When TechPowerUp spoke to AMD's Chief Software Officer and Senior Director of Software earlier in June, the executives made bold claims about the quality of its new FSR 4.1 implementation coming to older RDNA 3 GPUs, stating that, despite underlying technical differences, the actual output would have the same quality as it does on RDNA 4 GPUs. There was, however, little discussion about a potential performance hit from the upscaling tech, although it seems as though that discussion may not have been necessary at all, according to testing that has shown up on r/radeon on Reddit.

Based on the testing by the redditor, who tested AMD's FSR 4.1 in Cyberpunk 2077 on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX at 3840 × 2160p resolution, high settings, and with Ray Tracing on and Ray-Traced Lighting set to Ultra, the performance improvements can be as high as 100% compared to testing conducted without the tech enabled. In benchmark screenshots shared by the redditor, the RDNA 3 GPU managed to get a 49.82 FPS average (43.46 minimum and 60.51 maximum) with FSR 4 set to Balanced and 60.81 FPS average (52.94 minimum and 73.03 minimum) with FSR 4 set to Performance. While there are no results posted, the tester claims in a follow-up comment that performance went "from 24~FPS at native to 50~FPS with FSR 4 Balanced and 61~FPS with FSR 4 Performance." These tests were conducted on a Windows 11 Pro installation with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X CPU and 128 GB of RAM, which is an unconventional setup for gaming, and it may ultimately mean that gaming performance could be higher with a more gaming-focused PC build. As the updated FSR version rolls out to older hardware, we will likely see more tests on other hardware tease out the true performance and image quality benefits, but a ~100% performance uplift is promising, especially for gaming handhelds on Radeon 780M iGPUs, for example.

AMD has fixed a couple of threading bottlenecks in HandBrake that were holding back transcoding performance on high-core-count systems, and the fixes have been included in HandBrake 1.11.0. AMD found that the issues came down to two things. HandBrake wasn't built to efficiently manage systems with more than 64 logical processors, so on chips like Threadripper, available compute was sitting idle instead of being put to work. Separately, some workloads were chopped into jobs that were too small, creating scheduling overhead that affected the actual transcoding time, particularly noticeable at 720p. AMD found cases where performance actually dropped by up to 60% rather than scaling as more cores were assigned. The fix improves thread management and job scheduling so HandBrake can split work more effectively across high core counts, keeping more cores busy with actual transcoding instead of coordination overhead.

According to an AMD blog post, a Threadripper 7980X (64 cores, 128 threads) CPU with 128 GB of DDR5-5600 paired with a Radeon RX 9070 XT measured gains up to 215% in Perfume H.264 720p, 203% in LG_8K HEVC 8-bit 4320p and 105% in LG 8K 60 FPS HEVC 10-bit 4320p. Across all the tested workloads, improvements ranged from 16% to 215%. In HEVC, a Threadripper PRO 9995WX (96 cores, 192 threads) with the same RX 9070 XT achieved gains of up to 181%, depending on the workload. The biggest gains were up to 181% in Perfume H.264 720p, 151% in Perfume HEVC 10-bit 2160p and 149% in LG_8K HEVC 8-bit 4320p.

Earlier this month, EA revealed the Beta system specs for Battlefield 6 and now the final system requirements have been unveiled by the company, including what kind of hardware you need to play with ultra settings enabled. Starting with the minimum specs, not much has changed, but the potential good news is that the storage space required has decreased from 75 GB to 55 GB, which is a nice surprise. The recommended specs remains largely the same as well, but here the storage space requirement has increased from 75 GB to 90 GB, most likely due to larger textures being used.

As for the ultra specs, either at 2160p at 60 FPS or 1440p at 144 FPS requires some pretty recent hardware, such as an RTX 4080 or Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card or better, paired with a Core i9-12900K or Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU as well as 32 GB of standard DDR5 memory. There is no frame rate cap in the final game and support for monitors with a 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratio has also been added to the final game. The announcement also mentions support for all three upscaling technologies, frame generation and latency reduction technologies from AMD, Intel and NVIDIA. The game is also said to have native Steam platform support, which would be a first for a Battlefield game. A new trailer was also released which you can watch below the break. The game should launch on the 10th of October.

AVerMedia Technologies, Inc., a leader in digital video and audio solutions, is thrilled to announce the launch of the Live Gamer EXTREME 3 (GC551G2). As AVerMedia's latest plug-and-play external 4K capture card, it can capture up to 4K 30fps in SDR while passing through gameplay at up to 4K 60fps in HDR. It is also AVerMedia's first capture card that supports variable refresh rate (VRR).

