In October, we reported that Asahi Linux had made some pretty substantial progress in getting Linux working on Apple Silicon, with a custom GPU driver counting itself as the first OpenGL 3.0 compliant graphics driver for Apple Silicon. Now, according to a recent Fedora Magazine post, Asahi Linux now has a Fedora 41 Remix. The Fedora Asahi 41 Remix is still based on that same Asahi version from October 10, but it incorporates the myriad advancements from Fedora 41 and an improved Vulkan 1.4-conformant driver.

By default, Fedora Asahi Remix 41 ships with Plasma 6.2, although a GNOME 47 version is also available. However, despite using a Wayland-first dekstop environment as its default, Fedora Asahi 41 Remix will still be X11-first, for compatibility reasons. The Asahi team plans on getting Wayland working eventually, but there are technical hurdles to overcome before that is possible. Fedora Asahi Remix also ships by default with the improved DNF 5 package manager and the massively improved GIMP 3.0 image editor pre-installed as part of Plasma 6.2. Having a Fedora Remix for Asahi also provides a familiar experience for gamers on Apple Silicon Macs to get Windows games up and running via a mix of tools like Valve's Proton dxvk, FEX emulator, and vk3d-proton—check out our previous coverage of Asahi to find out more about which games are currently working. There are still a handful of hiccups when it comes to running Linux on Apple Silicon, including hardware incompatibilities, like a lack of Thunderbolt, microphone, Touch ID, and USB-C Display support.

The annual Game Awards is just around the corner, with the opening night scheduled for December 12, and gaming industry big-shots have teased that there are big announcements coming. One such announcement is the reveal of the second Borderlands 4 trailer, which is all but confirmed for The Game Awards, thanks to Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software. We already know the game is planned for release sometime in 2025, but fans are itching to know more about what's to come from the looter shooter that dominated the early 2010s. Around the same time, Andy Robinson, CEO of Video Game Chronicle, teased that he is "Expecting a VERY big Game Awards next week," going on to hype up his followers with "Fire up the hype train."

Pitchford, who has a reputation for being very active on X, recently posted a not-so-subtle confirmation that Gearbox was working on a new trailer for Borderlands 4. Without revealing much more, Pitchford teased that the next trailer would start where the first left off, suggesting that we may find out more about whom the cybernetic arm at the end of the teaser trailer belongs to. So far, prevailing fan theories and speculation around the owner of said arm propose that it is a hint at the return of Gaige, a playable character, and fan favorite, from Borderlands 2. This is a plausible guess, since the Borderlands franchise is known for bringing back characters from previous games, and it wouldn't be the first time we will have seen a former playable character turn NPC.

After spending some time testing the feature in the Steam Beta client, Valve has finally made native recording via the Steam game overlay public in the mainline Steam client. In the latest Steam client update, which landed on November 5, game recording finally went live for all versions of Steam. While the new feature is undoubtedly helpful for gamers on all platforms, it's particularly useful for Linux and Steam Deck gamers, who have, until now, had to rely on myriad third-party software, which can be a hassle to set up and present additional overhead that may cause issues in games.

Similar to the likes of NVIDIA's GeForce Experience (soon to be replaced by the NVIDIA App) and AMD's Adrenaline Software, Steam offers a number of different options to record entire sessions or just short gameplay clips. Unsurprisingly, Steam game recording works with the Steam Deck (and thus many other Linux distributions), but perhaps not as expected is that it also works with non-Steam games that allow the Steam overlay to work. Valve also put some thought into the technical side of things, with optimizations to minimize CPU usage and rely on NVIDIA and AMD GPU video encoding wherever possible. This should minimize any performance impacts and increase power efficiency where applicable—as in the case of gaming handhelds. Valve does note that non-AMD and -NVIDIA GPUs may see significant performance impacts, which is not great news for Intel Xe owners.

After being forced to shut down at the beginning of October, it looks like the open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, Ryujinx, may have found a new home. Late last week, a new fork of the Ryujinx emulator popped up online. The original Ryujinx project's lead developer, known online as gdkchan, took down the GitHub page after a mysterious offer from Nintendo. Although there was speculation that the creator of the project was offered money to shut the emulator down, the wording on the new GitHub project seems to suggest that Nintendo forced Ryujinx to shut down. The GitHub page for the new project is run by a developer that goes by GreemDev, who doesn't seem to have been involved with the original Ryujinx before it shut down.

