Ashes of the Singularity is one of those games that has always been in the forefront of the latest graphics technologies. One of the first games to support Microsoft's DX12 and async compute, and in receiving a Ryzen-optimized performance patch, the game is routinely used as a benchmark tool not only for graphics solutions, but also CPU benchmarks.

Now, Oxide Games has announced Ashes of The Singularity will feature support for the Vulkan renderer, which will be welcome news for users who don't want to upgrade to Windows 10, but don't want to live without low-level performance optimization in their games. The new Vulkan render path is still a beta feature, which you must enable through your Steam account. Just right click Ashes of the Singularity on your Steam library, hit "Properties", and activate the 2.4 opt-in in the beta features tab.

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announces from the SIGGRAPH 2017 Conference the immediate public availability of the OpenGL 4.6 specification. OpenGL 4.6 integrates the functionality of numerous ARB and EXT extensions created by Khronos members AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA into core, including the capability to ingest SPIR-V shaders.

SPIR-V is a Khronos-defined standard intermediate language for parallel compute and graphics, which enables content creators to simplify their shader authoring and management pipelines while providing significant source shading language flexibility. OpenGL 4.6 adds support for ingesting SPIR-V shaders to the core specification, guaranteeing that SPIR-V shaders will be widely supported by OpenGL implementations.

PC World posted a preview of an AMD Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition graphics card, and reported some interesting observations about the card ahead of its review NDA. The tech publication compared the air-cooled Pro Vega Frontier Edition against NVIDIA's fastest consumer graphics card, the TITAN Xp. It did reveal performance numbers of the two cards in two compute-heavy tests, SPECViewPerf 12.1 and Cinebench R15 (OpenGL test), where the Vega FE significantly outperforms the TITAN Xp. This shouldn't come as a shocker because AMD GPUs tend to have a strong footing with GPU compute performance, particularly with open standards.

It's PC World's comments on the Vega card's gaming performance that might pique your interest. In its report, the publication comments that the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition offers gaming performance that is faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, but slightly slower than its GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. To back its statement, PC World claims to have run the Vega Frontier Edition and TITAN Xp in "Doom" with Vulkan API, "Prey" with DirectX 11, and "Sniper Elite 4" with DirectX 12. You must also take into account that the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition could command a four-figure price, in the league of the TITAN Xp; and that gamers should look forward to the Radeon RX Vega series, bound for a late-July/early-August launch, at price-points more appropriate to their competitive positioning. The RX Vega is also expected to have 8 GB of memory compared to 16 GB on the Frontier Edition. Watch PC World's video presentation in the source link below.

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."

TechPowerUp today released GPU-Z 2.1.0, a major update to the popular graphics subsystem information and diagnostic utility. Version 2.1.0 introduces the new Advanced tab, which gives you in-depth information related to your installed graphics hardware and software related to graphics and GPU compute, such as API-level features available to you. Information is presented as drop-down lists in the new Advanced tab. API features of DirectX, OpenCL, CUDA, and Vulkan are added.

In addition to the groundbreaking Advanced tab, GPU-Z 2.1.0 adds support for EVGA iCX technology, and can put out live sensor data from various parts of your EVGA iCX graphics card. There's also the usual addition of new GPU support, which now includes NVIDIA Tesla P100 PCIe, Tesla M10, Quadro P5000, Intel HD Graphics 615, and AMD Radeon HD 8350G. In addition, there are various user-interface bug fixes and improvements.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.1.0The change-log follows.

In a blog post detailing the release of OpenCL 2.2 with SPIR-V 1.2 integration today, Khronos put in an interesting tidbit, saying that "we are also working to converge with, and leverage, the Khronos Vulkan API - merging advanced graphics and compute into a single API." PC Perspective understandably found this worth further looking into, since as it is phrased, it seems as if OpenCL and Vulkan are going to be slowly developed towards parity (until eventually merging with it.)

