Content and news by Rob Williams

We’re taking a fresh look at the many workloads available in SPECviewperf. This time around, we’re taking a much deeper look at subtest results, to gain a better understanding of how SVP’s overall scores are generated. With the help of 28 GPUs, two resolutions, and 38 subtests, we have a lot of data to explore.

AMD’s had a pretty busy 2023 so far, especially where CPUs are concerned. At CES, the company announced three 65W Ryzen models, in addition to three others that have been infused with 3D V-Cache. Today, the company has announced both pricing and availability for those latter SKUs (the 65W parts were officially…..

Intel has been on quite the “journey” since it launched its Arc-series graphics cards last year. While the GPU hardware is really quite good, the state of Arc’s drivers being less-than-ideal was known to pretty much every enthusiast. Fortunately, the company has been on a tear to get bugs fixed and support…..

Today’s the day when Intel launches its long-anticipated 4th-gen Xeon Scalable and Xeon Max-series processors, and the company has given us plenty to talk about. We have CPUs with built-in HBM2e memory, many accelerators scattered across the entire range, and notably, AMX AI acceleration built into every one.

As we covered during CES last week, AMD’s introducing a number of processor SKUs for the desktop market, including a trio of 65W parts, and another trio that packs AMD’s 3D V-Cache inside. Today’s launch revolves around the former, the 65W parts that give new options to those wanting to adopt AMD’s…..

When we first took a detailed look at Intel’s Arc graphics cards this past fall, we found ourselves impressed with the performance we were seeing across multiple scenarios. At that time, there was no question that Arc’s graphics drivers were still in bad need of polish, but after our exhaustive testing, we…..

This year’s CES has had the usual onslaught of product announcements, but it feels like the CPU market has been catered to more this go-around than in previous events. We wrote the other day of Intel’s new CPU launches, with an almost ridiculous number of SKUs targeting both desktop and notebook. Now,…..

At the ongoing CES 2023 event, NVIDIA has had lots to talk about – from new GPUs to Omniverse to DLSS 3. Perhaps one of the biggest announcements revolves around the company’s notebook gaming efforts. As of today, the company says that over 170 upcoming designs will include a latest generation GeForce…..

NVIDIA’s third Ada Lovelace-based GeForce has landed: RTX 4070 Ti. This artist formerly known as RTX 4080 packs in 12GB of memory, effectively delivering a 50% boost to VRAM gen-over-gen. Our first look at the new GPU will be focusing on creator: rendering, encoding, and more.

Following on the launch of the first 13th-gen Core “Raptor Lake” desktop processors a few months ago, Intel has taken full advantage of the ongoing CES 2023 event to debut a slew of new models for both desktop and notebook. To kick things off, let’s take a look at the new “HX”…..

Blender 3.4 released just a few weeks ago, and as usual, we couldn’t wait long before jumping in and exploring its performance with current GPUs from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. With 22 graphics cards and six Cycles and Eevee projects in-hand for rendering and viewport testing, let’s find out which GPUs rise above the rest.

In an update posted to its support website late last week, NVIDIA’s revealed that it will be removing the GameStream function that’s been present in all of its SHIELD devices dating back to the original portable version, released in 2013. This move hasn’t gone down well with the community, and it’s no…..

If at first glance you thought that NVIDIA NeRF was a sign that the graphics giant was attempting to pivot to the toy dart gun market, no one could blame you. Fortunately, the reality is much cooler. NeRF stands for “Neural Radiance Fields”, an AI-based technology that aims to recreate objects or…..

AMD has just launched its newest top-end Radeons – the RDNA3-based RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX – and for creators, there’s a lot to be intrigued by. That includes the fact that AMD is delivering the least-expensive 24GB GPU we’ve seen to date. In this article, we’ll explore performance of both GPUs across encoding, rendering, photogrammetry, and viewport tests.

AMD’s first RDNA3-based GPUs have just landed, with both the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX targeting the top-end of the market. We’re kicking off our performance coverage with a look at 4K gaming across a wide-range of titles, with ray tracing and upscaling tests strewn throughout.

The second GPU to grace NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace GeForce lineup has landed: RTX 4080. Like the previously-released RTX 4090, the RTX 4080 continues to show us that the Ada Lovelace generation offers huge upticks in rendering performance over the previous-gen Ampere.

With a new Blender version comes a new Blender performance deep-dive – and thankfully, there’s lots to talk about here. Blender 3.3 introduces support for Intel’s Arc GPUs, so those are tested and included here, along with NVIDIA’s newest top-end GeForce. We also explore AMD’s performance improvements over the past six months, as well as shader compile times.

When Valve introduced its Steam Deck handheld gaming device, the company began transitioning its SteamOS Linux distribution towards supporting only that device. It was uncertain whether the company had plans to return the OS to its original home on desktop PCs, but this week, we have hints that it is indeed going…..

If there’s been one constant in desktop and notebook PCs over the years, it’s that memory will need to be tested. Anyone who’s been working with PCs for a substantial amount of time are likely familiar with Memtest86+ – a bootable tool that couldn’t be much simpler in design, but serves an…..

Intel has just released the first Linux-bound graphics driver for its new Arc graphics cards, and as long as you’re running Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04, you should be able to get going fairly quickly. We emphasize “fairly” because you will be copying and pasting a fair number of commands to get your…..