GreemDev's Ryujinx is starting out as a direct fork and continuation of the original, although there are hints that the new Ryujinx will take on a slightly different nature in the future. For starters, it doesn't look like GreemDev plans to offer any documentation for the Nintendo Switch emulator—at least not yet. This is likely partially to avoid Nintendo's ire and because creating documentation is a lot of additional work for developers. Instead, the GitHub directs readers to the former Ryujinx documentation on Archive.org, indicating that, although there are intended changes in-store for the future of Ryujinx, the current forked version basically picks up where the original left off.

Denuvo has taken its fair share of flak over the years for a variety of warranted and unwarranted reasons, but it looks like the company has finally decided to put its foot down, or at least try to. Recently, Denuvo started a Discord server, seemingly in an effort to address the gaming community's complaints about a variety of topics. These include alleged performance impacts and hardware degradation caused by its anti-piracy and DRM software commonly used in modern games. Needless to say the Denuvo Discord server was met with about as much enthusiasm as one might expect, and the Discord sever was shut down just two days after it opened. Although the server has since been resuscitated, the company has muted unapproved community members. Today, however, Rock Paper Shotgun published an interview with Denuvo's product manager, Andreas Ullmann, and in it, Ullmann goes on to defend Denuvo's existence and outright dismiss gamers' concerns about the anti-cheat and anti-piracy software.

Addressing a question about "toxicity" and oft-genuine concerns from gamers over the use of Denuvo anti-tamper and anti-cheat software, Ullmann seemingly implied that gamers are just upset because the software works, robbing gamers of the ability to simply play a game for free instead of paying full retail price. When asked directly about why Denuvo doesn't address the claims of performance hits to games that implement it, Ullmann placed the onus on game developers to perform those comparative tests, again calling the gaming and piracy community toxic in the response. He dismissed the idea of Denuvo or a third party performing comparative analysis of the impact of anti-tamper and anti-cheat software, citing intellectual property concerns and community mistrust for a lack of first-party testing. At the same time, Ullmann admits that Denuvo has had performance impacts on games in the past but remarks that it's "interesting" that there aren't more incidents of reduced gaming performance. These comments were also made in spite of Denuvo's own marketing materials claiming that the software has "No impact on in-game performance."

AMI, the global leader in Dynamic Firmware for worldwide computing, has partnered with Samsung Electronics, the global leader in consumer technology, to create an enhanced joint security solution available in Samsung's Galaxy Book PCs. Alongside Samsung's multi-layer security platform Samsung Knox, AMI's Tektagon - the industry-leading Platform Root of Trust firmware security solution - is now integrated into Samsung PCs including the Galaxy Book5 Pro 360, Galaxy Book4 Pro, Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, and Galaxy Book4 Ultra.

Through this collaborative partnership, AMI's Tektagon seamlessly integrates with Samsung Knox to ensure that confidential and sensitive data stays safe at every layer of the device through real-time threat detection and collaborative protection, while providing the highest level of security against firmware-injected malware to help prevent ransomware and denial of service attacks.

Nintendo is living up to its litigious reputation this week, with news reports emerging of the gaming giant issuing a massive wave of copyright strikes on any YouTube videos containing footage of emulation. In addition to this, it seems like Nintendo may have had some harsh words for the lead developer of a popular open-source Switch emulator.

As of an announcement today, the open-source Switch emulator, Ryujinx, is no longer available for download from its GitHub repository. One of the more active developers for the project confirmed via a message in the official Discord that the lead developer, who goes by gdkchan, was contacted by Nintendo with an "offer," although given the outcome of the interaction, it was likely less an offer and more a threat. Shortly before that, Retro Game Corps, a popular content creator in the Nintendo emulation community, posted on X that his YouTube channel had received multiple copyright strikes, requiring that he move away from showing game emulation on-screen.

Since its inception, Razer Synapse has been designed with the goal of empowering gamers and elevating their experience; with core functions like key remapping and macro creation, Synapse enables users to create personally tailored setups to make Razer peripherals truly their own. For years, Synapse has been constantly innovating to meet evolving user needs. And now, as the Vice President of Software at Razer, it is with great pleasure and excitement that I am able to announce the official full rollout of Razer Synapse 4.

What's new with Synapse 4
In this latest evolution, after nearly a year of intensive beta testing, Synapse 4 has redefined performance and usability, ensuring that all users will be able to enjoy a more reliable and intuitive experience on the platform.

