AMD today released Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.9.1 beta. The drivers introduce optimization of "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" and "Star Control: Origins." A number of issues are also addressed with this release. To begin with, a bug that prevented FreeSync from enabling in "Monster Hunter: World" has been fixed. Radeon Link not connecting to devices running Android 9 Pie has been fixed. Radeon ReLive not properly recording DirectX 12 games on R9 290 and R9 390 series GPUs has been fixed. A cursor lag noticed on multi-display systems with one of the monitors turned off has been fixed. The Radeon Settings context-menu item not appearing after driver installation has been fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.9.1The change-log follows.

IO Interactive today released a 130 MB patch for the PC version of Hitman (2016), through Steam. The patch fixes DirectX 12 API support, which was broken by the recent April 26th update, that installs the game's second episode "Sapienza, Italy." After the update, Hitman appears to be working in DirectX 12 mode, in both its in-game benchmark, and the game itself, on both our GeForce GTX 970 SLI (365.10 drivers) and Radeon R9 290 (16.4.2 drivers) machines.

AMD's upcoming Radeon R9 390X and R9 390 performance-segment graphics cards reportedly feature higher GPU and memory clocks over the products they are a re-branding of, the R9 290X and R9 290, respectively. The 28 nm "Grenada" silicon they are based on, is identical to "Hawaii," down to the last transistor. This has been confirmed by leaked GPU-Z screenshots, which reveal the device-IDs of the two cards to be identical to those of the R9 290X and R9 290. Since the Device-IDs are the same, GPU-Z is reading the chip as "Hawaii." The code-name "Grenada" appears in the BIOS version string.

Unlike older, more blatant re-brands, such as GeForce 8800 GT to 9800 GT, AMD did drop in a few changes. To begin with, the memory amount has been doubled on both cards, to 8 GB. The memory clock has been increased from 1250 MHz (5.00 GHz GDDR5-effective), to 1500 MHz (6.00 GDDR5-effective), resulting in memory bandwidth increase to 384 GB/s, up from 320 GB/s. The core clock speed on the R9 390X is 1050 MHz (up from 1000 MHz on R9 290X); and 1000 MHz on the R9 390 (up from 947 MHz on the R9 290).

Back in 2008, when it looked like NVIDIA owned the GPU market, and AMD seemed lagging behind on the performance and efficiency game, the company sprung a surprise. The company's RV770 silicon, the first GPU to implement GDDR5 memory, trounced NVIDIA's big and inefficient GeForce GTX 200 series, and threw AMD back in the game. GDDR5 helped the company double the memory bandwidth, with lower pin- and memory-chip counts, letting the company and its partners build graphics cards with fewer components, and earn great margins, which the company invested in development of its even better HD 5000 series, that pushed NVIDIA with its comical GeForce GTX 480, to hit its lowest ever in market-share. Could AMD be looking at a similar turnaround this summer?

Since the introduction of its Graphics CoreNext architecture in 2012, AMD has been rather laxed in its product development cycle. The company has come out with a new high-end silicon every 18-24 months, and adopted a strategy of cascading re-branding. The introduction of each new high-end silicon would relegate the existing high-end silicon to the performance segment re-branded, and the existing performance-segment silicon to mid-range, re-branded. While the company could lay out its upcoming Radeon R9 series much in the same way, with the introduction of essentially just one new silicon, "Fiji," it could just prove enough for the company. Much like RV770, "Fiji" is about to bring something that could prove to be a very big feature to the consumer graphics market, stacked high-bandwidth memory (HBM).

Ahead of its June 23 release, the minimum- and recommended-system requirements of Rocksteady's next installment to the super-hit Batman: Arkham franchise, Arkham Knight, was disclosed by NVIDIA. The PC version appears to have some clear visual benefits over the console variants of this game, given its steep storage requirements. Given that it will get an NVIDIA GameWorks varnish, PC gamers can expect eye-candy that won't make it to the console versions, including support for high-resolution display standards, such as 4K Ultra HD.Without further ado, the system requirements lists.

AMD decided to cash-in on the GeForce GTX 970 memory controversy, with a bold move and a cheap (albeit accurate) shot. The company is making its add-in board (AIB) partners lower pricing of its Radeon R9 290X graphics card, which offers comparable levels of performance to the GTX 970, down to as low as US $299.

