AMD in a GPUOpen blog post showed off some "super early" performance numbers for a Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU rendering a DirectX 12 workload using Work Graphs, instead of the traditional ExecuteIndirect method. Work Graphs is method by with GPUs enjoy greater autonomy in executing render and general purpose compute workloads, by vastly reducing the role of the CPU in the rendering pipeline. At the ongoing GDC 2024, AMD showed off a performance demo of a DirectX 12 rendering workload that implements Work Graphs, running in sync with Mesh Nodes, a feature that will process draw calls while the rest of the graph is executing. This is compared its render times to the traditional method. The differences are staggering.

It takes the traditional ExecuteIndirect method 64% longer to render a frame compared to Work Graphs, in other words, the new method is 39% faster. This has a direct impact on frame-rates for applications that implement Work Graphs. Although not part of the demo, AMD RDNA 3 also implement a silicon-level acceleration for Multi-draw indirect, another API-level feature that's underutilized. AMD's demo showcases a 3D scene without the HUD UI and skybox, being rendered on a single work graph dispatch. Work Graphs and Mesh Nodes are the next big feature addition to the DirectX 12 API feature-set, which will begin rolling out later this year. Both AMD and NVIDIA have ongoing implementation efforts to implement it.

The Moore Threads MTT S80 first attracted wider media attention last summer due to it being introduced as the world's first PCIe Gen 5 gaming graphics card. Unfortunately, its performance prowess in gaming benchmarks did not match early expectations, especially for a 200 W TDP-rated unit with 4096 "MUSA" cores. Evaluators discovered that driver issues have limited the full potential of MTT GPUs—it is speculated that Moore Threads has simply repurposed existing PowerVR architecture under their in-house design: "Chunxaio." The Chinese firm has concentrated on driver improvements in the interim—mid-February experimentations indicated 100% performance boosts for MTT S80 and S70 discrete GPUs courtesy of driver version 240.90. Germany's ComputerBase managed to import Moore Threads MTT S80 and S30 models for testing purposes—in an effort to corroborate recently published performance figures, as disclosed by Asian review outlets.

The Moore Thread MTT S80—discounted down to $164 last October—was likely designed with MMO gamers in mind. VideoCardz (based on ComputerBase findings) discussed the card's struggles when weighed against Team Red's modern day integrated solutions: "S80 falls short when compared to the Ryzen 5 8600G, featuring the Radeon 760M iGPU with RDNA 3 graphics. A geometric mean across various titles reveals the S80's lag, but there are exceptions, like DOTA 2, where it takes the lead in framerate. It's clear that MTT GPUs (have a) less emphasized focus on supporting AAA titles." ComputerBase confirmed that DirectX 12 API support is still lacking, meaning that many popular Western games titles remain untested on the Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card. The freshly launched entry-level MTT S30 card produced "1/4 of the performance" when compared to its flagship sibling.

The Finals—a free-to-play online first-person shooter—has pulled in a large population of gamers across Windows PCs and current-gen gaming consoles since its surprise launch last month, but players on Linux Desktop + Intel Arc hardware were missing out on this experience...until very recently. Phoronix reports that Embark Studio's Unreal Engine 5-powered title has started to work in a Linux environment "thanks to Valve's Steam Play (Proton + VKD3D-Proton). With the latest Mesa driver activity, Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with their open-source driver can now handle this popular game." GamingOnLinux owner, Liam Dawe, created a post about this development, although he noticed a multitude of stability problems and glitches in-game, but was largely up and running with an AMD Radeon 6800 XT GPU on Mesa 23.3.3.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel noted some (Intel Arc-specific) feedback on GitLab: "when launching The Finals on Linux with Intel Arc Graphics using the default DirectX 12 renderer, it was reported that the game is stuck at a black screen for Intel Arc Graphics and then simply closes... Well, it's an easy fix and one that has come up before." He has witnessed similar problems with other games—notably Diablo IV and Cyberpunk 2077: "due to The Finals using Intel's XeSS upscaling tech but that not behaving well on Linux. The Windows game sees Intel Graphics being utilized and by default tries to leverage XeSS...Intel Arc Graphics on Linux can run The Finals when concealing the fact that it's Intel Graphics inside."

