exploits are only accessible on Windows based OSes, starting from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

However, one fact that's reassuring is that in order to exploit a system, attacker must have local access to the machine that is running NVIDIA GPU, as remote exploit can not happen. Bellow are the tables provided by NVIDIA that show type of exploit along with rating it carries and which driver versions are affected. There are no mitigations for this exploit, as driver update is the only available solution to secure the system.

Microsoft has reportedly restructured the way it adds major features to Windows 10 over time. The company currently has a biannual (twice a year) cadence in updating Windows 10 version. A major update in this context refers to a multi-gigabyte update package that changes the operating system's version, its key system files, and makes significant changes to the user interface. The most recent of these was the Windows 10 May 2019 Update (1903).

With its new update cadence, Microsoft plans to distribute a major update in one half of an year, and a "minor" update in the other half. This "minor" update, or "point update," is much lighter in download size, but is still fairly bigger than a monthly "Patch Tuesday" update, and adds features and UI changes. The "major" annual update brings with it under-the-hood changes to the OS, such as updates to its kernel, scheduler, APIs, driver models, etc. The next version of Windows, which is expected to be Windows 10 version 1909, will be a lightweight update if you're already on 1903, but a "heavy" update if you're still on 1809. Its successor, Windows 10 version 2003 (March 2020), will be a "heavy" update regardless of which version you're on.

IO Interactive announced that "Hitman 2" will receive a new DirectX 12 renderer through a patch scheduled for later today. The game launched with only DirectX 11 support unlike the 2016 reboot of the franchise that was one of the posterboys of DirectX 12, and let you choose between the two APIs. The DirectX 12 renderer is expected to be better optimized for multi-core CPUs. Hitman 2 is published by WB Games, which likely emphasized on getting all of the base game out instead of the piecemeal episodic approach of the 2016 "Hitman," making IOI focus on content over technical advancements. The DirectX 12 renderer is now being retrofitted through a 1.8-gigabyte patch. Besides DirectX 12, the March 2019 update (v2.20) includes a new location, Hantu Port (Singapore), which will unlock as a DLC, with Sniper Assassin missions. The DirectX 12 renderer can be enabled through the Advanced Settings in the game's launcher.The change-log follows.

A new patch has become available for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which updated the game to the latest graphical technologies in the form of RTX and DLSS. The PC port of the game has been handed by developer Nixxes, which partnered with NVIDIA to work on adding ray-tracing enabled shadows to the game (there's a thematic coherence there if I've ever seen one).

In what is likely to create a good deal of controversy along with a few cheers, Blizzard will be adding DirectX 12 support to World of Warcraft on Windows 7 thanks to a bit of effort from Microsoft. You might be wondering how that is possible? Well after seeing massive performance gains in WoW when Blizzard released their DirectX 12 update for Windows 10 in late 2018, resulted in the company wanting to bring those performance improvements to gamers still holding out on Windows 7. To facilitate this, they began talking with Microsoft who after getting a great deal of feedback from Blizzard decided to act on it. To achieve this Microsoft decided to port the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7, which will unblock developers, thereby allows them to take advantage of the latest improvements that the DirectX 12 API offers while still giving full support to customers on older operating systems.

For now, World of Warcraft is the first game to run in DirectX 12 on Windows 7 with the latest 8.1.5 patch. However, they will not be the last as more developers are working on porting DirectX 12 games to Windows 7 with more announcements to follow. Microsoft, of course, has taken it upon themselves to remind everyone that the best possible performance with DirectX 12 will still be had on Windows 10 due to numerous OS optimizations. How true this is remains to be seen, but for many curmudgeons still holding out on Windows 7, this will likely be seen as a form of vindication for sticking with the now venerable OS.

