CD Projekt RED has released the newest update for The Witcher 3 Next-Gen, bringing performance improvements for ray tracing, adding support for Intel XeSS, and fixing some issues seen earlier.

According to the update release notes, the latest The Witcher 3 Next-Gen Update 4.03 introduces general performance improvements for ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections, and fixes some issues seen with ray-traced shadows. It also addresses issue with DirectX 11 crashing on certain AMD GPUs, adds support for Intel Xe Super Sampling, and fixes lighting issues with Screen Space Reflection when ray-traced global illumination is off. There are also plenty of visual, quest, and gameplay fixes on both the PC and other platforms.

Real-time ray tracing (RT), using Microsoft DirectX ray tracing (DXR) and Vulkan Ray Tracing, adds a new level of incredible realism to games through effects like ray-traced reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination. Ray tracing is used in many of the latest games such as The Callisto Protocol, F1 22, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Returnal to maximize graphics fidelity and deliver the ultimate visual experience.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (AMD FSR 2) is the cutting-edge temporal upscaling technology designed to produce incredible image quality and boost framerates in supported games. AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series graphics feature advanced AMD RDNA 3 compute units with 2nd generation ray tracing accelerators to help deliver incredible RT performance in games.

Experience the visually stunning world of Layers of Fear, one of the first games to utilize the power of Unreal Engine 5 and advanced technological tools. Come with us on an immersive journey as we explore how we incorporated these cutting-edge features to bring you one of the most visually striking horror games out there. With the latest engine, we expedited the development process and introduced a host of technical novelties that make this game a spectacular visual treat. The Lumen, Ray Tracing, and Niagara effects helped us create visuals and effects that are beyond words and feel lifelike.

The canvas awaits its final brushstrokes. The stage calls for its lead actor. The novel needs its final chapter. It's time to face your fears. One. Last. Time. The series, which has left a mark on narrative-driven first-person psychological horror games, returns to tell its final spine-chilling story in Layers of Fear.. The series' crowning work is the definitive way to experience the critically acclaimed franchise as it features Layers of Fear and Layers of Fear 2, as well as all DLCs (including the new 'The Final Note' DLC that will give you a new perspective on the Layers of Fear storyline) and the never-before-told story of The Writer, which will tie everything together. Built on Unreal Engine 5, Layers of Fear supports Ray Tracing, HDR and 4K resolution to make the stunning visuals, and your nightmarish experience, as immersive and realistic as possible.

A Half Life 2 modder, Igor Zdrowowicz, has managed to integrate path tracing into the game - with striking results, even at an early stage in development. His project - codenamed "HL2RTX" - has been in-progress for a handful of months, and the modder has managed to integrate a ray tracing system into Valve's classic shooter (sort of) via NVIDIA's RTX Remix SDK. That package has become open source only very recently, so Zdrowowicz stated that a Portal RTX-derived binary was the tool of choice.

NVIDIA's Lightspeed Studios has already created an impressive RTX conversion of Valve's fan favorite puzzle-platform game Portal (2007), and modders have been poring over the underlying technology and update technique processes. A number of old favorites, running on past iterations of the Source Engine (DirectX 8 and 9), are getting the amateur mod community sprucing up treatment. It is posited that Zdrowowicz will have an easier time with his current conversion project, thanks to an official release of NVIDIA's RTX Remix toolkit (albeit in early access).

CD Projekt Red has now officially released the long-awaited patch for Cyberpunk 2077, bringing RT: Overdrive mode with Path Tracing technology preview, and other improvements. The new patch adds a Ray Tracing Overdrive and Path Tracing presets, which have to be manually enabled. Of course, the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is only supported on the NVIDIA RTX 40 series graphics cards, and it will work on the RTX 3090 graphics card, although it is only limited to 1080p resolution.

The new patch also adds an option to enable Path Tracing for Photo Mode, and adds support for NVIDIA DLAA, which is NVIDIA's AI-based anti-aliasing mode meant to improve image quality. To not make it all about NVIDIA, CD Projekt Red also added support for Intel XeSS 1.1, and some minor benchmark improvements. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, the new patch does not bring any expected gameplay improvements, which will probably come at a later date in a separate patch.

CD PROJEKT RED's Cyberpunk 2077 is already one of the most technologically advanced games available, using several ray tracing techniques to render its neon-illuminated environments and vast Night City visuals at incredible levels of detail. On April 11th, a new Cyberpunk 2077 update will hit the streets, featuring the technology preview of the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, which enhances the game's already-amazing visuals with full ray tracing, otherwise known as path tracing.

