The dankest of memes has come out of the digital underworld to spread fear through all chickens out there in the world. KFC has announced the KFConsole, a development made in partnership with Intel, ASUS, Cooler Master, and Seagate, do deliver a console that "runs better than any other console" - which means bugs relating to chicken movement have been ironed out before release. The chassis is a KFC chicken bucket-shaped one, and is based on Intel's NUC 9 Extreme compute element paired with an unspecified ASUS graphics card - that supports ray tracing.

Not to be outdone in comparison to almost all other AAA game releases in recent times, Far Cry 6 has recently been delayed from its February 18th release to May 25th 2021. However, that extra time may come to serve the game nicely, in that it may allow for all the planned features to be integrated. As part of AMD's partner showcase, Ubisoft has revealed that Far Cry 6 will make extensive use of DirectX 12 Ultimate features, featuring raytracing, AMD's Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), Variable Rate Shading (VRS), as well as Hybrid SSR (Stochastic Screen Space Reflections).

Ubisoft's head of 3D programming Oleksandr Polishchuk had this to say: "We were very impressed with the latest AMD technologies and joined forces to bring FidelityFX CAS, DXR raytracing and Variable Rate Shading to Far Cry 6. We are working together to ensure a smooth 4K viewing experience. This requires a lot of bandwidth, memory, and a Radeon RX 6000 with Infinity Cache that can handle it easily while maintaining high FPS rates." Check out the AMD partner showcase video below.

Today, Khronos has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate raytracing into the existing Vulkan framework. This is a significant milestone as it is the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for raytracing acceleration - and can be deployed either using existing GPU compute or dedicated raytracing cores. Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to anyone who has used DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in DirectX 12, but also introduces advanced functionality such as the ability to load balance raytracing setup operations onto the host CPU. Although raytracing will be first deployed on desktop systems, these Vulkan extensions have been designed to enable and encourage raytracing to also be deployed on mobile.

These extensions were initially released as provisional versions in March 2020. Since that time, we have received and incorporated feedback from hardware vendors and software developers, both inside Khronos and from the wider industry, but the overall shape of the API and the functionality provided are fundamentally unchanged. Thank you to all who reviewed and used the provisional extensions and especially those who provided feedback.

AMD is launching their next-generation RX 6800 series of graphics cards on November 18th, these will be the first cards from AMD featuring the new RDNA 2 architecture. To coincide with the launch of RDNA 2 in consumer graphics cards AMD is launching a new tech demo titled "Hangar 21", the new demonstration will highlight the power of RDNA 2 with real-time raytracing effects enabled by AMD FidelityFX and Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate. The "Hangar 21" tech demo will be launching on November 19th and you can view a short trailer of the tech demo down below.

AMDComing November 19, the "Hangar 21" Technology Demo Video will let you see the breakthrough AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture in action, the foundation of the AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards that power the next generation of gaming with mind-blowing visuals featuring realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections enabled by AMD FidelityFX and Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate.

Blizzard Entertainment is set to bring a significant upgrade to World of Warcraft's graphics just in time for the next expansion. A new Ray Traced Shadow option was discovered by Jaydaa over at the Wowhead forums on the Shadowlands Alpha, the ray tracing settings can be viewed on the alpha but can't be enabled yet. When Blizzard enables Ray Tracing support, players with NVIDIA RTX graphics cards will be able to take advantage of more realistic shadows and lighting within the game. The screenshots show the option for three levels of ray tracing fidelity from fair to good and up to high which will each offer higher resolution and more detailed lighting.

Millions of Minecraft gamers across the globe will get to experience their self-created worlds more vividly than ever before when Minecraft with RTX moves to open beta on Windows 10 this week and introduces realistic shadows, lighting and vibrant colors to the best-selling videogame of all time.

"We teamed up with Mojang Studios to bring next-generation ray tracing and AI to Minecraft and the results are truly amazing," said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of gaming at NVIDIA. "There is a ton of excitement from the community for Minecraft with RTX, and we can't wait to see what they create."

