Gamers receive hope once again that Valve’s long-delayed Steam Machine is moving forward towards a launch and not ending on the chopping block. The Khronos Group, which created the Vulkan graphics API standard, and is its developer and maintainer, has just listed the AMD Steam Machine as the latest entry in its list of conformant products. While this is in no way, shape, or form a confirmation that the console is arriving soon, it’s still a step in the right direction. It indicates that Valve is still actively working on the console despite the setbacks driven by insane memory and storage prices.

This certification does not mean that all Vulkan games will play well on the console — instead, it only says that the future Valve console complies with all the standards set by the body. In other words, the hardware, operating system, and drivers behave as expected with Vulkan, giving developers peace of mind that the entire stack would work consistently. The console’s inclusion in the list does not indicate performance or game compatibility, though.

Valve announced the Steam Machine along with the Steam Controller and the Steam Frame in November 2025. This has got many fans excited, especially as the Steam Deck brought SteamOS to a level of polish and compatibility that allowed users to play a big chunk of their Steam libraries on the handheld console. Unfortunately, this was also the time the memory and storage prices started to spiral out of control. Because of this, the Steam Machine runs the risk of becoming too expensive and moving out of reach of its target customers, especially as Valve is adamant that it will not subsidize its hardware.

Even though Valve announced the three gadgets simultaneously, the console, controller, and VR headset weren’t intended to launch simultaneously. So, even though the Steam Machine was delayed several times, the company saw no reason to hold back the Steam Controller. Fans could finally get their hands on the $99 accessory after it launched in late April, with Tom’s Hardware giving it four out of five stars in its review.

The gaming giant still hasn’t announced an official release date for its latest console, but we hope that the company can secure an affordable memory and storage supplier sooner. That way, it can deliver Steam Machine before the end of the year at a price that most gamers can afford.

Minecraft may be going on close to 15 years old, but the game's popularity is as strong as ever. The game's two editions (Bedrock and Java) introduced some fragmentation, however. The Java Edition's now-dated OpenGL renderer has been a headache for both performance and modding, but Mojang Studios is fixing that with a new Vulkan renderer.

The upgrade is expected to bring performance increases, improved stability, and much-improved support for contemporary graphical effects. In a blog post, Mojang says the Vibrant Visuals update is coming to the Java Edition, with testing expected to start sometime this summer.

Mojang says it kept OpenGL around for so long to make it easy to keep active ports for Windows, Linux, and macOS. That was a double-edged sword, as the studio now cites macOS support as the straw that broke the camel's back. The game was stuck on an old version of OpenGL that Macs can still use, and will likely be dropped entirely.

OpenGL and the game's rendering architecture are simply ancient by today's standards and have long been a thorn in modders' sides, as well as precluding sizable performance improvements. Besides likely being a lot faster on its own, the new Vulkan renderer will run in a separate thread from the main game logic.

Mojang's post expresses concerns about modding, a key feature that maintains the Java Edition as the primary version in the Windows/Linux/macOS space. Predictably, the studio notes the shift to Vulkan will create more work for graphical modders than a simple point update, and encourages them to try and stick to the game's internal rendering APIs as much as possible.

However, Mojang is also requesting feedback from the community, and outright tells modders that "if [the APIs aren't] sufficient for your needs, then come and talk to us", and keeps a Discord server dedicated to technical discussion. When the first test versions with Vulkan arrive, players will be able to switch between them, though Mojang asks gamers to be patient with their modders when the switch-over starts.

The update sounds pretty excellent overall, though perhaps not so for anyone still playing Minecraft on graphics cards without Vulkan support.

Vintage game emulation just got another slight boost, thanks to the release of D7VK version 1.1. This Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer makes it possible to run old Direct3D 7 games on contemporary hardware, and it got some meaty improvements, including a new front-end, and experimental support for Direct3D 6.

In case you're a little confused, D7VK is a translation layer that turns Direct3D 7 calls to Direct X 9 running under Proton's DXVK layer, thereby taking advantage of DXVK's tried-and-true infrastructure and software ecosystem. Being a mere translation layer, it has a minor performance penalty and can run several times faster than a full emulator like WineD3D.

Alongside with a new front-end, the 1.1 update adds Direct3D 6 support as an experimental option. The author mentions that judging by its documentation, adding this API shouldn't be a lot of work. That's in sharp contrast to the lawless lands of Direct3D version 5 and under. Even as it stands, in their own words, "D3D7 is a land of highly cursed interoperability", with many games mixing Direct3D calls with older Windows APIs like DirectDraw and even GDI for 2D graphics.

In turn, this means that support for games is hit-or-miss, depending on how "hacky" the game was initially programmed. For example, this latest version adds a workaround specific to Sacrifice, which uses a wholly unspported depth buffer format. Likewise, support for strided primitive rendering makes Sacred playable, and fixes to mipmap swapping enable gamers to once again enjoy Gothic, Gothic 2, and Star Trek DS9: The Fallen as if they were just released.

Many popular Direct3D 6 titles have seen re-releases using modern APIs, including Final Fantasy VIII, Resident Evil 2, and Grand Theft Auto 2.

Additional fixes for games include workarounds for Conquest: Frontier Wars, Tomb Raider Chronicles, Darkan: Order of the Flame, Earth 2150, Tachyon: The Fringe, and Arabian Nights. If you have a particular game that doesn't run well, visit the issues section in the D7VK GitHub to lend your feedback. In the meantime, if your game doesn't run or is too old to use even Direct3D 7, you can use Wine's WineD3D instead.

WinD3D ironically also works in Windows itself, making older games easy to run on contemporary versions of the OS. If your vintage title used old Glide or OpenGL instead, the author recomments nGlide.

Nvidia's latest driver-based frame generation technology (RTX 50-series exclusive) now supports all three major gaming APIs. A user on the Nvidia subreddit confirmed that Smooth Motion stealthily received an update allowing the technology to support Vulkan titles in addition to DX11 and DX12. In addition, Vulkan support will allow Smooth Motion to work with emulators, bringing frame generation to older games that are emulated through Proton or DXVK.

Smooth Motion is Nvidia's competitor (or counterpart) to AMD Fluid Motion Frames (or AFMF/AFMF2). Just like AFMF, Smooth Motion is a driver-based frame generation technology that works in any game (as long as the API is supported) and is completely developer-agnostic.

Nvidia ADDED VULKAN comparability with Smooth Motion! from r/nvidia

The Reddit user discovered Smooth Motion's new update in the Nvidia App, where Nvidia added Vulkan to the technology's minimum requirements in the description. Most games nowadays take advantage of DX11 or DX12, but Vulkan support will allow Smooth Motion to work with the relatively small pool of Vulkan-exclusive games.

Smooth Motion is now at parity with AFMF, at least in terms of game support with Vulkan support. One area where AMD's driver-based frame generation tech is still superior is GPU compatibility, supporting multiple generations of Radeon GPUs. Smooth Motion, by contrast, only supports RTX 50-series GPUs for the time being, with the technology allegedly coming to the RTX 40-series in a future update. However, there is no timeframe for that update, nor is there any word on whether the tech will make its way to older GPUs such as the RTX 30- and 20-series.

Smooth Motion is an alternative version of DLSS 3/4 frame generation that generates an entirely new frame using AI to boost frame rates. Smooth Motion works at the driver level, generating new frames independently from the game engine itself. DLSS 3/4 frame generation, by contrast, is embedded into a game engine by the game developers, improving image quality. AMD's AFMF counterpart works the same, but at the time of writing, it uses an inferior non-AI-based approach to generate frames.

The Arc B580 (via VideoCardz) has been tested in Geekbench across the OpenCL and Vulkan APIs, beating its predecessor, the A580, by upwards of 30%. From the looks of it, these tests were likely conducted by a reviewer before the embargo, which is set to be lifted on December 12. Despite the apparent authenticity, take this leak with a grain of salt since synthetic benchmarks aren't perfect for real-world performance.

The test bench features Intel's flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, 48GB of fast DDR5-8400 memory, and Gigabyte's Z890 AORUS PRO ICE motherboard. As a strong contender in the sub $300 market, Intel touts its Arc B580 as 10% faster than the RTX 4060 while being cheaper. We'll verify Intel's first-party performance metrics in our review once the embargo lifts. However, it'll be unfair to say that the value proposition isn't strong—especially if the drivers are as stable as Intel claims.

Moving on to the benchmarks, we've sorted publicly available OpenCL and Vulkan scores for the most relevant GPUs and compared them against the Arc B580. Performance is mixed since we're looking at two different APIs with variable performance across different architectures. For a direct-gen-on-gen comparison, the B580 is almost 30% faster than the A580 in Vulkan, dropping to roughly 10% if we switch to OpenCL.

Interestingly, the Arc B580 loses to the RTX 4060 in OpenCL but redeems itself with a marginal 6% lead in Vulkan. AMD's RX 7600 falls behind in both APIs, which can be attributed to the architectural variations we mentioned above. Still, the B580 trails behind the RX 6700 XT, but the latter is a three-year-old GPU with a higher price tag.

There is no magical formula to convert synthetic numbers into real-world FPS. Likewise, Battlemage - as seen on Lunar Lake - is slower than Alchemist (Meteor Lake) if we go by the on-paper specs and synthetic tests but practically ends up 42% faster (at 720p) in games per our extensive testing.

Intel can reignite the once-forgotten budget GPU market if the drivers hold up, which we hope they will. Battlemage has a secret wildcard up its sleeve: hardware-enabled XeSS Frame Generation rivaling Nvidia's DLSS FG. With its new XeSS 2 suite of upscaling and interpolating technologies, Intel currently has an edge over AMD, but that may change with RDNA 4, rumored to employ AI-enabled FSR.

A Raspberry Pi 5 hooked up to an AMD Radeon-powered eGPU has been demonstrated using the graphics hardware to accelerate running a Large Language Model (LLM). Of course, it's Pi wizard Jeff Geerling again, and in the video embedded below, he talks us through his experience of leveraging the Vulkan API support to enjoy GPU-accelerated local AI on the Raspberry Pi 5.

In our last Raspberry Pi 5 connected to an eGPU progress report, we highlighted the modern AAA 4K gaming possibilities of this unlikely pairing. Games like Doom Eternal, Crysis Remastered, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Forza Horizon 4 were demoed running at 4K on our favorite $50 SBC. With most struggling to maintain performance above say 25fps, actual enjoyment of the titles would be another question.

Geerling ended his fun and informative video, last time, with an update on the Pi 5’s LLM support. He noted that he hadn’t managed to GPU accelerate any LLMs on the Pi 5, but smaller models could run on the CPU, in the Pi’s RAM. Moreover, with AMD basically ruling out ROCm support on Arm, prospects didn’t look good.

Thankfully, in the world of enthusiast-driven tech, things can change quickly. In his latest video, Geerling reveals the answer to GPU-accelerated LLMs on the Pi 5 is the Vulkan API (with an experimental patch). Vulkan can even outperform AMD's ROCm on hardware / systems that offer the choice between, notes Geerling, so it is by no means merely a poor man’s choice.

At around two minutes into the video, Geerling walks us through his hardware setup. The most esoteric thing here are the two boards used to hook up the GPU to the Pi. He used an adaptor to convert the Pi’s PCIe express FFC connector to an M.2 slot. Into the M.2 slot, he plugged an M.2 to OCuLink adaptor, with a cable to a GPU OCuLink riser. In the video, he uses an RX 6700 XT again (you’ll need a spare PC PSU too, among several other bits and pieces).

Software setup is currently a bit more involved, requiring the user to compile their own Linux kernel, collect together a handful of drivers and patches, and more. More guidance is available via Geerling's blog.

Casting more light onto the benefits of his hardware and software wrangling, the Pi enthusiast and TechTuber provides some performance figures and comparisons.

It is interesting to hear Geerling propose the Pi plus eGPu as an alternative which is almost as fast and efficient as an M1 Max Mac Studio (64GB). He also highlighted that the cost of the whole caboodle is about $700 new, but a lot cheaper if you already have some of the bits and pieces (especially for those with a spare old GPU).

Adding the RTX 4090 benchmark to the mix (second slide) shows how much LLM performance a powerful modern PC can muster. That’s great if you want a 600W system generating hundreds of tokens per second (T/s), but for home use offline AI then 40-60 T/s should be plenty. Moreover, whoever pays your energy bill might be pleased with the ~12W system idling power consumption of this efficient Pi-based (Pi 5 plus RX 6700 XT) solution.

Two years ago, a bug report pointed out that the open-source Linux graphics library Mesa's RADV (Radeon Video) driver for AMD RDNA and GCN architecture GPUs had "significantly less" performance than the AMDGPU-PRO driver within the AMD FSR2 sample app. This issue has finally been fixed [h/t Phoronix].

Valve Linux driver team engineer Samuel Pitoiset fixed an issue these architectures had with culling triangles and lines when all W positions were zero. Since culling relates to the clearing of assets from the cache in order to improve performance, it makes sense that key culling optimizations can net huge gains. For this AMD FSR 2 sample application tested under Linux with AMD RDNA 2 architecture specifically, the "massive performance difference" between drivers has been fixed in the application, giving a 228% improvement.

As noted by Pitoiset in the Mesa merge notes, "AMDGPU-PRO seems to always cull these primitives. Note that disabling NGG culling with AMDPGU-PRO reports the same performance as RADV without that fix", pointing to some fundamental similarities between the two multi-generation AMD GPU architectures.

AMD GCN ("Graphics Core Next") architecture GPUs range through five Radeon product generations, from the Radeon HD 7000 (2012) series to the Radeon RX Vega (2017) series GPUs. Meanwhile, the still iterating AMD RDNA architecture debuted with the AMD RX 5000 (2019) series and is still in use with current-gen AMD RX 7000 series GPUs. RX 7000 series GPUs launched in 2022, and are to be succeeded soon by yet another iteration on RDNA architecture with much stronger ray tracing performance.

The AMD RX 8000 series GPUs are expected to debut with the AMD RDNA 4 architecture and, alongside ray-tracing improvements, include further improvements to AI performance in hardware and software. For example, the long-awaited implementation of AI-powered image reconstruction in the upcoming AMD FSR 4, will (eventually) be updated in the already-released Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which dropped on October 25.

If AMD can successfully meet these goals at an Nvidia-competitive pricepoint with its upcoming GPUs, it may be in a good place to take yet more slots on our Best Graphics Cards for Gaming list, among others. AMD has historically competed on a value proposition of some kind, but somewhat faltered in the desktop GPU market since the debut of highly Nvidia-favored or even exclusive ray-tracing and AI-powered features. Even before RTX, the pro GPU space was notoriously biased toward Nvidia GPUs and their characteristic CUDA compute cores.

