While we are all used to having a system with a CPU, GPU, and, recently, NPU—X-Silicon Inc. (XSi), a startup founded by former Silicon Valley veterans—has unveiled an interesting RISC-V processor that can simultaneously handle CPU, GPU, and NPU workloads in a chip. This innovative chip architecture, which will be open-source, aims to provide a flexible and efficient solution for a wide range of applications, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, automotive systems, and IoT devices. The new microprocessor combines a RISC-V CPU core with vector capabilities and GPU acceleration into a single chip, creating a versatile all-in-one processor. By integrating the functionality of a CPU and GPU into a single core, X-Silicon's design offers several advantages over traditional architectures. The chip utilizes the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) for both CPU and GPU operations, running a single instruction stream. This approach promises lower memory footprint execution and improved efficiency, as there is no need to copy data between separate CPU and GPU memory spaces.

Called the C-GPU architecture, X-Silicon uses RISC-V Vector Core, which has 16 32-bit FPUs and a Scaler ALU for processing regular integers as well as floating point instructions. A unified instruction decoder feeds the cores, which are connected to a thread scheduler, texture unit, rasterizer, clipping engine, neural engine, and pixel processors. All is fed into a frame buffer, which feeds the video engine for video output. The setup of the cores allows the users to program each core individually for HPC, AI, video, or graphics workloads. Without software, there is no usable chip, which prompts X-Silicon to work on OpenGL ES, Vulkan, Mesa, and OpenCL APIs. Additionally, the company plans to release a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for direct chip programming. According to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry has been seeking an open-standard GPU that is flexible and scalable enough to support various markets. X-Silicon's CPU/GPU hybrid chip aims to address this need by providing manufacturers with a single, open-chip design that can handle any desired workload. The XSi gave no timeline, but it has plans to distribute the IP to OEMs and hyperscalers, so the first silicon is still away.

Konstantin Seurer, a Mesa developer, has spent the past couple of months working on CPU-based Vulkan ray tracing—naturally, some folks will express scepticism about this project's practicality. Seurer has already set expectations with a brief message: "don't ask about performance." His GitLab merge request page attracted Michael Larabel's attention—the Phoronix founder and principal author was suitably impressed with Seurer's coding wizardry. He: "managed to implement support for VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations, and VK_KHR_ray_query for Lavapipe. This Lavapipe Vulkan ray tracing support is based in part on porting code from the emulated ray tracing worked on for RADV with older Radeon GPUs." A lone screenshot provided evidence of Quake II running at 1 FPS with Vulkan ray tracing enabled—this "atrocious" performance was achieved thanks to a Mesa Lavapipe driver "implementing the Vulkan API for CPU-based execution."

VideoCardz has highlighted an older example of CPU-based rendering techniques: "this is not the first time we heard about ray tracing on the CPU in Quake. In 2008, Intel demonstrated Enemy Territory: Quake Wars running at 720p resolution at 14 to 29 FPS on 16 core and 20-35 FPS at 24 core CPUs (quad-socket). The basic implementation of ray tracing in 2008 is not comparable to complex ray tracing techniques designed for GPUs, thus the performance on modern system is actually much lower. Beyond that, that game was specifically designed for the Intel architecture and used a specific API to achieve that. Sadly, the original ET demo is no longer available, it would be interesting to see how it performs today." CPU-based Vulkan ray tracing is expected to hit public distribution channels with the rollout of Mesa 24.1. Several members of the Phoronix community reckon that modern AMD Threadripper PRO processors have the potential to post double-digit in-game frame rates.

