Update 2.2 is the fruit of a close collaboration between CD PROJEKT RED and Virtuos, a studio known for its work on many well-known AAA games for consoles and PC. It is available to all owners of Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.

As part of Update 2.2, players will access new character customization options - including new variants of cosmetic cyberware, tattoos, makeup options, and more. That's not the only thing players can now modify - all luxury or sports cars that have partnered with Rayfield now have access to exclusive CrystalCoat technology, meaning players can swap out the colors of select rides. Changes have also been made to Photo Mode, which now boasts additional features - including improved camera modes, the ability to spawn up to three additional characters in the scene, increased camera range, and new lighting options. Players will also be able to enjoy the presence of Johnny Silverhand in the passenger seat as they drive through the city of dreams. On top of it all, Update 2.2 also brings a number of technical improvements and more secrets to Night City.

AMD has released the new ROCm 6.3 version which introduces several new features and optimizations, including SGLang integration for accelerated AI inferencing, a re-engineered FlashAttention-2 for optimized AI training and inference, the introduction of multi-node Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), new Fortran compiler, and enhanced computer vision libraries like rocDecode, rocJPEG, and rocAL.

According to AMD, the SGLang, a runtime that is now supported by ROCm 6.3, is purpose-built for optimizing inference on models like LLMs and VLMs on AMD Instinct GPUs, and promises 6x higher throughput and much easier usage thanks to Python-integrated and pre-configured ROCm Docker containers. In addition, the AMD ROCm 6.3 also brings further transformer optimizations with FlashAttention-2, which should bring significant improvements in forward and backward pass compared to FlashAttention-1, a whole new AMD Fortran compiler with direct GPU offloading, backward compatibility, and integration with HIP Kernels and ROCm libraries, a whole new multi-node FFT support in rocFFT, which simplifies multi-node scaling and improved scalability, as well as enhanced computer vision libraries, rocDecode, rocJPEG, and rocAL, for AV1 codec support, GPU-accelerated JPEG decoding, and better audio augmentation.

In an exclusive interview with Hot Hardware, Intel acknowledged that its recently launched Core Ultra 200 desktop processors, codenamed "Arrow Lake," have significant performance issues. However, Intel announced that a set of fixes are being developed. As our review confirmed, the launch of these new processors fell short of both consumer expectations and Intel's own projections, particularly in gaming performance, despite showing promise in productivity, content creation, and some AI workloads. In a discussion during a recent livestream, Intel's Robert Hallock, VP and general manager of client AI and technical marketing, addressed these concerns head-on, describing the Arrow Lake launch as "disastrous" and attributing the underwhelming performance to inadequately optimized systems.

Robert HallockI can't go into all the details yet, but we identified a series of multifactor issues at the OS level, at the BIOS level, and I will say that the performance we saw in reviews is not what we expected and not what we intended. The launch just didn't go as planned. That has been a humbling lesson for all of us, inspiring a fairly large response internally to get to the bottom of what happened and to fix it.

Many gamers have been skeptical of the recently announced Sony PS5 Pro since the day it was announced, largely due to the high price and the perceived lack of meaningful improvements. It seemed to many as though the PS5 Pro was simply a meaningless mid-cycle cash-grab with a few extra features tacked onto the top, however, it looks like Sony and its development partners have put in the work to make the PS5 Pro experience fresh and worthwhile. According to a new post on the official PlayStation Blog, the new console will launch with at least 50 confirmed "Enhanced" games.

What exactly Sony means by Enhanced is rather nebulous, since many of the Enhanced games for the PS5 Pro have a mishmash of different Pro features. For example, Resident Evil Village gets the full 120 FPS treatment, while Horizon Forbidden West only gets a bump up to 4K at 60 FPS. Stellar Blade, on the other hand, only gets an FPS boost to 80 FPS or 50 FPS at 4K. It's likely that, like Stellar Blade, all the titles aiming for higher refresh rates on the PS5 Pro are using some mix of PSSR, dedicated AI acceleration, and traditional rasterization rendering techniques to achieve the increased frame rates. Both The Last of Us Part I and The Last of Us II Remastered will run at 60 FPS on the PS5 Pro, but they will render at 1440p and use PSSR to upscale to 4K output.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in standards development for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of PS-007A LPDDR5 CAMM2 Connector Performance Standard. The connector, referred to as "LP5CAMM2," is designed to offer a standardized modular LPDDR5 solution with ecosystem support, unlike the traditional LPDDR5 memory-down approach. Developed by JEDEC's JC-11 Committee for Mechanical Standardization, PS-007A is available for free download from the JEDEC website.