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!

Lords of the Fallen got plenty of patches in the last few days, with two of them, Patch 1.1.199 and 1.1.203, launched yesterday, and the latest, Patch v1.1.207, launched earlier today. The previous two fixed GPU crashes on AMD graphics cards, as well as a big fix for the issue in communication between the drivers and DirectX 12. The Patch 1.1.203 also brought a reduction in VRAM usage that should provide additional headroom for GPUs operating at the limit, which in turn should provide a substantial performance improvement, at least according to Paradox Interactive.

The latest Patch 1.1.207 brought further stability improvements, fixing several crash issues as well as implementing various optimization, multiplayer, gameplay, AI, Quest and other improvements. The release notes also note that the fix for the issue that causes the game to crash on Steam Deck has been fixed, and should be published as soon as it passes QA.

Intel today released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4887 beta adds support for the new Arc A580 desktop graphics card, which you'll hear more about soon. The drivers also add optimization for "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III" (beta), "Total War: Pharaoh," and "Lords of the Fallen." The drivers also offer performance improvements for "Starfield," with up to 117% performance uplifts at 1080p with Ultra settings, and up to 149% uplifts at 1440p with High settings, as measured with an Arc A770.

The drivers also introduce performance uplifts for "Forza Motorsport," with up to 8% uplift at 1080p with Ultra settings; and "F1 23," which now yields up to 12% gains at 1440p with Ultra High settings; and up to 136% at 4K with Ultra High settings. With this release, Intel fixed a bug that caused "Minecraft" (DirectX 12) to exhibit color corruption in night scenes with DXR ray tracing enabled.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4887 beta

Argentina's HD Tecnología site has obtained and published AMD's official data outlining the performance prowess of the soon-to-be released Radeon RX 7800 XT & RX 7700 XT GPUs, when stacked up against their closest rivals—NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB and RTX 4070 12 GB. Team Red could have "cherry-picked" some of this information, and presented resultant performance charts during the grand unveiling of their mid-range RDNA 3 cards at last month's Gamescom press event. HD Tecnología claims that the fuzzy batch of screengrabs were obtained from an official review guide, they chose to not share pages containing precise details of system specifications. An embargo imposed on media outlets is set to be lifted tomorrow, which coincides with the launch of AMD's Navi 32-based contenders.

The test system was running games within a DirectX 12 environment, possibly at maximum settings—general hardware specs included an non-specific AMD Ryzen 7000-series CPU coupled with DDR5 memory on unidentified AM5 motherboard. VideoCardz's abbreviated analysis of the numbers stated: "In summary, without ray tracing, the Radeon RX 7800 XT outperforms the GeForce RTX 4070 by almost 7% on average, while with ray tracing enabled, it maintains a slight 0.5% lead. Conversely, the RX 7700 XT exhibits 16% higher performance over the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB. However, the presence of ray tracing can tip the scales slightly in NVIDIA's favor, resulting in an 8.5% lead over the AMD GPU."

A BioWare Austin developer is openly discussing the transfer of their long-running "Star Wars: The Old Republic" MMORPG to an external studio—games news sites picked up on insider information earlier this month alleging that the studio and its parent company (EA) were holding meetings with Broadsword Online Games. An EA spokesperson responded to the leak (at the time) and explained: "We're evaluating how we give the game and the team the best opportunity to grow and evolve, which includes conversations with Broadsword, a boutique studio that specializes in delivering online, community-driven experiences. Our goal is to do what is best for the game and its players." It seems that the involved parties have agreed upon terms for "handing off" responsibilities, according to a developer's recent declarations.

Keith Kanneg - the Executive producer for Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) - has this week provided a comprehensive update about future plans on the game's discussion board: "Appreciate your patience with us as we continue to navigate the future shift of SWTOR's development team to a third party studio. We're working through the changes right now so I'll share with you the details I have. With 7.3 now live, our priority is continuing to prepare for Game Updates 7.3.1 and 7.4 along with planning for 2024 and 2025 with a focus on content and continued modernization initiatives." It is interesting that Broadsword is not named or directly referred to.

