MSI is ready with its premium Gaming X and affordable Ventus XS custom board designs for NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 1660 Super GPU. These boards are largely identical to the GTX 1660 Ti down to the PCB design, as the GTX 1660 Super is essentially a GTX 1660 with GDDR6 memory instead of GDDR5, yet positioned a notch below the GTX 1660 Ti owing to fewer CUDA cores (1,408 vs. 1,536).

The MSI GTX 1660 Super Gaming X retains its brushed metal finish, RGB LED embellishments, and premium appeal of the GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X. The Ventus XS, too retains its compact dimensions. This time around, though, MSI gave the plastic back-plate a faux brushed-aluminium finish. The Ventus XS comes in a standard variant that sticks to NVIDIA-reference clock-speeds, and an OC Edition with a mild factory-overclock. The Gaming X has the highest factory-overclock from MSI for this SKU.

Diversity is the name of the game when it comes to the edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) chipset industry. In 2019, the AI industry is witnessing the continual migration of AI workloads, particularly AI inference, to edge devices, including on-premise servers, gateways, and end-devices and sensors. Based on the AI development in 17 vertical markets, ABI Research, a global tech market advisory firm, estimates that the edge AI chipset market will grow from US $2.6 billion in 2019 to US $7.6 billion by 2024, with no vendor commanding more than 40% of the market.

The frontrunner of this market is NVIDIA, with a 39% revenue share in the first half of 2019. The GPU vendor has a strong presence in key AI verticals that are currently leading in AI deployments, such as automotive, camera systems, robotics, and smart manufacturing. "In the face of different use cases, NVIDIA chooses to release GPU chipsets with different computational and power budgets. In combination with its large developer ecosystem and partnerships with academic and research institutions, the chipset vendor has developed a strong foothold in the edge AI industry," said Lian Jye Su, Principal Analyst at ABI Research.

NVIDIA is facing stiff competition from Intel with its comprehensive chipset portfolio, from Xeon CPU to Mobileye and Movidius Myriad. At the same time, FPGA vendors, such as Xilinx, QuickLogic, and Lattice Semiconductor, are creating compelling solutions for industrial AI applications. One missing vertical from NVIDIA's wide footprint is consumer electronics, specifically smartphones. In recent years, AI processing in smartphones has been driven by smartphone chipset manufacturers and smartphone vendors, such as Qualcomm, Huawei, and Apple. In smart home applications, MediaTek and Amlogic are making their presence known through the widespread adoption of voice control front ends and smart appliances.

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, today announced the world's first optical keyboard designed for laptops. Razer was the first to introduce a low-profile mechanical laptop keyboard in 2016 and has now brought next-generation optical switches to the Razer Blade 15 gaming laptop. The low-profile keyboard has been designed for gaming enthusiasts who demand near instant actuation, satisfying tactile feedback, and rapid-fire inputs.

The new optical laptop switch harnesses the power of light to instantly capture key actuations. Under every key, an infrared light beam is used to detect when a key is pressed (actuation), allowing for much greater precision and speed versus conventional laptop keyboards. The result is a groundbreaking keyboard with an actuation point of only 1 mm at 55 g of actuation force with 50% more travel, allowing players to input more commands in less time in the heat of battle.

Introducing the EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER ULTRA+ series - now with 10%+ Memory Speed. Available in FTW3 and XC versions, these new cards offer nearly 500 GB/s of GDDR6 memory bandwidth giving you even more performance in the latest gaming titles. The new GeForce RTX SUPER Series cards deliver everything you need to rule your game. They're powered by the Turing architecture and feature more cores and higher clocks. This gives you up to 25% faster performance than the original RTX 20 Series and 6X the performance of previous-generation 10 Series GPUs.

See every game come alive with super-fast ray tracing that delivers physically accurate shadows, reflections, and lighting. And tap into Tensor Cores for super-powerful AI-processing. Advanced memory, performance boosts, and processing technologies make these GPUs the perfect weapon for hardcore gamers. Gear up and get super powers.

TechPowerUp today announced NVCleanstall, its latest original software designed to give PC enthusiasts and gamers unparalleled control over the installation of NVIDIA GeForce software. Besides the actual driver for your GeForce graphics processor, NVIDIA GeForce software includes close to a dozen optional components, not all of which can be opted out of in the "Custom" installation screen of NVIDIA's installer. Among these are Telemetry, which regularly sends your usage data to NVIDIA, and drivers for stereoscopic 3D, Shield, etc. These components may not all be useless or harmful, but aren't strictly required for your GPU to work and render graphics like it should. NVIDIA treats many of these software components as an extension of the product itself.