As compared to a DDR5 SODIMM connector, benefits of the LP5CAMM2 connector include:

• Better signal integrity (SI) and improved radio frequency interference (RFI)
• To enable a module solution with lower power consumption and increased battery life
• 50% form factor reduction with the similar Z height

Today, AMD unveiled new desktop computing products, delivering enhanced performance for gamers. The lineup features the new AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Desktop processor, based on the "Zen 5" architecture and utilizing 2nd Gen AMD 3D V-Cache technology.

With the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, AMD has re-engineered its cutting-edge on-chip memory solution with 2nd Gen AMD 3D V-Cache technology. The 64 MB cache memory has been relocated below the processor, which puts the core complex die (CCD) closer to the cooling solution to help keep the "Zen 5" cores cooler, delivering high clock rates and providing up to an average 8% gaming performance improvement compared to our last-gen generation and up to an average 20% faster than the competition. This revolutionary change in placement allows for extreme overclocking of the processor. It's the first X3D processor to be fully unlocked, empowering enthusiasts and gamers to push its performance to new limits.

Plasma 6 has come into its own over the last two releases. The wrinkles that always come with a major migration have been ironed out, and it's time to start delivering on the promises of the new Qt 6 and Wayland technology platforms that Plasma is built on top of. One of the outstanding issues has been to make Plasma a more artist-friendly environment by providing full support for the hardware that creative people need to get their work done.

For Digital Artists
Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. Open System Settings and look for Drawing Tablet to see various tools for configuring drawing tablets.

Today Microsoft published an extensive blog post about the controversial Recall feature that was intended to launch with Copilot+ enabled Windows 11 PCs. To recap on Recall: Recall was announced as a service that creates and stores 'snapshots' of the user's activity on their PC, and uses the neural processing hardware within a Copilot+ certified machine to filter search requests by the user in order to find what they had previously seen. In effect, it took constant screenshots and would index the contents of those screenshots to assist with vague search queries. Saw a very funny picture in Discord a week ago and can't find it but can describe what it looked like? Search Recall and with the power of neural processing it would sift through its index of stored screenshots and attempt to provide you the exact image you described. Or, you could scroll back through the gallery of snapshots yourself to find what you wanted.

The idea of a program or service running in the background taking screenshots of your activity every few seconds yielded some pretty unsavory reactions from just about everyone. To assuage privacy concerns Microsoft did release an update in June committing to a broad set of security improvements to Recall before the preview would be available to test. This latest blog post titled, "Update on Recall security and privacy architecture", outlines more improvements on top of those announced back in June.

Mojang has revealed that the Minecraft's annual mob vote (a feature that allows players to pick the next creature added to the game) tradition is coming to an end as part of a new game update structure, following TikTok war propaganda-inspired posters by players fed-up with the tradition.

On September 9, via a post on its blog, Mojang announced that its annual news livestream, Minecraft Live, is discarding the mob vote feature and is now being split up into several smaller, more-focused broadcasts, which will occur twice a year. Mojang also revealed that free content updates would be released more often, abandoning the traditional annual larger updates and sticking to smaller updates like this year's Armored Paws update.

Recent reports suggest that AMD's Zen 5 desktop processors may soon receive a significant power upgrade. The upcoming AGESA 1.2.0.1A Patch A is rumored to increase the default power limits (TDP) from 65 W to 105 W for certain models, specifically the 8-core Ryzen 7 9700X and the 6-core Ryzen 5 9600X. This development comes as a surprise given that the first reviews of the Ryzen 9000 series were published just last week, with lower power consumption praised as a major advantage over previous generations. The potential TDP increase, while not as high as the 120 W initially rumored for the 9700X, still represents a substantial boost in power allocation.