The Crysis Twitter account today once again became active, after almost four years of inactivity, to post a two-worded tweet - "RECEIVING DATA". The tweet is an indication of something happening and the current industry rumors are pointing to a nonother then a remaster of the beloved title. Yes, we are talking about a remaster of one of the Crysis games, possibly the last entry added in 2013 - the Crysis 3. Originally developed by a German developer Crytek and published by Electronic Arts, the game is powered by CryEngine. The game is being worked on by both teams of EA and Crytek, however, the possible launch of the game is determined by EA, as it has rights to the game still. During the Q2 earnings call, EA's CEO mentioned that they are working delivering "some exciting remasters of fan favorites" for the fiscal year of 2021, so we can expect the game in a timeframe close to us.

It seems like the popular question "but can it run Crysis?" will gain traction again, as the game will likely be a real treat for the eyes. Implementing Crytek's latest CryEngine 5.6, it will feature all the latest bells and whistles of computer graphics. That means that Ray Tracing and support for 4K textures are going to be present. Meant for next-generation hardware of PCs and consoles like PS5 and Xbox Series X, the remastered Crysis game would need a powerful system to run on, however, judging by rumors of next-generation hardware it should be enough to power it without a problem. To see more about CryEngine 5.6, please check out the video below.

MSI has comprehensively evolved! On top of the award-winning GE66 Raider and GS66 Stealth, MSI grandly revealed the complete line-up of six series of gamer-oriented laptops. Only the strong one can survive and evolve! MSI is the only laptop manufacturer that provides a stable supply under the global disruption of the supply chain. Now be the vanguard and evolve to next-generation by choosing the latest MSI gaming laptops equipped with 10th Gen Intel Core i9 processor (Comet Lake H-series) and latest GeForce RTX Super series graphics, newly designed for gamers in style!

The next-gen performance can entertain and satisfy the gamers in all aspects. The revamped MSI laptops can reveal the true computing power of the 10th Gen Intel Core i9 Processor. Featuring up to i9-10980HK processor, the latest Intel chip has a noticeable impact on FPS in demanding games and multitasking. With the latest Intel chip's 50% boot in computing and the Single-Core Turbo boost reaching 5.3 GHz, now gamers can enjoy an unparalleled gaming experience. Furthermore, see real-time Ray Tracing in games with up to the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER, AI-enhanced graphics, which can also provide a faster efficiency than its erstwhile generation.

Sony has announced via Twitter that their lead system architect Mark Cerny will "provide a deep dive into PS5's system architecture, and how it will shape the future of games" tomorrow. This is likely the start of Sony's marketing campaign for the release of the PS5 which is due out Holidays 2020.

The Japanese company has remained puzzlingly tight-lipped regarding their next-gen games console, which is a far cry from Microsoft's position, who have been releasing details and teasing their next-gen Xbox Series X system for a while now. It remains to be seen how Sony's system will differ from Microsoft's Xbox Series X, since most specs are rumored to be close on both consoles. The underlying Zen 2 architecture for the CPUs is confirmed in both consoles, and so should the fabrication process and RDNA2-based graphics with dedicated ray tracing hardware. It remains to be seen how the companies will aim to differentiate their offerings.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that realistically simulates how light rays intersect and interact with scene geometry, materials, and light sources to generate photorealistic imagery. It is widely used for film and other production rendering and is beginning to be practical for real-time applications and games. Vulkan Ray Tracing seamlessly integrates a coherent ray tracing framework into the Vulkan API, enabling a flexible merging of rasterization and ray tracing acceleration. Vulkan Ray Tracing is designed to be hardware agnostic and so can be accelerated on both existing GPU compute and dedicated ray tracing cores if available.

