Valve has rolled out the new Steam Deck 3.4.6 OS stable update, which brings the Mesa 23.1 graphics driver update, adds support for Vulkan ray tracing and fixes some previous issues. The latest update was anxiously awaited by those playing either Forza Horizon 5, Resident Evil 4, or the new Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty game.

According to the release notes, the new update fixes a significant focus issue with Forza Horizon 5. The aforementioned Mesa 23.1 graphics driver update is bringing both functional as well as performance fixes. Mesa 23.1 fixes graphical corruption issues in both Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Resident Evil 4. The new driver also adds Vulkan ray tracing to the DOOM Eternal game. Unfortunately, there is no word on DXR ray tracing support, although the RDNA 2 GPU certainly has hardware support for it.

In April 2021, the Vulkan Working Group at Khronos released a set of provisional extensions, collectively called "Vulkan Video," for seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. Today, Khronos is releasing finalized extensions that incorporate industry feedback and expose core and decode Vulkan Video functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode.

Khronos will release an ongoing series of Vulkan Video extensions to enable additional codecs and accelerated encode as well as decode. This blog is a general overview of the Vulkan Video architecture and also provides details about the finalized extensions and links to important resources to help you create your first Vulkan Video applications.

NVIDIA dusted off its RTX-IO technology moniker which we thought it retired in the wake of the now-standardized DirectStorage API, in an attempt to bring its benefits to games powered by the Vulkan API. Team Green was the first to introduce such a technology to the PC platform, something functionally-similar existed with game consoles, where it plays a key role in speeding up game loading times. DirectStorage enables a means for the GPU to directly communicate with a storage device, with no round-trips to the CPU cores or main memory. This enables a quicker way for a game to transfer its assets to the video memory. NVIDIA introduces this as part of its latest GeForce 526.98 WHQL drivers. The same drivers also introduce official DirectStorage 1.1 support.

With DirectStorage 1.1, Microsoft went a step ahead and introduced GPU-accelerated game asset decompression. Game assets (such as textures) are stored on your disk in compressed form, and are decompressed as needed when your game loads. This involves the CPU cores, and tends to be slower when compared to getting the same job done by a GPU when not rendering 3D graphics. NVIDIA even developed a file-compression format optimized for highly-parallelized decompression hardware such as GPUs. The standardization by Microsoft extends this feature to other brands of GPUs (such as AMD and Intel, which are confirmed to be implementing it); but games powered by the Vulkan API were left out in the lurch. NVIDIA developed a Vulkan version of the original RTX-IO tech (which would go on to develop into DirectStorage), so now game developers with engines primarily designed for Vulkan (such as idTech), can speed up game load times.

The PC version of "Red Dead Redemption 2" received official support for the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 (FSR 2.0) performance enhancement with the latest Version 1.31 patch. The game now supports FSR 2.0 as well as DLSS. The update also includes improvements to the temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) implementation in the PC version. The update comes two months following a community mod that added FSR 2.0 to the game unofficially, which required you to run the game with its DirectX 12 renderer, and add or replace certain game files. The official 1.31 patch adds FSR 2.0 support for both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan renderers. The 433 MB patch is being pushed through Steam.

Basemark launched today its second GPUScore graphics benchmark, called The Expedition. The Expedition targets high-end smartphones and other mobile devices running on Android or iOS. It utilizes the latest mobile GPU technologies, like Variable Rate Shading on supporting devices. As for graphics APIs, The Expedition supports Vulkan and Metal. The Expedition uses state-of-the-art rendering algorithms, similar to ones seen in the latest mobile games. Every run of GPUScore: The Expedition runs exactly the same content regardless of hardware and operating system. This combination makes the test results truly comparable with high accuracy and reliability.

The difference in graphics performance between desktops and mobile devices is getting narrower, as consumers want smartphones and other mobile devices with superior graphics performance. Consequently, graphics processors used in handheld devices are rapidly evolving. This raises the importance of new graphics performance benchmarks that test the latest devices correctly. Relevant measurements give the consumers an accurate understanding of the graphics performance, which is a major selling point.

Intel earlier this week released its own performance numbers for as many as 50 benchmarks spanning the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs. From our testing, the Arc A380 performs sub-par with its rivals in games based on the DirectX 11 API. Intel tested the A750 in the 1080p and 1440p resolutions, and compared performance numbers with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060. Broadly, the testing reveals the A750 to be 3% faster than the RTX 3060 in DirectX 12 titles at 1080p; about 5% faster at 1440p; about 4% faster in Vulkan titles at 1080p, and about 5% faster at 1440p.

