Tech News

Qualcomm Launches Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 Mobile Platform

Posted on June 26, 2023 11:00 AM by Rob Williams
empty pavement with modern architecture at night

Qualcomm has today launched the newest iteration of its entry-level mobile SoC: Snapdragon 4 Gen 2. With Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 having launched just last September (alongside Snapdragon 6 Gen 2), this latest release might be one of the quickest successive launches we’ve seen from the company. Snapdragon 4 caters to users…..

AMD Launches Ryzen PRO 7000 Series Mobile & Desktop Platform

Posted on June 13, 2023 9:00 AM by Rob Williams
AMD Ryzen PRO 7000 Series Processor (Thumbnail)

AMD has today announced the launch of its latest generation Ryzen PRO desktop and notebook platform, featuring Ryzen PRO 7040 processors. This launch brings the Zen 4 architecture to AMD’s business-oriented Ryzen platform, providing more performance, better efficiency, improved battery-life, and the introduction of the Ryzen AI engine. Recent years have proven…..

Intel Launches Sleek Single-Slot Arc Pro A60 Workstation Graphics Card

Posted on June 12, 2023 3:05 PM by Rob Williams
Intel Arc Pro A60 Workstation Graphics Card (Thumbnail)

We’re a little late on covering this one, but wanted to make sure we did, because for multiple reasons, it’s an interesting launch. Up to this point, we haven’t heard too much about Intel’s Arc Pro series, aimed at workstation, despite two models having been available since last year. Today, a third…..

NVIDIA Announces Latest Ada Lovelace Additions: GeForce RTX 4060 Ti & RTX 4060

Posted on May 18, 2023 5:05 PM by Rob Williams
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (Thumbnail)

In the seven months since NVIDIA launched its first Ada Lovelace-based GeForce, we’ve seen the release of four models total. With the bottom of that bunch priced at $599, there’s been a ton of demand for more affordable options – and thankfully, we now know that those are arriving soon. Today’s launch…..

Maxon Redshift With AMD Radeon GPU Rendering Support Now Available

Posted on May 15, 2023 2:14 PM by Rob Williams
Maxon Redshift Render With AMD Radeon GPU (Thumbnail)

Last spring, Maxon announced that its popular Redshift renderer would be gaining support for AMD’s Radeon graphics cards. As with some competing engines (eg: Chaos V-Ray), most of Redshift’s existence has revolved around NVIDIA’s CUDA API, which of course means an NVIDIA GPU was required for use. Ahead of the AMD GPU…..

AMD Launches High-end RDNA3 Radeon PRO W7800 & W7900 Workstation GPUs

Posted on April 13, 2023 9:00 AM by Rob Williams
AMD Radeon PRO W7800 Perspective Shot

AMD has today announced its newest Radeon PRO workstation GPU series, with models built around its current generation RDNA3 architecture. While AMD could have launched this Radeon PRO W7000 with some modest models, it’s instead decided to make a statement with two top-end SKUs that don’t cater just to “heavy” workloads, but…..

Blender 3.5 Released: Adds New Geometry Nodes, Augments Viewport & Improves Lights

Posted on March 29, 2023 2:12 PM by Rob Williams
Blender 3.5 Splash Screen (Thumb)

The latest version of Blender has just released, and as we’ve come to expect, there’s a lot to take in, despite the previous version releasing just a mere three months ago. Key focuses here include hair- and fur-based Geometry Nodes, built-in assets (yes, you’re reading that right), support for vector displacement maps…..

NVIDIA Unveils Six Ada Lovelace-based Professional GPUs At GTC 2023

Posted on March 21, 2023 1:23 PM by Rob Williams
NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF Ada Lovelace Generation

NVIDIA’s latest (and still virtual) GTC has just kicked-off, and without wasting a single second, the company’s unveiled lots to talk about, with large focuses on proviz, healthcare, automotive, robotics, and lithography. For this post, we’re going to focus on what gets us (and much of our audience) the most excited: professional…..

AMD Announces Pricing And Availability For Its 3D V-Cache-infused Zen 4 SKUs

Posted on February 1, 2023 2:53 PM by Rob Williams
AMD Ryzen 9 3D V-Cache CPU (Thumbnail)

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 Drops Arc A750 Price To $249, Launches Major Driver Update

Posted on February 1, 2023 2:30 PM by Rob Williams
Intel Arc A770 LE Side View

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…..