In case you missed the giant banners on the website, EVGA shared news with us that they are bundling in a free game with their GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards, and this includes the EVGA GeForce RTX ️ 2080 Ti, 2080/2070/2060 SUPER, and 2080/2070/2060. The promotion is not from NVIDIA, and this is not the first time EVGA have gone the extra step to sweeten the deal towards consumers buying their cards as opposed to other add-in card partner solutions. Deliver Us The Moon is a weird little sci-fi thriller game with puzzle mechanics and rudimentary flight systems that yours truly found interesting for the few hours played thus far, and is well worth checking into- especially as a freebie on top of your GPU purchase. There is also NVIDIA RTX support to use with your new graphics card, and the ambient lighting in the game does benefit from it, especially when flying in space. For more information on this promo, click here.

Intel has been very serious about its efforts in computer graphics lately, mainly because of its plans to launch a dedicated GPU lineup and bring new features to the graphics card market. Today, Intel and Wargaming, a maker of MMO titles like World of Tanks, World of Warships, and World of Warplanes, partnered to bring ray tracing feature to the Wargaming's "Core" graphics engine, used in perhaps one of the best-known MMO title - World of Tanks.

Joint forces of Intel and Wargaming developers have lead to the implementation of ray tracing, using only regular software techniques without a need for special hardware. Being hardware agnostic, this implementation works on any graphics card that can run DirectX 11, as the "Core" engine is written in DirectX 11 API. To achieve this, developers had to make a solution that uses CPU's resources for fast, multi-threaded bounding volume hierarchy which then feeds the GPU's compute shaders for ray tracing processing, thus making the ray tracing feature entirely GPU shader/core dependent. Many features are reworked with emphasis put on shadow quality. In the images below you can see exactly what difference the new ray-tracing implementation makes, and you can use almost any graphics card to get it. Wargaming notes that "some FPS" will be sacrificed if ray tracing is turned on, so your GPU shouldn't struggle too much.

The official system requirements for the Call of Duty: modern Warfare Beta have been outed, and these should remain pretty close to the final release version requirements. If you want to enjoy the game's implemented NVIDIA RTX features, you know you'll have to have an NVIDIA RTX graphics card - that part is pretty straightforward.

Luckily, the system requirements for non-RTX gameplay aren't too steep; this is a Call of Duty game we're talking about, after all. Even though these games usually offer more than adequate graphics, this is a twitch shooter; the better frame rates players can have, the better and more fluid the action is; and hence, an optimized game engine is key. For the minimum system requirements, a Core i5 2500K "or AMD equivalent" is required, paired with an NVIDIA GeForce 670 2 GB (jeez, they really went into their dust bin for this one) or, puzzlingly, a GTX 1650 4 GB; for the AMD camp, a Radeon HD 7950 is all that's necessary. The recommended specs call for an Intel Core i7 4770K "or AMD equivalent" paired with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB / GTX 1660 6 GB or an AMD Radeon R9 390 / RX 580. The games' beta will be available for all players tomorrow, September 21st.

Top-of-the-line gaming brand AORUS, reveals itself at the 2019 GAMESCOM trade show in Germany Cologne, in which the spotlight shines at the all-new 17 inch flagship gaming laptop, the AORUS 17. AORUS takes the lead yet again through the co-op with world renowned switch manufacture OMRON to innovate and develop a set of unique mechanical switches that is tailored for the AORUS 17, not only does the keys offer exceptional durability, it also offers one of the best feeling keys that gamers can find on a laptop. The AORUS greatness continues through the combination of the brand new Intel 8-core CPU, NVIDIA RTX graphics chip with Ray Tracing technology and an exclusive WINDFORCE INFINITY cooling system, the AORUS 17 steadily sits on the high-end gaming thrown with these specs.

AORUS leads the industry again by working with world renowned mechanical switch manufacture, OMRON in order to create a unique set of mechanical keys for the AORUS laptop, with gamer oriented design details, including an optimal 2.5 mm key travel and an actuation point of 1.6 mm, giving gamers both the sensational touch and sound of a crisp blue switch, which gamers can now enjoy the qualities of a full mechanical keyboard right on their AORUS laptop. AORUS pursues further by redesigning the key caps to produce stunning backlit keys with unique "concentric" keycaps, letting the LED underneath the keycap shine though evenly, increasing the overall lighting intensity by 27%, in addition to the AORUS exclusive FUSION 2.0 keyboard customization software, gamers can truly create a unique personal style.