After what seemed to be a series of never ending bad news concerning Bethesda's latest game, Fallout 76 received a major patch today that aims to improve the gaming experience in more ways than one. For PC users, a welcome addition comes in the form of the much-needed FOV (field of view) slider that has already helped tackle some complaints as seen online after launch. This comes along with a depth of field slider to allow further customization of the in-game view, which should also have a graphics performance effect depending on your hardware and DOF setting.

More importantly, Bethesda Game Studios has finally conceded that their current C.A.M.P system was far too broken. In particular, users were noticing their camp was lost entirely in between online sessions if someone else occupied the same space/location. This meant that a lot of resources were suddenly lost, and brought the online, multiplayer-only aspect of the game to be more similar to, say, State of Decay wherein players had to treat individual game sessions as possibly not having a point of resumption anymore. It added unnecessary frustration on top of what is frankly a bad video game by all records, and this is before we even get to the various bugs and monetary mishaps the game has seen since. Today's patch is a positive step, however, and hopefully this is one of many, many more that are needed before the game gets any real traction on the PC or console platforms alike. A full list of changes can be seen in the source linked in the full post.

With a November deadline for feature freeze fast approaching, GNU toolchain developers are now adding the last feature additions to GCC 9.0 (GNU Compiler Collection). Ahead of that deadline, AMD has released their first basic patch adding the "znver2" target and therefore Zen 2 support to GCC. While the patch uses the same cost tables and scheduler data as Znver1, it does feature three new instructions that will be available to AMD's next-gen CPUs which include; Cache Line Write Back (CLWB), Read Processor ID (RDPID), and Write Back and Do Not Invalidate Cache (WBNOINVD).

These three instructions are the only ones that have been found thus far by digging through the current code. Taking into account this is the first patch it can be considered a jumping off point, making sure that the GCC 9.1 stable update, which comes out in 2019, has support for Zen 2. Further optimizations and instructions may be implemented in the future. This is likely since AMD has yet to update the scheduler cost tables and by extension means they may not want to reveal everything about Zen 2 just yet. You could say AMD is for now playing it safe, at least until their 7nm EPYC 2 processors launch in 2019.

The Spectre/Meltdown road is long and pocked with lawsuits and security holes as it is, and Microsoft is one of the players that's trying to put the asphalt back to tip-top, Autobahn-worth shape. The company has already improved users' security to the Meltdown and Spectre exploits on its OS side; however, hardware patches, and specifically BIOS-editing ones are much harder to deploy and distribute by the PC chain. That may be one of the reasons why Microsoft is now again stepping up with software-based mitigations for Intel-based systems, specifically.

The new updates introduce a software-based CPU microcode revision update, and work at the OS-level to plug some security holes on your Intel processors that might otherwise remain unpatched. The reasons for them remaining unpatched can be many: either Intel taking even more time to deploy patches to the still vulnerable systems; your OEMs not deploying the Intel CPU microcode revisions via a BIOS update; or the good old "I forgot I could do it" user story. Of course, being software based means these Microsoft patches will have to be reapplied should users format their Windows system. The update can for now only be manually downloaded and installed, and can only be applied to version 1709 (Fall Creators Update) and Windows Server version 1709 (Server Core), but that's definitely better than the alternative of forcing less knowledgeable users to try and find their way through BIOS updates. Of course, that is assuming OEMs will ever push BIOS updates to their products.

ASRock was just informed by Intel that they disclosed the reboot issue on the former microcode released earlier. To fix the security vulnerability (SA-00088), ASRock is still waiting for Intel's further support and we're committed to work closely with them to develop and update new BIOS for our 8/9/100/200/Z370/X99/X299 motherboard series. To mitigate this issue promptly and constructively, we will keep our customers posted on our official website, please refer to this page. For Intel's official announcement, please refer to this page.