The rationale behind this significant TDP increase appears to be addressing the lower than expected performance of the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X compared to their predecessors. Initial testing showed that both CPUs performed similarly to earlier models, especially in gaming scenarios, with notable improvements only visible when using Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO). Even at 65 W, the Ryzen 7 9700X struggled to outpace the 7800X3D in gaming performance, highlighting the need for improved power delivery.

AMD has introduced Fluid Motion Frames 2 (AFMF 2), an upgraded version of its frame generation technology designed to improve gameplay smoothness and frame rates. This new iteration brings several enhancements and expanded compatibility across Radeon RX 6000 and 7000 series graphics cards. AMD debuted Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) in September 2023 introducing frame generation capabilities across a broad spectrum of GPUs, including those from NVIDIA, and Intel. This technology was compatible with all DirectX 12 and DirectX 11 games, potentially doubling performance when frame generation was activated.

Following its initial release, AMD addressed major concerns such as stuttering and frame-pacing through substantial driver improvements. The refined version of AFMF was officially incorporated into AMD's driver package in January of this year. Now, AMD is offering Fluid Motion Frames 2 as a technical preview using a special driver to convince gamers that they can have an even faster and smoother gaming experience.

Just a few months after hiring Ben Skeggs, a lead maintainer of the open-source NVIDIA GPU driver for Linux kernel, NVIDIA has announced a complete transition to open-source GPU kernel modules in its upcoming R560 driver release for Linux. This decision comes two years after the company's initial foray into open-source territory with the R515 driver in May 2022. The tech giant began focusing on data center compute GPUs, while GeForce and Workstation GPU support remained in the alpha stages. Now, after extensive development and optimization, NVIDIA reports that its open-source modules have achieved performance parity with, and in some cases surpassed, their closed-source counterparts. This transition brings a host of new capabilities, including heterogeneous memory management support, confidential computing features, and compatibility with NVIDIA's Grace platform's coherent memory architectures.

The move to open-source is expected to foster greater collaboration within the Linux ecosystem and potentially lead to faster bug fixes and feature improvements. However, not all GPUs will be compatible with the new open-source modules. While cutting-edge platforms like NVIDIA Grace Hopper and Blackwell will require open-source drivers, older GPUs from the Maxwell, Pascal, or Volta architectures must stick with proprietary drivers. NVIDIA has developed a detection helper script to guide driver selection for users who are unsure about compatibility. The shift also brings changes to NVIDIA's installation processes. The default driver version for most installation methods will now be the open-source variant. This affects package managers with the CUDA meta package, run file installations and even Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Intel has released its latest version of Arc GPU Graphics drivers for A-series discrete GPUs and Arc Graphics iGPUs, version 101.5762 Beta. The new drivers bring Game On Driver support on Intel Arc A-series GPUs and Intel Core Ultra with Intel Arc GPUs for Once Human and Zenless Zone Zero games, as well as improve performance in Diablo IV under DirectX 12 by up to 35 percent at 1440p resolution and by up to 30 percent at 1080p resolution with Ray Tracing Ultra settings.

The new drivers also fix the issue seen in Plants vs. Zombies Game of the Year Edition when 3D acceleration is enabled on Intel Arc A-series GPUs and Core Ultra CPUs with Intel Arc GPUs, as well as issues with Endurance Gaming in games on Intel Core Ultra CPUs with Intel Arc GPUs. Intel also fixed an issue With Intel Arc Control where it may report incorrect Shader Model version in System Capabilities.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.5762 Beta

Applied Materials, Inc. today introduced materials engineering innovations designed to increase the performance-per-watt of computer systems by enabling copper wiring to scale to the 2 nm logic node and beyond. "The AI era needs more energy-efficient computing, and chip wiring and stacking are critical to performance and power consumption," said Dr. Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials. "Applied's newest integrated materials solution enables the industry to scale low-resistance copper wiring to the emerging angstrom nodes, while our latest low-k dielectric material simultaneously reduces capacitance and strengthens chips to take 3D stacking to new heights."