NVCleanstall has a clean user interface that begins with a screen that lets you choose the software version you want. It can either fetch the latest software from the Internet for you, or lets you select a downloaded NVIDIA GeForce software package (installer binary) from your PC, or lets you fetch a specific driver version you want from the Internet. You are then presented with an exhaustive list of components to install, categorized under the main components, and GeForce Experience. You can also select from our curated presets if you're not sure. In the following page, the app prepares your installation. In this screen, you can select from useful additional tweaks, including disabling the installer's own telemetry, scripting an unattended install, and pre-checking the "clean install" option in the NVIDIA driver installer. After that, NVCleanstall spawns the NVIDIA installer to install what you selected in NVCleanstall, or take you to the customized driver files. NVCleanstall has been put through months of rigorous testing from our community of PC enthusiasts. The app gives you not just greater control over your NVIDIA software, but also reduces the disk usage and memory footprint of your NVIDIA software.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp NVCleanstall 1.0.0

NVIDIA's efforts with Quake 2 RTX haven't gone unnoticed in the community, providing a distinct overhaul in image quality to the now decades-old game. Raytracing and its global illumination capabilities have already been well explored in this publication, and its effect in older games - the ones that already run remarkably well in modern hardware - has been well documented, with some third party solutions (such as ReShade) including the effect to great measure in a number of games that haven't been built from the ground-up for raytracing.

The new Lightspeed Studios from NVIDIA aims to bring Quake 2 RTX-like improvements to other games. A job posting from the company dated from the end of September seems to make it clear that the company is looking to increase the number of games with RTX support in this way. Read on after the break for the description in the job listing.

Videocardz have snagged some ZOTAC box renders (for an AMP and non-AMP model), and these all but confirm some rumors that have been circulating through the interwebs: NVIDIA's GTX 1660 SUPER will make use of a GDDR6 memory subsystem to increase bandwidth and competitiveness against AMD's lineup. As GDDR6 memory pricing falls, it makes sense that NVIDIA trickles it down across its product stack as a relatively inexpensive way to improve performance - a move that is well in line with their SUPER lineup policy.

The upcoming single-player Star Wars Jedi: Fallen order will be a tall calling for Respawn. Few franchises are as loved as Star Wars, and this one will definitely leave a mark in the company's legacy. It's unlikely EA will "pull an EA" on the studio even if it flops, though: Apex Legends remains an incredibly successful release form Respawn Entertainment, and it should be enough to hold EA's reins - at least for a while.

The system requirements for the highly-awaited, story-driven single-player game have been outed, and they're in the usual side of things. Minimum requirements call for an AMD FX-6100 or an Intel Core i3-3220, paired with 8 GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 7750 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 - alongside 65 GB of storage. The recommended specs are relatively standard as well, and nothing to throw users in an upgrade fit... We're looking at an AMD AMD Ryzen 7 1700 or an Intel i7-6700K, 16 GB of system RAM, An AMD RX Vega 56 or NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics cards. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order drops on November 15th.

According to the sources over at Igor's Lab, NVIDIA could launch its next generation of GPUs, codenamed "Ampere", as soon as first half of the 2020 arrives. Having just recently launched GeForce RTX Super lineup, NVIDIA could surprise us again in the coming months with replacement for it's Turing lineup of graphics cards. Expected to directly replace high-end GPU models that are currently present, like GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 Super, Ampere should bring many performance and technology advancements a new graphics card generation is usually associated with.

For starters, we could expect a notable die shrink to take place in form of 7 nm node, which will replace the aging 12 nm process that Turing is currently being built on. This alone should bring more than 50% increase in transistor density, resulting in much more performance and lower power consumption compared to previous generation. NVIDIA's foundry of choice is still unknown, however current speculations are predicting that Samsung will manufacture Ampere, possibly due to delivery issues that are taking place at TSMC. Architectural improvements should take place as well. Ray tracing is expected to persist and get enhanced with possibly more hardware allocated for it, along with better software to support the ray tracing ecosystem of applications.

NVIDIA today released an hotfix driver for their GeForce Suite. version 436.51 includes fixes specific for FIFA 19, FIFA 20 and Star Wars: Battlefront II, where these games would randomly crash to desktop; and also for Apex Legends, where the screen would intermittently flicker during gameplay. Other than that, there are no other changes compared to their latest Game Ready Drivers, version 436.48. Follow the NVIDIA link in the source to download this latest software suite, which apparently isn't being distributed over GeForce Experience.

