Back in August, Intel started shipping its 0x129 microcode update for 13/14th generation "Raptor Lake" and "Raptor Lake Refresh" processors. This update fixed incorrect voltage requests to the processor that are causing elevated operating voltage. Intel's analysis showed that the root cause of stability problems is voltage levels that are too high during the operation of the processors. These increases in voltage cause degradation that increases the minimum voltage required for stable operation. Intel calls this "Vmin." Today, the company discovered the root cause of this instability issue and informed users that a new microcode patch is underway. As explained by Intel, the Vmin Shift instability problem stems from a clock tree circuit in the IA core. When exposed to high voltage and temperature conditions, this circuit is vulnerable to reliability degradation. Intel's research has shown that these factors can cause a shift in the duty cycle of the clocks, resulting in system instability.

There are four scenarios that can cause Vmin Shift: increased motherboard power delivery, eTVB microcode algorithm running at higher performance operating states even at higher temperatures, microcode SVID algorithm requesting higher voltages at higher frequencies and longer durations, and finally microcode and BIOS requesting elevated core voltages. For motherboard power settings, mitigation is switching back to default settings. For the eTVB issue, the fix is a 0x125 microcode update. The 0x129 patch fixes the SVID algorithm, and the fourth condition, where microcode and BIOS request elevated core voltage, is fixed by the upcoming 0x12B microcode update. Intel is reportedly working with OEMs to start rolling out the 0x12B update with no apparent performance degradation. While the timeframe for shipping this update is unknown, we expect to see it soon. Additionally, Intel once again confirmed that the upcoming "Arrow Lake" CPUs don't have these issues.

A new patch for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora deployed on March 1, bringing more than 150 fixes and adjustments to the game. Title Update 3 includes technical, UI, balancing, main quest, and side quest improvements, plus additional bug fixes. To provide players with an improved experience, the development team, led by Massive Entertainment, listened to feedback from the community while working on Title Update 3.

An additional patch, Title Update 3.1, was deployed on March 7, adding additional fixes to the game. Check out the full list of improvements included in Title Update 3 & 3.1 here, and read on for the most notable improvements now available in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

Update Mar 14th: TPU has received alerts regarding player feedback—Massive Entertainment's "Title Update 3" has reportedly broken their implementation of FSR 3 in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. We will keep an eye on official Ubisoft channels—so far they have not addressed these FSR-related problems.

AMD has updated its Radeon Adrenalin driver with the latest edition, 23.9.2. The newest version brings unified driver support for AMD Radeon RX 7700 and RX 7800, which the previous driver lacked, and there was a separate download for these two SKUs. Besides merging into a single unified driver, the new update brings Lies of P, Party Animals, and The Crew Motorfest game support for AMD Radeon graphics. In this driver release, the AMD Radeon Anti-Lag+ feature is introduced for Starfield, Witcher 3, ELDEN RING, Immortals of Aveum, and an Anti-Lag+ screen overlay for system latency. AMD fixed some issues like application crashing while playing Baldur Gate 3 with Vulkan API on RX 7900 XTX, limited GPU clock tuning on RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT, application crash while playing SMITE on RX 7900 XTX, and application crash or driver timeout while playing F1 2023 on RX 7800 XT. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 update yet in this driver release.

You can download the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 23.9.2 Driver here.See the full list of changes below:

A previous attempt to enable NVIDIA GPU video hardware acceleration by default within Steam running on Linux platforms was thwarted by numerous bugs and faults - adopters of the mid-May Steam Client Beta update reported their experiences of various crashes encountered in Valve's user interface. The embattled software engineering team has since investigated this matter and released a new update (yesterday).

The June 6th Steam Client Beta patch notes list a number of general improvements along with Linux-specific adjustments: "a crash when Steam windows were closed with hardware (HW) acceleration enabled on NVIDIA GPUs" and the re-enabling of "HW acceleration by default for NVIDIA GPUs." Early reports indicate that Linux gamers are having a smoother time after installing yesterday's update.

PCGamesN reviewed the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB founder edition graphics card a few days ago - the author noticed some stuttering issues when testing out said GPU in Cyberpunk 2077, and proceeded to publish these details. The odd performance bug seemed to occur when DLSS Frame Generation was enabled on a Ryzen 7000-series CPU PC system. PCGamesN forwarded these findings to NVIDIA - who took the matter very seriously. Team Green has since confirmed that an incompatibility between DLSS and Ryzen 7000 series processors exists in Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 - both developed by CD Projekt RED, and running on variants of the studio's proprietary REDengine. PCGamesN was quickly provided with revised .dll files that have apparently resolved the in-game stuttering problems.

An NVIDIA spokesperson outlined plans for forthcoming fixes: "The latest StreamLine 1.5.6 SL.dll files will be included in an upcoming patch of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3, fixes stuttering on Ryzen 7000 CPUs." PCGamesN was impressed with the speedy response (on the software team's part) and effectiveness of the specified bug fixes - and jokingly signs off their article with this conclusion: "There's no word on when this update will arrive exactly, but we're glad to see NVIDIA both quickly recognize and provide a fix for the problem. Hopefully it'll arrive before or just in time for the Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty release date, instead of whenever The Witcher 4 release date will be."

NVIDIA has released the latest iteration of its GeForce Game Ready drivers - Version 531.68 WHQL. This latest update provides optimizations for the upcoming Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - an action adventure title, and Dead Island 2 (out this Friday) - a gory first person action RPG zombie shooter - ensuring the best possible in-game performance. Version 531.68 WHQL also implements a fix for Immortals Fenyx Rising, where crashes to desktop were reported following a previous driver update (531.41). A conflict between ShadowPlay and the EA Play application has been resolved, and another fix addresses a performance issue linked to the enabling of Reflex within Counter-Strike 2 Limited Test's graphics settings.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 531.68 WHQL

Microsoft's Window Defender engineering team has finally found the time to address a long term bug within its anti-malware software - relating to performance issues with Mozilla's Firefox web browser. User feedback stretching back to five years ago indicates extremely sluggish web surfing experiences, caused by a Windows "Anti-malware Service Executable" occupying significant chunks of CPU utilization (more than 30%). The combination of Firefox and Windows Defender running in parallel would guarantee a butting of (software) heads - up until last week's bug fix. A Microsoft issued update has reduced the "MsMpEng.exe" Defender component's CPU usage by a maximum of 75%.

Microsoft and Mozilla developers have collaborated on addressing the disharmonious relationship between Defender and Firefox. A plucky member of the latter's softwareengineering team has been very transparent about the sluggish browser experience. Yannis Juglaret has provided a string of project updates via Mozilla's Bugzilla tracking system - one of his latest entries provide details about the fix: "You may read online that Defender was making too many calls to VirtualProtect, and that global CPU usage will now go down by 75% when browsing with Firefox. This is absolutely wrong! The impact of this fix is that on all computers that rely on Microsoft Defender's Real-time Protection feature (which is enabled by default in Windows), MsMpEng.exe will consume much less CPU than before when monitoring the dynamic behavior of any program through Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Nothing less, nothing more."