NVIDIA today introduced the Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card - the company's first midrange professional GPU powered by the NVIDIA Turing architecture and the NVIDIA RTX platform. Unveiled at the annual Autodesk University Conference in Las Vegas, the Quadro RTX 4000 puts real-time ray tracing within reach of a wider range of developers, designers and artists worldwide.

Professionals from the manufacturing, architecture, engineering and media creation industries witnessed a seismic shift in computer graphics with the launch of Turing in August. The field's greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and next-gen Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible.

NVIDIA released its first GeForce software suite since Windows 10 October 2018 went official. The new GeForce 416.16 WHQL drivers add full support for the new operating system, including WDDM 2.5, and DirectX Ray-Tracing (DXR), which are essential for NVIDIA RTX to work. The drivers also add SLI profiles for a large number of games, including "Battlefield V," "Basingstroke," "Divinity: Original Sin II," "Immortal: Unchained," "Jurassic World Evolution," "Phoenix Point," and "Seven: The Days Long Gone." 3DVision profiles are added for "The Elder Scrolls: Online."

A small number of bugs are also fixed with this release. "Pascal" GPUs running "Quake HD remix" no longer experience black square glitches. Temporal AA sharp drops in performance with GeForce GTX 1060 running "Rainbow 6: Siege" has been fixed. Driver errors on TITAN Xp when waking up from S4 sleep have been fixed. Lastly, an issue found with "Turing" GPUs not exposing Netflix 4K mode to displays connected over USB-C, has been fixed. Grab the driver from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 416.16 WHQL

The change-log follows.

EK Water Blocks, the Slovenia-based premium computer liquid cooling gear manufacturer is excited to announce the expansion of the S Kit lineup. Following the recent release of EK-CoolStream SE 140 and EK-CoolStream SE 280 slim radiators, two new kits will also be joining the webshop. Slim Series kits or in short S Kits are a great choice for beginners at liquid cooling and people doing builds with limited radiator space.

EK-KIT S140 and EK-KIT S280 beside the super compatible thin EK-CoolStream SE radiator that they use will also be very suitable for low noise scenarios. As we know, slim radiators benefit from low-speed fans more than the thick ones, and the 140mm fan format only adds additional cooling surface.

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has recently announced plans to form a special working group within its ecosystem, whose mission will be to develop standards for XR (eXtended Reality) products and development. XR envelops both VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality), and VESA has apparently had enough of differing vendor implementations. According to VESA, "the lack of standardization is causing compatibility issues between products from different vendors, as well as increasing the complexity and cost of development, ownership and replacement. Lack of compatibility can also create confusion for end users and impede broader acceptance of AR/VR products."

Considering the XR market's value is expected to hit roughly $162 billion dollars by 2020, we can certainly see how "compatibility issues" and "lower acceptance of AR/VR products" could affect what is looking to be an extremely lucrative market. Let's just gloss over the fact (slightly paradoxical, actually) that we're now looking at two different XR standards groups, VESA's newly-announced initiative, and Khrono's OpenXR.

ARM processors have been making forays into hitherto shallow markets, with it's technology and processor architectures winning an ever increasing amount of design wins. Most recently, Microsoft itself announced a platform meant to use ARM processors in a server environment. Now, ARM has put forward its plans towards achieving a grand total of 100 billion chips shipped in the 2017-2021 time frame.

To put that goal in perspective, ARM is looking to ship as many ARM-powered processors in this 2017-2021 time frame as it did between 1991 and 2017. This is no easy task - at least if ARM were to stay in its known markets, where it has already achieved almost total saturation. The plan: to widen the appeal of its processor design, with big bets in the AI, Automotive, XR (which encompasses the Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality markets), leveraged by what ARM does best: hyper-efficient processors.