And then there's a gentle reminder from AMD to graphics card buyers with $300-ish in their pockets. With AMD, "4 GB means 4 GB." AMD also emphasizes that the R9 290 and R9 290X can fill their 4 GB video memory to the last bit, and feature a 512-bit wide memory interface, which churns up 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth at reference clocks, something the GTX 970 can't achieve, even with its fancy texture compression mojo.

Raijintek announced the Morpheus Core Edition, a matte-black variant of its popular universal VGA cooler. Armed with a large monolithic aluminium fin stack of 129 fins, the cooler features a nickel-plated copper base, with mirror finish. Six 6 mm thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes with dark / gunmetal finish, spread heat across the fin stack. The cooler can hold on to two common 120 mm fans for ventilation. It can soak up thermal loads of up to 360W, making it fit for a variety of feisty high-end GPUs, such as the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, the Radeon R9 290X, and other GPUs based on the GK104, GM204, and "Pitcairn" silicons. Heatsinks for VRM, and 24 heatsinks for memory chips, come included. Raijintek didn't announce pricing or availability details.A video presentation follows.

In one of the first interviews post GeForce GTX 900 series, AMD maintained that its Radeon R9 290 series products are still competitive. Speaking in an interview with TweakTown, Corporate Vice President of Global Channel Sales, Roy Taylor, said that gamers should choose the Radeon R9 290X "with its 512-bit memory bus" at its current price of US $370. He stated that the current low pricing with R9 290 series is due to "ongoing promotions within the channel," and that AMD didn't make an official price adjustment on its end. Taylor dodged questions on when AMD plans to launch its next high-end graphics products, whether they'll level up to the GTX 900 series, and on whether AMD is working with DICE on "Battlefield 5." You can find the full interview in the source link, below.

Corsair, a worldwide leader in high-performance PC hardware, today announced the immediate availability of the Hydro Series HG10 A1 Edition GPU liquid cooling bracket for AMD Radeon R9 290X and 290 graphics cards. Both a bracket and a heatsink, the HG10 allows the users to attach a Corsair Hydro Series liquid cooler to their graphics card to cool the GPU and other critical circuitry, unlocking a new level of performance and cooling for their GPU.

The black anodized aluminium HG10 bracket combined with a Corsair liquid cooler is a full-coverage GPU liquid cooling solution which cools the graphics card's GPU as well as the heat-producing voltage regulator module (VRM) and video memory. The HG10 utilizes the graphics card's original cooling fan, ensuring improved compatibility with the card's fan speed and temperature monitoring features.

It's been a year since the AMD Hawaii cards hit the market. The Radeon R9 290 and 290X reached a new level of performance and were the first cards aimed at gaming in 4K Ultra High Definition resolution. Club 3D launched PokerSeries versions of the R9 290 and 290X, targeted at gamers who demand the best looks, the highest framerates, the best cooling performance and great value for money. With the recent price adjustments the Club 3D R9 290(X) royalKing and royalAce versions now offer the highest performance ever at their respective price points.

But we have another Ace up our sleeve, a new member of the highly awarded PokerSeries family. Today we are proud to announce the Club 3D R9 290X 8Gb royalAce, the world's first Single GPU Gaming Card featuring 8192Mb GDDR5 memory. It's OverClocked out of the box for the best performance and packs the latest AMD Graphics Core Next technologies like True Audio, Powertune, XDMA and support for AMD's revolutionary Mantle API. The royalAce is beautifully designed and constructed and is fitted with a triple fan CoolStream cooler and a custom backplate which make it stand out in any serious gaming system.

AMD today announced that qualifying purchases from participating retailers of an AMD Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X or R9 290 graphics card will be eligible for a complimentary copy of 2K's Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth.

"I personally have enjoyed more than 500 hours of game time with the Sid Meier's Civilization franchise, and I'm thrilled by what AMD and Firaxis Games have done with the Mantle graphics API to make Beyond Earth a smooth, high-performance marvel," said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president, ISV/IHV Partner Group, AMD. "AMD believes that gamers should freely experience that remarkable development work, and our new Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth promotion offers exactly that as a 'thank you' to new AMD Radeon customers."

AMD cut prices of its Radeon R9 290 series and R9 280 series graphics cards further down from last month's price-cuts. The cuts see the company's flagship single-GPU product, the Radeon R9 290X, drop from $449, down to $399, an $150 overall drop, from its launch price of $549. The Radeon R9 290, on the other hand, has its price cut to $299, from its launch price of $399. The drop in price of the R9 290 is squeezing AMD's sub-$300 lineup like never before. The R9 280X is down to $270, just $30 less than the R9 290. The R9 285, which launched barely two months ago, has its price squeezed to $229, just $10 more than NVIDIA's GTX 760. If you're in the market for a graphics card with about $250 in hand, you're now open to a ton of options, including ramen for a week, in exchange for the $329 GeForce GTX 970.

