Intel today released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4972 beta fixes an issue with "Starfield" posting lower than expected performance with game patch version 1.8.86 on Arc GPUs. The drivers don't include any new performance updates or bug fixes, but Intel has taken the opportunity to identify a few new issues to address in its future driver updates, spanning games such as "Ghostrunner 2," "Total War: Pharaoh," "Dead by Daylight," and Topaz Video AI. Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4972 Beta

Intel has released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers, version 101.4900 Beta, which brings Game On Driver support on Intel Arc A-series Graphics for Alan Wake 2, Cities: Skylines 2, WRC, and Ghostrunner 2 games. New drivers do not fix any issues or bugs, so it will still have some issues in games like Starfield.

In terms of performance, and compared to the 101.4887 drivers, these will bring up to a 20 percent average performance uplift at 1080p and high settings and up to a 22 percent average performance increase at 1440p and medium settings in the upcoming Alan Wake 2 game which launches on October 27th. It also increases the average FPS by up to 34 percent at 1080p with high settings and up to 26 percent at 1440p with medium settings in Cities Skylines 2 (DX11), which launches today, October 24th.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4900 Beta

Intel just released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4824 WHQL adds Game On optimization for "The Crew Motorfest" and "Mortal Kombat 1." Among the issues fixed with this release include flickering or display corruption noticed in Fortnite (DirectX 12), and erratic fan behavior on some Arc Graphics products. For Intel Core processor iGPUs, the drivers address a "Tactics Ogre Reborn" display flickering issue during the dialog sequences.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4824 WHQL

NVIDIA late Tuesday released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 536.99 WHQL adds optimization for "Baldur's Gate 3," besides "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," and "Gord." Among the issues fixed with this release include screen-tearing and jitter noticed in cut-scenes of "Control," game stability issues with "Battlefield 2042" when applying GeForce Freestyle filters; general game stability issues when Freestyle filters are used with DLSS 3 enabled; stability issues with "Dead Space," and audio issues for Elgato Wave Link. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 536.99 WHQL

Intel today released the Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4576 beta. These drivers do not introduce Game On (day-zero) optimizations or improvements for any new games, but address a couple of glaring issues. "Remnant 2" exhibits texture corruption during gameplay, which has been fixed. In a similar light, "World War Z" exhibits flickering textures during gameplay, which has been fixed. Intel also identified a few more issues with this release, as detailed in the release notes, below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4576 beta

Intel released the Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4382 Beta. Thesse come with performance optimization for "Diablo IV," "Street Fighter 6," and improvements for its previous optimization for "Total War: Warhammer III" (D3D11 mode) Mirror of Madness benchmark, with up to 4% improved framerates to be had at 1080p with Ultra settings. Among the issues fixed with this release include random Vulkan API applications experiencing crashes; an application crash of "The Last of Us Part 1," an application crash with Unreal Engine 5.2 Editor, and lower than expected performance in the Battle Hub benchmark of "Street Fighter 6." Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4832 beta

Intel Graphics releases Arc GPU Graphics Drivers version 101.4369 WHQL. These drivers significantly improve performance for "The Outlast Trials," with gains of up to 65% and 52% to be had at 1080p and 1440p, respectively, compared to the previous 101.4355 drivers. The drivers also offer 4% to 11% uplifts for "Starship Troopers: Extermination" Early Access. The drivers introduce an all new version of Arc Control, which adds fan speed settings, VRR control, a new Search bar that finds features and settings; improved background replacement for virtual camera, and the ability to select more than one device for telemetry. It also fixes UAC requirements to launch Arc Control, improved Resizable BAR status reporting, and live performance monitoring.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4369 WHQL

Intel today released the latest version of its Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4257 beta adds Game On (day-zero) optimization for "Crime Boss." This particular release does not pack any "Fixed Issues" load, as it releases barely 5 days from the 101.4255 WHQL drivers. The company did, however, identify a dozen new issues as part of its "Known Issues" lists for Arc discrete GPUs, Iris Xe MAX GPUs, Core processor iGPUs (since 11th Gen), and its Arc Control software interface.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4257 beta

Intel Graphics today released the latest version of its Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4090 beta comes with launch-day optimization for "Forspoken." The company also fixed a couple of issues with this release. For Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs, an application freeze issue with "A Plague Tale: Requiem" has been fixed. Box corruptions noticed in "Need for Speed: Unbound," have also been fixed. For Intel Core processors with Xe LP-based iGPUs, a screenspace corruption issue with NFS: Unbound has been fixed; besides an intermittent application crash with Total War: Warhammer III in DirectX 11 mode, and color corruption in Battlefield: 2042. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4090 beta

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

"Join us on March 30th at 8 A.M. Pacific Time to see Intel Arc graphics take center stage and get a first look at our new discrete graphics for laptops." - is the statement that Intel posted on its website regarding the launch of its upcoming Arc Alchemist GPUs for laptops. While we await the final reveal of the desktop Arc Alchemist graphics cards, it looks like team blue will give us a very first look at Arc discrete graphics cards for laptops. Regarding the performance numbers, Intel's Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group, posted a quick performance claim stating that the Intel Arc A370M mobile GPU will feature two-fold performance improvement over integrated GPU designs found in Intel Core i7-12700H processor.

