SHADOW, the Global leader in high-performance cloud computing, is proud to announce the launch of Neo, a brand-new cloud gaming PC offering designed to deliver next-level RTX experiences for gamers, creators, and professionals alike. Neo will officially roll out in Europe and North America starting June 16, 2025.

Building on the success of the company's previous offers, Neo replaces its widely adopted "Boost" tier and delivers major performance leaps—up to 150% more in gaming and 200% more in pro software performance. All existing Boost users are being upgraded to Neo at no additional cost while new users rates will start at $37.99 per month.

Lisuan Technology announced this week on its official WeChat channel that it has successfully powered on its prototype G100 graphics card. The company describes the G100 as China's first domestically designed 6 nm GPU, marking a significant milestone in its effort to challenge established industry players. With the first silicon now operational, Lisuan is moving into driver development, software validation, and broader system integration testing. Although Lisuan has provided few formal specifications, rumors indicate that SMIC is fabbing the G100 die, currently the only Chinese foundry capable of producing a 6 nm node under US export restrictions. Rumors describe the performance as being on par with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 in mid-range gaming tests, alongside generous onboard memory, efficient power consumption, and support for DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenGL 4.6. If accurate, these features could position the G100 for both gaming and general-purpose GPU workloads.

Founded in late 2021 by a team of former Silicon Valley engineers with more than 25 years of collective chip-design experience, Lisuan Technology is among the youngest entrants in China's graphics-chip sector. It follows Biren Technology (established in 2019) and Moore Threads (established in 2020) in their pursuit of a homegrown alternative to foreign GPU offerings. Beijing's push for semiconductor self-sufficiency has encouraged such ventures, and Lisuan insists its TrueGPU architecture is fully developed in-house rather than licensed from outside sources. The G100 was initially slated for a 2023 launch but encountered financial headwinds that nearly forced Lisuan into bankruptcy in 2024. A $27.7 million capital injection from the parent company, Dongxin Semiconductor, kept development on track through tape-out and early risk-production trials. Lisuan now plans to ship small volumes of G100 cards in the third quarter of 2025, with mass availability more likely in 2026.

Intel along the sidelines of the 2025 GDC announced the release of the XeSS 2 SDK on the company's GitHub page. This makes it possible for any game developer to understand XeSS 2 and integrate it with their current and upcoming games, covering features such as XeSS 2 upscaling, XeSS 2 frame generation, and XeSS 2 Low Latency. Intel released the XeSS 2 feature-set with its Arc B-series "Battlemage" graphics cards, it is backwards compatible with Arc A-series "Alchemist" discrete GPUs that support XMX matrix math acceleration. XeSS 2 uses an AI DNN to reconstruct details in upscaled images, making it technologically closer to DLSS than to AMD FSR. Next up, Intel also announced that it has updated its first-party programming guides, its Unreal Engine plugin, and its XeSS Inspector software development tool, to each support XeSS 2, including its upscaling, frame-generation, and low-latency components.

Perhaps the more important development in the Intel Graphics team right now is that the company announced that it has laid the groundwork to implement Neural Rendering, or at least the parts that are standardized under the latest updates to DirectX 12, bringing the benefits of DirectX Cooperative Vectors to game developers. It will soon be possible for 3D applications to directly address the XMX engines on Arc A-series and B-series GPUs for an up to 10x gain in inference performance for neural texture compression.

NVIDIA today announced ahead of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) groundbreaking enhancements to NVIDIA RTX neural rendering technologies. NVIDIA has partnered with Microsoft to bring neural shading support to the Microsoft DirectX preview in April, giving developers access to AI Tensor Cores in NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs to accelerate neural networks from within a game's graphics pipeline. Neural shading represents a revolution in graphics programming, combining AI with traditional rendering to dramatically boost frame rates, enhance image quality and reduce system resource usage.

"Microsoft is adding cooperative vector support to DirectX and HLSL, starting with a preview this April," said Shawn Hargreaves, Direct3D development manager at Microsoft. "This will advance the future of graphics programming by enabling neural rendering across the gaming industry. Unlocking Tensor Cores on NVIDIA RTX will allow developers to fully leverage RTX Neural Shaders for richer, more immersive experiences on Windows."