HWiNFO v7.73-5370 Beta was released yesterday—the newly updated version includes a fully integrated On-Screen Display (OSD) feature. In the past, users have had to rely on external tools—for example; RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS)—to get vital information displayed on their monitor(s) of choice. Martin, HWiNFO's main author, revealed that this new addition is based on a Team Blue toolset—his February 13 official forum post stated: "(this) feature is based on Intel PresentMon and allows showing any value as a text or graph (with multiple values). Position, text font, size, weight and colors can be individually defined. It should work with any engine like DirectX 11, 12, OpenGL, Vulkan. The OSD is automatically placed over the most graphics intensive application currently running but it can also be manually targeted." Five days later he followed up with further information—HWInfo64's new OSD is "available in HWiNFO64 only," therefore making it incompatible with Windows XP. Similarly, MSI's Afterburner 4.6.6 Beta landed a week and a bit ago, without support for Microsoft's 2001-vintage operating system.

Martin reckons that the change could affect Windows Vista users: "Use legacy HWiNFO32 on these systems. We don't anticipate that these systems will benefit from 64-bit applications, nor require support of latest HWiNFO64 versions. So the impact of this (sad) limitation should be minimal. In case there will be a reasonable demand for new versions of HWiNFO64 on XP64 it's still possible to build such versions (without OSD support), but currently we don't expect to make such extra effort." Additionally, the popular monitoring application's latest upgrade brings enhanced sensor monitoring for ASUS NUC systems, improved health monitoring on a selection of NVMe drives (connected via Intel RST), and enhanced sensor monitoring on the ASUS TUF GAMING Z790-PRO WIFI motherboard model.

NVIDIA has released a new GeForce Hotfix Driver Version 551.46 that should fix stuttering issues in some scenarios. According to the release notes, the new hotfix driver fixes micro-stuttering in some games when vertical sync is enabled, as well as stuttering when scrolling in web browser. It also fixes stuttering issues on Advanced Optimus Notebooks when running Red Dead Redemption 2 under Vulkan API, and stability issues in Immortals of Aveum under extended gameplay.

The new GeForce Hotfix Driver Version 551.46 is based on the latest GeForce WHQL driver, version 551.23. You can download the new GeForce Hotfix Driver Version 551.46 over at NVIDIA's support page.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the latest roadmap milestone for Vulkan, the cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. The Vulkan roadmap targets the "immersive graphics" market, made up of mid- to high-end smartphones, tablets, laptops, consoles, and desktop devices. The Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone captures a set of capabilities that are expected to be supported in new products for that market, beginning in 2024. The roadmap specification provides a significant increase in functionality for the targeted devices and sets the evolutionary direction of the API, including both new hardware capabilities and improvements to the programming model for Vulkan developers.

Vulkan Roadmap 2024 is the second milestone release on the Vulkan Roadmap. Products that support it must be Vulkan 1.3 conformant and support the extensions and capabilities defined in both the 2022 and 2024 Roadmap specifications. Vulkan roadmap specifications use the Vulkan Profile mechanism to help developers build portable Vulkan applications; roadmap requirements are expressed in machine-readable JSON files, and tooling in the Vulkan SDK auto-generates code that makes it easy for developers to query for and enable profile support in their applications.

We are well aware that NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER graphics cards are next up on the review table (January 31)—TPU's W1zzard has so far toiled away on getting his evaluations published on time for options further down the Ada Lovelace SUPER food chain. This process was interrupted briefly by the appearance of custom Radeon RX 7600 XT models, but today's attention soon returned to another batch of GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER cards. Reviewers are already toying around with driver-enabled GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER sample units—under strict confidentiality conditions—but the occasional leak is expected to happen. The appropriately named Benchleaks social media account has kept track of emerging test results.

The Geekbench Browser database was updated earlier today with premature GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER GPU test results—one entry highlighted by Benchleaks provides a quick look at the card's prowess in three of Geekbench 5.1's graphics API trials: Vulkan, CUDA and OpenCL. VideoCardz points out that all of the scores could be fundamentally flawed; in particular the Vulkan result of 100378 points—the regular (non-SUPER) GeForce RTX 4080 GPU can achieve almost double that figure in Geekbench 6. The SUPER's other results included a Geekbench 5 CUDA score of 309554, and an achievement of 264806 points in OpenCL. A late morning entrant looks to be hitting the right mark—an ASUS testbed (PRIME Z790-A WIFI + Intel Core i9-13900KF) managed to score 210551 points in Geekbench 6.2.2 Vulkan.