According to new latest testing, the latest AGESA (AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture) update, version 1.2.0.2, promises a significant boost in performance for AMD Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" processors. This update is targeting one of the most crucial aspects of multi-core processing: inter-core latency. The AGESA 1.2.0.2 update addresses challenges initially reported in AMD's Zen 5 architecture, particularly in scenarios demanding rapid communication between multiple cores. Early reports suggest a remarkable reduction in inter-core latency by up to 58%. According to Overclock.net testing, older AGESA 1.2.0.1A showed the cross-CCD latency at around 180 ns. However, with the new AGESA 1.2.0.2 BIOS, the latency is seemingly around 75 ns.

Interestingly, the update has arrived on the ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E motherboard, with BIOS version 2401. BIOS updates with the latest AGESA 1.2.0.2 are still rolling out, so it will be interesting to see further testing and possible improvements. It could be that the cross-CCD latency has just been reported badly, so final testing will conclude the latency increase from Zen 4 to Zen 5 debate.

The latest Steam hardware and software survey reveals a significant shift in the gamer's operating system landscape, with Windows 11 gaining 3.36% among Windows OSes and finally surpassing the 50% mark in August 2024, now standing at 50.81%. This milestone is a notable achievement, considering the OS had been experiencing a decline in popularity just a month prior. The sudden surge in Windows 11 adoption can be attributed to users transitioning from Windows 10, which lost 3.29% of its user base in the same period. Additionally, a few users on older Windows versions, such as 8.1 and 7, have also switched to Windows 11.

Despite Windows 11's growing popularity, Windows 10 remains a formidable presence, with 48.66% of Steam users still preferring the older OS. Its success can be attributed to its stability and compatibility with a wide range of games and hardware. Many users have expressed concerns over Windows 11's performance and its stringent hardware requirements, which have made it less accessible for some gamers, especially those without the TPM 2.0-enhanced system. However, with Microsoft set to discontinue security updates and technical support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, users will need to consider upgrading to Windows 11 or another supported OS in the near future. The periodical resurgence of Windows 10 suggests that some users are hesitant to give up the older OS, but the writing is on the wall. As the deadline for Windows 10 support approaches, more users will likely make the transition to Windows 11.

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

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

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 24.8.1 WHQL

SPARKLE is launching a brand-new Streamer 4K60 PCIe Capture Card, which comes with 4K@60 / 2K@120 / FHD@240 capture and pass-thru. Dual-HDMI input design and designate software "Streamer Assistant" support PIP function (Picture-in-picture). Compatible with all the mainstream software, including OBS, XSplit…etc. SPARKLE Streamer 4K60 PCIe Capture Card is ready to GO LIVE your every gaming highlight.

4K@60 / 2K@120 / FHD@240 Capture & Pass-thru
As one of the most advanced models on the market, the SPARKLE Streamer 4K60 PCIe Capture Card offers top-tier video capture and pass-through capabilities. Supporting 4K@60Hz, 2K@120Hz, and FHD@240Hz, along with RGB444, YUV444, YUV422, and YUV420 hardware compressions, this card delivers exceptional video quality, both on your pass-through monitor and in your streaming PC.

The market for artificial intelligence (AI) platforms software grew at a rapid pace in 2023 and is projected to maintain its remarkable momentum, driven by the increasing adoption of AI across many industries. A new International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast shows that worldwide revenue for AI platforms software will grow to $153.0 billion in 2028 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.6% over the 2023-2028 forecast period.

"The AI platforms market shows no signs of slowing down. Rapid innovations in generative AI is changing how companies think about their products, how they develop and deploy AI applications, and how they leverage technology themselves for reinventing their business models and competitive positioning," said Ritu Jyoti, group vice president and general manager of IDC's Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Data and Analytics research. "IDC expects this upward trajectory will continue to accelerate with the emergence of unified platforms for predictive and generative AI that supports interoperating APIs, ecosystem extensibility, and responsible AI adoption at scale."

AMD has unveiled the latest release of its open software, AMD ROCm 6.1.3, marking the next step in its strategy to make ROCm software broadly available across its GPU portfolio, including AMD Radeon desktop GPUs. The new release gives developers broader support for Radeon GPUs to run ROCm AI workloads. "The new AMD ROCm release extends functional parity from data center to desktops, enabling AI research and development on readily available and accessible platforms," said Andrej Zdravkovic, senior vice president at AMD.