AMD is apparently working with its add-in board manufacturers and retailers to bring down prices of its flagship single-GPU graphics card, the Radeon R9 290X. The card can now be had for as low as $449, non-reference design, factory-overclocked cards starting at a $50 premium. Prices could settle down somewhere between $450 and $500. This closely follows AMD's move to bring down price of its dual-GPU flagship Radeon R9 295X2 by a whopping 34 percent, down to $999, offering performance competitive to the $2999 GeForce GTX TITAN-Z. NVIDIA is preparing two new graphics cards competitive in performance to the Radeon R9 290 series, the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980. The two are based on the company's new 28 nm "GM204" silicon, implementing the "Maxwell" GPU architecture.

EK Water Blocks, Ljubljana based premium computer liquid cooling gear manufacturer, is proud to introduce a new Full-Cover water block for TUL Corporation's (Power Color and VTX3D) and Club3D AMD Radeon R9 290(X) graphics cards with amended (non-reference) circuit board design R29FA.

EK-FC R9-290X SE directly cools the GPU, RAM as well as VRM (voltage regulation module) as water flows directly over these critical areas thus allowing the graphics card and its VRM to remain stable under high overclocks. This water block also features a very high flow design therefore it can be easily used in liquid cooling systems using weaker water pumps.

TechPowerUp released the latest version of GPU-Z, the popular PC graphics information, monitoring, and diagnostics utility, which gives you up to date information on your installed graphics processing hardware, and lets you monitor them in real-time. Version 0.7.9 of GPU-Z adds support for several new GPUs, and fixes various outstanding bugs.

To begin with, support is added for new and upcoming GPUs, such as AMD "Tonga," Radeon R9 M275X, FirePro W5100, W9100; NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 6 GB, GTX 860M, GT 830M, GTX 780M, GT 740, GT 730, GT 720, Quadro NVS 510, FX 380M, GRID K520, and Tesla K40c. Bug fixes include correct release date for Radeon R9 290, more robust NVIDIA PhysX detection, improved fan-speed monitoring on some newer AMD cards, sensor graph overflow/underflow, and fixed French translation.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.7.9 | GPU-Z 0.7.9 ASUS ROG Themed

The complete change-log follows.

EK Water Blocks, Ljubljana based premium water cooling gear manufacturer, is about to release a new Full-Cover water block for TUL Corporation's (Power Color, Club3D and VTX3D) AMD Radeon R9 290(X) graphics cards with amended circuit board design R29FA.

EK-FC R9-290X SE directly cools the GPU, RAM as well as VRM (voltage regulation module) as water flows directly over these critical areas thus allowing the graphics card and its VRM to remain stable under high overclocks. This water block also features a very high flow design therefore it can be easily used in liquid cooling systems using weaker water pumps.

VisionTek Products LLC, (VisionTek), a leading manufacturer of award-winning, high-performance upgrades and accessories for PCs and Macs, today announced a $100 savings promotion on its CryoVenom R9 290 and CryoVenom R9 290 LE liquid cooled graphics cards. The promotion begins today and is valid for every CryoVenom R9 290 and 290LE purchased directly from VisionTek's ecommerce portal - until June 3 or until card supplies last.

VisionTek is offering the over 15% discount promotion to celebrate CryoVenom being named a Finalist in the Best New Product - Computer Hardware Category of the 2014 American Business Awards.

EK Water Blocks, Ljubljana-based premium water cooling gear manufacturer, is proud to introduce a new revision of EK-FC R9-290X water block for AMD Radeon R9 290- and 290X series graphics cards. Rev.2.0 is functionally and visually identical to its predecessor but bring compatibility for previously unsupported MSI and GIGABYTE model graphics cards.

In order to simplify the search for suitable and compatible water block EK has already added new revision water blocks to EK Cooling Configurator database and compatible graphics cards are being added to the list on daily basis.

VisionTek Products LLC, (VisionTek), a leading manufacturer of award-winning, high-performance upgrades and accessories for PC and Apple Macintosh computers, today announced it has expanded the award-winning CryoVenom R9 290 graphics card with a new Limited Edition model.