During NVIDIA's second quarter earnings call, the company's co-founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, talked about earnings and what drives demand. When talking about sales, Huang noted a few things about NVIDIA's RTX lineup of graphics cards and why buying one is the only reasonable thing to do.

Specifically, Huang said that "SUPER is off to a super start for and at this point, it's a foregone conclusion that we're going to buy a new graphics card, and it's going to the last 2, 3, 4 years to not have ray tracing is just crazy. Ray tracing content just keeps coming out. And between the performance of SUPER and the fact that it has ray tracing hardware, it's going to be super well positioned for throughout all of next year."

As the world's most popular GAMING graphics card vendor, MSI is proud to introduce its full line up of graphics cards based on the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX SUPER GPUs. Equipped with exceptional thermal design, MSI GeForce RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER series are optimized for higher core and memory clock speeds for increased performance in games. The GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER will be available as GAMING, ARMOR, VENTUS and AERO ITX, while the GeForce RTX 2070/2080 SUPER will be limited to GAMING TRIO and VENTUS.

Ray Tracing, which has long been used for rendering in movies, provides realistic environments by simulating the physical behavior of light. The application of this technology will be even more widespread in the future, as many of the most highly-anticipated blockbuster games have announced support for real-time ray tracing, a next-gen feature only available on GeForce RTX GPUs.

An AMD patent may have just shown the company's hand when it comes to its interpretation of raytracing implementation on graphics cards. The patent, titled "Texture Processor Based Ray Tracing Acceleration Method and System", describes a hybrid, software-hardware approach to raytracing. AMD says this approach improves upon solely hardware-based solutions:

"The hybrid approach (doing fixed function acceleration for a single node of the bounded volume hierarchy (BVH) tree and using a shader unit to schedule the processing) addresses the issues with solely hardware based and/or solely software based solutions. Flexibility is preserved since the shader unit can still control the overall calculation and can bypass the fixed function hardware where needed and still get the performance advantage of the fixed function hardware. In addition, by utilizing the texture processor infrastructure, large buffers for ray storage and BVH caching are eliminated that are typically required in a hardware raytracing solution as the existing vector general purpose register (VGPRs) and texture cache can be used in its place, which substantially saves area and complexity of the hardware solution."

NVIDIA plans to release their adaptation of Quake, called Quake II RTX, soon on Steam. The Quake II RTX will be free(in some cases) to play, full Quake II game, with additional features such as ray tracing. The game is using Vulkan API for its Ray Tracing capabilities and requires NVIDIA's Turing GPUs in order to play with and use all of the advanced lighting effects.

All the owners of the original Quake II on Steam will get the RTX update free of charge. However, new users will get only 3 levels to play for free and if they want more levels with multiplayer as well, they will have to purchase the original Quake II for $4.99. The game will become available on June 6th, one day from present.

Manli Technology Group Limited, one of the major Graphics Cards and other components manufacturers, today announced the superior ultimate edition of Gallardo series graphics solution - Manli GeForce RTXTM 2080 Ti & RTXTM 2080 Gallardo, addition of the latest valued software - Turbo Engine and LED Lighting Control. Two lightning flash across cooling cover, and flashing with stunning LED lights. Meanwhile, it is equipped with 5 composite copper heatpipes, and triple 90 mm fans to ensure working in a silent and cool condition.

During AMD's annual shareholder meeting today, AMD president and CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed the launch of next-generation AMD Ryzen, EPYC CPUs and Navi GPUs for the third quarter of this year. The expected products are going to be manufactured on TSMC's 7 nm process and will be using new and improved architectures.