As of earlier today, a recent Vulkan spec update— version 1.3.291, to be specific— went live on GitHub, and besides miscellaneous fixes and the such, a new "VK_AMD_anti_lag" extension has been added to Vulkan, bringing full AMD Anti-Lag support outside the boundaries of the recent DirectX graphics APIs. Nvidia Reflex is also already supported with Vulkan in select titles, though some users have reported issues with that functionality under Vulkan. This update for adding Anti-Lag to Vulkan also addresses an existing "VK_NV_low_latency2" extension, as well.

For those unfamiliar with AMD Anti-Lag or Nvidia Reflex, the best way to think of these options when they are available in your game is "automated FPS capping." Traditionally, users may set FPS caps in games with unlocked FPS to stabilize visuals, performance, or GPU usage at a certain level without buffering frames (increasing latency) using V-Sync. In-engine FPS caps are almost always the best way to reduce input lag in a game, so long as that capped FPS target can be consistently met.

However, there are many caveats to FPS capping—namely, it's a very manual process, and it usually can't be easily adjusted during gameplay. For many gamers, doing it at all may be too difficult—or they're worried about maximum FPS losses. However, it's worth noting that a slightly lower, more consistent FPS target will nearly always "feel" smoother than a higher average with regular dips.

So, the greatest benefit of AMD Anti-Lag and Nvidia Reflex technologies is that they entirely automate the FPS capping process according to end-user latency and GPU utilization. Since fully maximizing GPU utilization can increase latency and the severity of FPS dips, both technologies tend to cap GPU utilization around ~95% while dynamically adjusting the framerate cap to ensure the smoothest image and lowest latency.

As a side note, the Steam Deck's built-in Refresh Rate/FPS Limiter toggle is one of the few ways to dynamically adjust an FPS cap without restarting the game, using external applications, relying on Anti-Lag, etc.

The most exciting implication of Vulkan adding support for AMD Anti-Lag is that this may lead to Anti-Lag being natively supported on Linux. As-is, there are already some efforts from Nvidia to get Reflex working on Linux through Proton extensions, though users have given mixed reports on how well this works. There's also an open-source, vendor-neutral LatencyFleX solution, but since it works akin to the canned AMD Anti-Lag+ (game engine hooking), it can trigger bans in games with anti-cheat, so it's far from perfect.

For now, only time will tell if these Vulkan updates lead to native AMD Anti-Lag or AMD Anti-Lag 2 support being added to native Linux games or at least AMD Linux systems running the Proton compatibility later, like Steam Deck. Since AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation can be made to work through Proton and there are already efforts to get Reflex working, we're cautiously optimistic.

Nvidia announced a new game-ready driver that adds support for several new games and eleven new G-Sync compatible monitors. The 555.85 drivers add support for EA Sports' F1 24, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Serum, and Ubisoft's XDefiant free-to-play shooter. Nvidia also announced new game integrations with DLSS, one of which includes Star Citizen, which now boasts DLSS 2 upscaling and Vulkan support in the latest Alpha 3.23 update.

That's a big jump in driver versions, incidentally. Nvidia does this on occasion, often signifying a more significant overhaul of some of the underlying software. The previous driver release was 552.44, which came out May 9, an update to the 552.22 drivers from mid-April. We've been on 551/552 drivers from Nvidia since the start of 2024, but now the version jumped up to 555. Perhaps that's just the mid-year bump, though there are quite a few updates to discuss this round.

F1 24 is the latest iteration of EA Sport's Formula 1 game. The new title represents the most extensive update to the game since F1 2016. Not only are there new cars to drive, but the handling model has been reworked to provide a more realistic driving experience. Suspension has been updated to provide different driving behavior under various steering inputs. Tire degradation has been massively overhauled to behave more like real F1 cars, changing grip levels and wear characteristics depending on the environment and load on the tires. Aerodynamics has also been updated to incorporate fluid dynamics, leading to changing grip levels depending on how closely a driver is chasing another car in its "dirty air." F1 24 launches on May 28th, sporting Nvidia's DLSS 3 upscaling and frame generation technology, DLAA, Reflex, and ray tracing graphics.

Sensua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is the sequel to the award-winning Hellblade: Sensua's Sacrifice. Hellblade 2's story continues where Hellblade left off, showing her journey of survival in Iceland during the Viking era. The game leverages Epic's latest Unreal Engine 5, with impressive-looking visuals from top to bottom. Hellblade 2 launches today, featuring DLSS 3 upscaling, frame generation, and Nvidia Reflex technology.

Serum also utilizes Unreal Engine 5. It's a survival-horror game focused entirely on time. A timer on your arm decides if you live and die, and your goal is to fight through all obstacles in your way to find a special potion called Serum that will replenish your time. The game enters early access on May 23, with day-one support for DLSS 3 upcaling and frame generation, DLAA, and Reflex.

Last in the list of game ready options for this driver, Ubisoft's XDefiant is a brand new free-to-play competitive first-person shooter. The game takes inspiration from numerous outgoing shooter games, featuring fast-paced gunplay mixed with special character abilities. The game has teams of six with different factions to diversify the gameplay. XDefiant launches today featuring Nvidia Reflex technology to reduce latency.

Additional DLSS Game Integrations

On top of the various games listed above with DLSS support, Nvidia also announced several more games that have recently been updated to incorporate DLSS. Wuthering Waves launches on May 22 with DLSS 2 upscaling, Ships at Sea also has DLSS 2 and comes out on May 23.

One of the bigger announcements is that Star Citizen's DLSS 2 update is now available with the game's new Alpha 3.23 update, which is the largest patch the game has seen since Alpha 3.0 several years back. Along with DLSS 2 upscaling, the game now has Vulkan support, which will replace Star Citizen's outgoing DX11 implementation in the near future. Vulkan should deliver superior multi-threaded performance, which is crucially important for the scope and scale of the game. However, Vulkan is only in beta right now and the multi-threaded enhancements are not yet available and will be integrated in future updates.

Game performance, according to Nvidia

Nvidia also showed several performance graphs of most of the above games, including performance uplifts with DLSS 3 upscaling and frame generation in Hellblade 2. Nvidia's RTX 4090 only manages 53.5 FPS at 4K maximum settings with DLSS off, but with DLSS 3 upscaling (4x performance mode) and frame generation, frame rates triple to 149 FPS. Similar effects are seen on other RTX 40-series GPUs.

Serum shows very similar performance results, not too surprising as both games are running on Unreal Engine 5. Nvidia's RTX 4090 at 4K max settings achieves just 54.9 FPS without DLSS, but with DLSS 3 upscaling and framegen, that almost triples to 132.1 FPS. Similar benefits are also shown on Nvidia's less potent 40-series GPUs and at lower resolutions.

XDefiant is by far the lightest game out of the bunch. Nvidia reports that its RTX 4090 can achieve nearly 400 FPS at 1080p ultra settings, with just 8ms of latency enabled by Reflex. Other 40-series GPUs achieve triple-digit frame rates as well — even the lowest tier RTX 4060 reportedly achieves 137 FPS average in the game (15ms latency), while the RTX 4070 achieves 237 FPS (10ms of latency).

New G-Sync Compatible Monitors

Wrapping up today's Nvidia announcements, it showcased 11 new G-Sync-compatible displays that are all supported by the latest driver update. These include ultra-high refresh rate 1080p panels from Asus and LG, as well as three new OLED offerings from both manufacturers. The LG 32GS95UE is also supported, which is the world's first OLED display to feature dual-resolution support, enabling users to switch between 4K 240Hz and 1080p 480Hz with the press of a button.

Three bugs are squashed in Nvidia's latest driver update as well: Tekken 8 no longer randomly crashes on GTX 10-series graphics cards and Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition no longer succumbs to low GPU utilization issues when running Reflex in "On + Boost" mode. Finally, a bug was fixed in Blender where motion blur would render incorrectly on some Nvidia GPU architectures.

A Mesa 3D Graphics Library developer has implemented support for CPU-based ray-tracing in Vulkan, reports Phoronix. While we applaud the effort, early testing of the driver in Quake II RTX indicates mainstream modern CPUs aren't going to convince anyone to give up their graphics card. Developer Konstantin Seurer's screenshot shows that the ray-traced version of Quake II only runs at 1 frame per second after all his Vulkan Lavapipe driver travails.

Linux developer Seurer admits his work is "mostly" based on porting code from the RADV Vulkan drivers, which were designed for owners of old and new AMD Radeon graphics cards (including emulated RT on pre-RDNA2 GPUs). The new code is implemented in Lavapipe, a CPU-based software Vulkan driver (for Mesa version 21.1 or newer). Specifically, Seurer's work supports VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations, and VK_KHR_ray_query, in Lavapipe. This is enough to get real-time ray-tracing working via a CPU-based render path, but performance leaves much to be desired.

The Lavapipe: Implement VK_KHR_ray_query merge request by Seurer raises many questions. He provides evidence that CPU-based ray-tracing isn't going to scare GPU makers and their partners in 2024, but some more data would have been very welcome. It would have been more illuminating to know what kind of CPU was used in the developer's Quake II RTX test system, for example. The embedded screengrab shows the game was being played at 720p, but it could be a downsampled image. Moreover, Quake II RTX gamers have lots of settings to play with to fine-tune their experience. Adjusting levels of global illumination, texture filtering, reflection/refraction depth, sharpness, and more can all impact performance. We don't know what graphics/video settings were used in the 1 fps 'gaming' session.

While the consumer CPUs we have in 2024 might not be powerful enough for enjoyable real-time ray-traced gaming, we don't know what kind of crazy CPU power we will have access to in five or ten years. Thus, CPU-based ray-tracing support has a chance of being useful one day. We also wonder what one of the newest AMD Threadripper chips could manage using this Lavapipe Vulkan ray-tracing implementation coming to Mesa 24.1 (RC1 is due in April this year).

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart will make its PC debut on Steam from July 26 with a whole host of new features including Microsoft DirectStorage support and GPU decompression technology. 

Using Microsoft DirectStorage 1.2 and GPU decompression technology, and as far as we can tell, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart will be the first game ever to incorporate GPU decompression through the DirectStorage API. DirectStorage support is set to significantly boost game load times and real-time asset streaming.

Unlike previous games that feature GPU decompression technology, like Portal: Prelude RTX which used Nvidia's Vulkan extensions Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart's gameplay requires Microsoft's DirectStorage GPU decompression to run the game at playable frame rates. As players blast their way through interdimensional portals, new game worlds, textures and assets are streamed in real-time, which wouldn't be possible without GPU decompression. For more details be sure to check out our previous coverage here.

• NVIDIA DLSS 3 - AI-powered performance multiplier. At 4K, with all ray tracing effects enabled, and settings maxed, GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090 desktop GPU gamers can experience 140+ FPS gameplay.
• NVIDIA Reflex - reducing system latency in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart by up to 48%.
• NVIDIA RTX IO - GPU-accelerated storage technology enables rapid loading of assets.
• NVIDIA DLAA - an AI-based anti-aliasing mode for users who have spare GPU headroom and want higher levels of image quality.
• Ray tracing - Ray-traced shadows, ambient occlusion and reflections will run at the highest speeds possible on dedicated ray tracing cores on each GeForce RTX GPUs

Besides GPU decompression, the game has received an extensive amount of PC upgrades to differentiate it from the original PS5 version. These upgrades include DLSS 2/3, DLAA, AMD FSR 2, and Intel's XeSS technology integration for boosting performance with image upscaling/downscaling. Support for ultrawide aspect ratios like 21:9, 32:9, and 48:9, and improved ray-traced graphics including RT reflections and RT shadows have also been added.

The game focuses on Ratchet and Clank, a pair of intergalactic adventurers who are focused on taking down an evil power and preventing a dimensional collapse before it destroys their own universe.

Thankfully, if you want a shot at playing the game tomorrow, the game's system requirements are not monstrous, depending on what graphics setting you want to play at. For the bare minimum experience, you don't even need an SSD to play, with the minimum requirement demanding 75GB of hard drive space. But if you want to play the game at any of the higher settings, especially the RT settings, you'll need a modern Intel/AMD hexa core CPU based system with an RTX 3060 Ti/RTX 3070 class GPUs at a minimum to turn most of the eye candy on.

Digital Foundry recently took a sneak peek at Nvidia's new RTX IO GPU decompression technology in Portal: Prelude RTX, and found the tech can seriously improve game load times with modern SSD hardware. The game review outlet found that Nvidia's new storage-enhancing tech cut loading times in half, drastically accelerating the wait time for both game levels and high-resolution textures found in the game.

RTX IO is a new method of uploading game information to your graphics card, that reduces game loading times and decreases CPU utilization. Instead of transferring data to the CPU for decompression, RTX IO's GPU decompression transfers all game assets from storage to the GPU, where the GPU cores decompress the data at a significantly faster pace.

RTX IO is a term that Nvidia coined to comprise several technologies for GPU-based loading and asset decompression. In actuality, RTX IO is based on GDeflate, an open-source compression format Nvidia created that is supported by Microsoft's DirectStorage API, and Vulkan — with two new Nvidia Vulkan extensions. As a result, you don't need an Nvidia GPU to run RTX IO necessarily. All you need is a GPU that supports DirectStorage or Nvidia's new Vulkan extensions to run it.

In testing, Digital Foundry found that RTX IO was able to improve load time performance by roughly 50% in Portal: Prelude RTX. Testing was conducted on a Core i9-12900K and an RTX 4090, with the game stored on a 500MB/s SATA 3 SSD. With RTX IO disabled (featuring a specialized test build of the game), the game was able to load in 2.36 seconds. But by turning RTX IO on, the game was able to load everything in just 1.16 seconds — including the test chamber and the high-resolution textures.

In further testing with Gen 3 NVMe SSDs, the review outlet found that RTX IO was able to boost load time performance by an additional 90ms beyond what the SATA 3 drive was able to achieve. Additionally, RTX IO was also able to turbocharge the SATA 3 drive, making the slower SSD faster than the NVMe drive with RTX IO enabled (and RTX IO disabled on the NVMe drive).

Sub-three-second loading times are plenty fast for any video game, but from a benchmarking perspective. Cutting an extra second off of the load time is very impressive and a good demonstration of RTX IO's capabilities. It also improves the capabilities of any storage drive, whether or not you have the Best SSDs in your system.

This is just a glimpse of the capabilities can expect from RTX IO GPU decompression. Portal: Prelude RTX is a mod of a mod based on a game created 15 years ago, so there's no real-world benefit from having RTX IO unless you really crave sub-3-second load times. Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart will be the first game to truly test RTX IO when it arrives next week, and will hopefully show substantially more tangible results with RTX IO, with its inter-dimensional gameplay demanding instantaneous asset streaming.