All testing was done without ray tracing, performance enhancements such as XeSS or DLSS weren't used. The small set of 6 Vulkan API titles show a more consistent performance lead for the A750 over the RTX 3060, whereas the DirectX 12 API titles sees the two trade blows, with a diversity of results varying among game engines. In "Dolmen," for example, the RTX 3060 scores 347 FPS compared to the Arc's 263. In "Resident Evil VIII," the Arc scores 160 FPS compared to 133 FPS of the GeForce. Such variations among the titles pulls up the average in favor of the Intel card. Intel stated that the A750 is on-course to launch "later this year," but without being any more specific than that. The individual test results can be seen below.The testing notes and configuration follows.

AMD on Tuesday released the AMD Software Adrenalin 22.7.1 drivers, which include several major updates to the feature-set. To begin with, AMD has significantly updated its OpenGL ICD (installable client driver), which can have an incredible 79 percent increase in frame-rates at 4K with "Fabulous" settings, as measured on the flagship RX 6950 XT, and up to 75 percent, as measured on the entry-level RX 6400. Also debuting is AMD Noise Suppression, a new feature that lets you clear out your voice-calls and in-game voice-chats. The software leverages AI to filter out background noises that don't identify as the prominent foreground speech. Radeon Super Resolution support has been extended to RX 5000 series and RX 6000 series GPUs running on Ryzen processor notebooks with Hybrid graphics setups.

Besides these, Adrenalin 22.7.1 adds optimization for "Swordsman Remake," support for Radeon Boost plus VRS with "Elden Ring," "Resident Evil VIII," and "Valorant." The drivers improve support for Windows 11 22H2 Update, and Agility SDK 1.602 and 1.607. A few more Vulkan API extensions are added with this release. Among the handful issues fixed are lower-than-expected F@H performance on RX 6000 series, Auto Undervolt disabling idle-fan-stop; "Hitman 3" freezing when switching between windows in exclusive fullscreen mode; blurry web video upscaling on certain RX 6000 series cards, and Enhanced Sync locking framerates to 15 FPS with video playback on extended monitors.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 22.7.1

Today marks a year since gamers could try out AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution technology for themselves with our spatial upscaler - FSR 1. With the introduction of FSR 2, our temporal upscaling solution earlier this year, there are now over 110 games that support FSR. The rate of uptake has been very impressive - FSR is AMD's fastest adopted software gaming technology to date.

So it seems fitting that we should pick this anniversary day to share the source code for FSR 2, opening up the opportunity for every game developer to integrate FSR 2 if they wish, and add their title to the 24 games which have already announced support. As always, the source code is being made available via GPUOpen under the MIT license, and you can now find links to it on our dedicated FSR 2 page.

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.

A part of the process of building a graphics card is designing compatibility to execute the latest graphics APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan. Today, we have confirmation that Intel's Arc Alchemist discrete graphics cards will be compatible with Vulkan's latest iteration - version 1.3. In January, Khronos, the team behind Vulkan API, released their regular two-year update to the standard. Graphics card vendors like NVIDIA and AMD announced support immediately with their drivers. Today, the Khronos website officially lists Intel Arc Alchemist mobile graphics cards as compatible with Vulkan 1.3 with Intel Arc A770M, A730M, A550M, A370M, and A350M GPUs.

At the time of writing, there is no official announcement for the desktop cards yet. However, given that the mobile SKUs are supporting the latest standard, it is extremely likely that the desktop variants will also carry the same level of support.

Chinese company Moore Threads has unveiled their MTT GPU series just 18 months after the company's establishment in 2020. The MT Unified System Architecture (MUSA) architecture is the first for any Chinese company to be developed fully domestically and includes support for DirectX, OpenCL, OpenGL, Vulkan, and CUDA. The company announced the MTT S60 and MTT S2000 single slot desktop graphics cards for gaming and server applications at a recent event. The MTT S60 is manufactured on a 12 nm node and features 2,048 MUSA cores paired with 8 GB of LPGDDR4X memory offering 6 TFLOPs of performance. The MTT S2000 is also manufactured on a 12 nm node and doubles the number of MUSA cores to 4096 paired with 32 GB of undisclosed video memory allowing it to reach 12 TFLOPs.

Moore Threads joins Intel in supporting AV1 encoding on a consumer GPU with MUSA cards featuring H.264, H.265, and AV1 encoding support in addition to H.264, H.265, AV1, VP8, and VP9 decoding. The company is also developing a physics engine dubbed Alphacore which is said to work with existing tools such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and Houdini to accelerate physics performance by 5 to 10 times. The only gaming performance shown was a simple demonstration of the MTT S60 running League of Legends at 1080p without any frame rate details.