Ryzen 3000 series CPUs are rumored to have up to as much as 16 cores in Ryzen 9 SKUs, 12 cores in Ryzen 7 SKUs and 8 cores in Ryzen 5 SKUs. EPYC server CPUs will be available in models up to 64 cores. All of the new CPUs will be using AMD "Zen 2" architecture that will offer better IPC performance and, as rumors suggest for consumer models, are OC beasts. Navi GPUs are the new 7 nm GPUs that are expected to be very competitive both price and performance wise to NVIDIA's Turing series, hopefully integrating new technologies such as dedicated Ray Tracing cores for higher frame rates in Ray Tracing enabled games. No next generation ThreadRipper launch date was mentioned, so we don't yet know when and if that will that land.

Crytek have updated their development roadmap for CryEngine, adding in some of the features we discussed yesterday on our piece regarding their Neon Noir ray tracing tech demo performance. The new roadmap now places Spring 2020 as the time where both DirectX 12 and Vulkan, lower level APIs than the currently-supported DX11, will be fully integrated into the engine. Ray Tracing will be added at the same time, no doubt taking advantage of the higher performance that can be extracted from hardware through the lower level APIs.

It will be interesting to see the level of performance on CryEngine's hardware agnostic ray tracing, and whether their Spring 2020 implementation will take advantage of specialized RTX hardware - or focus on a software solution ran at varying degrees of rendering resolution according to the scene. Though with AMD's Navi being expected to incorporate some sort of hardware-based ray tracing acceleration, it's very likely software calculations will only be a fallback of the coding.

Sony's own lead system architect Mark Cerny spilled the beans on the company's upcoming "PlayStation 5" games console - the name isn't confirmed, but it's a PlayStation, and it's the fifth, so, following from the previous nomenclature just makes sense, doesn't it? One particular detail, however, is of most interest to us PC hardware junkies, and that one little fact is the confirmed Navi GPU that will power it. This is, almost certainly, a semi-custom Navi-based GPU, however; but the tidbit that PlayStation 5 will have raytracing support is the one game changer for hardware expectations - on paper, at least.

Of course, Navi is expected to debut much sooner in the consumer space than on next-gen consoles, but the fact that PlayStation 5 development kits are already being seeded - and an increasing rate, according to Sony - bodes well for the feature's inclusion on AMD's consumer-based cards. Either that or the company is taking a software approach to raytracing, which, if NVIDIA's 1000 and 10*0 series is any indication, wouldn't go very well with performance intentions. This does mean that raytracing is about to receive a much-needed market penetration boost for its adoption by developers. NVIDIA will of course be able to wave the flag of having been the first company to introduce the technology to consumers.

Christoph Schied reimagined the 1990s cult-classic "Quake II" with real-time ray-tracing, using the Vulkan API and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series hardware exposing the "VK_NV_ray_tracing" extension. Called "Q2VKPT," this game based on id Software's open-source Quake II code, implemented real-time path-tracing to make the lighting more physically accurate. NVIDIA expanded on Schied's work with "Quake II RTX," which is possibly the world's first game that is fully real-time ray-traced.

This NVIDIA rendition of Q2VKPT leverages NVIDIA's RTX for Vulkan to ensure all lighting, shadows, reflections, and other visual effects are ray-traced and denoised using NVIDIA's AI-accelerated denoiser. Unless it somehow scored higher-resolution texture assets from id Software, NVIDIA could also be using a GPU-accelerated upscaler to improve texture resolution. It's also possible that ambient-occlusion methods such as HBAO+ are in play to add apparent geometric detail to some of the surfaces in the game. NVIDIA hasn't made Quake II RTX public yet, although you could take the path-traced Q2VKPT for a spin. You'll need an RTX 20-series graphics card and the latest drivers.

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

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

Crytek has released a new video demonstrating the results of a CRYENGINE research and development project. Neon Noir shows how real-time mesh ray-traced reflections and refractions can deliver highly realistic visuals for games. The Neon Noir demo was created with the new advanced version of CRYENGINE's Total Illumination showcasing real time ray tracing. This feature will be added to CRYENGINE release roadmap in 2019, enabling developers around the world to build more immersive scenes, more easily, with a production-ready version of the feature.