Roccat’s Vulcan II Max is so beautiful, we made a spot for it on our list of best gaming keyboards — it’s just that damn pretty. But not everyone wants to spend upwards of $200 on a gaming keyboard, so it’s nice to see that Roccat’s newest release is more budget-friendly and sports the brand’s newest mechanical switches (as opposed to the Vulcan II Max’s optical switches). 

The Vulcan II is (sort of) a stripped-down version of the Vulcan II Max, though it’s not really stripped down — it has a less-exciting wrist rest (though the Vulcan II Max’s wrist rest, while pretty, is not particularly premium), pretty but less powerful lighting effects (I assume, based on the fact that it only has one, not two, USB plugs), and... one set of flip-out feet. It has mechanical switches instead of optical switches, which seems like a lateral move (if not an upgrade). 

Otherwise, the Vulcan II is almost identical to the Vulcan II Max, with the same general layout and construction, and a similarly bright, pretty per-key RGB lighting (but no edge lighting). The Vulcan II comes in black and white colorways with Roccat’s Titan II mechanical red (linear) switches, and costs $149.99 — significantly less than the Vulcan II Max’s retail price of $229.99. It would be a great deal, except the Vulcan II Max is currently on sale for $169.99 — so it’s not really much of a deal at all.

Design and Construction of the Vulcan II

The Vulcan II is a full-size wired keyboard with Roccat’s Titan II Red linear mechanical switches. At a glance, it looks very similar to the Vulcan II Max, which Roccat released in October 2022, with a lightweight plastic chassis and durable aluminum top plate with a shiny, diamond-cut chamfered edge — though the Vulcan II’s top plate has a brushed metal finish, which looks more premium (in my opinion) than the Vulcan II Max’s matte finish.

The Vulcan II is the same size as the Vulcan II Max, measuring approximately 18.2 inches (463mm) inches long by 6.2 inches (152mm) wide by 1.3 inches (33mm) tall. It weighs less, however — just 2.09 pounds (949g) without accessories, which is a little over three ounces lighter than the Vulcan II Max’s 2.29lbs (1040g). The Vulcan II comes in black and white colorways — our review model was white. The white colorway features a silver top plate, white keycaps, and a white wrist rest, while the black is all black.

It has three dedicated media keys in the upper right corner (rewind, play/pause, fast-forward) and a tactile, clickable volume knob. It also has indicator lights — which the Vulcan II Max does not have — along the lower right edge, which light up to indicate numlock, “Easy-Shift,” and Game Mode.

On the back, the keyboard has small strips of anti-slip material and one set of flip-out feet. The keyboard is wired and has a fixed 6-foot (1.8m) USB-A cable at center-back. It’s thinner than the cable on the Vulcan II Max, because it’s just one cable (the Vulcan II Max has two, for extra power). It’s a nice, braided cable with attached cable management and a helpful identifying keyboard icon on the plug, but I do like to see detachable cables on premium gaming keyboards.

The Vulcan II comes with a detachable wrist rest, which is made of hard plastic with a small amount of flex. It attaches via two plastic tabs that snap into slots on the front of the keyboard. The white wrist rest is edged in light gray plastic and features Roccat’s logo in the lower right corner. It’s not particularly impressive, and it’s definitely not “cushioned” as the product page for the Vulcan II suggests, but it attaches to the keyboard and provides adequate support for keeping your wrists in line with your hands as you type.

Specs

Typing and Gaming Experience on the Vulcan II

Perhaps the biggest difference between the Vulcan II and the Vulcan II Max are the switches: The Vulcan II is the first keyboard to feature Roccat’s Titan II mechanical switches, in red (linear) and, potentially, brown (tactile) in the future — our review unit came with red switches — while the Vulcan II Max has Roccat’s Titan II optical switches (also in red/brown). The new Titan II mechanical switches have “optimized transparent housing” for a better lighting experience, and are rated for up to 80 million keystrokes.

The Titan II mechanical red switches have an actuation force of 45g, an actuation distance of 1.4mm, and a total travel distance of 3.6mm — the same as their optical counterparts. They’re linear switches, which means they have a smooth, consistent keypress with no tactile bump or audible click. Despite being the same weight as the Titan II optical red switches, the Titan II mechanical red switches definitely feel a little...weightier. Not heavier, per se, but you can tell from both feel and sound that these are mechanical switches and not optical — the Titan II mechanical reds also have a weightier, more muted sound than do their optical counterparts.

As far as typing experience goes, the Vulcan II offers a fairly similar typing experience to the Vulcan II Max, though the Vulcan II’s mechanical switches feel and sound slightly better. Specifically, the Vulcan II’s switches just feel super, super smooth and have a more satisfying thunk (it’s noticeable when you’re using both keyboards side-by-side, but the Vulcan II Max’s optical switches are not a dealbreaker). The Vulcan II has thin, shallow ABS keycaps which are mildly dished (except for the bottom row, which is convex rather than concave — I understand the reasoning behind this but I dislike it as a design choice). The keycaps are lightweight and slippery, even if you don’t sweat very much while typing and gaming. They’re not the best keycaps for typing, but they are well-designed to show off the keyboard’s bright, pretty, per-key RGB lighting. 

Gaming on the Vulcan II is better than typing, thanks to the keyboard’s smooth, speedy linear switches and, to some extent, slippery keycaps. The mechanical switches are still light enough that you can press them quickly and consistantly, without fatigue, and the keycaps’ slipperiness means your fingers can fly around the keyboard (albeit perhaps with a little less accuracy than you’d get with more premium keycaps). I didn’t experience a noticeable difference in latency between the Vulcan II and the Vulcan II Max in games like Overwatch 2 and Valorant, even though the latter’s optical switches should be faster than mechanical switches — however, I was also not playing at a particularly competitive level.

Features and Software of the Vulcan II

The Vulcan II works with Roccat’s universal peripheral software, Swarm, which lets you program both primary and secondary keybindings and customize the keyboard’s per-key RGB lighting. According to Roccat, the keyboard has onboard storage for up to four profiles, but according to Swarm and my testing, it actually has onboard storage for up to five profiles — though you’ll need to program a hotkey for the fifth profile (the first four are linked by default to the secondary keybinds of F1 - F4).

Swarm, like basically all peripheral software, is unnecessarily overwrought and clunky, with gratuitous features such as software-based typing sounds (which are exactly as awful as you imagine). For programming keybindings, Swarm offers a drag-and-drop format with a fairly comprehensive list of functions. There’s also a built-in macro manager, which lets you create and record your own macros and also comes with preset macros for a number of popular games.

The Vulcan II comes with several preset secondary keybinds (pictured on the keycaps under the primary legend), most of which can be reprogrammed (except for the number pad). It also features Roccat’s “Easy-Shift” button duplicator technology, which gives you a second layer of functionality when the keyboard is in Game Mode. You can toggle Game Mode by pressing Fn + Windows key, and then activate the secondary “Easy-Shift'' keybindings by pressing Capslock + [key]. For the most part, the primary keybindings, Game Mode keybindings, and “Easy-Shift” keybindings can all be reprogrammed — which gives you plenty of customizable keys, albeit in a very convoluted format.

The Vulcan II doesn’t have the same dual-LED switches as the Vulcan II Max, nor does it have light spilling out the bottom, but it offers a very bright, pretty RGB light show regardless. The keyboard is set up by default with Roccat’s signature Aimo lighting effect, which is a multi-colored “organic” lighting experience that changes and adapts based on your usage over time. I’m not sure how true that last part is, but I do like the Aimo lighting — it’s an attractive twist on the typical spectrum cycling default you see on every other gaming keyboard.

The Bottom Line

I would say the Vulcan II is a more budget-friendly option for people who love the look of the Vulcan II Max, but not the $230 price tag. The Vulcan II offers a very similar aesthetic and feel as the Vulcan II Max, and even has some advantages — a more premium-looking brushed aluminum finish on the top plate, and super smooth, satisfying mechanical switches — and is priced at a much more reasonable $150. However, the Vulcan II Max is currently on sale for $170, so I’m not sure what Roccat is really aiming for here.

The Vulcan II’s mechanical switches do feel better than the the Vulcan II Max’s optical switches, but not that much better. And they can’t hold a candle to the Vulcan II Max’s extra-pretty light show, which spills onto the (also more comfortable) wrist rest. If you’re looking for a white keyboard with pretty lighting effects and a plush wrist rest in TKL format, I also recommend Logitech’s G715 keyboard, if you can find it on sale.

MORE: Best Gaming Keyboards

MORE: How to Pick Keycaps for Your Mechanical Keyboard

MORE: How to Build a Custom Mechanical Keyboard

AMD has released a new graphics driver which fixes high idle power issues observed by Radeon RX 7000 users. AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.7.1, which supports graphics cards from the Radeon RX 400 Series and newer, addresses an unusual high-power usage case in Windows, but at this stage we aren't sure if it has covered all incidences.

We first reported on the headlining high idle power on RDNA 3 cards issue last December. In our story about a fix for RX 7900 XT(X) power consumption - particularly addressing video playback efficiency on these powerful cards - we welcomed the driver update. However, that driver release came with AMD's first admission that “high idle power has situationally been observed when using select high resolution and high refresh rate displays.” It turns out his bug affects the whole RX 7000 family, which has only recently grown beyond the high-end with the release of the Radeon RX 7600.

The release notes features a bullet point which provides the scope of the idle power fix provided by the Adrenalin Edition 23.7.1 driver. We are sure this fix will be warmly welcomed by users of AMD's newest architecture, as it should reduce the amount of wasted electricity.

Other RDNA 3 architecture bug fixes in this latest Radeon driver include one which causes suboptimal performance or occasional stuttering in VR games and applications. An RX 7900 XTX specific fix has also been implemented to eliminate intermittent corruption when playing WWE 2K23.

The last two fixes are for a wider audience. A crashing and driver timeout issue which annoyed DaVinci Resolve Studio users has been quashed. Lastly, intermittent corruption observed when switching windows while playing Nioh 2 has been fixed. AMD mentions this Nioh 2 bug affected multiple Radeon products including the RX 6800 XT.

There is only one new feature mentioned by the official Adrenalin Edition 23.7.1 release notes. AMD has implemented support for additional Vulkan extensions. If any of your favorite games / apps use the Vulkan API you may appreciate these additions.

AMD's list of remaining known issues outguns the list of fixes, but at least we know the red team developers are working on these specific annoying wrinkles.

Lastly, we must note that AMD has temporarily disabled the 'Factory Reset' driver install feature. Back in March, we reported on the bricked Windows installs that this driver install option was precipitating. There is a workaround for now; AMD recommends users run its AMD Cleanup Utility if they want / need to start afresh.

Some of the first purported benchmarks for the upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 have leaked out. Benchleaks has spotted two different Geekbench 6 runs, apparently using this graphics card: the first run was the GPU Compute test using the Vulkan API, and there was another one using OpenCL. According to the leaks, the shiny new RTX 4060 runs almost a fifth faster than the RTX 3060 if these tests are genuine and representative of the final product. Take the data with a pinch of salt for now.

Nvidia revealed its plans for RTX 4060-class graphics cards back in mid-May and we know that we should expect the RTX 4060 8GB model in July. This, the first AD107 GPU-based desktop graphics card to be launched, has since had its launch date officially pinpointed to June 29th at 6 AM Pacific time. With a little over a week to go until launch day it wouldn't be surprising if reviewers and similar early access testers have put this GPU through Geekbench, precipitating these leaks.

We mentioned that these early Geekbench 6 GPU compute benchmarks indicate that the upcoming RTX 4060 is about a fifth faster than its predecessor, the RTX 3060. Let us look closer at the numbers, and throw in a couple of other reference points for a wider picture. 

Please remember that the RTX 4060 result, if genuine, appears to be based upon a single sample so the Geekbench average could change quite a bit when more cards run these tests. We'll be covering the RTX 4060 in full detail when it launches. Keep the salt handy for now.

Pondering over the table's Vulkan API scores, it looks like the new RTX 4060 is about 12% faster than the RTX 3060. In Open CL tests the difference is better, with the new Ada Lovelace card being very nearly 20% faster. Geekbench scores have a reputation for not correlating very closely with gaming performance, so we will be looking out for further leaked third party benchmarks to get a clearer picture of the RTX 4060 between now and next Thursday.

The specs of the upcoming GeForce RTX 4060 are going to be a GPU with 24 SMs, 3072 CUDA cores, 24 MB of L2 cache. This will be paired with a memory subsystem featuring 8 GB of 17 Gbps GDDR6 memory, operating on a 128-bit wide bus for 272 (453 effective) GBps bandwidth. The reference card will run at approximately 115 W TGP. The launch price we have is $299, but with luck there will be some models released cheaper than this.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 might just do enough to earn a place on our list of the Best Graphics Cards for Gaming in 2023, we shall have to wait and see.

Phoronix recently published an article covering the performance differences between Windows 11 and Linux Ubuntu with Nvidia's best graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080. For gaming, both GPUs were found to be 10% slower in Linux than Windows 11 when gaming with non-native Linux gaming applications. Natively, both operating systems perform very similarly.

For testing, Phoronix used a test rig comprised of the all-new Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Games and benchmarking applications tested include Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, Unigine Heaven 4, and Unigine Superposition. Cyberpunk and Hitman ran on Steam's Proton compatibility layer, while the Unigine applications had dedicated native applications for Linux.

In Cyberpunk 2077, at 1440P Ultra settings, the RTX 4090 was 13% slower in Linux than Windows 11 Pro. The RTX 4080 fared similarly and was 15% slower in Linux Ubuntu than Windows 11.

At 1440P high settings, the gap starts closing for the RTX 4090, where the Linux OS was just 5% slower than Windows 11 Pro. Strangely when testing at medium graphics settings, the frame rates for the RTX 4090 don't get close to the high settings, for unknown reasons.

The RTX 4080 at 1440P high, did not show the same behavior as the RTX 4090. Featuring a performance gap of 15% again, just like Ultra settings. For details on the 4K results, be sure to check out the Phoronix article. But generally, the 4K results share similar behavior to the 1440P results.

Hitman 3 yielded interesting results. The 1440P results were much closer together between the two operating systems, but at 4K, the game exhibited much wider performance variance between Linux and Windows. At 1440P Ultra settings, the RTX 4090 and 4080 had a 4% to 5% performance variance between Linux and Windows. At 4K Ultra settings, the frame rate variance goes up to 14% and 15%, respectively.

Unsurprisingly, the Unigine Heaven and Superposition results were basically identical between both operating systems, with both the RTX 4090 and 4080, because both apps have native applications for Windows and Linux. At best, there was a 1.5% difference between both benchmarking applications at 1440P and 4K.