Today, KOEI TECMO and developer Team NINJA announced that their open-world action RPG, Rise of the Ronin, is now available digitally on Windows PC via Steam. Originally released for PlayStation 5, the epic Bakumatsu era tale takes players on a historic journey where a masterless warrior, a ronin, must fight to forge their own destiny through the chaos of war and political unrest. The Steam version supports various PC features, including ultra-wide monitor combatibility, 8K resolution, 120 FPS, 3D audio, and more.

In Rise of the Ronin, fans will play as a ronin in 1863 Japan in turmoil. With Japan's fate now in their hands, players will encounter various historical figures and factions with differing ideologies, and make significant decisions such as whether to confront or defend them. Players will also be able to form special relationships with some characters thanks to the "Veiled Vow" system, which will allow them to freely shape their own experience of the Bakumatsu period.

Moore Threads has released version 290.100 of its MTT S Series Windows desktop driver; today's freshly published patch notes describe "performance and experience optimizations" for multiple modern games titles. Press coverage of the Chinese graphics card manufacturer's hardware portfolio has concentrated mostly on deficiencies, relative to Western offerings. Despite being the first desktop gaming graphics card to arrive with a PCI Express Gen 5 bus interface, Moore Threads' MTT S80 model has consistently struggled to keep up with mainstream competition. Most notably, their current 200 W TDP-rated flagship—packing 4096 "MUSA" cores—trailed behind AMD Radeon iGPUs, according to March 2024 benchmarks.

The latest Moore Threads driver improvements were tested out internally, prior to public release. Patch notes claim that Infinity Nikki (DirectX 12-only) average frame rates "increased by more than 40%." Another DX12 title was benched—Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding: "average frame rate has increased by more than 50%." The largest upgrade was observed when playing A Plague Tale: Requiem; the MTT engineering team claims that average in-game frame rates climbed by more than 120%. We hope that independent outlets will publish results based on their own testing methodologies, in the near future. Going back to September 2023, Moore Threads boasted about driver update 230.40.0.1 producing a 40% gaming performance uplift for MTT S80 and S70 cards. Outside the gaming sphere, Moore Threads has hinted about its MTT S80 GPU being a high achiever with DeepSeek's R1-Distill-Qwen-7B distilled model.

AMD has released its latest Adrenalin Edition 25.1.1 Radeon beta driver today, supporting additional gaming titles, improvements, and bug fixes. In this release, AMD has brought driver game support for the newly released FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH, released today, and Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which is finally coming to PCs after being console-exclusive for years. AMD has brought day-one support and has managed to fix some software issues along the way. First in line is the improvement in performance while playing Apex Legends with DirectX 12 API, which has been a pain point for AMD's drivers. Previously, some AI enthusiasts experienced lower-than-expected performance while using LM Studio on AMD Ryzen AI and Radeon products, which is now also fixed.

However, some issues persist. Users can experience a partial black screen problem in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 when using Radeon Anti-Lag 2 and Ray Tracing on AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors, intermittent crashes in FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH, driver timeouts in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, and performance stuttering in Marvel Rivals with AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 frame generation. Additionally, users may encounter an intermittent AMD Bug Report Tool appearance after using the AMD Cleanup Utility and potential HEVC encoding issues with OBS Studio's Twitch-enhanced broadcasting, which will hopefully be fixed soon.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 25.1.1 Beta

VeriSilicon today announced the launch of its latest Vitality architecture Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) IP series, designed to deliver high-performance computing across a wide range of applications, including cloud gaming, AI PC, and both discrete and integrated graphics cards.

VeriSilicon's new generation Vitality GPU architecture delivers exceptional advancements in computational performance with scalability. It incorporates advanced features such as a configurable Tensor Core AI accelerator and a 32 MB to 64 MB Level 3 (L3) cache, offering both powerful processing power and superior energy efficiency. Additionally, the Vitality architecture supports up to 128 channels of cloud gaming per core, addressing the needs of high concurrency and high image quality cloud-based entertainment, while enabling large-scale desktop gaming and applications on Windows systems. With robust support for Microsoft DirectX 12 APIs and AI acceleration libraries, this architecture is ideally suited for a wide range of performance-intensive applications and complex computing workloads.

BIOSTAR, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, IPC solutions, and storage devices, is excited to introduce the all-new Z890A-SILVER motherboard designed for the latest Intel Core Ultra series-2 processors. Based on Intel Z890 single-chip architecture, this new SILVER series motherboard brings cutting-edge features, fine-tuned to deliver top-notch performance tailored for gamers, content creators, and casual users.