In April 2021, the Vulkan Working Group at Khronos released a set of provisional extensions, collectively referred to as Vulkan Video which provide seamless encoding and decoding of video streams using a variety of video coding standards. The December 2022 release of Vulkan 1.3.238 saw the finalization of the extensions to decode H.264 and H.265, and today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.274, Khronos has finalized their counterpart: the extensions to enable encoding of H.264 and H.265 video streams. Leveraging the Vulkan framework, they provide a standardized, seamless, low-overhead, and highly controllable way to produce H.264 and H.265 video via hardware accelerators, with applications ranging from real-time, low-latency streaming to offline server-scale transcoding.

Incorporating industry feedback, the extensions saw many improvements since their introduction, from a bidirectional interface (overrides) to help with coding and exposing advanced hardware capabilities, to rate control configuration parameters and an interface to aid with quality vs. performance trade-offs. This feedback also prompted the release of the first video maintenance extension. In addition, given the high industry demand for AV1 codec support, an AV1 decode extension release is imminent, with an AV1 encode extension development also underway. Figure 1 depicts Vulkan Video extensions along with their status and relations.

AMD is working hard on delivering next-generation products, and today, its Linux team has submitted a few interesting patches that made a subtle appearance through recent GitHub patches for GFX12 targets, as reported by Phoronix. These patches have introduced two new discrete GPUs into the LLVM compiler for Linux, fueling speculation that these will be the first iterations of the RDNA4 graphics architecture, potentially being a part of the Radeon RX 8000 series of desktop graphics cards. The naming scheme for these new targets, GFX1200 and GFX1201, suggests a continuation of AMD's logical progression through graphics architectures, considering the company's history of associating RDNA1 with GFX10 and following suit with subsequent generations, like RDNA2 was GFX10.2 and RDNA3 was GFX11.

The development of these new GPUs is still in the early stages, indicated by the lack of detailed information about the upcoming graphics ISA or its features within the patches. Currently, the new GFX12 targets are set to be treated akin to GFX11 as the patch notes that "For now they behave identically to GFX11," implying that AMD is keeping the specifics under wraps until closer to release. The patch that defines target names and ELF numbers for new GFX12 targets GFX1200 and GFX1201 is needed in order to enable timely support for AMD ROCm compute stack, the AMDVLK Vulkan driver, and the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Thank you to the 3DMark community - the gamers, overclockers, hardware reviewers, tech-heads and those in the industry using our benchmarks, who have joined us in discovering what the cutting edge of PC hardware can do over this last quarter of a century. Looking back, it's amazing how far graphics have come, and we're very excited to see what the next 25 years bring.

After looking back, it's time to share a sneak peek of what's coming next. Here are some preview screenshots for 3DMark Steel Nomad, our successor to 3DMark Time Spy. It's been more than seven years since we launched Time Spy, and after more than 42 million submitted results, we think it's time for a new heavy non-ray tracing benchmark. Steel Nomad will be our most demanding non-ray tracing benchmark and will not only support Windows using DirectX 12, but also macOS and iOS using Metal, Android using Vulkan, and Linux using Vulkan for Enterprise and reviewers. To celebrate 3DMark's 25th year, the scene will feature some callbacks to many of our previous benchmarks. We hope you have fun finding them all!

AMD has released the latest version of the Adrenalin software, version 23.11.1 WHQL. The new AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 23.11.1 WHQL drivers add support for upcoming games, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, The Invincible, and JX3 Ultimate, and add Radeon Boost support for Alan Wake 2. The new drivers also add improvements and optimizations for Stable Diffusion, Adobe Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, UL Procyon AI workloads on Radeon RX 600M, 700M, 6000, and 7000 series graphics cards.