Steam's Proton compatibility layer is obviously the main issue preventing Nvidia's 40 series GPUs from attaining Windows-like performance in Linux. But this should be expected since Proton's API translation from DX to Vulkan requires additional processing overhead. Either way, the 10% performance penalty (on average) is not that significant, and with how powerful these GPUs are, 90% of an RTX 4090 or 4080 still delivers a superb 4K or 1440P gaming experience.

Now that AMD, Intel, and Nvidia cannot sell their top-of-the-range compute GPUs to customers in China without permission of the U.S. government, and Chinese developers of GPUs for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications do not have access to leading-edge production capabilities, smaller GPU designers have a chance to capitalize on various types of generative AI, reports DigiTimes. 

The rise of the Chinese chip design sector in the recent years has formed two vectors of domestic GPU development: datacenter GPUs designed to address AI and HPC megatrends and classic GPUs designed primarily for client PCs yet capable of addressing some datacenter-specific workloads. It looks like the latter have better chances for success in the current situation.

Developers of Small GPUs Can Address Big Things

Innosilicon, Jingjia Microelectronics, and Moore Threads are perhaps the most well-known Chinese developers of gaming graphics processors. Gaming graphics depends on single-precision floating point (FP32) compute throughput, so GPUs from Innosilicon, Jingjia, and Moore's Threads support this data format. For now, these GPUs can hardly claim a place among the best graphics cards. Furthermore, to address various artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, these companies are going to need to tweak their hardware to support lower-precision data formats (think FP16, BF16/8, INT8, INT 4, etc.) as well as specific instructions for matrix and vector processing. Some have already done this, while others have yet to. 

Jingjia has been offering gaming GPUs based on its own architectures since 2014 and its latest JM9-series GPUs from 2021 promise to offer performance levels similar to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080. For now, Jingjia's GPUs cannot address AI/DL/ML applications, but the company told DigiTimes that it was working on AI-capable GPUs for a variety of applications, such as speech recognition and natural language processing, but did not elaborate. 

Innosilicon introduced its 1st Generation Fenghua (Fantasy) discrete graphics processor featuring a PowerVR microarchitecture from Imagination Technologies in late 2021, followed up with 2nd Generation Fantasy GPU for low-power applications in mid-2022, and announced development of its 3rd Generation Fantasy with ray tracing support last year. Innosilicon's original Fantasy GPU supports both FP32 and INT8, while its drivers support modern application programming interfaces for compute, including DirectX, Vulkan, OpenCL, Caffe 1.0, TensorFlow 1.1.2, and ONNX. 

Hardware from Moore Threads is perhaps better suited for AI. The company's latest Chunxiao graphics processor supports FP32, FP16, and INT8 precision and, assuming that it also supports appropriate instruction sets, can address at least some AI/DL/ML workloads. The company also says that its MTVerse platform can enable developers to build applications for big data, AI training and reasoning, speech recognition, and visual recognition, among other things.

Some Background

Total available market of graphics processing units in China reached $4.739 billion, making up 18.7% of the global market share, according to data from VMR cited by DigiTimes. It is unclear whether datacenter GPUs are included in $4.739 billion. The market is projected to increase to US$34.56 billion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.8% over the seven-year period. 

There are about 10 developers of GPUs in China. Two of them — Biren Technology and Tianshu Zhixin Semiconductor — are focused purely on processors for AI and HPC applications and their GPUs are not exactly meant to process graphics. But these processors need leading-edge fabrication technology to be made and TSMC needs an export license from the U.S. government to produce GPUs for Biren and Tianshu Zhixin. 

Meanwhile, there are plenty of developers of more or less universal GPUs — in addition to Jingjia, Innosilicon, and Moore Threads — for rendering games, but which can also address AI and technical computing applications if they gain appropriate hardware capabilities.  

Up until recently Chinese designers of gaming GPUs were not inclined to build AI and HPC-oriented processors that would rival solutions from big companies like Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Biren, and Tianshu Zhixin. Now that the future of China-based AI and HPC GPU developers is uncertain and the abilities of AMD, Intel, and Nvidia to address Chinese customers are limited, they may review their plans and come up with chips that can address China's needs for AI/DL/ML hardware.

Nvidia has issued a press release ahead of next week's Game Developers Conference (GDC), announcing that DLSS 3 support will expand to several new games and applications for developers. A few featured highlights include DLSS 3 integration into Unreal Engine with the upcoming 5.2 updates and integration with Nvidia's Streamline cross-IHV solution — more on this later.

The announced DLSS 3 game support list includes several current and upcoming titles, featuring Forza Horizon 5, Redfall, and Diablo 4. Integration with Forza Horizon 5 will come as an update on March 28th, while integration with Redfall and Diablo 4 will arrive later this year when the games launch. The Finals closed beta also has DLSS 3 enabled.

Redfall is an upcoming open-world co-op first-person shooter title from the developers Arkane Austin, focused on anti-vampire gameplay. The game will launch on May 2nd. Diablo 4 hardly needs an introduction, as Blizzard's latest title in the Diablo series of RPG games. It adds several new gameplay elements, including class optimizations and full character customization. For more details, check out our sister site PC Gamer's analysis of the game right now. Diablo 4 will officially launch on June 6th.

Additional PC games announcing support at GDC will include Deceive Inc., Gripper, Smalland: Survive the Wilds, and The Finals.

As mentioned above, Unreal Engine 5.2 will make its debut at GDC with DLSS 3 support. That will come in the form of an Unreal Engine 5.2 plug-in that will reduce the integration time of DLSS 3 into Unreal Engine 5 games. This could make DLSS 3 as easy as downloading the plug-in and turning it on, just like a Chrome add-on, though most games with DLSS or other forms of upscaling seem to benefit from fine tuning.

DLSS 3 will also make its debut with Nvidia Streamline, an open-source, cross-vendor framework that simplifies integration of upscaling technologies with games and applications. Basically, this application serves as a "plugin" of sorts that can work with an assortment of different game engines and APIs. Streamline sits between the render API (DX11/12/Vulkan etc) and the game engine itself, and theoretically makes it easy to inject technologies like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS into the rendering pipeline. In practice, it's mostly useful for DLSS integration right now.

DLSS support has grown massively since its inception, with over 270 games and applications now supporting the AI-based upscaling technology. DLSS 3 alone is already available on 28 games and is being adopted substantially quicker than DLSS 2 according to Nvidia. With Nvidia Streamline, Unreal 5.2 engine plugins, and a continued heavy marketing push by Nvidia, you can expect DLSS 3 adoption to expand at an even faster rate. Now we just need some mainstream desktop GPUs that can support it (coming soon, we'd wager).

China doesn't have many homebrew graphics cards, so expectations were high when graphics card manufacturer Moore Threads revealed the MTT S80. It's hard to tell whether the MTT S80 has what it takes to compete with the best graphics cards, but hopefully, graphics card collector Löschzwerg's latest benchmarks can provide some insight.

While Moore Threads is green behind the ears, the company has strong leadership. Former Nvidia global VP and China GM Zhang Jianzhong founded Moore Threads in 2020, so the Chinese fabless semiconductor company is a newcomer to the graphics card game. Besides being China's domestic graphics card, the MTT S80 has garnered a fair amount of hype outside the country since it's the first PCIe 5.0 gaming graphics card to hit the market. Nvidia's GeForce RTX 40-series (Ada Lovelace) and AMD's Radeon RX 7000-series (RDNA 3) products are still on PCIe 4.0.

The MTT S80 is the successor to the MTT S60 and still leverages the same MT Unified System Architecture (MUSA) architecture. It supports modern APIs, including CUDA, DirectX, OpenCL, OpenGL, and Vulkan. The Chunxiao GPU, manufactured under the 12nm process node, powers the MTT S80. Like Nvidia and AMD, the MTT S80 embraces AV1 encoding support in addition to other popular formats, such as H.264, H.265, and VP9.

The MTT S80, which supports PCIe 5.0 x16, wields 4,096 MUSA cores operating at 1.8 GHz to offer up to 14.4 TFLOPs of FP32 performance. This places the Chinese graphics card between the GeForce RTX 3060 (12.7 TFLOPs) and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (16.2 TFLOPs) or, alternatively, the Radeon RX 6750 XT (13.3 TFLOPs) and Radeon RX 6800 (16.2 TFLOPs). Moore Threads outfits the MTT S80 with 16GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit memory interface. This arrangement is suitable for a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth of up to 448 GBps, on equal footing with the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti.

The MTT S80 features your typical dual-slot design with a triple-fan cooling solution. Of course, it's a gaming graphics card; some RGB eye candy is inevitable. The graphics card utilizes an 8-pin EPS connector, yes, the kind that you find on motherboards. It has a 255W TBP (total board power), and one EPS connector supplies up to 300W. The MTT S80 has the same outputs as Nvidia's flagship GeForce RTX 4090. In addition, you receive three DisplayPort1.4a outputs and one HDMI 2.1 port to support up to four 8K displays.

To say that benchmarking the MTT S80 was difficult is an understatement. Löschzwerg emphasized that the graphics card's performance and driver were wonky. The GPU utilization wasn't optimal, and the graphics card rarely showed its full potential, suggesting a lack of driver optimization. Tessellation doesn't work with the current driver and causes crashes on Unigine Heaven, 3DMark 11, and Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker. Surprisingly, Resizable BAR works fine.

Moore Threads MTT S80 Benchmarks

The MTT S80 delivered between 16 FPS and 31 FPS (actual gameplay) in Crysis at 1080p on the high preset with DirectX 9. In F.E.A.R., with 1080p and maximum preset, the graphics card ran the game between 54 FPS and 186 FPS. Meanwhile, the average framerate for Half-Life 2: Lost Coast at 1080p and maximum settings was 132.2 FPS.

The MTT S80 finished the Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker benchmark with a score of 4,312 points. Unfortunately, the reviewer used custom settings so we couldn't compare it to our results. However, the score slides between the 4,000 to 5,999 range, equivalent to standard performance, meaning the graphics card has what it takes to run the game on default settings. The Arc A770 scored 18,674 points in the same benchmark, outpacing the MTT S80 by 100%.

The results revealed that the Arc A770 outperformed the MTT S80 by over 170% in 3DMark06 on both presets. Intel's graphics card also delivered 155% higher performance in 3DMark03. With the more demanding preset, the Arc A770 still beat the MTT S80 by a 54% margin.

The MTT S80 scored 551 points in Unigine Heaven at 1080p 8xAA on the ultra preset. Another Twitter user provided the scores for the GeForce GTX 680 and the Radeon HD 7950 Boost. The former had a 114% higher score, while the latter showed a 101% better score than the MTT S80.

The power metrics are a real shocker, though. The test system, which comprises the Core i5-10400, ASRock B560M-HDV, and 32GB (2x16GB) of DDR4-3200 memory, idles around 22W. With the MTT S80, the idle power was about 131W, conveying that the graphics card consumes 109W while idling. On the other hand, the peak system power consumption was 315W, so the MTT S80 consumed 293W. Again, the values are ridiculously high. For example, even the enthusiast-grade GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is a 285W graphics card.

With the driver's current state, the MTT S80 is potentially leaving some performance on the table. Officially, the graphics card supports around 20 DirectX games, but performance is a hit or miss. The graphics card performs better on DirectX 9 titles than on DirectX 11. However, there's still a long way to go regarding game compatibility.

The MTT S80 retails for 2,999 yuan or $442.65 on JD.com, a popular Chinese online retailer. Unfortunately, it won't be a suitable option since gamers can still purchase Intel, AMD, or Nvidia graphics cards in China. However, if restrictions on exports to China get harsh, the MTT S80 could gain relevance.

We now have three major players vying to be the best graphics cards: AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. The two incumbents recently released their next-generation GPU architectures, with Nvidia Ada Lovelace taking on AMD RDNA 3. The Intel Arc Alchemist architecture also came out last year, but you can certainly make the argument that it was really designed to compete with Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA 2. Beyond the hardware, though, software and drivers play a critical role in extracting maximum performance from the GPU, and drivers are becoming increasingly complex.

Consider all the APIs that need to be supported: DirectX 9/10/11/12, OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and others besides. Then you have potentially multiple generations of hardware — Nvidia's latest drivers support five different architectures while AMD's drivers support ... well, AMD's a bit of a special case right now, as one set of drivers only supports the latest RDNA 3 GPUs while the other set supports RDNA 2, RDNA, Vega, and Polaris, but we're told the two will get a unified driver in the future.

Intel in contrast is at an advantage, since it doesn't have a huge back catalog of GPUs to support... unless you count integrated graphics. And Intel does support 11th Gen Tiger Lake, 12th Gen Alder Lake, and 13th Gen Raptor Lake integrated graphics with its drivers. That's a bit interesting, because there's a huge gulf in performance between many of those integrated solutions and the dedicated Arc GPUs.

One thing we've noticed over the years has been the steadily bloating size of GPU driver downloads. Which got us thinking about the current status quo. You might think Nvidia's drivers would be larger, since it also has some extra stuff like CUDA and DLSS that it needs to support. You'd be partially correct. At present, here's how the download sizes stack up:

We've become accustomed to seeing larger download sizes on Nvidia's drivers, though they did shrink quite a bit back when Nvidia killed off 3D Vision support (RIP). Besides the drivers, there's also the included GeForce Experience app — a 124.8 MiB download if you grab it separately, but it's normally packaged with every Nvidia driver.

The newer AMD drivers strike us as somewhat odd, however. Why are the drivers that only have to support two GPUs 8% larger than the drivers that support probably over 100 different GPUs? Maybe the unified AMD drivers won't be much larger and it's just a matter of tying a few remaining pieces together.

But AMD and Nvidia have nothing on Intel when it comes to driver bloat. 1.21 GB? Great Scott! How could they have been so careless? But seriously, you have to wonder what exactly is taking up so much space. (Update, 3/24/2023: Intel managed to slash the driver download in size in half within two months of this article going up. Interesting timing!)

Granted, Intel is newer to this than AMD and Nvidia. It also has tried to stuff in a bunch of extra features, including XeSS support and things like Smooth Sync. But AMD and Nvidia have that sort of stuff as well. More to the point, we can't help but wonder if the larger, presumably unoptimized file sizes might also correlate with unoptimized code that's full of extra cruft. Also, will the drivers get even larger when Battlemage arrives?

Thank goodness the best SSDs have become pretty affordable, as these days you can grab a fast 1TB NVMe drive for around $85, or alternatively a 2TB SATA drive. Unpacking and installing the drivers will of course consume even more space, but that's nothing compared to 100GB and larger game install sizes — unless you have a data cap and like to download drivers on a regular basis. Bon appétit!

Unnamed sources have reached out to developer Kuba Wojciechowski with an extensive set of specifications for the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 SoC. This is an important processor for the PC industry that promises to deliver a similar impact for Windows PCs to that of Apple Silicon in the MacOS and iOS device universe. The SD 8cx Gen 4 is being developed as the first PC processor that features Arm cores optimized by the Nuvia team, now part of Qualcomm. Nuvia was formed by three senior Apple execs who departed the Cupertino company after the first Apple Silicon (M1) projects had been successfully delivered.  