Khrono's response to PC Perspective's inquiry was clear enough: "The OpenCL working group has taken the decision to converge its roadmap with Vulkan, and use Vulkan as the basis for the next generation of explicit compute APIs - this also provides the opportunity for the OpenCL roadmap to merge graphics and compute."

NVIDIA has released an update to its GeForce Experience application that is sure to be loved by streamers and gamers alike who previously found ShadowPlay support on Vulkan and OpenGL games to be lacking. Version 3.6 of the program adds official support to games that make use of these renderers. Screenshot, video, and broadcast functions that Shadowplay enables are enhanced by the addition of support for these APIs, which means you can now use ShadowPlay with a press of a hotkey to record and stream your Doom and Minecraft gameplay at 4K 60fps.

Other improvements include a unified Broadcast screen and a newly revamped Video and Screenshot upload interface: YouTube and Twitch streamers can now control broadcast options from a unified screen, and log in to all services from there as well. NVIDIA has also worked some improvements to its GeForce Experience Gallery, by adding an upload history screen that displays all prior uploads and locations. You now also have the option of instantly jumping to the file location of a screenshot or video in Windows Explorer through a new button.

BIOSTAR is thrilled to announce its latest lineup of graphics card for gamers featuring the 2nd-generation Polaris architecture from AMD coupled with excellent gaming performance and higher clock speeds. Introducing the new BIOSTAR RADEON RX 500 series GPUs designed to be the perfect graphics upgrade for those looking to play modern games and experience VR at compelling prices and the prodcuts will be exclusively for Asia Pacific and China region.

The new BIOSTAR RADEON RX 500 series GPUs include the latest flagship RX 580, together with the mainstream RX 570 and RX 550. The new GPUs feature support for DX12 and Vulkan API. Combined with technologies to help improve visual performance and display technologies to improve the overall gaming experience, gamers will fully enjoy their gaming experience with the new RADEON RX 500 series.

With the success of Blizzard's "Overwatch," it's only natural for game studio Bethesda to develop the oldest, most successful hero-based FPS brand from the early 2000s, "Quake III Arena," into a brand-new title that keeps up with the times, and perhaps even sets new standards. That title is "Quake Champions," and Bethesda is tapping into big id Software talent in its development.

"Quake Champions" will by driven by a proprietary engine that's not id Tech 6. This game will take advantage of the Vulkan API, besides an OpenGL fallback, and as part of an agreement between Bethesda and AMD, it could feature optimization for AMD Ryzen processors. "Quake Champions" will build on the things that made Quake III Arena a cult-classic, besides featuring a cutting-edge production design. Besides PC, the game will launch on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 platforms.

Futuremark has just released a major update to its 3DMark benchmarking suite, adding Vulkan support while simultaneously axing its cousin, Mantle. This means that the API Overhead test now uses a Vulkan path instead of its previous Mantle one, which is sure to lead several enthusiasts into a frenzy of benchmarking under the Khronos's API (which has just recently been announced will offer support for multi-GPU in Windows 10, 8.x, 7, and Linux operating systems.)

Check some of the new features, improvements and fixes on the new version right after the break. You can download this piece of software right here on TPU - just follow the link below.Download: Futuremark 3DMark + TimeSpy v2.3.3663

Vulkan is arguably the API which has garnered the most positive reactions from enthusiasts. Its implementation in Doom, for example, brought about incredible performance improvements in a game that not only looked and played great, but also performed amazingly well. Vulkan's support for other operating systems other than Windows 10 (where Microsoft still has a lot of ground to cover in acquiring enthusiast trust and interest) is one of its greatest selling points, and the API has been gaining ever more traction in the market, with some developers even going so far as to axe DX12 support in favor of Vulkan.

Now, Khronos Group has come ahead and clarified that "(...) the Vulkan multi-GPU specification is very definitely NOT tied to Windows 10. It is possible to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension on any desktop OS including Windows 7, 8.X and 10 and Linux." Khronos also goes on to say that they are aware that some developers are already baking Multi-GPU support into their games in various platforms other than Windows 10. These are sure to come as good news - the fact that Vulkan is platform agnostic is great for consumers and developers alike. And maybe this support - which still depends on developers to implement it - will bring about the shot in the arm that multi-GPU implementations sorely need.