Full ray tracing accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene. It is used by visual effects artists to create film and TV graphics that are indistinguishable from reality, but until the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores, and the AI-powered acceleration of NVIDIA DLSS, real-time video game full ray tracing was impossible because it's extremely GPU intensive.

In an interview done by PCWorld's Gordon Ung at GDC 2023, CD Projekt Red's VP and Global Art Director, Jakub "Kuba" Knapik, and NVIDIA's Senior Developer Technology Engineer, Pawel Kozlowski, shed a bit more light about the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing update and what it brings to the game as well as what kind of hardware will you need to run it.

In case you missed it earlier, both CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA did talk about the RTX Path Tracing Overdrive Mode for Cyberpunk 2077, which will launch on April 11th. This will be a part of the Cyberpunk 2077 Update 1.62, which should bring additional gameplay improvements as well. It is worth to note that Path Tracing will be introduced to the game as a "technology preview," Jakub notes, as the developer is implementing this technology with NVIDIA and it is still a work in progress.

FromSoftware and Bandai Namco have released a new major patch for Elden Ring, implementing ray tracing on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X, as well as adding some gameplay improvements and fixing some bugs. Unfortunately, the game still does not support any upscaling technologies, so there is no support for DLSS or FSR, meaning that those ray tracing effects will have a rather high impact on frame rates.

The ray tracing patch for Elden Ring was announced back in November last year, and it certainly took a while before it was implemented. As detailed earlier, the ray tracing update for Elden Ring adds ambient occlusion and ray traced shadows, but does not include ray traced reflections.

The latest patch for Halo Infinite has introduced an undesired side effect for a select portion of its PC platform playerbase. Changes to minimum system specification requirements were not clarified by 343 Industries in their patch notes, but it appears that the game now refuses to launch for owners of older GPU hardware. A limit of 4 GB of VRAM has been listed as the bare minimum since Halo Infinite's launch in late 2021, with the AMD Radeon RX 570 and Nvidia GTX GeForce 1050 Ti cards representing the entry level GPU tier, basic versions of both were fitted with 4 GB of VRAM as standard.

Apparently users running the GTX 1060 3 GB model were able to launch and play the game just fine prior to the latest patch, due to it being more powerful than the entry level cards, but now it seems that the advertised hard VRAM limit has finally gone into full effect. The weaker RX 570 and GTX 1050 Ti cards are still capable of running Halo Infinite after the introduction of season 3 content, but a technically superior piece of hardware cannot, which is unfortunate for owners of the GTX 1060 3 GB model who want to play Halo Infinite in its current state.

As promised and detailed earlier, NVIDIA has now released the first SDK for Path Tracing. Path Tracing, which should accurately re-create physics of all light sources in a scene, has been around and we already had a chance to see it in some demos like Quake RTX and Portal RTX, but now, thanks to some previously available NVIDIA tools and features, it could be finally coming to more games and not just tech demos.

According to NVIDIA, the thing that makes Path Tracing possible now, and more accessible to developers, is the combination of previously available NVIDIA technologies, as well as some new ones, including the new performance multiplier in DLSS 3, called the DLSS Frame Generation. The DLSS Frame Generation, working on GeForce 40 series cards and using the Optical Flow Accelerator, is what made real-time path tracing possible. The RTX Path Tracing SDK, according to NVIDIA, should re-create the physics of all light sources in a scene in order to reproduce what the eye sees in real life, and allows to build a reference path traces to ensure that lighting during production is true to life, while accelerating the iteration process; or build high-quality photo modes for RT-capable GPUs or real-time, ultra-quality modes that take advantage of the Ada Lovelace architecture.

Get an exclusive first-look at the gameplay of Layers of Fear, the series' crowning work, in this 11-minute walkthrough. Follow the Painter from the original Layers of Fear, and join the Writer - a recently unveiled character - for a closer look at the latest installment in the Layers franchise.

As The Writer, enter the lone and ghastly Lighthouse - a newly-introduced location - and uncover an untold story that links all of the Layers' characters and events together. Unravel secrets, solve puzzles, and face the threats of the old Mansion that can only be solved with a lantern - a new and essential tool to confront the nightmares in the game!

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

Colorful Technology Company Limited, a professional manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards, all-in-one gaming and multimedia solutions, and high-performance storage, proudly announces the launch of the EVOL X16 PRO gaming laptop. The new COLORFUL EVOL X16 PRO mainstream model is equipped an 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700H processor and up to a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 laptop graphics. The gaming laptop sports a 16-inch QHD 240 Hz IPS display with support for NVIDIA G-SYNC technology for smooth and stutter-free gaming visuals.