In brief, Wojciechowski stated that the information he shared back in November, about the codename ‘Hamoa’ desktop PC processor with up to 12 (8P+4E) Nuvia Phoenix-based Oryon cores, still stands. Now he has added that the Performance cores are being tested at around 3.4 GHz, and the Efficiency cores at approximately 2.5 GHz. The cores are clustered in blocks of four, with 12MB of shared L2 cache, and there is also 8MB of L3 cache. Additionally, the SD 8cx Gen 4 design features, 12MB of system cache and 4MB for graphics purposes, according to the Twitter thread.

As ever with leaks, take the news with a pinch of salt until it can be verified.

The extensive leak also suggests that the top model(s) of Qualcomm’s next gen chip for PCs, i.e. those featuring the full complement of 12 cores, will also support discrete GPUs over 8 lanes of PCIe 4.0. Another 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 can be allocated for NVMe storage use, and PCIe 3.0 is there to support stuff like the Wi-Fi card and/or modem. Apparently, Wi-Fi 7 is supported by the upcoming SoC and those who want cellular connectivity will have an external X65 option. Systems packing an SD 8cx Gen 4 will be able to support up to 64GB of 8-channel LPDDR5x, according to the recent leak.

Another key spec of a Qualcomm SD 8cx Gen 4 powered PC will be the integrated Adreno 740 GPU. This is the same GPU as in the previous Qualcomm processor for Windows on Arm PCs, and its supports APIs like DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, OpenCL as well as DirectML - but remember there will be discrete GPU support in top-end configurations.

Some other specs shared include; the support for UFS 4.0 storage, dedicated AI processing with the Hexagon Tensor Processor, and AV1 codec support. I/O support should extend to twin USB3 (10Gbps) ports, plus a trio of USB4 ports which also can be used for video out and up to 5K+4K+4K displays displays. 

Wojciechowski estimates that the Qualcomm SD 8cx Gen 4 could mean his big 300W PC could be made redundant by a compact new 100W model. Of course, there will be great benefits to laptop designs too, as long as the Nuvia team lives up to its own hype.

Qualcomm management previously stated that the first Nuvia CPU packing chips would be sampled by device partners towards the end of last year, with devices launching for consumers in late 2023 to early 24.

There may not be a Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023, but Raspberry Pi alternative Radxa has announced the Rock 5A which bears a striking resemblance to the Raspberry Pi 4 but this particular board offers up to 8K video support and up to 16GB RAM.

Radxa's Rock 5 will be available from the end of Q1 2023. The board features an RK3588S SoC with an octo core CPU. Four of the cores, Arm Cortex A76, run between 2.2 and 2.4 GHz, much higher than the Raspberry Pi 4's 1.8 GHz A72 CPU. The smaller cores of the RK3588S are Arm Cortex A55 running at 1.8 GHz. The RK3588 has been gaining ground and features in a number of SBC, for example the Firefly RK3588S and Pine64's QuartzPro 64. Video decoding is supported at up to 8K 60, a very attractive feature for the $99 price point.

So why is the Rock 5A an interesting alternative to the Raspberry Pi? Chiefly it comes down to price and performance. For around $99 we can per-order the 4GB model, which offers plenty of RAM for most SBC users. Retro game enthusiasts will most likely choose this model as it offers plenty of RAM to emulate classic games, including some from the PlayStation2 era. Yes, PS2 is now considered retro and we feel considerably older for it.

The camera connector looks to be compatible with cameras similar to the official Raspberry Pi cameras, but that can only be confirmed when we get one in our hands. As for the GPIO, don't expect it to be Raspberry Pi compatible.  While it could be electrically compatible with your favorite HATs and add-ons, software support may not be.  The onboard M.2 slot supports SATA and thankfully has a binding post inside the board's footprint. If we can boot from this drive then we have a compact and relatively fast SBC. If you prefer eMMC, then on the underside of the board we have an eMMC interface. Speeds will likely fall between micro SD and SATA. Also on the underside, just by the USB ports, is an RTC (Real Time Clock) battery connector, looking at the silkscreen we can see that this JST connector provides power to an onboard RTC.

We look forward to taking this board for a spin later this year.

Innosilicon showcased its Fantasy 2 graphics card at the 17th China Chip Excellence Awards Ceremony, where the consumer-targeted GPU scooped up the China Chip Excellent Technology Innovation Product Award. 

Thanks to this industry event we now have some great new images of the graphics card (H/T to Twitter user @Loschzwerg_3DC). There's still no word on consumer availability of this GPU — even though it was supposed to become available last August.

If you haven't been following the Innosilicon Fantasy 2 graphics card news closely, it's a PowerVR architecture consumer product, claimed to be capable of "4K-level high- performance rendering," while using very little power.

Don't expect too much in terms of performance from this product when it gets into the hands of reviewers, especially from the fanless model in the new images. Its 1.5 TFLOPs FP32 performance and 10 TOPS (Int8) computing power aren't exactly the stuff of gamers' dreams. That said, it's good to see PowerVR back in desktop PC products: its ultra-low power consumption (5-15W), as well as its broad graphics API (OpenGL, Vulkan, and DirectX) and OS support (Windows, Linux, Android), are particularly welcome.

Innosilicon claims that the Fantasy 2 graphics card is capable enough for "daily needs" such as office use, entertainment, CAD, and other applications. But when it says the GPU "performs well in games," we suspect it's talking about casual 2D gaming titles rather than the latest AAA 3D PC releases.

Those with the thirst for PowerVR power might be better served by the Fantasy 1, which is supposed to target GeForce RTX 3060 grade performance (take that with a big pinch of salt). This card has been confirmed by ImgTec to feature the BXT-32-1024 GPU, delivering 5 TFLOPs FP32 performance, and coming kitted out with 16GB of GDDR6X on a 128-bit interface. 

Muddying the already opaque waters regarding these elusive GPUs, there are also reported to be two variants of the Fantasy 1, with the Type A (outlined above) using a single BXT-32-1024 GPU, and the Type B version featuring a dual-GPU-equipped PCB.

Chinese tech news sites, forums, and social media have almost no hands-on information regarding any of these Innosilicon Fantasy graphics cards, even though we're now firmly into 2023. As it stands with the phantom launches and no-shows, it doesn't look likely that the Fantasy 2 will make it onto our highly competitive best graphics cards list.

The Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC continues our coverage of custom RTX 4090 cards — our fifth so far. Check the Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition, Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC, MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X, and Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC for details on the other cards, though we'll have the performance results in our charts. The RTX 4090 remains the top performer in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy and one of the best graphics cards, and with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT launch now in the rearview mirror, it's clear that the 4090 will remain unchallenged for quite some time.

Colorful's 4090 Vulcan OC follows a now-familiar pattern: you get a massive air cooler and triple fans with a wider than triple-slot form factor. But Colorful doesn't stop there, tossing in a detachable LED screen that can be used to show details like temperatures and clock speeds, or just extra RGB effects if that's what you're after. There's also a stand to support the card and prevent sagging

Two months after the initial launch, the brouhaha surrounding the melting 16-pin adapters has subsided, with Nvidia declaring that improperly connected cables were to blame. We haven't heard much in the way of new reports on melted connectors, so hopefully the word is out and the root cause really was user error. Certainly, Nvidia would like to put melt-gate in the past, especially since it appears to have plans to use the same 16-pin connector across most of its RTX 40-series lineup.

 As far as specifications go, the only difference between the various RTX 4090 cards is their boost clocks. Even then, there's not a big gap, as the boost clocks tend to be conservative. We've seen around 2.7–2.75 GHz from the Founders Edition, and maybe 50 MHz higher from some of the third-party cards. It generally means less than a 2% difference, though sometimes higher power limits can increase the gap a bit.

Colorful includes an OC button on the IO panel, rather than the usual switch we see on other cards. Perhaps it's useful if the side of your PC is closed and you switch modes on a regular basis… but since a reboot is required, we suspect most users will just press the button (or not) and forget about it. If you don't press the "1-button OC," you end up with reference clocks, though I'm not sure if the power limit changes.

Colorful's official MSRP is a bit higher than most of the other cards, with only the Asus model having a higher starting point. In practice, right now it doesn't matter much as all of the RTX 4090 cards we've seen online lately sell for over $2,000. That's assuming you can even find the Colorful card in the U.S. It's a well-known brand globally, but its U.S. presence remains more limited than some of the other graphics card names. Maybe it can try to grab some of EVGA's former market share now that it's exiting the market?

For more information on the core RTX 4090 functionality, check our Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture piece where we go into more detail about the various changes Nvidia has made relative to the previous generation Ampere architecture. There are also additional tests that we performed with the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, including professional content creation workloads and DLSS 3 testing. Our AIB card reviews focus more on the card design and aesthetics, as well as any other extras, as those tend to be more important than minor variations in performance.

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Colorful's card comes in a large package with plenty of extras. There's a support stand, small Phillips screwdriver, and an 800 x 216 resolution LED display. If you don't want to use the LED display on the card, you can also connect an alternative "Vision" RGB LED piece and use the LED display with an included stand somewhere else.

There's lots of padding in the package to keep the card and accessories safe, which we appreciate for graphics cards in this price bracket. Along with the above, there's also the standard 4x 8-pin to 16-pin ‘quadropus’ adapter for power. Like the other adapters we’ve received with RTX 4090 cards, this one uses AWG14 wires rated for 300V.

One interesting footnote to the packaging is a sticker on the graphics card's anti-static bag that states, "Warning — Not for cryptocurrency mining. Violation of this will void warranty." Not that it would necessarily stop miners from using the card, should mining become wildly profitable again, but it makes you wonder how many mining cards have been RMA'ed over the years.

Colorful's card isn't the largest we've tested — that distinction goes to the Asus ROG Strix — but it's certainly big. It measures 336 x 134 x 68.5 mm (our measurements) and weighs 2433g, not including the optional LED display or Vision RGB lights. We do appreciate Colorful's decision to include a full 3-slot IO bracket, which helps to support the card, and the card's construction in general is very sturdy.

Colorful uses three relatively large 98mm fans with integrated rims to keep the GPU and memory cool, and as we'll see in a moment, the heatsink does its job very well. Besides the flashy LED screen that mounts via magnets to the top (side in a typical case orientation) of the graphics card, there are two RGB strips on the top and bottom edges of the card — enough to provide accents without lighting up the entire room.

As with most other RTX 4090 cards, Colorful includes the ubiquitous triple DisplayPort 1.4a and single HDMI 2.1 monitor outputs. The DP1.4a ports can transmit up to 25.92 Gbps of data (32.40 Gbps of total bandwidth, but the 8b/10b encoding uses 20% of the bandwidth), which is enough to support uncompressed 3840x2160 resolution at 98 Hz. If you want to go beyond that, Display Stream Compression (DSC) allows for up to 4K and 240 Hz with "visually lossless" quality — which isn't the same as truly lossless video. Of course, you'd need a monitor with support for DSC and such a high refresh rate first.

Disassembly of the Colorful 4090 was far more involved than on the other RTX 4090 cards we've looked at. At the start, you wouldn't expect this, and you can remove the six screws that help secure the cooler to the card along with the four screws on the GPU bracket relatively easily. Unplug the RGB cable at the top of the card and you can pry the cooler off and expose the GPU and memory.

This will reveal some of the PCB, and there's a large structural frame mounted on the PCB that also holds the backplate in place. You can also see that the large heatsink has good contact with all of the GDDR6X memory and VRMs, but half of the VRMs are under the aluminum frame.

To get at them, you'll need to remove eight more screws that hold the frame in place, plus the IO bracket, which in turn requires removal of the cable and screws holding the overclocking button in place. You'll also want to disconnect the two fan cables before going much further.

As you'd expect from a card rated for up to 515W, there are lots of power phases — 24 for the GPU, four more for the GDDR6X, and two more in the corner near the power connector. This is Colorful's "maxed out" 4090 card, so perhaps the non-OC Vulcan omits some of the power phases.

Similar to what we saw with the Asus ROG Strix, the GDDR6X memory shows the expected "Micron DB8ZC" label, but at least on the sample we received, this appears to be down-binned 24 Gbps memory. Three of the 4090 cards we've tested top out at 23–23.6 Gbps on the memory overclock, but the Colorful and Asus cards were able to reach 25 Gbps with relative ease.

Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC Manual Overclocking

This is the fifth RTX 4090 card we’ve tested and reviewed, all of which seem to hit similar limits on the GPU core clocks, at least without the ability to directly modify the voltage. We followed our normal procedure for manual overclocking: Max out the power limit (only 106% on this card when starting from OC mode), then start trying for increased GPU clocks.

+200 MHz on the GPU cores caused a crash after a bit of testing, so once more we ended up with +180 MHz as reasonably stable — no guarantees long-term, but it passed all of our benchmarks at 4K. Then we moved on to the memory.

We started at +1000 MHz and things were fine. Bumping that up to 1500 MHz often results in an immediate crash, but the Colorful 4090 did just fine. As with the Asus ROG Strix, we then maxed out the slider at +2000 MHz and it didn't immediately crash, suggesting this is actually 24 Gbps GDDR6X that's been labeled as 21 Gbps by Micron. Ultimately, we had another crash at +2000 MHz and backed off to +1800 MHz, which completed our test suite.

Power draw with our overclock in place routinely broke 500W during testing, which is sort of 'fun' to see. At stock settings (with the OC button engaged), the highest power draw we recorded while gaming was 492W in Metro Exodus Enhanced, and that increased to 531W with our manual overclock active. Performance improved by 8% overall thanks to the overclock, but we'd still exercise caution in light of the melting 16-pin adapters — even if it was just user error, sucking down over 500W of power can still be a bit nerve wracking. Alternatively, you can reduce the power limits to improve efficiency, as we showed in our RTX 4090 Founders Edition efficiency testing. 

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4K Gaming Performance

Our gaming tests consist of a "standard" suite of eight games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it), and a separate "ray tracing" suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects. We've already tested the RTX 4090 Founders Edition at 1080p, and our focus on AIB cards will be the 4K and 1440p performance.

Please note that testing of the Colorful card was conducted on our standard test bed, a few weeks ago (around the time the RTX 4080 launch took over my free time). This is the same as the other 4090 cards, and not the new and improved test bed we used in the RX 7900 XTX / XT review. This was also before Fortnite broke our benchmarks and changed its settings, and the same for Forza Horizon 5 and Total War: Warhammer 3.

The Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC ends up right in the mix of the 4090 cards. It ties the MSI model while falling just slightly behind the Asus card in our 4K rasterization tests, but the 0.6% deficit is well within the margin of error. That applies to all the individual tests as well, where it's always in the top three spots for the 4090 models (not counting the manually overclocked Founders Edition).

At worst, Colorful's card came in 2.2% behind the Asus card (in Forza Horizon 5), and at best it was 3.9% faster than the Gigabyte card (in Total War: Warhammer 3). That gives a good indication of just how narrow the spread is among all the RTX 4090 cards, which means price, features, and any other extras will generally take precedence over performance.

The ray tracing results tell a similar story, except now we have overclocking performance in the charts as well. The Colorful 4090 lands in second place for both stock and overclocked performance, right behind the Asus card — technically tied with it at factory stock settings.

Also note the massive gulf between the 4090 cards and the next-closest RTX 4080 and 3090 Ti. If you want maximum ray tracing performance, the 4090 is the card you'll want — and DLSS tends to be supported in most DXR games, so you can get an additional boost there for a slight loss in image fidelity.

1440p Gaming Performance

 Dropping the testing resolution to 1440p improves frame rates while also narrowing the gap between the GPUs. The 4090 still ranks at the top, but the 4080 and RX 7900 XTX are basically tied and only about 11% slower than the 4090. That's in rasterization benchmarks, though, and the gap in ray tracing games remains quite large.

In our DXR suite, the 4090 cards still hold on to an approximately 35% advantage over the next closest GPU, the RTX 4080. Next comes the 3090 Ti, followed by the 3090 and AMD's 7900 XTX. The 4090 ends up being about 90% faster than AMD's newcomer.

As for the Colorful RTX 4090, it places in second for both the rasterization and ray tracing results, once again just behind the Asus card.

Test Setup for Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC

We updated our GPU test PC and gaming suite in early 2022 to a Core i9-12900K and the other hardware shown in the test equipment list. We're now moving on to testing with Core i9-13900K (and Ryzen 9 7950X in some cases), which you can see in our more recent AMD RX 7900 XTX and XT review. However, we've got a few final cards that were tested and reviewed with our previous test suite.

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We measure real-world power consumption using Powenetics testing hardware and software. We capture in-line GPU power consumption by collecting data while looping Metro Exodus and while running the FurMark stress test. Our test PC remains the same old Core i9-9900K as we've used previously, to keep results consistent.

Besides Powenetics, we also have power results reported via FrameView. These are software values, which in testing tend to be a few percent lower than the actual power values, but they're at least relatively close on Nvidia hardware. We'll be switching to PCAT going forward, on our newer 13900K and 7950X test PCs.

For the RTX 4090 cards, we've upped the quality setting in Metro Exodus to 4K extreme in order to tax the GPU as much as possible, and we run at 2560 x 1440 with FurMark. That's slightly different from the other GPUs we've tested in the past, but these charts are intended to represent something close to worst-case power consumption, temps, etc., so we check other settings to ensure we're pushing the GPUs as much as reasonably possible.

The Colorful RTX 4090 uses more power than any of the other 4090 cards, thanks to its higher 515W power limit (according to Colorful's specs sheet). We measured 463W in Metro Exodus, and 519W in FurMark, running with the card's OC button engaged.

Manual overclocking pushes the power use even higher, up to 552W in FurMark and 493W in Metro, the latter of which is the highest power draw of any of the GPUs so far in our gaming tests. You can of course disengage the OC mode (after a restart) and run at reference clocks and power limits, though we suspect most people buying an RTX 4090 factory overclocked model prefer the additional performance.

Clock speeds as usual end up tightly clustered, with the 4090 cards at stock ranging from 2727 MHz to 2791 MHz in Metro — a 2.3% spread. The spread is much wider in FurMark at 11%, where VBIOS tweaks can cause higher amounts of throttling in what is more of a worst-case scenario than a realistic graphics workload. The higher power limit on the Colorful card comes into play, allowing it to still run at 2617 MHz. Manual overclocking pushes all the cards into the 2.82–2.91 GHz range for FurMark, and 2.93–2.98 GHz for Metro.

Temperatures and fan speeds generally have a direct correlation, with power use also factoring into things. The Colorful card at stock runs a bit warmer than some of the other models and only comes in slightly below the 4090 Founders Edition, but 65C while gaming and 69C in FurMark are decent results. Overclocked temperatures are actually lower than the stock temperatures, as we use a far more aggressive fan speed curve to try and keep things stable.

Speaking of fan speeds, at stock the Colorful 4090 runs the fans at over 1800 rpm in gaming, and 2100 rpm in FurMark. Those are the highest speeds of any of the tested 4090 GPUs, and manual overclocking kicks things into high gear with over 3000 rpms (though you could certainly tune the fans to run at lower speeds and likely still maintain a similar overclock). As you'd expect, that results in higher noise levels.

We also use an SPL (sound pressure level) meter for noise testing, positioned about 10cm away from the GPU fans. This is done to focus measurements on the graphics card fans and avoid the influence of other noise sources. Idle noise measured less than 32 dB(A) for all of the cards, which is more or less the limit of our noise floor. We run Metro Exodus for over 15 minutes to let fan speeds stabilize before taking our readings.

The Colorful 4090 card ended up at 50.5 dB(A), matching the reference RTX 3080 Ti and rating as one of the noisier cards in our charts. That's… not a great showing. Everything about the card seems like it should do better than this, though perhaps part of the problem is the higher power draw in our tested OC mode. The fans ran at 55%, so there's still some room in the tank for even higher speeds, more cooling … and higher noise levels.

We also set a static fan speed of 75%, but that on its own isn't super meaningful. Some cards have fans that can reach higher speeds and thus create more noise. The Colorful card at 75% hit 58 dB(A), basically matching the Asus 4090 — but the Asus card only needed to run its fans at 41% at stock. 

As noted above, we also collected temperature, power, and clock speed data via Nvidia FrameView for most of our benchmarks — "most" because the older version of FrameView caused Red Dead Redemption 2 Vulkan to crash to desktop. These are the results from the test runs used in our charts.

For the full suite of 13 games, the Colorful 4090 card averaged about 2.76 GHz at 1440p and 2.74 GHz at 4K, with an average GPU of 83% at 1440p and 93% at 4K. Those results are nearly identical to the Gigabyte card, even though the Colorful ended up slightly faster and with a higher power draw.

The power data shows that an underutilized GPU typically results in lower power draw, and few of the games we tested come anywhere near the nominal 515W TBP limit of the Colorful 4090 card. Metro Exodus Enhanced ends up as the most demanding of the games we tested, with 445W using the factory OC mode and 543W when overclocked. That's nearly 100W more power (a 22% increase), for just 7.5% more performance. 

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The Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC has a lot to offer, including a decent factory overclock of 105 MHz along with a programmable LED display and a graphics card support stand. The question, as with all of the RTX 4090 cards, is whether it can justify its price premium over the reference 4090 Founders Edition.

For most people, assuming you could actually find the 4090 Founders Edition in stock for $1,599, that would be the most sensible choice. It's nearly as fast as any other 4090 card, offers decent overclocking headroom, and it has a large cooler and relatively quiet fans. The Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC bumps the theoretical price up by $170 based on what we could find, but all of the 4090 cards are currently out of stock or selling at more than $2,000.

Perhaps a bigger issue for Colorful is that its graphics cards simply aren't widely available in the U.S. or the American continents in general. If you're reading this wondering if the Colorful 4090 card is worth buying, we don't have any serious complaints other than the somewhat high noise levels. If the card has a reasonable price compared to other options, it's as fast or slightly faster than most other models in our testing.

Looking at the wider graphics card market, the RTX 4090 sits at the top of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, and all indications are that the only potential competition for this generation will come from a future RTX 4090 Ti. Even then, you're probably going to need to wait a year and the overall performance improvement from a fully enabled AD102 chip will likely be 10% at most.

AMD's RDNA 3 based RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT deliver a somewhat comparable value proposition, as does the RTX 4080, but the cost savings scale almost in direct proportion to the performance loss. Looking at our 4K results and the current MSRPs, the RTX 4090 delivers 0.054 FPS/$, the RTX 4080 offers 0.053 FPS/$, AMD's RX 7900 XTX delivers 0.058 FPS/$, and the RX 7900 XT gets 0.055 FPS/$. And if you're wondering, the RTX 3090 Ti (at $1,099, which you can no longer find in stock) is 0.049 FPS/$ and the RX 6950 XT at $799 also gets 0.049 FPS/$.

How's that for a change? The fastest and most expensive cards aren't a substantially worse value than slower and less expensive cards — at least when we're only looking at the very top of the performance stack. It almost feels like we need a clip of Nvidia's CEO saying, "The more you buy, the more you save!" Sorry, not sorry.

Getting back to the Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC, if you like the extra LED display, that's probably the biggest draw. Other 4090 cards include a support bracket or stand or whatever, but none of them have a display mounted on the side of the card. Or, you know, just buy your own little external LED display and call it a day.

The Colorful RTX 4090 ends up delivering similar performance to all the other 4090 cards, and tries to add value with some extras that probably aren't necessary. If you can find one in stock at a price you're willing to pay, it's a good card and worthy of consideration. But for most gamers, the price is going to be far too high for quite some time. 

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Just yesterday, Intel released a massive driver update to its Arc Alchemist GPUs, resulting in a near 2x FPS (frames per second) increase in DX9-based titles. Now, according to a report by GamingOnLinux, we know how Intel was able to accomplish this task in some games. Intel has added another translation layer to its latest graphics driver, featuring Steam’s DXVK translation layer. This is the same translation layer Steam uses in its Proton API to translate Windows games to Linux (like we saw on the Steam Deck), allowing Intel to translate DX9 code to the open-source Vulkan API.

According to Intel’s blog post from yesterday, Intel is apparently only using the DXVK translation layer in some cases; its driver will take a hybrid approach of opportunistically utilizing a combination of API techniques that take advantage of translation layers using one or more modern API implementations. As a result, Intel won’t be using DXVK for the entirety of its DX9 processing, and will only use DXVK when it can provide better performance over Intel’s DX12 emulation technique.

Intel never actually stated it was using DXVK in its official blog post, but thanks to Gaming On Linux, we now know DXVK translation is what Intel is referring to, based on a readme document Intel published on the same topic. Unfortunately, we do not know how effective DXVK actually is with Intel’s implementation, but it must be a very effective solution for Intel to implement the translation layer into its latest driver at all.

Intel’s Arc GPUs - and its associated Xe integrated graphics, no longer feature native DX9 support. Instead Intel has opted to rely solely on translation layers to replicate native rendering. One such example is Intel’s utilization of the Microsoft D3D9On12 mapping layer, which translates DX9 commands to DX12.

Intel’s reliance on translation layers may not be ideal, but it actually gives the company a shortcut in garnering good DX9 GPU performance quickly. Translation layers allow Intel to use DX12 optimizations for both modern DX12 titles and for older DX9 games, which severely cuts down the development time needed to optimize both new and old APIs. This was a necessary move for Intel, because it needed a way to compete with Nvidia and AMD, which have nearly twenty years of experience developing DX9 drivers for discrete GPU hardware.

The awesome part about DXVK is that Intel no longer needs to rely on Microsoft’s DX12 emulation layer to play DX9 games on Arc. With DXVK, Intel can now run DX9 games on other operating systems such as Linux, and gain additional performance benefits that might not be available in Microsoft’s emulator. 

Significant news arrives from Asahi Linux, the project that’s attempting, and actually succeeding, to get an operating system that’s not macOS running natively on Apple Silicon Macs. It has hit an important milestone: a graphics driver that brings work-in-progress OpenGL 2 support to the distro. Meanwhile, the M-chips’ journey toward mainstream Linux support took a step forward too.

The new driver, which hasn’t passed OpenGL conformance tests and is very much an alpha, can run desktop environments such as Gnome and Plasma with hardware acceleration. The developers are still working on the driver, bringing in more OpenGL 2 features and a planned Vulkan expansion in the works. “We estimated that we could ship working OpenGL 2 drivers much sooner than a working Vulkan 1.0 driver, and we wanted to get hardware accelerated desktops into your hands as soon as possible. For the most part, those desktops use OpenGL, so supporting OpenGL first made more sense to us than diving into the Vulkan deep end,” reads a blog post authored by Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina.

The driver is an opt-in release, meaning you’ll have to install it on your Linux-Mac using the pacman package manager. It’s unclear at the moment whether the driver can run Crysis, but Quake 3 in 4K at 60fps appears to be within its capabilities, and it runs desktops at the same speed.

In other news, support for M-series chips in the mainline Linux kernel also saw an important improvement this week, with an Apple Silicon CPU frequency-scaling driver being merged into the Linux kernel’s 6.2 release. 

Hector Martin, Asahi Linux’s lead developer, explained on kernel.org: “This driver implements CPU frequency scaling for Apple Silicon SoCs, including M1, M1 Max/Pro/Ultra, and M2. Each CPU cluster has its own register set, and frequency management is fully automated by the hardware; the driver only has to write one register. There is boost frequency support, but the hardware will only allow their use if only a subset of cores in a cluster are in non-deep-idle. Since we don't support deep idle yet, these frequencies are not achievable, but the driver supports them. They will remain disabled in the device tree until deep idle is implemented, to avoid confusing users. This driver does not yet implement the memory controller performance state tuning that usually accompanies higher CPU p-states. This will be done in a future patch.”

Intel has made significant progress with DirectX 9 performance on its Arc Alchemist graphics cards. The latest 31.0.101.3959 driver brings up to 1.8X higher average FPS and up to 2.3X improved 99th percentile FPS on the Arc A770, one of the best graphics cards on the market.

When Arc first came out, it was already public knowledge that the Intel graphics cards perform poorly on games with legacy APIs. Nonetheless, Intel had pledged to improve performance over time, and the chipmaker has delivered on its promise. As a result, the new Arc display driver offers a substantial performance increase in DirectX 9 titles, including CS:GO, League of Legends, Starcraft 2, Guild Wars 2, Payday 2, and Stellaris.

Compared to the previous driver (31.0.101.3490), the new v3953 driver delivered 1.79X higher average FPS in CS:GO at 1080p with high settings. It's a tremendous jump in framerates when comparing 177 FPS on the old driver versus 318 FPS on the new driver. At 1440p with ultra settings, we're looking at 1.77X better performance. The v3953 driver doesn't just make the framerates jump through the roof. It also ensures smoother gameplay. On the v3953 driver, the Arc A770 exhibited 2.26X higher 99th percentile FPS at 1080p and 2.15X at 1440p.

Intel's test system was pretty standard for a high-end gaming PC. It consisted of a Core i9-12900K (Alder Lake) processor, 32GB (2x16GB) of Dominator Platinum DDR5-5600 C36 memory, and an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard. Intel used the Arc A770 for testing; however, the Arc A750, Arc A380, or their mobile counterparts should enjoy similar performance benefits from the v3959 driver.