NVIDIA today unveiled the NVIDIA Jetson TX2, a credit card-sized platform that delivers AI computing at the edge -- opening the door to powerfully intelligent factory robots, commercial drones and smart cameras for AI cities. Jetson TX2 offers twice the performance of its predecessor, or it can run at more than twice the power efficiency, while drawing less than 7.5 watts of power. This allows Jetson TX2 to run larger, deeper neural networks on edge devices. The result: smarter devices with higher accuracy and faster response times for tasks like image classification, navigation and speech recognition.

"Jetson TX2 brings powerful AI capabilities at the edge, making possible a new class of intelligent machines," said Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of the Tegra business at NVIDIA. "These devices will enable intelligent video analytics that keep our cities smarter and safer, new kinds of robots that optimize manufacturing, and new collaboration that makes long-distance work more efficient."

At GDC's AMD Capsaicin Event, AMD's Raja Koduri reaffirmed Radeon's commitment to Multi-GPU setups by remembering his RX 480 launch event claim on a RX 480 dual setup beating their competition's high-end solutions. Then, Rebellion's Chris Kingsley took stage, who attributed the fact that his team was able to get Sniper Elite 4 to run with 100% scaling on a RX 480 dual GPU setup to Rebellion's previous work with Mantle. Next to it, for perspective, AMD showed a dual-GPU RX 480 system running the same game and settings at virtually double the frame rate - a perfect, 100% scaling. Rebellion's Chris Kingsley also elaborated on the importance of DX 12 and Vulkan on making such a thing even possible in the first place, reiterating the software and coding investment necessary to make that happen.

We are at the 2017 Game Developers Conference, and were invited to one of the many enlightening tech sessions, titled "Is DirectX 12 Worth it," by Jurjen Katsman, CEO of Nixxes, a company credited with several successful PC ports of console games (Rise of the Tomb Raider, Deus Ex Mankind Divided). Over the past 18 months, DirectX 12 has become the selling point to PC gamers, of everything from Windows 10 (free upgrade) to new graphics cards, and even games, with the lack of DirectX 12 support even denting the PR of certain new AAA game launches, until the developers hashed out support for the new API through patches. Game developers are asking the dev community at large to manage their expectations from DirectX 12, with the underlying point being that it isn't a silver-bullet to all the tech limitations developers have to cope with, and that to reap all its performance rewards, a proportionate amount of effort has to be put in by developers.

The presentation begins with the speaker talking about the disillusionment consumers have about DirectX 12, and how they're yet to see the kind of console-rivaling performance gains DirectX 12 was purported to bring. Besides lack of huge performance gains, consumers eagerly await the multi-GPU utopia that was promised to them, in which not only can you mix and match GPUs of your choice across models and brands, but also have them stack up their video memory - a theoretical possibility with by DirectX 12, but which developers argue is easier said than done, in the real world. One of the key areas where DirectX 12 is designed to improve performance is by distributing rendering overhead evenly among many CPU cores, in a multi-core CPU. For high-performance desktop users with reasonably fast CPUs, the gains are negligible. This also goes for people gaming on higher resolutions, such as 1440p and 4K Ultra HD, where the frame-rates are low, and the performance tends to be more GPU-limited.

Futuremark is working on new game-tests for its 3DMark benchmark suite. One of these is a game test that takes advantage of DirectX 12, but isn't as taxing on the hardware as "Time Spy." Its target hardware is notebook graphics and entry-mainstream graphics cards. It will be to "Time Spy" what "Sky Diver" is to "Fire Strike."

The next, more interesting move by Futuremark is a benchmark that takes advantage of the Vulkan 3D graphics API. The company will release this Vulkan-based benchmark for both Windows and Android platforms. Lastly we've learned that development of the company's VR benchmarks are coming along nicely, and the company hopes to release new VR benchmarks for PC and mobile platforms soon. Futuremark is expected to reveal these new game-tests and benchmarks at its 2017 International CES booth, early January.