With VRR, the Live Gamer EXTREME 3 brings out the best performance for a competitive streaming session. VRR allows the monitor and gaming device to synchronize each frame to provide smooth tear-free gameplay so gamers can focus solely on the actions without getting distracted by any graphic delay. Additionally, the Live Gamer EXTREME 3's ultra-low latency feature enables zero lag between the gaming device and the monitor, ensuring the capture signal is delivered to the live stream equally fast. These two features allow gamers to enjoy the highest video quality for their gameplays and streams. And thanks to the use of UVC standard, the Live Gamer EXTREME 3 works out of the box without the need to install any drivers.

Is there anything better than yet another benchmark leak of upcoming products? This time around we don't have to make do with Geekbench or some other useless benchmark, as a bilibili user in the PRC has posted a video where he has put the upcoming Intel Core i5-13600K and Core i7-13700K CPUs through 10 different games, plus 3DMark Fire Strike and Time Spy. This has been done at 1080p, 1440p and 2160p at that, using a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card. Both CPUs are QS or Qualification Samples, which means they're going to be close to identical to retail chips, unless there are some last minute issues that are discovered. The CPUs were tested using an ASRock Z690 Steel Legends WiFi 6E motherboard, well, two actually, as both a DDR4 and a DDR5 version were used. The DDR4 RAM was running at 3600 MHz with slow-ish timings of 18-22-22 in gear 1, whereas the DDR5 memory was running at 5200 MHz, most likely at 40-40-40 timings, although the modules were rated for 6400 MHz, in both cases we're looking at 32 GB.

Courtesy of @harukaze5719, we have some much easier to read graphs than those provided by the person that tested the two CPUs, but we've included the full graphs below as well. Each CPU was compared to its current SKU equivalent from Intel and in many of the games tested, the gain was a mere percent or less to three or four percent. However, in some games—at specific resolutions—especially when paired with DDR5 memory, the performance gain was as much as 15-20 percent. A few of the games tested, such as FarCry 6 at 4K, the game ends up being GPU limited, so a faster CPU doesn't help here as you'll see in the graphs below. There are some odd results as well, where the DDR5 equipped systems saw a regression in performance, so it's hard to draw any final conclusions from this test. That said, both CPUs should offer a decent performance gain, as long as the game in question isn't GPU limited, of around five percent at 1440p when paired with DDR5 memory.

Video streaming is looking a bit like magic. The uploader sends a video to one platform in one resolution and encoding format, while the viewer requests a video in a specific resolution and encoding format used by the device the video is streamed on. YouTube knows this best, as it represents the world's largest video platform with over 2 billion users visiting the platform each month. That takes a massive load on the server infrastructure over at Google's data centers that host the service. There is about 500 hours worth of video content uploaded to the platform every minute, and regular hardware isn't being enough anymore to handle everything.

That is why YouTube has developed custom chips, ASICs, that are called VCUs or Video (trans)Coding Units. In Google data centers, there is a large problem with transcoding. Each video needs to adapt to the streaming platform and desired specifications, and doing that on regular hardware is a problem. By using ASIC devices, such as VCUs, Google can keep up with the demand and deliver the best possible quality. Codenamed Argos, the chip can deliver 20-33x improvement in efficiency compared to the regular server platform. In data centers, the VCU is implemented as a regular PCIe card, with two chips under the heatsinks.

BenQ today announced the latest addition to its monitor family design for professional use. The SW321C, as it is called, is a 32-inch monitor with an IPS panel of 4K (3840×2160p) resolution. The panel itself is a 60 Hz screen with 250 nits of brightness, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 5 ms GtG response time, and it offers 178-degree viewing angles, which is standard for IPS panels. When it comes to the color coverage and the ability to accurately represent them, the SW321C features 95% of the DCI-P3, 99% of the Adobe RGB, and 100% of the sRGB color gamut. It has a 16-bit 3D look-up table (LUT) and features calibration for DeltaE ≤ 2.

The monitor comes with HDR10 specification, however, due to the brightness of 250 nits, it is not capable of performing any serious HDR content editing. Another interesting note is that this monitor supports Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) standard, which is an uncommon one. For input, the monitor had support for one DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI 2.0, and one USB-C port. There is a dual-port USB hub, which has an SD card reader right next to it, making this very useful feature for photographers. Exact pricing and availability of this monitor are unknown, however, it is supposed to hit the market soon.

Bethesda today released the final system requirements for its upcoming massacre-fest Doom Eternal. The game, which is geared for release just 10 days from now (March 20th), promises to be one of the most impressive (and fluid) games in recent times, if the original, modern Doom is anything to go by.

Bethesda has even gone so far so as to list preferred specs for gamers that want to play in 4K at 60 FPS or in 1440p at 120 FPS: and these are pretty abusive, with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti being required - likely because of its gargantuan 11 GB VRAM. AMD's Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel's Core i9-9900K are the requirements here, alongside 16 GB of system RAM. Check after the break for a breakdown on recommended specs for other resolutions and quality settings, and for Bethesda's trailer showing off customization options for your DOOM slayer. Do you have what it takes to run the game?