The EVOL X16 PRO also comes equipped with 16 GB of DDR5-4800 MHz memory, expandable up to 64 GB. For storage, the mainstream model comes with 512 GB of fast NVMe SSD storage with an empty M.2 slot for storage expansion. The laptop also features a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port for high-speed data transmission and multi-device connectivity. For networking, the EVOL X16 PRO comes with a 2.5 GbE LAN port for gamers that prefer reliable and fast wired connection. For wireless networking, the gaming laptop also comes equipped with the latest Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth solution.

AMD for the past couple of weeks, has been releasing exclusive driver updates for the Radeon RX 7900 series, with which it hopes to iron out some glaring launch-time bugs for these cards. The latest from this driver branch is the Adrenalin 23.1.1 for RX 7900 series (these drivers won't work with older Radeon GPUs, for which drivers are released in the main trunk). AMD promised to release updates for all other GPUs. Version 23.1.1 addresses an intermittent driver timeout issue when applying Auto Overclock performance tuning; a driver timeout or crash may occur when playing "Valheim" with the Vulkan API, which has been fixed. With the latest "Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" update, a crash or driver timeout may occur with ray tracing enabled, which has also been fixed. Performance degradation observed after applying Factory Reset settings, has been fixed.

An AMD employee has confirmed on Reddit that a driver for owners of older graphics cards will be released soon.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 23.1.1 for Radeon RX 7900 series

CD Projekt RED announced an unexpected content update for the now-7 year old "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," an immensely popular AAA game that continues to be a favorite among GPU reviewers and PC enthusiasts. The content update, dubbed simply "Next Gen Update," is expected to go live on December 14, 2022. The free update adds several visual enhancements that would normally be marketed as a "Remastered" title, and sold separately.

To begin with, CDPR has increased texture resolutions, and redesigned the foliage to be more realistic. It gets new real-time ray traced global illumination (RT-GI), which should significantly improve the lighting throughout the game. The game also gets super-sampling performance enhancements, namely NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR 2. Thanks to the higher-resolution assets and RT-GI, the graphics settings now include a new preset called "Ultra+," which maxes out everything, including the new assets. The game's UI now offers more camera perspectives. For next-generation consoles, the update adds a new "Performance" mode that runs it at 60 FPS, and a new "Quality" mode that enables RT-GI along with FSR 2.The trailer for the new content update follows.

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

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

Intel on Thursday posted an article that dives deep into the ray tracing architecture of its Arc "Alchemist" GPUs, which are particularly relevant with performance-segment parts such as the Arc A770, which competes with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060. In the article, Intel posted ray tracing performance numbers that put it at-par with, or faster than the RTX 3060, which which it has traditional raster performance parity. In theory, this would make Intel's ray tracing tech superior to that of AMD RDNA2, because while the AMD chips have raster performance parity, their ray tracing performance do not tend to be at par with NVIDIA parts at a price-segment level.

The Arc "Alchemist" GPUs meet the DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set, and its ray tracing engine supports DXR 1.0, DXR 1.1, and Vulkan RT APIs. The Xe Core is the indivisible subunit of the GPU, and packs its main number-crunching machinery. Each Xe Core features a Thread Sorting Unit (TSU), and a Ray Tracing Unit (RTU). The TSU is responsible for scheduling work among the Xe Core and RTU, and is the core of Intel's "secret sauce." Each RTU has two ray traversal pipelines (fixed function hardware tasked with calculating ray intersections with intersections/BVH. The RTU can calculate 12 box intersections per cycle, 1 triangle intersection per cycle, and features a dedicated cache for BVH data.

Intel Graphics in an interview with PC Gamer on the sidelines of the 2022 IFA Berlin, claimed that the real-time ray tracing architecture of the Xe-HPG graphics architecture in the Arc A770 "Alchemist" graphics card is "competitive or better than" the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, and that the company plans to launch the card at an attractive price-point, to grab a slice of the very top of the gaming graphics market bell-curve. The RTX 3060 is a very successful GPU, especially with graphics card prices on the chill, and AMD is already competing with its Radeon RX 6650 XT, which can be spotted at lower prices. The RTX 3060 has been in the crosshairs of Intel Graphics marketing, in recent performance reveals for the A770.