AMD's next-generation high-end graphics card, based on the "Vega" architecture, was showcased at an event in Sonoma CA, earlier this week. While the architecture is being debuted with the Radeon Instinct MI25 deep-learning accelerator, a prototype graphics card based on the silicon was exhibited by the company, showing Vulkan API gaming.

AMD was pretty tight-lipped about the specifications of this prototype, but two details appear to have slipped out. Apparently, the chip has a floating point performance of 25 TFLOP/s (FP16), and 12.5 TFLOP/s (FP32, single-precision). On paper, this is higher than the 11 TFLOP/s (FP32) of NVIDIA TITAN X Pascal. The other important specification that emerged is that the card features 8 GB of HBM2 memory, with a memory bandwidth of 512 GB/s. This, too, is higher than the 480 GB/s of the TITAN X Pascal. It remains to be seen which market-segment AMD targets with this card.

This article was updated on Dec 15 to accommodate AMD's request to remove all info regarding the demo system, the shown game and its performance, which has been put under NDA retroactively.

After putting in work in the OpenGL, WebGL, and most recently, Vulkan APIs, the technology industry consortium Khronos Group is setting its sights on the VR industry and ecosystems. Their aim: to create a "cross-vendor, royalty-free, open standard" for the VR development community. This move is an effort to prevent the VR system from fragmenting itself towards an eventual collapse, considering the multiple engines to create content, platforms to sell that content through, and a few different hardware options with casuistically different requirements and tool-sets. As a result, for a developer to support SteamVR (OpenVR), Oculus (OVR), and OSVR, it has a lot of work to do, since each platform (with its unique runtime) interfaces with the game engine in a different way. Developers must account for the intricacies of each platform during the development process.

The crew at WCCFTech have just leaked AMD's now annual major software update release (with Catalyst Omega in 2014 and Crimson Edition in 2015). The new 2016 release is apparently dubbed the "Crimson ReLive" release, and these are purported to bring a lot of features and performance improvements across the board for AMD products, as has been historically achieved by AMD with these annual driver releases. This time, there's just one other thing: game recording and streaming through a built-in app.

Since its inception, the Radeon Software division has released 29 drivers of which 8 were WHQL releases, with support and optimizations for over 28 gaming titles, having been downloaded over 85 million times. AMD seems to put newfound interest in consumer satisfaction with their driver releases, considering how a leaked slide mentions that they have achieved a 4.5/5 rating in customer satisfaction in recent times (AMD had already given us at TPU a glimpse of that at the Computex event in Macau, pre-Polaris days, and this seems to be it). AMD is putting much stock in their DX12 performance thanks to features such as asynchronous compute, and the staples of supported platforms and projects. AMD also seems to have a new-found claim towards it being one of the most important players in the graphics industry, chalking up their market dominance by including gaming consoles in their portfolio.

The folks over at 3dcenter.org have compiled comprehensive historical GPU AIB market share data for our digestion. While we recently reported on Q3'16 and its comparison to the quarter before and the same period last year, this information spans a near 14 year quarter-on-quarter time frame. The compilers have quite helpfully included points of reference along the timeline which highlight the two major GPU manufacturers milestone desktop product line debuts.

It is worth noting that their exact numbers differ slightly to the ones Jon Peddie Research provided as 3dcenter have also cited the work of Mercury Research, which appears more conservative. The figures provided in their own graph split the difference between the two sources to give us a more impartial look at the market.

AMD FirePro and Radeon Pro graphics empower content creators and designers at many levels, from casual makers and students all the way up to seasoned professionals and enterprise workstation users. It's not just hardware, though, that lets professionals unleash their creativity; powerful software is critical too, and today we are introducing the first of many Radeon Pro Software releases.

The Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Driver 16.Q4 is designed to address the specific needs of enterprise users and also will support the upcoming release of AMD's next-generation of professional graphics, the Radeon Pro WX series.