Intel explained that modern APIs, such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, are still the main focus; however, the company's opting to use a hybrid approach. As a result, there will be occasions when a title runs on the native DirectX implementation and other circumstances where it'll leverage translation layers to go from DirectX 9 to a modern API.

It's incredible what the Intel engineers could achieve with the Arc driver in less than two months since the Arc graphics cards debuted. Nonetheless, Intel has promised further improvements for titles on legacy APIs, meaning it could just be a matter of time before we see enhanced performance for games based on DirectX 10 or DirectX 11.

Performance leaks of AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 7900 XTX were recently shared by @BenchLeaks on Twitter, showcasing OpenCL and Vulkan compute scores in Geekbench 5. The RDNA3 GPU showed very favorable results in the Vulkan benchmark, yielding similar performance to Nvidia's RTX 4080. The OpenCL results aren't as promising, though Geekbench in general isn't the best indicator of real-world gaming performance. Still, it does support AMD's claims that the RX 7900 XTX will compete well against the Nvidia RTX 4080.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX ran a score of 179,579 in Geekbench 5's Vulkan benchmark, and 228,647 points in the OpenCL benchmark. This puts the RX 7900 XTX right in line with the RTX 4080's score of 178,105 points in Vulkan, which is just 0.8% slower than the 7900 XTX. But the 7900 XTX falls behind the RTX 4080 in the OpenCL benchmark, where the RTX 4080's score of 264,482 points is 15.7% faster than the RX 7900 XTX.

The following 4080 and 4090 scores were taken from a multitude of user uploads to Geekbench 5's browser, which we then average down to one value. Unfortunately, we had to do this since Geekbench 5 does not have any official RTX 40-series compute benchmark scores available to compare against.

The RX 7900 XTX results aren't too surprising, as AMD's recent GPU architectures have rarely been able to match Nvidia's counterparts in terms of raw compute, which is what OpenCL measures. Gaming workloads on the other hand have shown competitive results from the previous RX 6000-series, and we're seeing the same trend here.

The 7900 XTX's performance characteristics in Vulkan are particularly interesting against the RTX 4080. AMD has said in the past that the 7900 XTX was not intended to fight against Nvidia's 4090, but rather face off against the Nvidia's runner-up RTX 4080 GPU. We don't know if this was AMD's intent all along, but either way, the Geekbench 5 Vulkan results  we are seeing here today certainly back up that statement.

Thankfully we won't have long to wait before we'll have our own full testing results. AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT will arrive on December 13, just one week away. Stay tuned for our official reviews, and we'll see how the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT fare against Nvidia's RTX 4080 and plenty of other GPUs across a wide range of benchmarks.

Linux graphics library Mesa 3D has released an update, version 22.3.0, that adds a number of optimizations and new features to the open-source library. The biggest of these updates is support for AMD's RDNA3 graphics architecture within AMD's own Radeon Vulkan Driver. 

This will provide Linux gamers with support for AMD's latest RX 7000 series graphics cards running on the RDNA3 GPU architecture when running titles that use the Vulkan API. This support should also extend to compatibility layers such as Proton and Wine, which are designed to run Windows DirectX-based titles on Linux through Vulkan.

Along with RDNA3 support, the new Mesa 3D update also adds a boatload of other additions and optimizations: including Ray Tracing in the RADV driver, and the addition of the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer for analyzing potential bottlenecks in an application's ray tracing pipeline.

For now, we don't know which Linux distros will be updating to version 22.3.0 automatically, so you may have to update to this version manually yourself, if you want to check out the new features.

Here is the full list of patch notes:

• GL_ARB_shader_clock on llvmpipe
• VK_KHR_shader_clock on lavapipe
• Mesa-DB, the new single file cache type
• VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_layout on RADV, lavapipe
• VK_KHR_global_priority on RADV
• GL_KHR_blend_equation_advanced_coherent on zink
• VK_EXT_load_store_op_none on RADV
• VK_EXT_mutable_descriptor_type on RADV
• VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float on lvp
• VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float2 on lvp
• GL_NV_shader_atomic_float on llvmpipe
• VK_EXT_image_robustness on v3dv
• VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 on lavapipe
• VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 on RADV & anv
• VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness on v3dv
• Mali T620 on panfrost
• Shader disk cache on Panfrost
• support for R8G8B8, B8G8R8, R16G16B16 and 64-bit vertex buffer formats
   on RADV
• initial GFX11/RDNA3 support on RADV
• various ray tracing optimizations on RADV
• extendedDynamicState2PatchControlPoints on RADV
   (VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2 feature)
• Radeon Raytracing Analyzer integration (using RADV_RRA_* environment
   variables)
• OpenGL 4.5 on freedreno/a6xx (up from 3.3)
• VK_EXT_mesh_shader on ANV

The powerful Rockchip RK3588 chipset has surfaced again, this time in the form of the ROCK 5 board from OKdo and Radxa. It claims to be the first SBC to support 8k60 video output.

The RK3588 puts together eight Arm cores where other boards, such as the Raspberry Pi 4, have only four. There's a quad-core 2.4 GHz Cortex A76 unit providing processing grunt, and four Cortex 1.8  GHz A55 cores for efficiency and background tasks. Add to this 8GB of RAM and a Mali G610MC4 GPU (it’s not clear how many cores this has, but we suspect six, which is the maximum number), and you have a board that can tackle a variety of tasks.

Dotted around the edge of the board are an array of ports, including a pair of full-size HDMIs (for the 8k60 output), a single micro-HDMI (4k60), four USB-A (two USB 2 and two USB 3) plus a headphone jack, and a USB-C port for power. The board itself requires 24W, and 36W if you mount an SSD. There's a 2.5G Ethernet port, 40-pin GPIO, CSI and DSI MIPI, two UART interfaces, Micro SD and eMMC storage options, and PCIe 3.0 (NVMe compatible) and PCIe 2.1 interfaces for M.2 SSDs, the latter of which also supports SATA. There's even an on/off switch.

It’s a lot for a little board to manage, and it’s helped in this task by a variety of the usual suspect operating systems, including Debian and Ubuntu Linux, plus Android 12. There are mounting holes for a heatsink if things start getting too hot.

It sounds like the ideal board for a gaming or video station, especially if a less powerful board isn’t quite cutting it, and could probably run digital signage well too. The ROCK 5 is is currently available for pre-order from OKdo (for $159) and ameriDrioid (for $144.95). Hopefully, some accessories will soon be available for it too.

Nvidia has released a new Game Ready Driver — version 526.98, which is jam-packed with feature updates, including support for the RTX 4080, as well as G-Sync and V-Sync support for DLSS 3 frame generation, HDR10+ Gaming, and RTX I/O DirectStorage.

Arguably the most anticipated feature — aside from RTX 4080 support — is official support for V-Sync and Nvidia G-Sync with DLSS 3 frame generation. Support for these two frame-syncing technologies was noticeably absent during the initial release of DLSS 3, but it's finally here with the new 526.98 driver — giving gamers a tear-free experience with frame generation enabled. 

That said, support isn't as liberal as we hoped. For now, it's limited to the Nvidia driver version of V-Sync, rather than in-game implementation. This means you have to go to the Nvidia Control Panel and manually enable V-Sync within the 3D settings profile the game you're playing (or enable it globally). 

G-Sync support is more straightforward, and only requires the tech to be enabled in the control panel once. DLSS 3 support of G-Sync works for both G-Sync Compatible and G-Sync Ultimate displays. If you still have tearing problems, you can enable V-Sync (manually) in combination with G-Sync.

For those worried about increased input lag, Nvidia says DLSS 3's combination with Nvidia Reflex technology will help decrease input lag even with V-Sync enabled. However we suspect you'll still see slightly higher input lag due to the way V-Sync works.

RTX I/O GPU Decompression Update

The next major feature is support for Microsoft's DirectStorage 1.1 API, in the form of RTX I/O. This feature allows RTX GPUs to comply with the DirectStorage standard, which lets them decompress and load game assets directly from high speed storage solutions with aid from the CPU. This will significantly decrease game load times in titles that support the technology.

RTX I/O's feature set will also extend past Microsoft's DirectStorage API in the form of Vulkan extensions. These extensions will give Vulkan-based titles access to the same performance enhancements as DirectStorage while bypassing Microsoft requirements such as Windows 10, 11, and DirectX 12.

HDR10+ Gaming Standard

Another gaming focused update in driver 526.98 is support for the HDR10+ Gaming standard. This new standard is an enhanced version of HDR10+ designed specifically for video games that adds Source Side Tone Mapping, auto calibration, and an automatic low-latency mode for TVs. Nvidia says this new feature is especially beneficial for games, since games can query HDR Luminance and color information directly from the display. This ensures the color reproduction of HDR10+ is perfectly produced no matter how strong or weak the display's HDR properties.

For HDR10+ gaming support to work, you'll need a GTX 16 series GPU or a GeForce RTX GPU, as well as a certified HDR gaming display.

Game Ready, Monitor Support, and CUDA 12

Finally, driver 526.98 features Game Ready support for several new titles, support for G-Sync Compatible displays, and support for CUDA 12.

Game Ready support includes the upcoming Spider-Man: Miles Morales, WarHammer 40,000: Darktide, WRC Generations, and World of Warcraft: Dragonflight. There's alao a DLAA update for Monster Hunter Rise. 

Monitor support includes 12 new displays from Philips, Eve, Corsair, Asus, and AOC. Ten of these monitors are 27- and 32-inch IPS and OLED panels with 144 Hz to 280 Hz refresh rates, while the other two are OLED TVs (ranging from 48 inches to 77 inches) with up to 120 Hz refresh rates at 4K resolution..

For more details, check out Nvidia's full patch notes here.

A new mobile Ryzen 9 CPU might just have made its first appearance in a benchmark, bringing 12 Zen 4 cores to laptops for the first time. If it exists, that is. This is definitely a rumor, for now, coming as it does from hardware leaker Benchleaks’ Twitter account.

The purported AMD Ryzen 9 7845HX APU appears in a benchmark listing for Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, a strategy videogame with a reputation for being hard on the processing cores. The rig appears to use the integrated Radeon GPU, has 8GB of RAM, and ran the game at 1080p under DirectX 11 with its graphics settings on ‘crazy,’ which is the level above ‘extreme.’ It averaged just over 50fps.

With 12 cores and 24 threads - appearing in the benchmark as 24 cores, as was the case with the 12-core 7900X - this is the first Ryzen HX processor to be equipped with more than eight cores. HX processors were added to AMD's range in the Ryzen 5000 generation and signify even greater performance than the ‘normal’ H series, which are high-performance mobile APUs. The mainstream mobile APUs get a U on the end of their name, while an M series chip is for low-power mobile.

Videocardz speculates that this could mean the Ryzen 9 7845HX is a repurposed desktop model, and it certainly could be a member of the Dragon Range family announced back in June. This makes it one of the first mobile chips to be identified using AMD's new naming convention: the 7 at the beginning signifies 2022, the 8 is its market segment, and can confusingly mean it’s either a Ryzen 7 or 9 (though the CPU name is pretty clear). The 4 is for the Zen 4 architecture, and the 5 means it’s the upper model in its segment - a lower-class chip would have a 0 here.

Direct comparisons are hard to find, as most other benchmarks on the site show AMD HX chips from earlier generations running discrete GPUs, using DirectX 12 or Vulkan, or having their graphics options set completely differently. A 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X using the integrated GPU under Vulkan and with 32GB of RAM managed an average score of 112FPS, for example, suggesting DirectX 11 isn’t the best API to really show off the new chip's capabilities.

AMD's next generation graphics cards based on the RDNA 3 architecture have passed conformity tests with Khronos Group's Vulkan 1.3 application programming interface. The compliancy indicates that the new graphics processors from AMD are functional and their drivers can pass conformity tests. 

AMD plans to formally unveil its forthcoming graphics cards based on the RDNA 3 architecture on November 3, 2022, next week. Since the new GPUs are a little more than a week away, it's not particularly surprising that their drivers for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 5.15 Linux kernel are good enough to pass Vulkan 1.3.3.1 conformity tests, based on the list of conformant products published at Khronos.org (via VideoCardz). 

The list currently includes not only an Undisclosed Product that belongs to the AMD RDNA 3 family of GPUs, but also an Undisclosed Product that belongs to AMD's Undisclosed Family of GPUs. While we do not know for sure how many of AMD's new products are compliant with the Vulkan 1.3 API, it's safe to say that at least two of them can pass the Vulkan 1.3.3.1 conformity tests. 

AMD's codenamed Navi 3x graphics processors based on the company's RDNA 3 architecture are projected to substantially increase performance compared to existing Radeon RX 6000-series offerings. Also, the top-of-the-range Navi 31 is expected to use a multi-chiplet design. 

Unofficial sources indicate that AMD plans to reveal two high-end RDNA 3-based graphics cards — a flagship offering and the one that is positioned slightly below — this year and start their sales in the second half of December. While prices of the new boards are unknown, there are rumors that AMD might position them higher than it positioned its Radeon RX 6900 XT at launch.

Kinetic Kudu is finally here. The latest release of popular Linux distribution Ubuntu 22.10 has been announced for general release. This time there's quite a lot that’s new, including an excellent antelope-based desktop background.

Kinetic is an interim release, meaning it gets support for nine months, after which you’re expected to upgrade to the next version. This stands in contrast to the previous release, 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, which was a long-term support, or LTS, release, which will be supported for much longer. All the way to April 2027 in fact.

Gnome 43 is the big news in Kinetic, the latest version of the popular desktop environment brings with it a number of enhancements. These include quick settings so you can toggle Wi-Fi, dark mode theme, and power schemes easily. The quick settings also makes switching between different networks and audio devices simple too. The Nautilus file manager has had a complete makeover, and elsewhere a lot of work has gone into increasing overall performance, with support for the latest processor architectures from Intel and AMD, plus the OS includes multi-threaded decompression to improve multi-core desktop Snap performance.

Talking of Snaps, the containerised app packages that have been divisive among users for being convenient but slow and buggy, Kinetic’s Steam snap comes with the latest version of Mesa, an open-source graphics library that bundles OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan and more into one package. Linux gaming is increasing in popularity, particularly since the launch of the Steam Deck, and useful packages like Mesa just make it easier.

Users of single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi are catered for too, with a release also being provided for our favorite single board computer. If your SBC preferences is for alternative CPUs, 22.10 has support for more RISC-V processors included. Interestingly the press release mentions support for MicroPython on a variety of microcontrollers, including the Raspberry Pi Pico W. this support boils down to software packages being available in the official repositories. There's also a lean toward Internet of Things development, with updated toolchains for Ruby, Go, GCC and the Rust programming language. “Connected devices are an exciting area of innovation that also create new digital risks in the home and the business,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Ubuntu parent company Canonical. “We are focused on enabling a new generation of easy to use and highly secure IoT, so these developers in particular will find a number of quality of life improvements for embedded device and remote development in Ubuntu 22.10.”