"When you have a title that is optimized for Intel, in the sense that it runs well on DX12, you're gonna get performance that's significantly above an [RTX] 3060," said Tom Petersen with Intel Graphics. "When you have a title that is optimized for Intel, in the sense that it runs well on DX12, you're gonna get performance that's significantly above an [RTX] 3060. And this is A750 compared to a 3060, so 17%, 14%, 10%. It's going to vary of course based on the title," he said. "We're going to be a little bit faster but depending on your game and depending on your settings, it's trading blows, and that's the A750. Obviously, A770 is going to be a little bit faster. So when you add in DX11, you're gonna see our performance is a little less trading blows, and we're kind of behind in some cases, ahead in some cases, but more losses than wins at DX11," he added. While Intel is still non-committal about a launch date, although it stated that the Arc A770 and A750 will launch with an attractive "introductory pricing."

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

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

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

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

Colorful Technology Company Limited, a professional manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards, all-in-one gaming and multimedia solutions, and high-performance storage, announce the launch of the COLORFUL X15-AT 22 gaming laptop equipped with a 12th generation Intel Core i9 processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics. The COLORFUL X15-AT 22 is coming to the United States via Newegg.

The COLORFUL X15-AT 22 is equipped with the latest 12th generation Intel Core i9-12900H processor with 8 cores and 16 threads, and a maximum boost clock of 4.60 GHz. The gaming laptop is also fitted with 16 GB of DDR4-3200 memory - upgradeable to 64 GB. For storage, the X15-AT 22 packs a 512 GB PCIe Gen4 SSD. The X15-AT 22 also features a Thunderbolt 4 port with up to 40 Gbps transfer speed.

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

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

MAINGEAR—an award-winning PC system integrator of custom gaming desktops, notebooks, and workstations—today announced that new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 graphics cards are now available to configure within MAINGEAR's product line of award-winning custom gaming desktop PCs and workstations. Featuring support for real-time ray tracing effects and AI technologies, MAINGEAR PCs equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 offer gamers next-generation ray-traced graphics and performance comparable to the latest consoles.

Powered by Ampere, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 features NVIDIA's 2nd gen Ray Tracing Cores and 3rd generation Tensor Cores. Combined with new streaming multiprocessors and high-speed G6 memory, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 can power the latest and greatest games. NVIDIA RTX on 30 Series GPUs deliver real-time ray tracing effects—including shadows, reflections, and Ambient Occlusion (AO). The groundbreaking NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) 2.0 AI technology utilizes Tensor Core AI processors to boost frame rates while producing sharp, uncompromised visual fidelity comparable to high native resolutions.

Today as part of CES 2022, Intel demonstrated advancements and momentum with Mobileye, progress toward discrete graphics leadership and the launch of the newest members of the 12th Gen Intel Core family. With these milestones, Intel furthers its commitment to enable the industry and its customers and partners to harness the technology superpowers - ubiquitous computing, cloud-to-edge infrastructure, pervasive connectivity and artificial intelligence - at the heart of the digital transformation.

During the Intel news conference, Gregory Bryant, executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group, was joined by Lisa Pearce, vice president of the Visual Compute Group, and Prof. Amnon Shashua, Mobileye CEO, to share Intel's progress across multiple strategic businesses. "The Intel execution engine is back. From advancing the PC to high-performance graphics to autonomous driving solutions, Intel and Mobileye are proud to create new ecosystems and opportunities across multiple industries," Bryant said. "Together with our partners and customers, we are driving new innovation across products, platforms and services, and delivering on our vision of enabling world-changing technology that improves the lives of every person on the planet."

Samsung appears to be in a hurry to beat Apple and Qualcomm at bringing real-time ray tracing to the smartphone space, with its next-generation Exynos 2200 "Pamir" SoC. The chip integrates a graphics processor based on the AMD RDNA2 architecture, codenamed "Voyager." Samsung all but confirmed that the compute units of this will feature Ray Accelerators, the hardware component that performs ray-intersection calculations. The "Voyager" iGPU, as implemented on the Exynos 2200 SoC, physically features six RDNA2 compute units (384 stream processors), and hence six Ray Accelerators.

Built on the 4 nm EUV silicon fabrication process, Exynos 2200 will feature not two, but three kinds of CPU cores—four lightweight efficiency cores, three mid-tier cores, and one ultra high-performance core. Each of these three operate in unique performance/Watt bands, giving software finer-grained control over the kinds of hardware resources they want. Samsung is expected to debut the Exynos 2200 with its next-generation Galaxy S and Galaxy Note devices.