Lisa PearceWhat performance can we expect from the first product to make it to market, the Intel Arc A370M?
The first Intel Arc discrete graphics products to enter the mobile market will enable up to a 2X improvement in graphics performance vs. integrated graphics alone while maintaining similar form factors.
2x performance claim based on average FPS at 1080p Medium with Metro Exodus (DX12) as of March 3, 2022 as the beginning of the disclosure. Intel Arc system: Intel Core i7-12700H processor 14C/20T, 32 GB 4800Mhz system memory, Intel Arc A370M graphics, Windows 11 Pro v10.0.22000, Preproduction driver as of March 2022, total system TDP 40 W. Intel Core system: Intel Core i71280P 14C/20T, 32 GB 4800 MHz system memory, Iris Xe integrated graphics, Windows 11 Pro 21H2 22000.493, Driver version 30.0.101.1029, total system TDP 28 W.

Microsoft today announced the release of H264 and H265 encoding through its DX12 API. The move brings GPU acceleration support for several video applications such as Video Decoding, Video Processing and Motion estimation. Theoretically, this should ease the burden on developers, who instead of having to implement video encoding acceleration according to the graphics vendor (be it AMD, Intel or NVIDIA), can now work through the DX12 API to achieve the same effect throughout all providers, simplifying programming and efficiency efforts - though Microsoft was coy about potential advantages and disadvantages of the new feature.

While the implementation will eventually reach all platforms, the DX12 API encoding integration is currently only available for both Intel and NVIDIA. Work still has to be done on AMD's implementation, which generally uses fixed-hardware function blocks to allow for higher performance whilst encoding and transcoding - at the loss of some flexibility. There are graphics cards driver requirements that have to be fulfilled to enable the full encoding capabilities (and these can also be only partially supported, though performance will undoubtedly suffer).

We are excited to announce that the Microsoft Flight Simulator: Game of the Year Edition (GOTY) is available today! This new edition celebrates all the positive feedback, reviews and awards garnered, and is also a "Thank You" to our fans - new and old - that have made Microsoft Flight Simulator such a phenomenon. The Microsoft Flight Simulator: Game of the Year Edition features five new handcrafted aircraft, eight new airports, six new Discovery Flights and updated weather systems and incorporates all six World Updates.

Marcin Gollent, Lead Graphics Programmer at CD Projekt RED revealed in an interview with PC Games Hardware that cyberpunk 2077 would only support DX12 on the PC release, which means that gamers playing on either Windows 8 or (god forbid) older windows releases won't be able to partake in the cyberpunk dream of Night City. A special note to Windows 7 users though - the game will be supported on Windows 7's DX12 implementation as well. The decision to cut out other API's isn't an opaque one - Marcin Gollent himself said that DX12 was chosen as the only development target due to the fact that it's the rendering API for the Xbox family of consoles (including for the next-generation ones), and thus, a decision to streamline the rendering pipeline and API support was made.

The decision was also made, according to the developer, because DX12 is the birthplace of DXR - and CD Projekt Red has already announced that cyberpunk 2077 will be making heavy use of raytracing on the PC (and will almost certainly bring the same magic potion to the next-generation update to their yet-unreleased game). Marcin Gollent also said that the game will be compatible with all DX12 GPUs - but the DX12 Ultimate badge might be of interest to some of the hardware features that may be deployed in the final version of the game. A question, of course, could be asked regarding how some games' DX11 API actually delivers increased performance over the DX12 version. But with the game being originally developed with DX12 in mind, we'll have to believe it's the best version it could be.

Considering your reaction, you certainly remember Crytek's Neon noir raytracing scene that we shared with you back in march. At the time, the fact that raytracing was running at such mesmerizing levels on AMD hardware was arguably the biggest part of the news piece: AMD's Vega 56 graphics card with no dedicated raytracing hardware, was pushing the raytraced scene in a confident manner. Now, Crytek have shared some details on how exactly Neon noir was rendered.

The AMD Radeon Vega 56 pushed the demo at 1080p/30 FPS, with full-resolution rendering of raytraced effects. Crytek further shared that raytracing can be rendered at half resolution compared to the rest of the scene, and that if they did so on AMD's Vega 56, they could push a 1440p resolution at 40+ FPS. The raytraced path wasn't running on any modern, lower-level API, such as DX12 or Vulkan, but rather, on a custom branch of Crytek's CryEngine, version 5.5.