Elden Ring launched in late February to rave critic and consumer reviews. The game is an excellent showcase of From Software's gaming design ethos, but ultimately proves that the company's rendering engine still requires work after years of installments due to widely-reported stuttering issues - irrespective of hardware configuration. A fix for Elden Ring's stuttering issues has surfaced on late Monday - courtesy of Valve and its Proton wrapper, and only applicable to the Steam Deck. In a way, this turns Steam Deck into the smoothest device to play Elden Ring on.

The issue with Elden Ring's stuttering has been linked to the games' continuous shader loading. Apparently, Elden Ring allows users to enter its vast open-world without pre-compiling the required shaders (something that we've seen other games do through usually lengthy boot-up processes) for the specific hardware. This forces the game to constantly compile shaders as they're required (due to world loading, animation loading, among other triggers), which is responsible for the stuttering issues gamers on PC have been encountering.

Basemark launched today GPUScore, an all-new GPU (graphics processing unit) performance benchmarking suite for a wide device range from smartphones to high-end gaming PCs. GPUScore supports all modern graphics APIs, such as Vulkan, Metal and DirectX, and operating systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS.

GPUScore will consist of three different testing suites. Today, the first one of these was launched, named Relic of Life. It is available immediately. Basemark will introduce the two other GPUScore testing suites during the following months. Relic of Life is ideal for benchmarking high-end gaming PCs' discrete graphics cards' GPUs. It requires hardware accelerated ray tracing, supports Vulkan and DirectX, and is available for both Windows and Linux. GPUScore: Relic of Life is an ideal benchmark for comparing Vulkan and DirectX accelerated ray tracing performance.

AMD on Thursday released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers. Version 22.2.1 beta comes with optimization for "Dying Light 2: Stay Human," and "Lost Ark." It also adds support for the Vulkan 1.3 graphics API, and feature-support for Vulkan Roadmap 2022. A bug which caused "Fortnite" players on Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards to observe flashing or colored lights in DirectX 12 mode, has been fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.2.1

Mesh shader is a relatively new concept of a programmable geometric shading pipeline, which promises to simplify the whole graphics rendering pipeline organization. NVIDIA introduced this concept with Turing back in 2018, and AMD joined with RDNA2. Today, thanks to the finds of Phoronix, we have gathered information that Intel's DG2 GPU will carry support for mesh shaders and bring it under Vulkan API. For starters, the difference between mesh/task and traditional graphics rendering pipeline is that the mesh edition is much simpler and offers higher scalability, bandwidth reduction, and greater flexibility in the design of mesh topology and graphics work. In Vulkan, the current mesh shader state is NVIDIA's contribution called the VK_NV_mesh_shader extension. The below docs explain it in greater detail:

Vulkan API documentationThis extension provides a new mechanism allowing applications to generate collections of geometric primitives via programmable mesh shading. It is an alternative to the existing programmable primitive shading pipeline, which relied on generating input primitives by a fixed function assembler as well as fixed function vertex fetch.

There are new programmable shader types—the task and mesh shader—to generate these collections to be processed by fixed-function primitive assembly and rasterization logic. When task and mesh shaders are dispatched, they replace the core pre-rasterization stages, including vertex array attribute fetching, vertex shader processing, tessellation, and geometry shader processing.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the latest updates to Vulkan, the cross-platform 3D graphics API and its ecosystem. The Vulkan 1.3 specification was released today, incorporating and mandating proven, developer-requested extensions to make that functionality consistently available across all supported platforms.

The Vulkan Working Group is developing a public roadmap to provide guidance on when and where more advanced Vulkan functionality will be supported. The Vulkan Roadmap 2022 milestone for mid-to-high-end hardware defines features beyond Vulkan 1.3 that will be available starting this year. Vulkan profiles will be introduced, with tooling, in the February 2022 Vulkan 1.3 SDK to precisely specify, manage and use sets of API capabilities. Profiles will be used to communicate functionality requirements for roadmaps, markets, platforms, and hardware and software developers.

The upcoming Samsung Exynos 2200 mobile processor that is set to feature in the S22 series of phones features an RDNA2 Xclipse 920 GPU designed in collaboration with AMD. This new GPU has surfaced in various Geekbench scores where it handily outperforms the Adreno 730 found in the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The Exynos 2200 achieved an OpenCL Geekbench score of 9,143 points which is 50.7% higher than the OnePlus 10 Pro sporting a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The processor also performed impressively in the Vulkan benchmarks scoring an average of 8,556 points which places it between 17 - 25% faster. These synthetic benchmarks aren't always entirely reflective of actual performance and we have yet to see power and heat figures so we will need to wait until Samsung officially releases the S22 lineup on February 9th to determine if this will be the new mobile champion.