Apple has struggled in the area of offering comprehensive gaming ecosystems - in the personal computer space - over the past few decades with only a handful of studios bothering to port their games over to macOS, but material presented at this week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) indicates that the technology giant is getting serious about its silicon becoming a legitimate platform for video games. A lot of the company's presentation focused on the controversial Vision Pro Headset, but some press outlets took notice of a quieter announcement during proceedings. Hideo Kojima (of Metal Gear Solid fame) made an appearance and announced: "I have been a die-hard Apple fan since I bought my first Mac back in 1994—and it has been a dream of mine to see my team's best work come to life on the Mac. Death Stranding Director's Cut on the Mac takes advantage of the latest Apple technologies to provide the best experience to our fans." Several other development outfits have also declared that their games are set for arrival on Mac systems this year. Apple was enthused about this new strategy and let everyone know that: "tens of millions of Macs can run demanding games with outstanding performance, exceptional battery life, and breathtaking visuals."

Susan Prescott, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations stated: "A new era for gaming on Mac is here...Developers around the world can harness our powerful tools in Metal 3 to deliver incredibly responsive gameplay with high frame rates to more players than ever before." Their software engineering team has been working on a system that simplifies and accelerates the process of creating Windows-to-Mac game ports. A Proton-esque environment - comparable to Valve's software layer efforts with Steam Deck - is capable of translating and running the latest DirectX 12 Windows titles on macOS. Codeweavers revealed in a blog post that Apple has chosen to base the Game Porting Toolkit on their CrossOver source code.

Ubisoft has released its latest Title Update 17.2 which brings a lot of gameplay fixes, but also improves DirectX 12 performance and stability.

There are plenty of fixes, including some serious gameplay bugs with NPCs, weapons, and more, that have been spotted in the game.

Microsoft has implemented two new features into its DirectX 12 API - GPU Upload Heaps and Non-Normalized sampling have been added via the latest Agility SDK 1.710.0 preview, and the former looks to be the more intriguing of the pair. The SDK preview is only accessible to developers at the present time, since its official introduction on Friday 31 March. Support has also been initiated via the latest graphics drivers issued by NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD. The Microsoft team has this to say about the preview version of GPU upload heaps feature in DirectX 12: "Historically a GPU's VRAM was inaccessible to the CPU, forcing programs to have to copy large amounts of data to the GPU via the PCI bus. Most modern GPUs have introduced VRAM resizable base address register (BAR) enabling Windows to manage the GPU VRAM in WDDM 2.0 or later."

They continue to describe how the update allows the CPU to gain access to the pool of VRAM on the connected graphics card: "With the VRAM being managed by Windows, D3D now exposes the heap memory access directly to the CPU! This allows both the CPU and GPU to directly access the memory simultaneously, removing the need to copy data from the CPU to the GPU increasing performance in certain scenarios." This GPU optimization could offer many benefits in the context of computer games, since memory requirements continue to grow in line with an increase in visual sophistication and complexity.

AMD Radeon RX 400 series and RX 500 series graphics cards based on the "Polaris" graphics architecture are simply unable to run "Forspoken," as users on Reddit report. The game has certain DirectX 12 feature-level 12_1 API requirements that the architecture does not meet. Interestingly, NVIDIA's "Maxwell" graphics architecture, which predates AMD "Polaris" by almost a year, supports FL 12_1, and is able to play the game. Popular GPUs from the "Maxwell" generation include the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 960. Making matters much worse, AMD is yet to release an update to its Adrenalin graphics drivers for the RX Vega, RX 5000, and RX 6000 series that come with "Forspoken" optimization. Its latest 23.1.2 beta drivers that come with these optimizations only support the RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards. It's now been over 50 days since the vast majority of AMD discrete GPUs have received a driver update.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 527.56 WHQL comes with optimization for Portal with RTX, a remaster of the cult classic with enhanced with NVIDIA RTX, which we took for a spin. Besides, the new drivers also add optimization for The Witcher 3 Wildhunt Enhanced Edition, which will debut later this month, and Jurassic World Evolution 2. Among the issues fixed with this release include flickering noticed when looking at the sky in Watch_Dogs 2, on machines powered by RTX 4090; games with DLSS 3 crashing when ending a recording using Shadowplay or OBS with NVENC; display corruption noticed in Minecraft Java Edition, hotplugging between HDMI and DP not working correctly on RTX 4090; and certain issues with Adobe Premiere with H.265 and HEVC content.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 527.56 WHQL

Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics architecture was originally developed as a forward-facing PC GPU architecture with many of the contemporary graphics technologies, including full DirectX 12 Ultimate support, however, the GPU curiously lacks hardware support for DirectX 9. Released 20 years ago, DirectX 9 continued to power AAA PC titles well into the 2010s as game console development lagged (the era of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), and most e-sports titles of the time included either native or fallback DirectX 9 support for those on older GPUs. This is a problem for Intel, as many of the currently-popular e-Sports titles may still use DirectX 9, and so the Intel Graphics team set out to individually optimize DirectX 9 titles with each new Arc GPU driver release.

While Arc GPUs lack DirectX 9 support, foolproof API translation technologies exist, which convert DirectX 9 API instructions into DirectX 12. This is not fundamentally unlike how 32-bit applications work on 64-bit Windows (using WOW64 machine-architecture translation). This, however, requires per-game optimization to ensure any engine-level special features are correctly translated. With the latest 101.3959 Beta drivers, Intel optimized popular DirectX 9 titles "League of Legends," "Counter Strike: Global Offensive," "Starcraft 2," "Payday 2," "Guild Wars 2," "Stellaris," "NiZhan," and "Moonlight Blade." The company seems to be going about this the smart way, by relying on market analysis for selecting the games in need of optimization (understanding what DirectX 9 games are still being played).

UL Solutions is excited to announce that our new DirectX 12 Ultimate Benchmark 3DMark Speed Way is now available to download and buy on Steam and on the UL Solutions website. 3DMark Speed Way is sponsored by Lenovo Legion. Developed with input from AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and other leading technology companies, Speed Way is an ideal benchmark for comparing the DirectX 12 Ultimate performance of the latest graphics cards.

DirectX 12 Ultimate is the next-generation application programming interface (API) for gaming graphics. It adds powerful new capabilities to DirectX 12, helping game developers improve visual quality, boost frame rates, reduce loading times and create vast, detailed worlds. 3DMark Speed Way's engine demonstrates what the latest DirectX API brings to ray-traced gaming, using DirectX Raytracing tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and real-time ray-traced reflections, coupled with new performance optimizations like mesh shaders.

It's the moment you've been waiting for! (And the moment our teams have been working towards!) The Intel Arc A750 and A770 GPUs will be for sale on October 12th starting at $289 and $329 respectively, with the Arc A770 Limited Edition available for $349. After years of price increases in the massive $200-400 GPU segment, Intel is bringing balance back to the GPU market. Pricing seems to have gone off the deep end and we're working to reel it back in with the Intel Arc A-series GPUs. As we've shown in earlier performance blogs, the Arc A750 and A770 trade blows with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060—a popular mainstream GPU. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger called out the extreme GPU prices in his Intel Innovation Day 1 keynote, showing that the last four years have seen a nonstop upward trend in prices of mainstream GPUs. By entering the GPU space as a third player, Intel is ready to turn these tides in gamers' favor and disrupt the market.

On average, a new GeForce RTX 3060 will set you back $418. (This number was calculated on Newegg.com, targeting in stock, sold by Newegg, new RTX 3060 cards as of Sept 22, 2022.) Picking up an Intel Arc A750 on October 12th for $289 gets you 53% more performance per dollar on average, or an 8 GB Arc A770 for $329 provides 42% more perf/dollar. Why is that? The Arc A700-series performance beats the 3060 in most modern titles using DirectX 12 or Vulkan APIs and our GPUs aren't far behind in most DX11 games—all for much less cash.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 517.48 WHQL comes with optimization for Overwatch 2. It also offers optimization for Microsoft Flight Simulator with DLSS support. A number of bugs are addressed with this release. To begin with, display brightness settings not being applied correctly on certain kinds of Lenovo notebooks in dGPU mode, has been fixed. The "NVIDIA GPU only" toggle not persisting on reboots on certain notebooks, has been fixed. The "reduce noise" option with ray tracing in Adobe Illustrator appears pixellated, which has been fixed.