ZOTAC International, a global manufacturer of innovation, is pleased to introduce MAGNUS ERX480 as the world's first AMD powered Mini PC equipped with Polaris Architecture. The award-winning ZBOX MAGNUS Gaming Mini PC series, renowned for whisper quiet performance, brings a refreshing level of power and speed for every gamer. "We are always aiming to provide powerful solutions available to a wide audience and the MAGNUS ERX480 could be it" said Jacky Huang, Director of Mini PC.

MAGNUS is designed for gaming and entertainment. Hosting power that surpasses the requirements for experiencing virtual reality, MAGNUS is an ideal solution for both high-end gaming, premium entertainment, and much more. "The Radeon RX 480 with Polaris Architecture changes the gaming hardware dynamic with an effective cost-performance combination. We're excited to partner with ZOTAC, a well-established gaming mini PC manufacturer, to bring together the world first and most powerful AMD based gaming mini PC equipped with a Radeon RX 480" said Spencer Pan, AMD Corporate VP and President of Greater China.

Shader intrinsic functions stand as a partial solution for granting developers more control over existing computational resources and how they are leveraged. This capability (much touted by AMD as a performance-enhancing feature on their GCN-based products) essentially exposes features and capabilities that exist on the hardware developers are programming for, but wouldn't generally be able to access. This can happen either because they're being abstracted by a high-level API (Application Programming Interface, like DX11), or because the API isn't functionally able to access them. To understand why high-level APIs such as DX11 don't usually offer support for a piece of hardware's full feature list, or full processing capabilities, we must first look at the basic architecture of a given computer system.

AMD announced the AMD Embedded Radeon E9260 and E9550 graphics processing units (GPUs), the industry's first discrete embedded graphics cards leveraging the new AMD Polaris architecture. The cards are ideal for applications requiring rich multimedia and 4K video in power-constrained embedded environments. Use cases include immersive casino gaming, digital signage, 4K teleconferencing and interactive digital whiteboards, enhanced medical imaging for clinical diagnoses, and transportation instrumentation.

The Polaris GPU architecture leverages an optimized 14nm FinFET process designed to deliver a dramatic performance-per-watt gain over previous generations of embedded GPU architecture. Providing up to 5.8 TFLOPS performance in a sub-95W TDP power profile, the new embedded GPUs offer advanced 4K encode/decode multimedia processing capabilities and support for up to six displays on the E9550.

Vulkan, the new-generation cross-platform 3D graphics API governed by the people behind OpenGL, the Khronos Group, is gaining in relevance, with Google making it the primary 3D graphics API for Android. AMD said that it's actively promoting the API. Responding to a question by TechPowerUp in its recent Radeon Technology Group (RTG) first anniversary presser, its chief Raja Koduri agreed that the company is actively working with developers to add Vulkan to their productions, and optimize them for Radeon GPUs. This, we believe, could be due to one of many strategic reasons.

First, Vulkan works inherently better on AMD Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture because it's been largely derived from Mantle, a now defunct 3D graphics API by AMD that brings a lot of "close-to-metal" API features that make game consoles more performance-efficient, over to the PC ecosystem. The proof of this pudding is the AAA title and 2016 reboot of the iconic first-person shooter "Doom," in which Radeon GPUs get significant performance boosts switching from the default OpenGL renderer to Vulkan. These boosts aren't as pronounced on NVIDIA GPUs.

Game developer CryTek is planning to implement Vulkan API support for its in-house game-engine, CryEngine. To be released in November 2016 as CryEngine 5.3, CryTek will implement Vulkan across platforms, including PC (Windows desktop/notebook), and mobile (smartphones, tablets). The decision to implement Vulkan could have been fueled by Google's decision to make Vulkan the primary 3D graphics API of Android.

CryTek will also expand its support for DirectX 12, which it implemented in March 2016. With CryEngine 5.4, scheduled to be released in February 2017, along the sidelines of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), CryTek is introducing support for DirectX 12 native multi-GPU; deferred shading in sandboxed viewports, and multi-threaded rendering in sandbox.