Microsoft today via a devblog announced their push to make Variable Rate Shading an industry-wide adoption in the search of increased performance that can support the number of pixels and quality of those pixels in future games. The post starts with what is likely the foremost question on the mind of any discerning user that hears of a technique to improve performance: "does it degrade image quality?". And the answer, it seems, is a no: no discernible image quality differences between the Variable Rate Shading part of the image, and the fully rendered one. I'll give you the option to speak on your own perception, though: analyze the image below and cast your vote on the poll.

As resolution increases, so does the amount of work that any given GPU has to process to generate a single frame - and compare that to the amount of additional work that goes from rendering a 30 FPS, 1080p game to a 60 FPS, 4K one, and... It stands to reason that ways of squeezing the highest amount of performance from a given process are at a premium. Particularly in the console space, where cost concerns require the usage of more mainstream-equivalent hardware, which requires creative ways of bridging the desired image quality and the available rendering time for each frame.

Crytek has released a new video demonstrating the results of a CRYENGINE research and development project. Neon Noir shows how real-time mesh ray-traced reflections and refractions can deliver highly realistic visuals for games. The Neon Noir demo was created with the new advanced version of CRYENGINE's Total Illumination showcasing real time ray tracing. This feature will be added to CRYENGINE release roadmap in 2019, enabling developers around the world to build more immersive scenes, more easily, with a production-ready version of the feature.

The Division 2 is shaping up to be one of the hottest releases of 2019 - particularly as the other shared world, third-person shooter, Anthem, has fared somewhat below expectations. And while Anthem offers very impressive visuals, it also comes with relatively steep performance requirements - at least comparing with The Division 2's requirement of an RX 480 for 1080, 60 FPS gaming. For 4K, 60 FPS, you'll require a much bigger hardware commitment, in the form of AMD'S Radeon VII or NVIDIA's RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards, with a minimum of 16 GB system RAM and a Ryzen 7 2700X or Intel Core I7-8700X CPU.

The Snowdrop engine The Division 2 makes use of, developed in-house by Massive Entertainment, features a particularly impressive DX12 implementation, which should offer some 10-20 fps improvement in certain scenarios. DSO Gaming, testing in the private Beta, saw differences between 59 FPS under DX 11 and 80 FPS, in the minimum frame rate, for the same scene. So if you're not running DX 12 or a DX 12 capable card, know that even a graphics card with the same performance as yours, but that supports the DX12 renderer, will bring tangible performance benefits - particularly if you have an AMD card, due to the title's extensive use of Async Compute. The Division 2's release is set for March 15.

In what is likely to create a good deal of controversy along with a few cheers, Blizzard will be adding DirectX 12 support to World of Warcraft on Windows 7 thanks to a bit of effort from Microsoft. You might be wondering how that is possible? Well after seeing massive performance gains in WoW when Blizzard released their DirectX 12 update for Windows 10 in late 2018, resulted in the company wanting to bring those performance improvements to gamers still holding out on Windows 7. To facilitate this, they began talking with Microsoft who after getting a great deal of feedback from Blizzard decided to act on it. To achieve this Microsoft decided to port the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7, which will unblock developers, thereby allows them to take advantage of the latest improvements that the DirectX 12 API offers while still giving full support to customers on older operating systems.

For now, World of Warcraft is the first game to run in DirectX 12 on Windows 7 with the latest 8.1.5 patch. However, they will not be the last as more developers are working on porting DirectX 12 games to Windows 7 with more announcements to follow. Microsoft, of course, has taken it upon themselves to remind everyone that the best possible performance with DirectX 12 will still be had on Windows 10 due to numerous OS optimizations. How true this is remains to be seen, but for many curmudgeons still holding out on Windows 7, this will likely be seen as a form of vindication for sticking with the now venerable OS.

With update 2.6.6174, released today, 3DMark now includes a new benchmark dubbed Night Raid. This latest addition to the popular 3DMark suite offers DX12 performance testing for laptops, tablets and other devices with integrated graphics. It also offers full support for ARM based processors in the latest always-connected PCs running Microsoft's Windows 10 on ARM. Users running 3DMark Basic Edition which is free will have access to this latest addition upon installing the update.

The Night Raid benchmark continues the trend of offering two graphics tests and a CPU test. While not as visually stunning as previous entries this is to be expected considering it is targeted at integrated graphics processors and entry level systems. Even so, it makes use of numerous graphical features with graphics test 1 including; dynamic reflections, ambient occlusion, and deferred rendering. Graphics test 2 features; tessellation, complex particle systems and depth of field effects with forward-rendering. Finally, the CPU test will measures performance through a combination of physics simulation, occlusion culling, and procedural generation.