Random crashes in DirectML.dll with Adobe Photoshop have been fixed. Performance issues with VRR monitors in Fusion 360 has been fixed. Shadow flickering with "Jurassic World Evolution 2" has been fixed. Some UWP apps in Windows 11 exhibit lag with G-SYNC, which has been fixed. Language bugs with NVIDIA Control Panel has been fixed. External displays connected via USB-C or Thunderbolt dongles in Razer notebooks not correctly being detected, have been fixed. MS Flight Simulator exhibiting texture corruption after extended gameplay, has been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 517.48 WHQL

The latest Community Update 1 patch of "Dying Light: Stay Human" adds support for the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 (FSR 2.0) performance enhancement. This adds several more quality-performance presets that improve visuals over FSR 1.0 at a given frame-rate, or improve frame-rate at a given quality-level. The update also improves the game's memory-management of the GPU's video memory in DirectX 12 mode, which should benefit features such as real-time ray tracing. There are other minor fixes for SSAO and TAA temporal anti-aliasing.

Intel Graphics over the weekend released the Arc Graphics Drivers version 30.0.101.3268 beta. These drivers add performance optimization for Saints Row and Madden NFL 23, but that's hardly the defining feature. In our testing, the drivers were found to to be night-and-day compared to the previous version, in terms of overall system stability. The release comes hot on the heels of a report that Intel fixed as many as 43 bugs just by watching a product review video by Gamers Nexus.

Among the fixed issues are lower-than-expected performance with Marvel's Spider Man (Remastered) in DirectX 12 mode; an application crash with SoTR in DirectX 12 mode with ray traced shadow quality set to "high," a texture-corruption issue with Battlefield 2042 in DirectX 12 mode; artifacts and object loading failures seen in Halo Infinite, an application crash with Horizon Zero Dawn, and the nasty bug where Windows Update attempts to replace the installed driver, causing severe stability issues. As many as 17 bugs related to Arc Control and 11 bugs related to Arc Control Performance Tuning, have been fixed, as listed below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc 30.0.101.3268 beta

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.

NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 4090 "Ada" flagship graphics card allegedly scores over 19000 points in the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme synthetic benchmark, according to kopite7kimi, a reliable source with NVIDIA leaks. This would put its score around 66 percent above that of the current RTX 3090 Ti flagship. The RTX 4090 is expected to be based on the 5 nm AD102 silicon, with a rumored CUDA core count of 16,384. The higher IPC from the new architecture, coupled with higher clock speeds and power limits, could be contributing to this feat. Time Spy Extreme is a traditional DirectX 12 raster-only benchmark, with no ray traced elements. The Ada graphics architecture is expected to reduce the "cost" of ray tracing (versus raster-only rendering), although we're yet to see leaks of RTX performance, yet.

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.

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

NVIDIA on Tuesday released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready software. Version 511.65 WHQL comes with support for the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU and RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU. The drivers also come with optimization for "Dying Light 2: Stay Human," and "Sifu." The drivers also add a few security updates, improvements to the interoperability between OpenCL and Vulkan APIs, an updated NVIDIA OpenCL compiler; and application profile for "Dead by Daylight Epic Games version."

Among the bugs fixed are geometry corruption for "Far Cry 6" in Windows 11, stuttering noticed in multiple apps; a black screen noticed in notebooks with Advanced Optimus configured for dGPU mode; DLDSR causing black screens on certain 3440 x 1440-pixel displays; GeForce Experience filters causing flickering in certain DirectX 12 games; and "Forza Horizon" game freezing noticed when applying certain trims on cars. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 511.65 WHQL

AMD released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers. Version 22.1.2 beta comes with optimization for "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction," and support for new graphics cards launching today, including the Radeon RX 6500 XT, RX 6400, RX 6500M, and RX 6300M. The only issue fixed with this release addresses longer-than-expected load times for "Borderlands 3" in DirectX 12 mode with Radeon Boost enabled, on certain RDNA2-series GPUs. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.1.2