Key feature enhancements in this release focus on improving compatibility, accessibility, and scalability, and include:

• Multi-GPU support to enable building scalable AI desktops for multi-serving, multi-user solutions.
• Beta-level support for Windows Subsystem for Linux, allowing these solutions to work with ROCm on a Windows OS-based system.
• TensorFlow Framework support offering more choice for AI development.

Coinciding with the upcoming start of the European Football Championship, astragon Entertainment and weltenbauer. Software Entwicklung are pleased to announce the latest DLC for the popular Construction Simulator. The Construction Simulator - Stadium Expansion will be released on June 06, 2024 on the digital stores for PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One and will bring a brand-new major contract to the game's European map - the construction of a football stadium and its associated infrastructure!

With the Construction Simulator - Stadium Expansion, construction enthusiasts will have the opportunity to contribute to the construction of a football stadium and its facilities on the game's European map. The campaign, which adds more than 30 hours of gameplay, involves building the stadium itself as well as a pedestrian bridge, a parking area, a multi-storey car park and a clubhouse. Once the stadium, including its newly erected spectator stands, VIP lounges and the impressive entrance area of the building, has been completed, the final touches can be added to the epic scenery - the construction of the pitch and the installation of the floodlights. And then it's time for the kick-off in the Friedenberg Arena!The company's teaser video follows.

AMD has released the latest version of Adrenalin Edition graphics drivers, version 24.4.1 WHQL. It includes support for the upcoming Manor Lords game, as well as add performance improvements for HELLDIVERS 2 game, and adds AMD HYPR-Tune support to Nightingale and SKULL AND BONES games. New drivers also expand Vulkan API extensions support with VK_KHR_shader_maximal_reconvergence and VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering_local_read, as well as include support and optimizations for Topaz Gigapixel AI application, versions 7.1.0 and 7.1.1, with new "Recovery" and "Low Resolution" AI upscaling features.

New AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 24.4.1 WHQL drivers come with several fixes, including performance improvements for HELLDIVERS 2, fix for intermittent application crash in Lords of the Fallen on Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, various artifact issues in SnowRunner and Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition on Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, fix for intermittent application crash or driver timeout in Overwatch 2 when Radeon Boost is enabled on Radeon RX 6000 and above series graphics cards, intermittent crash while changing Anti-Aliasing settings in Enshrouded on Radeon 7000 series graphics cards, and various application freeze or crash issues with the SteamVR while using Quest Link on Meta Quest 2 or when screen sharing with Microsoft Teams.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 24.4.1 WHQL

In a interesting discovery that sent a series of shockwaves through the Linux community, Andres Freund, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, located a malicious backdoor in the widely used compression tool called "xz Utils." The backdoor, introduced in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of the utility, can break the robust encryption provided by the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, allowing unauthorized access to affected systems. What Andres Freund found is that the latest version of xz Utils is taking 0.5 seconds in SSH on his system, while the older system with the older version took 0.1 seconds for simple processing, prompting the user to investigate and later send a widespread act for caution. While there are no confirmed reports of the backdoored versions being incorporated into production releases of major Linux distributions, the incident has raised serious concerns among users and developers alike.

Red Hat and Debian, two of the most well-known Linux distribution developers, have reported that their recently published beta releases, including Fedora 40, Fedora Rawhide, and Debian testing, unstable, and experimental distributions, used at least one of the affected versions of xz Utils. According to Red Hat officials, the first signs of the backdoor were introduced in a February 23 update, which added obfuscated (unreadable) code to xz Utils. A subsequent update the following day introduced functions for deobfuscating the code and injecting it into code libraries during the utility's update process. The malicious code has been cleverly hidden only in the tarballs, which target upstream releases of Linux distributions.

Other World Computing, the leading provider of computer hardware, accessories, and software that bring artistic expression and the digital world together for creative professionals and consumers of technology, today unveiled SoftRAID 8, a groundbreaking new software release that redefines RAID management for Mac and Windows environments.

Quickly accessing data with the right safeguards is a difficult balance. Whether it is enhancing multimedia production workflows, protecting critical business files, or ensuring uninterrupted access to valuable data, OWC's SoftRAID is the ideal solution to manage RAID arrays. SoftRAID implements the latest performance technology unleashing remarkable speeds on a RAID system. Simply connect the drive array, format the preferred RAID level, and experience the breakneck speeds first-hand. RAID management has never been this powerful and easy to use.