The BIOSTAR Z890A-SILVER motherboard supports up to 192 GB of DDR5 memory across 4 DIMM slots, providing exceptional bandwidth and enhanced performance for multitasking, which is ideal for high-performance computing setups. Furthermore, the Z890A-SILVER motherboard supports PCIe 5.0 M.2, delivering blazing-fast storage speeds for faster load times and overall system responsiveness. With 2.5 GbE LAN support, it ensures high-speed and stable network connectivity, while the inclusion of USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C provides versatile and fast data transfer options. The motherboard is also ready for Wi-Fi 7 and 6E modules (no Wi-Fi card included), allowing for the latest wireless connectivity standards.

Microsoft's Direct3D and HLSL teams have unveiled plans to integrate SPIR-V support into DirectX 12 with the upcoming release of Shader Model 7. This significant transition marks a new era in GPU programmability, as it aims to unify the intermediate representation for graphical-shader stages and compute kernels. SPIR-V, an open standard intermediate representation for graphics and compute shaders, will replace the proprietary DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) as the shader interchange format for DirectX 12. The adoption of SPIR-V is expected to ease development processes across multiple GPU runtime environments. By embracing this open standard, Microsoft aims to enhance HLSL's position as the premier language for compiling graphics and compute shaders across various devices and APIs. This transition is part of a multi-year development process, during which Microsoft will work closely with The Khronos Group and the LLVM Project. The company has joined Khronos' SPIR and Vulkan working groups to ensure smooth collaboration and rapid feature adoption.

While the transition will take several years, Microsoft is providing early notice to allow developers and partners to plan accordingly. The company will offer translation tools between SPIR-V and DXIL to facilitate a gradual transition for both application and driver developers. For those not familiar with graphics development, graphics APIs ship with virtual instruction set architectures (ISA) that abstracts standard hardware features at a higher level. As GPUs don't follow the same ISA as CPUs (x86, Arm, RISC-V), this virtual ISA is needed to define some generics in the GPU architecture and allow various APIs like DirectX and Vulkan to run. Instead of focusing support on several formats like DXIL, Microsoft is embracing the open SPIR-V standard, which will become de facto for API developers in the future, allowing focus on more features instead of constantly replicating each other's functions. While DXIL is used mainly for gaming environments, SPIR-V has adoption in high-performance computing as well, with OpenCL and SYCL. Gaming presence is also there with Vulkan API, and we expect to see SPIR-V join DirectX 12 games.

AMD today released the latest version of AMD Software Adrenalin drivers for its graphics cards and integrated graphics. Version 24.7.1 WHQL comes with optimization for "Zenless Zone Zero" and "Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess." The drivers add HYPR-Tune support for "Gray Zone Warfare," "Lords of the Fallen," "RoboCop: Rogue City," and "Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name." The drivers also add Radeon Anti-Lag 2 support for "Dota 2."

Among the issues fixed with this release include stutter noticed with Anti-Lag and FSR 3; stutter when playing Fortnite with DirectX 12 renderer, a texture corruption noticed when playing TEKKEN 8 with ray tracing or upscale enabled; display corruption noticed when playing Dying Light: Stay Human with Radeon Boost enabled, crash or corruption noticed with Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy with ray tracing enabled; VSR or display color enhancements being disabled after driver update; inability to change display pixel format with certain language settings; black corruption being observed on scaled 3D models while using Origin or OriginPro; and a black display corruption noticed when seeking with PotPlayer.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 24.7.1 WHQL

AMD today released its latest update to AMD Software Adrenalin drivers. Version 24.6.1 WHQL comes with optimization for "The First Descendant" and "Once Human." The drivers add HYPR-TUNE profiles for Like a Dragon 8: Infinite Wealth, Overwatch 2, The First Descendant, F1 24, and Outpost: Infinity Siege. HYPR-RX adds up to 149% performance to Radeon RX 7800 XT in Baldur's Gate 3, F1 23, Resident Evil 4 and more titles. The drivers add official support for Windows 11 24H2 update. AMD launched Anti-Lag 2 technology in May 2024, and announced the first title that support it through these drivers—Counter Strike 2. Among the issues fixed with this release include Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas failing to launch, a driver timeout with Helldivers 2 on RX 7900 series GPUs, and AMD Software performance metrics intermittently failing with this title, and a display freeze error with certain FreeSync displays.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 24.6.1 WHQL

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

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.