Chinese company Innosilicon Technology has recently announced their Fenghua No.1 high-performance server graphics card. The card features a dual-fan cooling design with HDMI 2.1 and Embedded DisplayPort 1.4 video connectors. The card will utilize a PCIe 4.0 connector and features GDDR6X memory developed by Innosilicon Technology with potential speeds of 21 Gbps. We have seen announcements from Chinese companies with similar products in the past but this recent announcement is the first to include support for a variety of graphics APIs including DirectX. The press release from the company didn't specify the DirectX version supported but also noted that the card will support OpenGL, OpenGLES, OpenCL, and Vulkan which will enable VR, AR, and AI applications.

AMD announced the AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPU, built with the latest AMD RDNA 2 architecture which delivers high-performance GPU acceleration for today's demanding cloud workloads including immersive AAA game experiences, intensive 3D workloads and modern office productivity applications at scale in the cloud.

With its innovative GPU-partitioning capabilities, multi-stream hardware accelerated encoders and 32 GB GDDR6 memory, the AMD Radeon PRO V620 offers dedicated GPU resources that scale to multiple graphics users, helping ensure cost-effective graphics acceleration for a range of workloads. Built using the same GPU architecture that powers the latest generation game consoles and PC game experiences, the AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPU is also designed to develop and deliver immersive AAA game experiences.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers. Version 21.7.2 beta introduces optimization for "Chernobylite." It also adds support for two new Vulkan API extensions, including "VK_KHR_copy_commands2," and "VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2." Among the handful issues fixed include incorrect upgrade advice by the Game Compatibility advisor over certain CPUs and GPUs; a BSOD error noticed on certain mobile platforms when using Enhanced sign-in; "Resident Evil Village" experiencing application hang or driver crash on machines with Radeon VII; and an application crash with Radeon Software when upgrading with core isolation enabled.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.7.2

NVIDIA has announced that they are partnering with Valve to bring its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) graphics technology to Linux via Steam Proton. This will allow Linux gamers with an RTX GPU to take advantage of the AI tool to improve their framerates in games through Steam. Proton is an open-source tool from Valve which allows Windows games to be run on Linux, the tool is built into the Linux Steam Client Beta. This news comes after AMD announced their open-source DLSS competitor FidelityFX Super Resolution which supports AMD, and NVIDIA graphics cards.

NVIDIANVIDIA, Valve, and the Linux gaming community are collaborating to bring NVIDIA DLSS to Proton - Linux gamers will be able to use the dedicated AI cores on GeForce RTX GPUs to boost frame rates for their favorite Windows Games running on the Linux operating system. Support for Vulkan titles is coming this month with DirectX support coming in the Fall.

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.

Basemark is pioneer in GPU benchmarking. Our current product Basemark GPU has been improving the 3D graphics industry since 2016. After releasing GPU 1.2 in March Basemark development team has been really busy developing brand new benchmark - GPUScore. GPUScore benchmark will introduce hyper realistic, true gaming type of content in three different workloads: Relic of Life, Sacret Path and Expedition.

GPUScore Relic of Life is targeted to benchmark high end graphics cards. It is completely new benchmark with many new features. The key new feature is real-time ray traced reflections and reflections of reflections. The benchmark will not only support Windows & DirectX 12, but also Linux & Vulkan raytracing.

NVIDIA has been limiting SLI support recently with only the RTX 3090 featuring support for the feature and even then only through modern APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan meaning that games must explicitly support SLI to work. NVIDIA will no longer be adding new SLI driver profiles on RTX 20 Series and earlier GPUs starting on January 1st, 2021. The only way to use SLI going forward will be through native game integrations which NVIDIA will focus on helping developers provide. NVIDIA also noted that various DirectX 12 and Vulkan games already feature native integrations such as; Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Civilization VI, Sniper Elite 4, Gears of War 4, and Red Dead Redemption 2. Creative and other non-gaming applications that support multi-GPU acceleration will continue to function across all supported GPUs.

AMD today posted the Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.8.3 WHQL drivers. This was earlier released as a beta in late-August. Besides the WHQL certification, nothing appears to have changed since 20.8.3 beta. The drivers come with optimization for "Marvel's Avengers" (the game), "Project CARS 3," and "Fortnite" (specific to DirectX 12 model in "Epic" setting). Other changes over the previous 20.8.2 drivers include new Vulkan API extensions, a number of game-specific fixes, improved compatibility of YouTube playback on certain browsers when paired with AMD Ryzen processors, and more. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.8.3 WHQL