ASRock is aware that the current Intel microcode version might be defected by security vulnerabilities. We recommend users update their systems by flashing the latest BIOS once the revision microcode is released from Intel. To mitigate this issue promptly and constructively, please refer to below links for more info and stayed tuned.DOWNLOAD: Latest ASRock BIOS Updates

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, the most popular datacenter operating system, proclaimed Intel's patches for the recent Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities "complete and utter garbage." Torvalds continues to work on the innermost code of Linux, and has been closely associated with kernel patches that are supposed to work in conjunction with updated CPU microcode to mitigate the two vulnerabilities that threaten to severely compromise security of data-centers and cloud-computing service providers.

Torvalds, in a heated public chain-mail with David Woodhouse, an Amazon engineer based out of the UK, called Intel's fix "insane" and questioned its intent behind making the patch "toggle-able" (any admin can disable the patch to a seemingly cataclysmic vulnerability, which can bring down a Fortune 500 company). Torvalds also takes issue with redundant fixes to vulnerabilities already patched by Google Project Zero "retpoline" technique. Later down in the thread, Woodhouse admits that there's no good reason for Intel's patches to be an "opt-in." Intel commented on this exchange with a vanilla-flavored potato: "We take the feedback of industry partners seriously. We are actively engaging with the Linux community, including Linus, as we seek to work together on solutions."

Intel has finally come around towards reporting on the state of the reboot issues that have been plaguing Intel systems ever since the company started rolling out patches to customers. These patches, which aimed to mitigate security vulnerabilities present in Intel's chips, ended up causing a whole slew of other problems for Intel CPU deployment managers. As a result of Intel's investigation, the company has ascertained that there were, in fact, problems with the patch implementation, and is now changing its guidelines: where before users were encouraged to apply any issued updates as soon as possible, the company now states that "OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior." A full transcription of the Intel press release follows.

It's safe to say that there's one thing that you don't mess around with, and that's performance. Enthusiasts don't spend hundreds of dollars on a processor to watch it underperform. Given the complicated nature of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, Microsoft's so-called mitigations were bound to have an impact on processor performance. The million dollar question was: Just how much? The initial estimate was somewhere around 30%, but Intel, being optimistic as usual, expected the performance impact to be insignificant for the average user. They recently provided some preliminary benchmark results that looked quite convincing too. Well, let's take a look at their findings, shall we?

Intel measured the mitgations' impact on CPU performance using their 6th, 7th, and 8th Generation Intel Core processors but, more specifically, the i7-6700K, i7-7920HQ, i7-8650U, and i7-8700K. The preferred operating system used in the majority of the benchmarks was Windows 10, however, Windows 7 also made a brief appearance. Intel chose four key benchmarks for their testing. SYSmark 2014 SE evaluated CPU performance on an enterprise level simulating office productivity, data and financial analysis, and media creation. PC Mark 10, on the other hand, tested performance in real-world usage employing different workloads like web browsing, video conferencing, application start-up time, spreadsheets, writing, and digital content creation. 3DMark Sky Diver assessed CPU performance in a DirectX 11 gaming scenario. Lastly, WebXPRT 2015 measured system performance using six HTML5- and JavaScript-based workloads which include photo enhancement, organize album, stock option pricing, local notes, sales graphs, and explore DNA sequencing.

Following the launch of Need for Speed Payback, we've been working on addressing feedback by making changes to the progression system and other aspects of the game. These range from decreasing the amount of time for parts to refresh within the tune-up shops to the way events, bait crates and roaming racers work. Players in Ranked Speedlists will also notice an increased amount of parts being paid out. Win the Speedlist and you're guaranteed a new part, while simply participating means you get more chances of receiving an item of your own. We've already pushed a number of these updates live and will continue to listen to our players to make Need for Speed Payback the best experience possible.

Soon players will see a client-side patch going live and will benefit from a range of updates including improved game performance, multiple fixes to improve stability and tune-up shops stocking a higher quality selection of parts.

If you are running the original release of Windows 10 for some reason nearly 2 years after launch, you may want to consider finally doing a feature update to one of the newer builds. This May's "Patch Tuesday" will be the last for the original release build of the operating system, otherwise known as "Version 1507."