AMD today released the latest version of the Ryzen Chipset Software. Version 6.02.07.2300 WHQL updates the driver versions of its various component drivers, and is applicable to AMD 300-series through 600-series desktop chipsets; and TRX and WRX series Ryzen Threadripper chipsets. The version also identifies a few issues that will be addressed in future updates, such as non-English driver names appearing in the English language selection; incorrect Uninstall log when uninstallation fails; and a failure to upgrade Ryzen PPKG.

The installer from AMD has now been fixed, and we are now hosting the 6.02.07.2300 driver.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Chipset Software 6.02.07.2300 WHQL

Microsoft's DirectX department is scheduled to show off several innovations at this month's Game Developers Conference (GDC), although a late February preview has already spilled their DirectSR Super Resolution API's beans. Today, retail support for Shader Model 6.8 and Work Graphs has been introduced with an updated version of the company's Agility Software Development Kit. Program manager, Joshua Tucker, stated that these technologies will be showcased on-stage at GDC 2024—Shader Model 6.8 arrives with a "host of new features for shader developers, including Start Vertex/Instance Location, Wave Size Range, and Expanded Comparison Sampling." A linked supplementary article—D3D12 Work Graphs—provides an in-depth look into the cutting-edge API's underpinnings, best consumed if you have an hour or two to spare.

Tucker summarized the Work Graphs API: "(it) utilizes the full potential of your GPU. It's not just an upgrade to the existing models, but a whole new paradigm that enables more efficient, flexible, and creative game development. With Work Graphs, you can generate and schedule GPU work on the fly, without relying on the host. This means you can achieve higher performance, lower latency, and greater scalability for your games with tasks such as culling, binning, chaining of compute work, and much more." AMD and NVIDIA are offering driver support on day one. Team Red has discussed the launch of "Microsoft DirectX 12 Work Graphs 1.0 API" in a GPUOpen blog—they confirm that "a deep dive" into the API will happen during their Advanced Graphics Summit presentation. NVIDIA's Wessam Bahnassi has also discussed the significance of Work Graphs—check out his "Advancing GPU-driven rendering" article. Graham Wihlidal—of Epic Games—is excited about the latest development: "we have been advocating for something like this for a number of years, and it is very exciting to finally see the release of Work Graphs."

2024 will be the year generative AI gets personal, the CEOs of NVIDIA and HP said today in a fireside chat, unveiling new laptops that can build, test and run large language models. "This is a renaissance of the personal computer," said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at HP Amplify, a gathering in Las Vegas of about 1,500 resellers and distributors. "The work of creators, designers and data scientists is going to be revolutionized by these new workstations."

Greater Speed and Security
"AI is the biggest thing to come to the PC in decades," said HP's Enrique Lores, in the runup to the announcement of what his company billed as "the industry's largest portfolio of AI PCs and workstations." Compared to running their AI work in the cloud, the new systems will provide increased speed and security while reducing costs and energy, Lores said in a keynote at the event. New HP ZBooks provide a portfolio of mobile AI workstations powered by a full range of NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation GPUs. Entry-level systems with the NVIDIA RTX 500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU let users run generative AI apps and tools wherever they go. High-end models pack the RTX 5000 to deliver up to 682 TOPS, so they can create and run LLMs locally, using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to connect to their content for results that are both personalized and private.

NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) has long been the de facto standard programming interface for developing GPU-accelerated software. Over the years, NVIDIA has built an entire ecosystem around CUDA, cementing its position as the leading GPU computing and AI manufacturer. However, rivals AMD and Intel have been trying to make inroads with their own open API offerings—ROCm from AMD and oneAPI from Intel. The idea was that developers could more easily run existing CUDA code on non-NVIDIA GPUs by providing open access through translation layers. Developers had created projects like ZLUDA to translate CUDA to ROCm, and Intel's CUDA to SYCL aimed to do the same for oneAPI. However, with the release of CUDA 11.5, NVIDIA appears to have cracked down on these translation efforts by modifying its terms of use, according to developer Longhorn on X.