Overcoming the Physics Challenges of Classic Moore's Law Scaling
Today's most advanced logic chips can contain tens of billions of transistors connected by more than 60 miles of microscopic copper wiring. Each layer of a chip's wiring begins with a thin film of dielectric material, which is etched to create channels that are filled with copper. Low-k dielectrics and copper have been the industry's workhorse wiring combination for decades, allowing chipmakers to deliver improvements in scaling, performance and power-efficiency with each generation.

Plasma 6 hits its stride with version 6.1. While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct (and what a massive job that was), 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take your desktop to a new level.

In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too), as you delve into interacting with desktops on remote machines, become more productive with usability and accessibility enhancements galore, and discover customizations that will even affect the hardware of your computer.

ASUS has had issues with customer support, as reported following last month's investigation by Gamers Nexus. However, they are now promising several fixes. If you've been wrongly denied a warranty repair or charged for unnecessary service, ASUS wants you to email them at "executivecare@asus.com" using a predefined template (see below). It also promises to respond within a week and apologizes for past negative experiences, citing customer feedback as an opportunity for improvement. These cases will be handled directly by ASUS staff.

Getting into a bit more details, after criticism, ASUS executives met with Gamers Nexus staff face to face and agreed to a list of promises.

Intel released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers today. The latest version 101.5522 WHQL brings mostly game ready support for titles like Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Starfield May Update, Wuthering Waves, and XDefiant. With the support for Starfield May Update, Intel has prepared performance improvements when the game runs on DirectX 12 API. This brings up to 8% average FPS uplift at 1080p with Ultra settings and up to 7% average FPS uplift at 1440p with High settings, which is a notable improvement coming only from the driver. You can download the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.5522 WHQL.

Bethesda had already promised a big update for Starfield, and yesterday, it announced all the goodies to come, including the May 15th launch date. The May Update, as it is called, will bring detailed surface maps, new gameplay difficulty options, new display settings, new features for ship customizations, and more, as well as an extensive list of bug fixes.

According to Bethesda, the Starfield May Update comes with improved surface maps, new gameplay options which allow fine-tuning for those looking for an extra challenge or want to make certain aspects of the game a bit easier, and a new Ship Decoration mode for the interior of ships that now allows players to decorate the ship in the same way as outposts. The update also adds tabs to container menus for easier inventory management, adds an ability to change traits and appearance after entering the Unity, a new Dialogue camera toggle in settings, and new display settings for the Xbox Series X.

MSI, a leading brand in gaming, content creation, and business and productivity laptops, is proud to announce that its gaming handheld, Claw, has achieved a significant boost in gaming performance, with an increase of up to 150% through new BIOS and GPU drivers. Moreover, the updated BIOS and GPU drivers enable the Claw to smoothly play the top 100 popular games on the Steam platform, providing an excellent mobile gaming experience.

The new E1T41IMS.106 BIOS (referred to as 106) and 31.0.101.5445 GPU driver (referred to as 5445) for the MSI Claw have significantly enhanced gaming performance according to internal tests. For instance, the performance of the well-known open-world horror game "7 Days to Die" increased by up to 150%. Other popular games such as "Monster Hunter World" and "Cyberpunk 2077" also saw performance improvements of over 50% with the new BIOS and GPU drivers, providing a smoother gaming experience.

As promised earlier, Capcom has released a new Dragon's Dogma 2 patch for PC and consoles, and while it does not bring any performance improvements to the game, which still lacks NVIDIA DLSS 3 support, it brings some much-needed gameplay tweaks and fixes.

The April 25th Update, as it is called, mostly improves the game's Pawns, allowing users to zoom in on the faces of the Arisen and Pawns, as well as their general behavior and dialogue. The update also adds several fixes, including fixes for issues in escort quests and fighting monsters in town which results in jail time. Capcom did say it also fixed some crashes and freezes in specific circumstances, as well as other miscellaneous bugs, but no further details were given.