In addition to new games support and optimizations, it also fixes several issues, including a fix for Performance Metrics Overlay FPS reporting in various games, performance issues with Radeon RX 7600 in Counter Strike 2, flickering issues in Total War: Pharaoh and Alan Wake, issues with rebuilding shader cache in Baldur Gate 3 on Vulkan API and Forza Motorsport, fix for driver crash in Forza Motorsport, and a fix for an intermittent black screen or code 31 error on some graphics cards, including the Radeon RX 6700 XT.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 23.11.1 WHQL

It has been over four years since the release of the Raspberry Pi 4, and in that time a lot has changed in the maker board and single-board computer landscape. For the Raspberry Pi Foundation there were struggles with worldwide demand and production capacity brought on by the global pandemic starting in 2020, and plenty of new competitors came to the scene to offer ready to order alternatives to the venerable RPi 4. Today however the production woes have been assuaged and a new generation of Raspberry Pi is here; the Raspberry Pi 5.

Raspberry Pi 5 is being announced in advance of availability unlike every prior RPi device launch. Pre-orders are open with many of the listed Approved Resellers on RPi's website starting today but unit shipments aren't expected until near the end of October 2023. As part of this pre-order scheme, RPi Foundation is withholding pre-orders from bulk customers and will be dealing in single-unit sales for individuals until at least the end of the year, as well as running some promotions with The MagPi and HackSpace magazines to give priority access to their subscribers. Genuinely nice to see, considering how hard it was to obtain a Pi 4 for the average Joe over the last couple years. The two announced prices for the RPi 5 are $60 USD for the 4 GB variant, and $80 USD for the 8 GB variant; or about $5 USD more than current reseller pricing on comparable configurations of the Raspberry Pi 4.

Thanks to the latest report from Phoronix, we know that Intel is working on supporting the latest "Xe2" graphics architecture for their upcoming Lunar Lake processors. Today, the latest enablement comes in the Mesa Linux drivers. By employing a new technique that allows for importing prior-generation XML files within the Intel Mesa driver code, Intel engineers have managed to streamline the overall file size. This is significant not just for the efficiency it brings but also because it signifies the beginning of work on enabling Xe2 graphics support. It suggests a thoughtful approach to building upon existing architectures, making it easier to adapt and evolve the software support for each new generation of Intel graphics.

Even though we are at the early stage and Lunar Lake is far away, the progress on Xe2 doesn't stop at Mesa driver changes. There is already some work at the kernel level, and new merge requests for draft compiler changes and shader compiler patches have also been spotted. This proactive development strategy positions Intel well in offering robust open-source graphics support for Linux, and it sends a strong signal to the developer community about Intel's dedication to the platform. After the Linux kernel driver works, this Mesa driver will enable better OpenGL/Vulkan API compatibility, so Lunar Lake arrives with proper software support.

Ampere Computing, known for its Altra (Max) and upcoming AmpereOne families of AArch64 server processors tailored for data centers, has released a guide for enthusiasts on running Steam for Linux on these ARM64 processors. This includes using Steam Play (Proton) to play Windows games on these Linux-powered servers. Over the summer, Ampere Computing introduced a GitHub repository detailing the process of running Steam for Linux on their AArch64 platforms, including Steam Play/Proton. While the guide is primarily designed for Ampere Altra/Altra Max and AmpereOne hardware, it can be adapted for other 64-bit Arm platforms. However, a powerful processor is essential to appreciate the gaming experience truly. Additionally, for the 3D OpenGL/Vulkan graphics to function optimally, an Ampere workstation system is more suitable than a headless server.

The guide recommends the Ampere Altra Developer platform paired with an NVIDIA RTX A6000 series graphics card, which supports AArch64 proprietary drivers. The guide uses Box86 and Box64 to run Steam x86 binaries and other x86/x86-64 games for emulation. While there are other options like FEX-Emu and Hangover to enhance the Linux binary experience on AArch64, Box86/Box64 is the preferred choice for gaming on Ampere workstations, as indicated by its mention in Ampere Computing's Once the AArch64 Linux graphics drivers are accelerated and Box86/Box64 emulation is set up, users can install Steam for Linux. By activating Proton within Steam, it becomes feasible to play Windows-exclusive x86/x86-64 games on Ampere AArch64 workstations or server processors. However, the guide doesn't provide insights into the performance of such a configuration.