"You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the output generated using Software elements for the purpose of translating such output artifacts to target a non-NVIDIA platform," says the CUDA 11.5 terms of service document. The changes don't seem to be technical in nature but rather licensing restrictions. The impact remains to be seen, depending on how much code still requires translation versus running natively on each vendor's API. While CUDA gave NVIDIA a unique selling point, its supremacy has diminished as more libraries work across hardware. Still, the move could slow the adoption of AMD and Intel offerings by making it harder for developers to port existing CUDA applications. As GPU-accelerated computing grows in fields like AI, the battle for developer mindshare between NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel is heating up.

ServiceNow, Hugging Face, and NVIDIA today announced the release of StarCoder2, a family of open-access large language models for code generation that sets new standards for performance, transparency, and cost-effectiveness. StarCoder2 was developed in partnership with the BigCode Community, managed by ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, and Hugging Face, the most-used open-source platform, where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets, and applications. Trained on 619 programming languages, StarCoder2 can be further trained and embedded in enterprise applications to perform specialized tasks such as application source code generation, workflow generation, text summarization, and more. Developers can use its code completion, advanced code summarization, code snippets retrieval, and other capabilities to accelerate innovation and improve productivity.

StarCoder2 offers three model sizes: a 3-billion-parameter model trained by ServiceNow; a 7-billion-parameter model trained by Hugging Face; and a 15-billion-parameter model built by NVIDIA with NVIDIA NeMo and trained on NVIDIA accelerated infrastructure. The smaller variants provide powerful performance while saving on compute costs, as fewer parameters require less computing during inference. In fact, the new 3-billion-parameter model matches the performance of the original StarCoder 15-billion-parameter model. "StarCoder2 stands as a testament to the combined power of open scientific collaboration and responsible AI practices with an ethical data supply chain," emphasized Harm de Vries, lead of ServiceNow's StarCoder2 development team and co-lead of BigCode. "The state-of-the-art open-access model improves on prior generative AI performance to increase developer productivity and provides developers equal access to the benefits of code generation AI, which in turn enables organizations of any size to more easily meet their full business potential."

According to a Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024 schedule page, Microsoft is planning to present next-gen technologies with their upcoming "DirectX State of the Union Ft. Work Graphs and Introducing DirectSR" presentation. Shawn Hargreaves, Direct3D's Development Manager and Austin Kinross (PIX Developer Lead, Microsoft) are scheduled to discuss matters with representatives from NVIDIA and AMD. Wessam Bahnassi, a "20-year veteran in 3D engine design and optimization," is Team Green's Principal Engineer of Developer Technology. Rob Martin, a Fellow Software Engineer, will be representing all things Team Red—where he leads development on implementations for GPU Work Graphs. According to GDC, the intended audience will be: "graphics developers or technical directors from game studios or engine companies."

Earlier this month, an "Automatic super resolution" feature was discovered in Windows 11 Insider Preview build (24H2)—the captioned part stated: "use AI to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details," although further interface options granted usage in desktop applications as well. Initial analysis and user impressions indicated that Microsoft engineers had created a proprietary model, separate from familiar technologies: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. It is interesting to note that Team Blue is not participating in the upcoming March 21 "DirectX State of the Union" panel discussion (a sponsored session). GDC's event description states (in full): "The DirectX team will showcase the latest updates, demos, and best practices for game development with key partners from AMD and NVIDIA. Work graphs are the newest way to take full advantage of GPU hardware and parallelize workloads. Microsoft will provide a preview into DirectSR, making it easier than ever for game devs to scale super resolution support across Windows devices. Finally, dive into the latest tooling updates for PIX."

Building on our previously announced support of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, XTX and Radeon PRO W7900 GPUs with AMD ROCm 5.7 and PyTorch, we are now expanding our client-based ML Development offering, both from the hardware and software side with AMD ROCm 6.0. Firstly, AI researchers and ML engineers can now also develop on Radeon PRO W7800 and on Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPUs. With support for such a broad product portfolio, AMD is helping the AI community to get access to desktop graphics cards at even more price points and at different performance levels.

Furthermore, we are complementing our solution stack with support for ONNX Runtime. ONNX, short for Open Neural Network Exchange, is an intermediary Machine Learning framework used to convert AI models between different ML frameworks. As a result, users can now perform inference on a wider range of source data on local AMD hardware. This also adds INT8 via MIGraphX—AMD's own graph inference engine—to the available data types (including FP32 and FP16). With AMD ROCm 6.0, we are continuing our support for the PyTorch framework bringing mixed precision with FP32/FP16 to Machine Learning training workflows.