Zen 4 At 65W: Ryzen 9 7900, Ryzen 7 7700 & Ryzen 5 7600 Launched

Posted on January 9, 2023 4:11 PM by Rob Williams
AMD Ryzen 9 Retail Packaging (Thumbnail)

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…..

Intel Arc Rendering Performance Strengths Are Really Understated

Posted on January 9, 2023 1:55 PM by Rob Williams
Intel Arc Neon Light (Thumbnail)

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…..

AMD Unveils New Desktop And Mobile Ryzens At CES, Including Three 3D V-Cache Options

Posted on January 5, 2023 3:30 PM by Rob Williams
AMD Ryzen 9 3D V-Cache CPU (Thumbnail)

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,…..

NVIDIA Launches Mobile Ada Lovelace GeForces, Delivers DLSS 3 & Studio Updates At CES

Posted on January 4, 2023 3:52 PM by Rob Williams
NVIDIA DLSS 3 Games - CES 2023 (Thumbnail)

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…..

Intel Launches Many 13th-gen Core Notebook And Desktop Processors At CES

Posted on January 3, 2023 4:20 PM by Rob Williams
At CES 2023, Intel introduces the 13th Gen Intel Core mobile pro

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”…..

NVIDIA To Remove GameStream Function In Upcoming SHIELD Update

Posted on December 20, 2022 3:33 PM by Rob Williams
NVIDIA SHIELD TV Family (2019)

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…..

NVIDIA NeRF Could Make Future Games Much Smaller In Size

Posted on December 19, 2022 10:57 AM by Rob Williams
NVIDIA NeRF Examples - Two Minute Papers

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 Announces RDNA3 Radeon RX 7900 XTX – 61 TFLOPS Of Compute At $999

Posted on November 3, 2022 8:17 PM by Jamie Fletcher
Dr Lisa Su Holding Up Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU Feature Image

AMD announced today its latest generation of GPUs, the Radeon RX 7000 series, sporting some impressive generational leaps. There were two cards announced, the RX 7900 XTX and the RX 7900 XT, to be released December 13th 2022, at $999 and $899 respectively through AMD directly. Third-party AIBs will be making announcements…..

Steam Soon To Get Big Picture Upgrade, Possible SteamOS 3 Desktop Release

Posted on October 27, 2022 4:52 PM by Rob Williams
Steam Big Picture (October 2022)

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…..

Memory Test Tool Memtest86+ Gets First Major Update In Nearly A Decade

Posted on October 25, 2022 5:42 PM by Rob Williams
Memtest86+ 6.0

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 Releases First Arc GPU Driver For Linux, Tinkering Prowess Required

Posted on October 21, 2022 3:25 PM by Rob Williams
Intel Arc GPU Driver Operational Under Ubuntu

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…..

Intel Launches 13th-gen Core ‘Raptor Lake’ Processors, Z790 Chipset

Posted on October 20, 2022 9:00 AM by Rob Williams
Intel 13th-gen Core Processor

Intel today announces the release of its 13th-gen Core desktop processors – built around the Raptor Lake microarchitecture – as well as its Z790 motherboard platform. To kick things off, the company is offering three base models with one each for Core i5, i7, and i9, as well as a variant of…..

NVIDIA Unlaunches Its GeForce RTX 4080 12GB Variant

Posted on October 14, 2022 1:55 PM by Rob Williams
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 PCB

When NVIDIA announced its Ada Lovelace generation of GeForces last month, it kicked things off with the top-end RTX 4090 (our review here), and two models below it: RTX 4080 16GB, and RTX 4080 12GB. In name alone, those sub-RTX 4090 models seem identical aside from the memory density, but closer inspection…..

Intel Reveals More Details About Its Full Arc GPU Desktop Launch

Posted on September 29, 2022 8:42 PM by Rob Williams
Intel Arc A770 LE Graphics Card

Earlier this week, Intel announced that it would be launching its top-end Arc A770 graphics card on October 12, and today, the company reveals more about its plans, specs for the entire lineup, and how it’s sweetening the deal to make the Arc 7 look even more alluring. Some of the information…..

AMD’s Radeon PRO 22.Q3 Driver Provides Huge Boosts To Viewport Performance

Posted on September 29, 2022 3:14 PM by Rob Williams
AMD Radeon Pro W6400 with W6800

After what we’d consider a rather calm year for AMD’s Radeon PRO drivers, the company’s latest release highlights that its engineers have been hard at work putting polish on an important performance scenario: interacting with the viewport! A completely rearchitected OpenGL driver helped make it happen. It’s become standard fare that if…..

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