We're excited to announce the launch of 3DMark Solar Bay, a new cross-platform benchmark for testing ray traced graphics performance on Windows PCs and high-end Android devices. This benchmark measures games-related graphics performance by rendering a demanding, ray-traced scene in real time. Solar Bay is available now for Android on the Google Play Store and for Windows on Steam, Epic Games or directly from UL Solutions.

Compare ray tracing performance across platforms
Ray tracing is the showcase technology for Solar Bay, simulating real-time reflections. Compared to traditional rasterization, ray-traced scenes produce far more realistic lighting. While dedicated desktop and laptop graphics processing units (GPUs) have supported ray tracing for several years, it's only recently that integrated GPUs and Android devices have been capable of running real-time ray-traced games at frame rates acceptable to gamers.

Intel's Alchemist engineering team has been working on improving its open-source Vulkan drivers for Linux—recent coverage from Phoronix shows that Team Blue's hard work is paying off, especially in the area of gaming performance. The site's founder, Michael Larabel, approves of the latest Mesa work produced by Intel engineers, and has commended them on their efforts to better the Arc Graphics family. His mid-month testings—on a Linux 6.4-based system running an Intel Arc A770 GPU—demonstrated a "~10% speed-up for the Intel Arc Graphics on Linux." He has benchmarked this system again over the past weekend, following the release of a new set of optimizations for Mesa 23.3-devel: "The latest performance boost for Intel graphics on Linux is by supporting the I915_FORMAT_MOD_4_TILED_DG2_RC_CCS modifier. Indeed it's panning out nicely for furthering the Intel Arc Graphics Vulkan performance."

He apologized for the limited selection of games, due to: "the Intel Linux graphics driver still not having sparse support in place, but at least that will hopefully be here in the coming months when the Intel Xe kernel driver is upstreamed. Another recent promising development for the Intel open-source graphics driver support is fake sparse support to at least help some games and that code will hopefully be merged soon." First up was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive—thanks to the optimized Vulkan drivers it: "enjoyed another nice boost to the performance as a result of this latest code. For CS Linux gamers, it's great seeing the 21% boost just over the past month."

Rapid loading and smooth navigation through endless open worlds has long been a goal of gamers and developers alike. Even with the incredible performance of NVMe SSDs, this goal has remained out of reach. Modern game engines have exceeded the capability of traditional storage APIs; a new generation of Input/Output (IO) architecture is needed.

Enter NVIDIA RTX IO, enabling fast GPU-based loading and game asset decompression, massively accelerating IO performance compared to hard drives and traditional storage APIs. NVIDIA RTX IO leverages GPU decompression for smaller data packages, enabling faster load times and lower CPU utilization, allowing developers to create a new generation of games with massive, highly detailed worlds. NVIDIA RTX IO makes its debut alongside the free Portal: Prelude RTX mod today, and will also feature in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, launching July 26th.

AMD late Thursday released the Adrenalin 23.7.1 WHQL drivers. While these do not come with optimization for any new games since the previous 23.5.2 drivers, they add several new Vulkan API extensions, and fix a few issues. In particular, they introduce Vulkan-based accelerated video decode for H.264 and H.265 formats, among 8 other extensions spanning the Khronos and Valve trunks. The drivers also claim to improve idle power and multi-monitor power draw of RX 7000 series GPUs.