Chinese website ITHome has new info on the release of NVIDA's GeForce GTX 1660 Super graphics cards. According to their website, the release is expected for October 22nd, which seems credible, considering NVIDIA always launches on a Tuesday. As expected, the card will be built around the Turing TU116 graphics processor, which also powers the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti. Shader counts should either be 1472, because NVIDIA wants to position their card between GTX 1660 (1408 cores) and GTX 1660 Ti (1536 cores). The memory size will be either 4 GB or 6 GB. Specifications of the memory are somewhat vague, it is rumored that NVIDIA's GTX 1660 Super will use GDDR6 chips, just like GTX 1660 Ti — the plain GTX 1660 uses GDDR5 memory. Another possibility is that shader count matches GTX 1660, and the only difference (other than clock speeds) is that GTX 1660 Super uses GDDR6 VRAM.

The Chinese pricing is expected around 1100 Yuan, which converts to $150 — surprisingly low, considering GTX 1660 retails at $210 and GTX 1660 Ti is priced at $275. Maybe NVIDIA is adjusting their pricing to preempt AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 5500/5600 Series. Videocardz has separately confirmed this rumor with their sources at ASUS Taiwan, who are expected to launch at least three SKUs based on the new NVIDIA offering, among them DUAL EVO, Phoenix and TUF3 series.

ViewSonic announced new additions to the ELITE gaming portfolio. The company is expanding its gaming line-up with the ELITE XG27 gaming monitor series, XG05 gaming monitor series, ELITE Ally monitor control peripheral, and two new software applications. The new gaming products and software provide the ultimate experience for multifaceted gamers while fulfilling a variety of setups and lifestyles.

The official system requirements for the Call of Duty: modern Warfare Beta have been outed, and these should remain pretty close to the final release version requirements. If you want to enjoy the game's implemented NVIDIA RTX features, you know you'll have to have an NVIDIA RTX graphics card - that part is pretty straightforward.

Luckily, the system requirements for non-RTX gameplay aren't too steep; this is a Call of Duty game we're talking about, after all. Even though these games usually offer more than adequate graphics, this is a twitch shooter; the better frame rates players can have, the better and more fluid the action is; and hence, an optimized game engine is key. For the minimum system requirements, a Core i5 2500K "or AMD equivalent" is required, paired with an NVIDIA GeForce 670 2 GB (jeez, they really went into their dust bin for this one) or, puzzlingly, a GTX 1650 4 GB; for the AMD camp, a Radeon HD 7950 is all that's necessary. The recommended specs call for an Intel Core i7 4770K "or AMD equivalent" paired with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB / GTX 1660 6 GB or an AMD Radeon R9 390 / RX 580. The games' beta will be available for all players tomorrow, September 21st.

According to the recent round of rumors, NVIDIA could extend its budget GPU offering on October 22nd when it will launch the new GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics card. Expected to sit between GTX 1650 and GTX 1660, the new graphics card is supposed to be NVIDIA's answer to AMD's unannounced, low-end NAVI GPUs rumored to be called the RX 5600 series.

As per ITHome, GTX 1650 Ti will be priced at 1100 yuan which translates to $155, meaning that either GTX 1650 will get a price cut to sit below new Ti model or upcoming GTX 1650 Ti will have a price slightly above the rumored number. Envisioned to feature 4 GB of VRAM and anything between 1024 to 1280 CUDA cores, the new GPU could provide a good balance between current offerings and reduce the gap between GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 graphics cards.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's re-release will see the game supporting real-time raytracing, and given NVIDIA's current stand in the market as the only provider of hardware-accelerated raytracing capable GPUs, this partnership makes total sense. NVIDIA has announced that they will be bundling Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with select RTX series GPUs, which gives gamers on the fence towards buying an RTX graphics card one more reason to take the plunge.

The bundle is available for eligible GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, 2070 Super, 2070, 2060 Super and 2060 products, whether in discrete card or laptop/desktop pre-built form. The game will be taking advantage of ray tracing and adaptive shading, and will bring gamers back to Soap and Price's story.

LG Electronics (LG) has joined forces with NVIDIA to make gamers' dreams come true, adding support for NVIDIA G-SYNC Compatibility to its stunning 2019 OLED TVs (model 65/55E9, model 77/65/55C9). LG's newest OLED products offer blazing speed and stunning color reproduction, their superior performance and image quality validated through NVIDIA G-SYNC Compatible testing to ensure a smooth and immersive gaming experience without flickering, tearing or stuttering.

With exceptional picture quality, low input lag and an ultra-fast response time, LG OLED TVs have already earned a reputation for delivering an optimized gaming performance. The addition of NVIDIA G-SYNC Compatibility raises the bar once more, guaranteeing even more immersive big-screen PC gaming on the company's industry-leading 4K OLED models, available in 55- to 77-inch screen sizes.