The folks at Blizzard have taken it into their hands to update the eons-old, but still running strong, World of Warcraft. Some back-end improvements have been made, and were essentially lost within the latest patch notes - as in, not even mentioned - that included this update to the latest API. The game now supports DX11 and DX12, but there's a caveat - only AMD users should use the DX12 implementation. Players using an NVIDIA graphics card will see an immediate performance hit from going to the more modern renderer. For now, the change is virtual - there doesn't seem to have been any particular work for performance improvements.

Other changes include ditching Exclusive Fullscreen (now only windowed and borderless windowed modes are available), improving the cinematic renderer for 21:9 ratio support, and changing graphical options. The performance presets of low, medium and high have been swapped with 1-10 sliders (a change prior to this patch), which allow for more granular control of graphics options - and improved performance, since more rendering variables are now affected. The game really does run extremely well nowadays, however; it seems a little counter intuitive to devote the resources to add DX12 support for barely any real improvement, so this could be the herald of future changes.

A report via PCGamesN points to some... interesting performance positioning when it comes to NVIDIA and AMD offerings. Battlefield V is being developed by DICE in collaboration with NVIDIA, but it seems there's some sand in the gears of performance improvements as of now. I say this because according to the report, AMD's RX 580 8 GB graphics card (the only red GPU to be tested) bests NVIDIA's GTX 1060 6GB... by quite a considerable margin at that.

The performance difference across both 1080p and 1440p scenarios (with Ultra settings) ranges in the 30% mark, and as has been usually the case, AMD's offerings are bettering NVIDIA's when a change of render - to DX12 - is made - AMD's cards teeter between consistency or worsening performance under DX 12, but NVIDIA's GTX 1060 consistently delivers worse performance levels. Perhaps we're witnessing some bits of AMD's old collaboration efforts with DICE? Still, It's too early to cry wolf right now - performance will only likely improve between now and the October 19th release date.

AMD at E3 2018 announced its commitment to powering the ultimate gaming experiences via partnerships with game publishers and developers, to bring fantastic 3D realms to life. In line with AMD's cooperation with Ubisoft in Far Cry 5, which saw the usage of AMD Vega-centric technologies (such as FP16 Compute on some water and lighting scenarios, Rapid Packed Math, and Shader Intrinsics) across the title, the company has announced it will help Ubisoft deliver a DX12-driven experience with The Division 2. It remains to be seen if more technologies than were used in Far Cry 5 will be in play here.

Alongside its Ubisoft/The Division 2 announcement, AMD also established partnerships with Capcom, for the upcoming Resident Evil 2 remake, and with Rebellion for their Strange Brigade title. The partnership with Capcom is a novel one, but AMD had already worked with Rebellion on Sniper Elite 4, for some stellar CrossFire performance. These partnerships join AMD's long-standing, long-reaching partnership with Bethesda Softworks, in order to fight NVIDIA's entrenchment with the videogame industry via its GameWorks program.

Benchmarking company Futuremark has recently introduced a new benchmark to its VRMark suite, the Cyan Room, which brings the latest in rendering technologies to the VR world. Futuremark expects this test to leverage the latest hardware and software developments in DX12 to better utilize today's GPUs still somewhat untapped power. In something of a plot twist, AMD's Radeon architectures (in the form of Polaris 20-based RX 580 and Vega-based RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64) trump NVIDIA's equivalent offerings in pure performance numbers.

Testing was performed by pairing a Ryzen 7 1800X CPU with a selection of graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA, supported by 16GB of DDR4-2933 system memory, and Windows 10 x64. In a post on Radeon gaming, Scott Wasson said that "The Cyan Room (...) highlights AMD's continued performance leadership on this (VR) front," adding that "the Radeon GPUs we tested have clear leads over their direct competition. What's more, all the Radeon GPUs are meeting the key requirement for today's VR headsets by delivering at least 90 frames per second in this test."

CryEngine, the rendering prodigy responsible for some of the most visually impressive titles ever to grace our personal computing and gaming shores, is getting a Vulkan renderer. The news were broken down by the team at Crytek through a blog post, where they reaffirmed their commitment to proper GitHub support and updates for their game engine. The company puts it this way:

"Vulkan renderer
Following on from the renderer refactoring and DirectX 12 implementation, the team has been hard at work implementing a Vulkan renderer. The code can be seen in Code/RenderDll/XRenderD3D9/Vulkan/… although the feature is not functional, yet. We want to make these changes available to you for review whilst we are currently stabilizing the engine for our 5.4 release. So you can track our progress on GitHub until 5.4 is finally here by the end of July."