Designed to appeal to hardcore gamers that desire the best gaming experience and the envy of the gaming community for owning an exclusive upgrade, the $650 MSRP CryoVenom R9 290LE will be limited in availability to 100 units or less. As a special incentive for customers to spend their income tax refund on a CryoVenom purchase, VisionTek is offering a 5% discount promotion on the new LE model and the original $600 MSRP CryoVenom R9 290 model until May 1, 2014.

SAPPHIRE technology, the leading manufacturer and global supplier of AMD-based graphics products, has just announced an exciting new model in the successful R9 series of graphics cards. The SAPPHIRE R9 290 Vapor-X OC features several of the company's industry-leading technologies and a factory overclock to deliver best in class performance with very low noise.

Based on the award-winning Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture from AMD with 2560 Stream Processors, the SAPPHIRE R9 290 Vapor-X is an Overclocked edition which boasts 4 GB of the latest GDDR5 memory running at 1400 MHz (5.6 GB/s effective) and high speed engine clocks of 1030 MHz. Together these clocks deliver industry leading performance - but to achieve this performance with stability and reliability demands high quality components throughout the design (especially in the power control circuitry) together with a sophisticated cooling solution.

CyberPower Inc., a global manufacturer of custom gaming PCs, today announced its MEGA MINER series, a family of high-performance systems designed and optimized not only for gaming, but for cryptocurrency mining as well. The MEGA MINER series is powered by AMD's Radeon R9 series graphics cards, which provide up to 1000KHash/sec on a single card. With the ability to add up to three cards per system, the MEGA MINER has been intelligently designed with the GPU power to perform the necessary calculations faster to earn more coins.

The MEGA MINER series comes with a choice of AMD's FX-4300 processor or Intel's Core i3-4130 Haswell processor depending on the model. The series also utilizes the Thermaltake DPS series of 80 Plus digital power supplies, which conveniently monitor one of the most vital pieces of information all coin miners need to know - your electricity cost. The MEGA MINER systems combine powerful mining hardware with the precision and control of Thermaltake DPS power supplies for the best coin mining experience.

EK Water Blocks, Ljubljana-based premium water cooling gear manufacturer, is proud to introduce the full-cover water cooling solution for the ASUS engineered Direct CU II series AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics card.

EK-FC R9-290X DCII water block directly cools the GPU, RAM as well as VRM (voltage regulation module) as water flows directly over these critical areas thus allowing the graphics card and its VRM to remain stable under high overclocks.

Club 3D launched a pair of top-spec factory-overclocked Radeon R9 290X and R9 290 graphics cards branded "royalAce," part of its Poker series. Based on a TUL-made custom-design PCB, the two feature a meaty new triple-slot and triple-fan cooling solution that doesn't look too different from that of the PowerColor R9 290X PCS+, under the hood (shroud). The R9 290X royalAce offers GPU clocks as high as 1050 MHz, and memory clocks of 5.40 GHz; while the R9 290 royalAce offers 1040 MHz GPU clocks, with 5.40 GHz memory clocks. The company didn't announce pricing.

Crushed your F5 key on AMD driver download page yet? Unless you have four very specific AMD Radeon GPUs, you can stop it right now. According to DICE, developers of the first game to take advantage of Mantle, the 3D graphics API AMD is introducing with its Catalyst 14.1 beta driver, will give tangible benefits to only four specific GPUs - Radeon R9 290X, R9 290 (non-X), R7 260X, and A-Series "Kaveri" APU-integrated R7 200 series.

Owners of all other Radeon GPUs, including those based on the Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture, such as the recently launched R9 280X and R9 270X, are out of luck, for now. AMD is still ironing out issues with Mantle on those other GCN GPUs. Interestingly, in the same press note, DICE posted performance numbers yielded on an HD 7970, which look promising. AMD is expected to release its Catalyst 14.1 beta driver a little later this week, as it's jousting with some last-minute bug-finds.

DICE, developers of the smash-hit online multiplayer FPS of the season, Battlefield 4, rolled out its promised game update that lends it support for AMD Mantle API. The low-overhead 3D graphics API, according to leaked documents we've seen, is claimed to improve performance of the game by up to 45 percent in CPU-limited scenarios. By that token, we imagine the performance increment in GPU-limited scenarios to be different. The game patch is only half of the story. The other half is the API itself, which will be distributed by AMD, in its Catalyst software suite. The first public release of Mantle will be part of Catalyst 14.1 beta, which will be rolling out a little later this week. Stay tuned for our comprehensive DirectX 11.1 vs. Mantle testing, starring a Radeon R9 290.