NVIDIA and ASUS today announced that the Quadro RTX 6000 GPU will power the world's fastest laptop, the ASUS ProArt StudioBook One, which joins 11 other new RTX Studio systems, launched just in time for IFA, the world's largest electronics conference, bringing the total number of RTX Studio systems to 39.

The Quadro RTX 6000 at the heart of the ProArt StudioBook One enables creatives and other innovators to tap into the power of a high-end deskside workstation without being chained to their desks. Wherever their work takes them, professionals can harness the RTX Studio-based system to handle massive datasets and accelerate compute-intensive workflows, such as creating 3D animations, rendering photoreal product designs, editing 8K video, visualizing volumetric geophysical datasets and conducting walk-throughs of photoreal building designs in VR.

The PC GPU market sequentially increased by 0.6% in Q2'19, decreased year-to-year by -10.4% This is the latest report from Jon Peddie Research on the GPUs used in PCs. It is reporting on the results of Q2'19 GPU shipments world-wide. AMD shipments increased 9.8% NVIDIA was flat and Intel's shipments, decreased -1.4% as indicated in the following chart.

Even though there is uncertainty in the notebook supply chain, there has been a record number of new notebook announcements, and systems with amazing specifications in performance, battery life, and screen resolution. Specialized notebooks that sit somewhere between workstations and enthusiast PCs are arriving on the market for creative professionals. Strong graphics subsystems are an important selling point for these machines.

Gears 5, the next upcoming installment in the Gears of War series of video games, is launching this September 10th. In anticipation, developer The Coalition has announced the games' close partnership development with AMD, optimizing it for the company's cadre of GPU and CPU solutions. The game will make extensive use of Asynchronous Compute - one of AMD's most relevant technologies in gaining the upper hand against NVIDIA on performance terms. According to the developer, post-processing effects are being run exclusively on Asynchronous Compute, which means that the games' rendering is being run as close to a clockwork as possible. FidelityFX also makes an appearance again, as one of the latest AMD technologies for improving visual fidelity and sharpness. Multithreaded Command Buffering is the technical implementation for a system that improves AMD's Ryzen CPUs' processing of the game, specifically geared towards taking advantage of that CPU architecture's strong points.

The game seems to be a pretty scalable affair, with minimum requirements making do with just 2 GB of VRAM and an AMD RX 560 or NVIDIA GTX 1050. The ideal system requirements, however, call for a much beefier setup, with an AMD Radeon VII or NVIDIA RTX 2080 being called for, including 16 GB of system memory and a whopping 100 GB+ install footprint - preferably on an SSD. The game, like Gears of War 4, has been developed with the PC market in mind - there are more than 35 different graphical options for users to tweak. Here's hoping the games' writing is as much a technical achievement as its engine development seems to be.

3DMark today announced they've introduced a new benchmarking feature. Specifically developed to test Variable Rate Shading (VRS) performance and image quality differences, the new feature allows users to actually visualize the performance and image quality differences associated with more aggressive (or less aggressive) VRS settings. The algorithm is a smart one - it aims to reduce the number of pixel shader operations on surfaces where detail isn't as important (such as frame edges, fast-moving objects, darkened areas, etc) so as to improve performance and shave some precious milliseconds in the deployment of each frame.

To run this test, you will need Windows 10 version 1903 or later and a DirectX 12 GPU that supports Tier 1 VRS and the "AdditionalShadingRatesSupported" capability, such as an NVIDIA Turing-based GPU or an Intel Ice Lake CPU. The VRS feature test is available now as a free update for 3DMark Advanced Edition, or from now until September 2, 3DMark is 75% off when you buy it from Steam or the UL benchmarks website.

AMD CEO Lisa Su at the Hot Chips conference answered some questions from the attending press. One of these regarded AMD's stance on CrossFire and whether or not it remains a focus for the company. Once the poster child for a scalable consumer graphics future, with AMD even going as far as enabling mixed-GPU support (with debatable merits). Lisa Su came out and said what we all have been seeing happening in the background: "To be honest, the software is going faster than the hardware, I would say that CrossFire isn't a significant focus".

There isn't anything really new here; we've all seen the consumer GPU trends as of late, with CrossFire barely being deserving of mention (and the NVIDIA camp does the same for their SLI technology, which has been cut from all but the higher-tier graphics cards). Support seems to be enabled as more of an afterthought than a "focus", and that's just the way things are. It seems that the old, old practice of buying a lower-tier GPU at launch and then buying an additional graphics processor further down the line to leapfrog performance of higher-performance, single GPU solutions is going the way of the proverbial dodo - at least until an MCM (Multi-Chip-Module) approach sees the light of day, paired with a hardware syncing solution that does away with the software side of things. A true, integrated, software-blind multi-GPU solution comprised of two or more smaller dies than a single monolithic solution seems to be the way to go. We'll see.