Among the issues fixed with Adrenalin 23.7.1 WHQL include sub-optimal VR performance or stuttering noticed with RX 7000 series GPUs, and an application crash for DaVinci Resolve Studio with AV1 video playback. The drivers improve idle- and multi-monitor power-draw for RX 7000 series GPUs on some 4K@144 Hz displays, and multi-monitor configurations. Display corruption noticed with WWE 2K23, and Nioh 2 have been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 23.7.1 WHQL

When it comes to APIs, OpenGL is something of a classic. According to the Khronos Group, OpenGL is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API. Since its launch in 1992 it has been used extensively by software developers for PCs and workstations to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics applications for markets such as CAD, content creation, entertainment, game development and virtual reality.

To date, Imagination GPUs have natively supported OpenGL up until Release 3.3 as well as OpenGL ES (the version of OpenGL for embedded systems), Vulkan (a cross-platform graphics API) and OpenCL (an API for parallel programming). However, thanks to the increasing performance of our top-end GPUs, especially with the likes of the DXT-72-2304, they present a competitive offering to the data centre and desktop (DCD) market. Indeed, we have multiple customers - including the likes of Innosilicon - choosing Imagination GPUs for the flexibility an IP solution, their scalability and their ability to offer up to 6 TFLOPS of compute.

Imagination Technologies is bringing seamless visual experiences to cost-sensitive consumer devices with the new IMG CXM GPU range which includes the smallest GPU to support HDR user interfaces natively.

Consumers are looking for visuals on their smart home platforms that are as detailed, smooth, and responsive as the experience they are accustomed to on mobile devices. At the same time, ambitious content providers are aligning the look and feel of their applications' user interfaces with their cinematic content, by integrating advanced features such as 4K and HDR.

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 7800 XT has made an appearance online, having been tested in Geekbench. The entire system appears to be some kind of internal test system at AMD, as it's listed as "Advanced Micro Devices X670_E7" on Geekbench. The system consists of an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU paired with what should be 64 GB of RAM and oddly enough running Debian Linux. It's also entirely possible that this is a fake submission, which makes somewhat sense considering the weak performance. The Radeon RX 7800 XT was tested using the Vulkan test in Geekbench and you can find the numbers below.

Overall, the card scored 113,819 points in the Vulkan test, which is close to what an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT scores on an older Ryzen 7 5700X system with 32 GB of RAM, so not too much should be read into the performance figures here. However, this gives us the first indication that AMD is readying its RX 7800 XT GPUs—assuming it's a real submission—which may or may not be announced at Computex later this month. However, there have been rumours that the RX 7800 XT has been pushed back, with the lower-end cards launching first, but we don't have long until we find out at least.

Samsung's unannounced Exynos 2400 mobile chipset has been linked to the upcoming Galaxy S24 smartphone family, but internet tipsters have speculated that the in-house SoC will be reserved for the baseline model only. The more expensive Plus and Ultra variants could be the main targets for flagship smartphone fetishists - it is possible that Qualcomm's upper echelon Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset is set to feature within these premium devices. Samsung's Exynos processors are not considered to be fan favorites, but industry insiders reckon that the latest performance figures indicate that Samsung's up-and-comer has the potential to turn some heads. Exact specifications for the Exynos 2400 are not public knowledge - one of the tipsters suggests that a 10-core layout has been settled on by Samsung, as well as a recent bump up in GPU core count - from 6 to 12. The company's own 4 nm SF4P process is the apparent choice set for production line.

A leaker has posted benchmark scores generated by an unknown device that was running an Exynos 2400 SoC - the Geekbench 5 results indicate an average single-core score of 1530 with a peak of 1711. The multi-core average score is shown to be 6210, and the highest number achieved is 6967. Therefore the Exynos 2400 is 31% percent faster (in multi-core performance) than the refreshed Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 variant currently found in Galaxy S23 Ultra smartphones, but the divide between the two in terms of single-core performance is not so great. The 2400 manages to outpace (by 30%) Apple's present generation Bionic A16's average multi-core score, although the latter beats the presumed engineering sample's single-core result by 20%. The Exynos 2400 will face a new lineup of rival mobile processors in 2024 - namely Apple's next generation Bionic A17 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, so it is difficult to extrapolate today's leaked figures into a future scenario.

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.