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

Lords of the Fallen got a new big update that is now live for both PC and consoles, and brings several new features, improvements, and fixes, as well as support for AMD FSR 3. Called the Master of Fate, the new version 1.5 update is the culmination of over 30 updates released since launch and should significantly improve performance, stability and optimization, as well as bring difficulty balancing based on the feedback from gamers.

According to the full release notes released over at Steam, the biggest update is the new Advanced Game Modifier System, which will be available to both new and old players, and brings several content and quality of life enhancements. In addition, the new Version 1.5 update also adds support for AMD FSR 3 and fixes several issues, including a multiplayer issue where the player can fall through the elevator, a fix to increase the maximum stack count of Vestige Seeds from 5 to 99, and a fix for a rare crash caused by AI.

Unreal Engine 5.4 is here, and it's packed with new features and improvements to performance, visual fidelity, and productivity that will benefit game developers and creators across industries. With this release, we're delivering the toolsets we've been using internally to build and ship Fortnite Chapter 5, Rocket Racing, Fortnite Festival, and LEGO Fortnite. Here are some of the highlights.

Animation
Character rigging and animation authoring
This release sees substantial updates to Unreal Engine's built-in animation toolset, enabling you to quickly, easily, and enjoyably rig characters and author animation directly in engine, without the frustrating and time-consuming need to round trip to external applications. With an Experimental new Modular Control Rig feature, you can build animation rigs from understandable modular parts instead of complex granular graphs, while Automatic Retargeting makes it easier to get great results when reusing bipedal character animations. There are also extensions to the Skeletal Editor and a suite of new deformer functions to make the Deformer Graph more accessible.

During the Vision 2024 event, Intel announced its latest Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, promising significant improvements over its predecessor. Intel claims the Gaudi 3 offers up to 70% improvement in training performance, 50% better inference, and 40% better efficiency than Nvidia's H100 processors. The new AI accelerator is presented as a PCIe Gen 5 dual-slot add-in card with a 600 W TDP or an OAM module with 900 W. The PCIe card has the same peak 1,835 TeraFLOPS of FP8 performance as the OAM module despite a 300 W lower TDP. The PCIe version works as a group of four per system, while the OAM HL-325L modules can be run in an eight-accelerator configuration per server. This likely will result in a lower sustained performance, given the lower TDP, but it confirms that the same silicon is used, just finetuned with a lower frequency. Built on TSMC's N5 5 nm node, the AI accelerator features 64 Tensor Cores, delivering double the FP8 and quadruple FP16 performance over the previous generation Gaudi 2.

The Gaudi 3 AI chip comes with 128 GB of HBM2E with 3.7 TB/s of bandwidth and 24 200 Gbps Ethernet NICs, with dual 400 Gbps NICs used for scale-out. All of that is laid out on 10 tiles that make up the Gaudi 3 accelerator, which you can see pictured below. There is 96 MB of SRAM split between two compute tiles, which acts as a low-level cache that bridges data communication between Tensor Cores and HBM memory. Intel also announced support for the new performance-boosting standardized MXFP4 data format and is developing an AI NIC ASIC for Ultra Ethernet Consortium-compliant networking. The Gaudi 3 supports clusters of up to 8192 cards, coming from 1024 nodes comprised of systems with eight accelerators. It is on track for volume production in Q3, offering a cost-effective alternative to NVIDIA accelerators with the additional promise of a more open ecosystem. More information and a deeper dive can be found in the Gaudi 3 Whitepaper.

We are thrilled to share that over the next few weeks, the EA app will officially replace Origin as our primary Mac platform. A faster, more reliable, and more streamlined experience - it's the best place for you to experience EA's incredible games, services and content. With the new streamlined design you will easily find the games and content you're looking for and discover your new favorite games. With automatic game downloads and background updates you can ensure that your games are ready to play when you are.

For existing Origin players, we've worked hard to make the transition to the EA app as simple as possible. When you get there, all your games and content, including games already installed on Origin, will be ready and waiting for you. Your local and cloud saves will transfer forward ensuring you can pick up where you left off. New players will start by downloading a new favorite game and jump into the action with our optimized experience. Players on unsupported macOS devices can continue to enjoy their favorite games on Origin.