Taking the lead in producing laptops for creators, MSI continues to expand its dream-weaver series, now unveiling a complete product line designed specifically for creatives and content creators. MSI presents the world's very first laptops equipped with the latest best-in-class processors; its newest technological innovation will make a grand debut with Intel at the IFA exhibition from September 6th to 11th. The industry pioneering Prestige 14 & 15 feature the most powerful 10th Gen Intel Core i7 processor and True Pixel display. A must-have product paired with top-performing technology that will undoubtedly fulfill and enhance the life's work of creators.

As creative devices and software continue to improve, heavy computing ability has become a crucial function for creators. MSI, always striving to create breakthrough technologies and achieve innovative excellence, has introduced the pioneering Prestige and Modern series. Outfitted with the latest processor, the Prestige series are the world's first laptops powered by a 10th Gen Intel 6-core CPU and deliver at least 50% faster performance for a more fluid creative workflow, especially during multi-threaded processing.

NVIDIA yesterday posted its much publicized GeForce 436.02 WHQL Gamescom Special graphics drivers that brought about performance improvements across a spectrum of games, and added new features such as low-latency input (akin to AMD Radeon Anti-Lag), and beat Intel to Integer Upscaling. The installer that brought all these goodies to you, however, was buggy, as NVIDIA admitted. It originally installed GeForce Experience regardless of obtaining GDPR-mandated user-consent, and made deselecting the application in the "Custom Install" components list impossible.

Later in the evening, NVIDIA temporarily pulled the driver from the Downloads section of its website, and hours later, re-uploaded the drivers with an installer that fixes this bug. The driver version number remains the same, all that's changed is an "-rp" suffix in the installer binary's file-name (eg: "436.02-desktop-win10-64bit-international-whql-rp.exe"). We've added the updated files to our downloads section.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 436.02 WHQL (Fixed)

NVIDIA today released its GeForce 436.02 WHQL Gamescom Special graphics drivers. You can read all about them here. The installer of these drivers appears to have a major bug that forces the installation of GeForce Experience without obtaining GDPR-compliant consent from the user. With the ratification of GDPR, NVIDIA driver installers present a selection screen right at the start of the installation, which lets users opt to install GeForce Experience (and give their GDPR consent in doing so), but a second option lets users decline GDPR consent, forcing the installer to install GeForce drivers without GeForce Experience. A bug with the installer of GeForce 436.02 WHQL disregards the user's choice at this screen, and installs GeForce Experience without the GDPR-mandated user-consent.

Making matters far worse is the fact that you cannot deselect GeForce Experience from the list of components in the Custom Install screen. The Custom Install list lets you make the installer skip installation of optional components that are otherwise installed by default in Express Install (GeForce Experience features in this list only if a user gives GDPR consent in the previous screen). We're hoping that this is a simple installer bug by NVIDIA, because anything worse would put the company in violation of EU privacy laws. We at TechPowerUp are in the final stages of developing a free utility that lets users take complete control over their NVIDIA graphics driver installation, called NVCleanstall. Using this software you may skip lot more optional components than what the NVIDIA Installer allows, such as Telemetry. Grab a beta version of NVCleanstall from here.Update 16:27 UTC: NVIDIA has removed the 436.02 drivers from their website, and confirmed that this is a bug.

Update Aug 21st: The 436.02 drivers are available again, and the GeForce Experience install problem is fixed. Look for the suffix "-rp" in the file name to identify the fixed version.

NVIDIA, with its GeForce 436.02 Gamescom-special drivers. among several new features and performance updates, introduced integer scaling, a resolution upscaling algorithm that scales up extremely low-resolution visuals to a more eye-pleasing blocky pixellated lines by multiplying pixels in a "nearest-neighbor" pattern without changing their color, as opposed to bilinear upscaling, that blurs the image by attempting to add details where none exist, by altering colors of multiplied pixels.

Intel originally announced an integer upscaler this June that will be exclusive to the company's new Gen11 graphics architecture, since older generations of its iGPUs "lack the hardware requirements" to pull it off. Intel's driver updates that add integer-scaling are set to arrive toward the end of this month, and even when they do, only a tiny fraction of Intel hardware actually benefit from the feature (notebooks and tablets that use "Ice Lake" processors).