Ubuntu 22.10 is available for download and installation on x86 and compatible Arm or RISC-V devices starting today.

Is there a “most beautiful” category on our best gaming keyboards page? Well, there will be, and it’ll go to Roccat’s new Vulcan II Max. 

Which. Is. Gorgeous. 

The Vulcan II Max is the full-size version of the recently-launched Vulcan II Mini, and it sports many of the same features: Roccat’s Titan II optical switches (in linear Red or tactile Brown), 24 “smart” dual-LED switches, an anodized aluminum top plate, and Roccat’s signature “organic” Aimo lighting experience. It also comes with a detachable translucent wrist rest that serves as a conduit for the keyboard’s lighting, and the effect is...hypnotizing. 

Okay, it’s not perfect. It suffers from some of the same issues the Vulcan II Mini suffered from; though its roomier layout means some of these problems (such as the convoluted button duplicator feature) aren’t as significant. But if Roccat is trying to distract me with a dazzling light show — well, success. 

The Vulcan II Max is available now in both black and white colorways (though the wrist rest looks better paired with the white version), for $230. 

Roccat Vulcan II Max Specs

 Design and Construction of the Vulcan II Max

 The Vulcan II Max is a full-size wired keyboard with a slim, lightweight plastic chassis and an anodized aluminum top plate. It measures 18.23 x 6.0625 inches (463 x 154mm) and comes with a 3.25-inch (82.6mm) detachable wrist rest — it’s not the best keyboard if space is a concern. Our review model came in white, which has a white chassis and white keycaps and a matte silver top plate with a shiny, mirrored border.  

 The Vulcan II Max sports three dedicated media keys in the upper left corner (rewind, play/pause, and fast forward), as well as a volume knob. The volume knob is notched, with tactile feedback, and is also clickable (mute/unmute). The media keys and volume knob cannot be remapped.  

Although the Vulcan II Max is fairly lightweight at just 2.29 pounds (1040g), it has large anti-slip strips on its back that prevent it from moving around as you type. It also has two sets of flip-out feet (each with anti-slip strips) for three levels of tilt adjustment.  

 The Vulcan II Max comes with a detachable translucent wrist rest, which measures 18.23 x 3.25 inches (463 x 82.6mm) and has a smooth, matte finish. It’s perhaps slightly lower than I would prefer, but it offers decent palm and wrist support otherwise.  

 The wrist rest is made of ribbed, translucent silicone and attaches to the keyboard via silicone tabs that slide into the slots along the bottom. There are 16 tabs (six of which feature notches to “lock” the wrist rest in place), which act as a conduit for the keyboard’s lighting — and the effect is very pretty, especially with Roccat’s Aimo lighting enabled.  

 The wrist rest isn’t particularly plush, but it’s beautiful and I love it.  

The keyboard is wired and has a fixed six-foot (1.8m) braided cable with dual USB-A connectors. There are no pass-through ports; the dual connectors are to ensure the keyboard receives enough power for its lighting effects. According to Roccat, the keyboard should be fine if connected to one USB 3.0 port, but may not receive enough power for some power-hungry lighting effects from just one USB 2.0 port.  

While this is understandable — especially considering 24 of the Vulcan II Max’s keys have dual LEDs — I’m not thrilled with a keyboard that takes up two USB ports.  I didn’t have any issues plugging the keyboard into just one USB 2.0 port, however.  

Typing and Gaming Experience on the Vulcan II Max 

The Vulcan II Max features Roccat’s Titan II optical switches in Red (linear) or Brown (tactile). Our review unit came with linear switches, which have a smooth, uniform keypress with no tactile “bump” or audible click. 

Optical switches are actuated via light rather than physical force — so while optical switches usually lack the tactile feel and feedback typists crave, they’re easier to press, faster, and more durable than traditional mechanical switches. Roccat’s Titan II switches have a lifecycle rating of 100 million keypresses — twice that of traditional mechanical switches and the same as competitors’ optical switches. 

The Vulcan II Max has thin, lightweight ABS keycaps that expose the keyboard’s switches. The keycaps are lightly dished but still pretty flat and slippery, which makes them less-than-ideal for people who are prone to sweating and/or used to typing on keyboards with more tactile feedback. The Titan II optical switches are compatible with third-party cross mounted keycaps, though, so you can always swap them out.  

Typing on the Vulcan II Max was — unsurprisingly — very similar to typing on the Vulcan II Mini. The combination of linear optical switches and thin, light, slippery ABS keycaps made for an overall mediocre typing experience, even if I didn’t suffer a significant hit to speed or accuracy. But this isn’t a major drawback, because the Vulcan II Max is, first and foremost, a gaming keyboard. 

The Vulcan II Max is much more suited to gaming than it is to typing, thanks to its smooth, speedy linear optical switches. The slick keycaps did help my fingers slide quickly around the board, but I don’t sweat very much — the keycaps would definitely be too slick if I’d been sweating at all. Speed is important, but so is accuracy.  

 Features & Software of the Roccat Vulcan II Max

The Vulcan II Max features 24 “smart” multi-function keys with dual-LEDs, most of which ship with default secondary keybinds. The dual LEDs light up to indicate which secondary functions are active, and can also change colors to display real-time information, such as headset or mouse battery life. 

The keyboard also features Roccat’s “Easy-Shift” button duplicator technology, which gives you a second layer of functionality; this is sort of like Razer’s HyperShift and SteelSeries’ SS key, but for some reason Roccat has decided to implement their version in the most confusing way possible. Most of the Vulcan II Max’s keys can have custom secondary keybinds, but some are implemented with the Fn key and some are implemented with Easy-Shift — the latter of which requires Game Mode to be toggled on. Since Game Mode also allows for some remapping, you sort of end up with three layers of functionality, but at that point you’ll probably be too confused to remember what’s remapped to what, and it won’t be very useful anyway. 

Luckily, this is a full-size keyboard, so the second- and third-layers of functionality aren’t nearly as critical as they are in a smaller layout. 

Key remapping and lighting settings can be performed in Roccat Swarm, Roccat’s universal companion software. I’ll be frank — I hate Roccat Swarm. Not only does it have settings nobody should ever even consider using, such as options to add artificial typing sounds to your keyboard, it’s quite possibly one of the least intuitive and most confusing pieces of peripheral software I’ve ever used (and, as we know, I am not a fan of peripheral software). 

Luckily, the Vulcan II Max has onboard memory and can store up to five profiles, so you can fight your way through the jungle that is Roccat Swarm, save your settings to the hardware, and (hopefully) never have to deal with it again.  

Bottom Line 

The Roccat Vulcan II Max is gorgeous. If you’re looking for a keyboard that will give you a bright, beautiful light show, this is it — everything about this keyboard is pretty much designed to dazzle you with lights, from the switch-exposing keycaps to the dual-LED switches to the included silicone wrist rest. In addition to being mesmerizing to look at, the Vulcan II Max also offers up decent performance — it may not be the best keyboard for typing (but no linear optical switch is); and it’s an excellent gaming keyboard thanks to its speedy optical actuation and built-in secondary functions. 

That said, if you’re not wowed by pretty lights, this probably isn’t the keyboard for you. For one thing, the lights may cost you two USB 2.0 ports, depending on what lighting effects you choose. Also, while the Vulcan II Max’s built-in secondary functions are useful, programming any customizable secondary functions is a chore, thanks to Roccat’s confusing implementation and unintuitive software. 

MORE: Best Gaming Keyboards

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YouTube channel Benchmark Lab has decided to test Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 4090 in a unique fashion — by pitting it against two RTX 3090s in SLI. 

That's right, SLI — Nvidia's obsolete multi-GPU tech that Benchmark Labs managed to run using some unknown SLI-enablement magic. The channel was able to run SLI decently well in several DX11, DX12, and Vulkan titles, but ultimately the 3090s couldn't beat the RTX 4090 (though they got close). 

Before we jump to the results, it's worth noting that all of this should be taken with a grain (or several) of salt. SLI has been unsupported for years at this point, and getting it to work with most modern titles — especially with DX12 and Vulkan — would require...unorthodox methods. We're not sure how Benchmark Lab managed to enable SLI in most of the games tested — again, specifically the DX12 versions — or if the results were doctored or extrapolated. That said, the results are pretty interesting (if they are, indeed, accurate). 

Benchmark Lab tested 9 games: Spider-Man Remastered, Cyberpunk 2077, Watch Dogs Legion, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, Minecraft RTX, God of War, Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Read Dead Redemption 2. Testing was performed at 4k resolution using a variety of different quality settings and DLSS modes. 

In Spider-Man Remastered, with maxed out settings (Ray Tracing and DLSS Balanced mode enabled), the RTX 3090s in SLI achieved 80 - 85 frames per second (fps) on average, while the RTX 4090 managed a noticeably higher 95 fps average. 

In Cyberpunk 2077, with maxed out settings (Ray Tracing and DLSS Balanced mode enabled), the RTX 3090s in SLI managed 50 fps while the RTX 4090 averaged 70 fps.

In Watch Dogs: Legion, with maxed out settings (Ray Tracing and DLSS Quality mode enabled) the gap closed a little: the RTX 3090s in SLI averaged 73 fps, while the RTX 4090 averaged 80 fps.

The results were even closer in Microsoft Flight Simulator with maxed out settings (Ray Tracing and DLSS Quality mode enabled). The RTX 3090s in SLI averaged 80 fps, while the RTX 4090 averaged 83 - 85 fps. (However, note that Microsoft Flight Simulator is known to be CPU-bound, especially at higher frame rates.)

In Minecraft RTX, with max settings (Ray Tracing enabled), the RTX 3090s in SLI averaged 70 fps while the RTX 4090 hit a slightly higher average of 75 fps. And in God of War at max settings (DLSS Quality mode enabled), the RTX 3090s in SLI hit an average of 103 fps while the RTX 4090 did quite a bit better with an average of 120 fps.

For the rest of the titles, check out the video below: 

RTX 3090 SLI Is The Only Setup That Can Get Close To The RTX 4090

With the exception of the Cyberpunk 2077 results, the RTX 3090s in SLI were around 8 - 15% slower than the RTX 4090. For an SLI implementation, this isn't bad at all — and it's the only GPU configuration we've seen so far that can get close to the RTX 4090's performance bracket. For some perspective, the next-closest GPU is the RTX 3090 Ti — which trails the 4090 by over 50% based on our tests. 

Sadly, the 3090s in SLI setup wasn't being used to its full potential, as the secondary 3090 consistently maxed out at 45% utilization. This is one of the pitfalls of SLI setups, in which bad optimization leads to less-than-superb GPU utilization on the secondary card. In theory, if we could get anywhere close to 100% utilization on both GPUs, we would probably see the 3090s in SLI outperform the 4090 by a good margin. 

But the chances of that happening are extremely unlikely, since Nvidia officially killed off SLI in the form of physical bridges with the RTX 40 series. SLI support has dwindled so much over the past several years that it's basically only useful in synthetic benchmarks at this point. 

There are technically ways of enabling SLI (unofficially) in games that don't support it — like in the case of the benchmarks seen in this video. But these results are unpredictable at best, and usually result in system instability or severe micro-stuttering problems while gaming. 

There is some hope for SLI, however. Multi-GPU workloads are very common in the enterprise space, and Nvidia even has multi-GPU technologies that don't require an NVLink or SLI bridge. 

On the gaming side, modern APIs such as DX12 and Vulkan do have the capability to render frames to two completely different GPUs in tandem. So there's a chance multi-GPU tech might make its way back to the gaming space, eventually (but whether developers want to support multi-GPU technology for gaming is a different story). 

Intel has today released drivers for its new Arc Alchemist discrete graphics boards, including the rather midrange A770 and the A750 (a card that can go toe-to-toe with Nvidia's 3060). These provide a third competitor in the race for the best graphics cards, though we're not quite ready to give Intel a spot.

The drivers also brings improvements for those running older Intel integrated GPUs on its 11th and 12th-gen processors. The drivers support both Windows 10 and 11, and offer fixes for games such as Marvel’s Spider-Man, Overwatch 2, and Deathloop.

Lisa Pearce, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Visual Compute Group, posted a celebratory video for the launch of the latest cards. Should you wish to avail yourself of a new Arc board, the A770 and A750 are now available, including some from partners such as ASRock, but stocks appear limited. Part of the attraction may be a recently announced bundle netting new owners a copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II on Battle.net, plus creative applications and Gotham Knights, Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, and The Settlers through Intel Gaming Access.

The driver package also brings with it the latest version of Arc Control, along with XeSS AI-enhanced upscaling to those with GPUs that support it. The download acts as the launch driver for Arc A770 and A750 boards, and owners of the A770 Limited Edition can also use the Arc RGB Controller to control the LEDs in their graphics card.

Fixes include Marvel’s Spider-Man no longer crashing when asked to do ray-tracing, no more color corruption in Total Warhammer III, an end to stuttering in Overwatch 2, while crashing issues in Battlefield 2042 multiplayer matches have also been rectified.

It does bring a few issues of its own, however. Set Marvel’s Spider-Man to use HBAO+ under DirectX 12 and you may get scene corruption, while Adobe Premiere Pro users may not be able to use the GPU for playback acceleration. Similarly, A380 owners lack hardware acceleration in Adobe Lightroom, and there's a crash bug in Affinity Photo. Arc Control has problems scaling between 1080p and 4K resolutions, may cause application windows to be blank when using CMAA anti-aliasing, and may fail to update itself correctly.

It’s still early days for Intel’s discrete GPUs, in other words, and these are just the sort of issues we should expect. If you prefer to not be a beta tester for the next several months, it would be wise to hold off on hopping aboard the Arc.

The driver supports DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL 4.6, and OpenCL 3.0, as well as version 1.7 of Intel’s oneAPI Level Zero, and 2.7 of the oneAPI video processing library. The file, version number 31.0.101.3490, is available as either a self-installing .exe file or as a .zip from the Intel website, while the release notes can be read as a PDF here.

With global stocks of Raspberry Pi not being so plentiful, Raspberry Pi alternatives are becoming more and more attractive to makers. StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC that crowdfunded over the summer is finally available to preorder in several configurations depending on what your networking needs are, with plenty of Linux support.

The board is an upgrade from the VisionFive 1 . VisionFive2 is built around SiFive’s U74 quad-core 64bit RV64GC running at 1.5Ghz. It’s almost the same chip as in the VisionFive 1, but that was a dual-core version. There's a choice of RAM - 2, 4 or 8GB of LPDDR4 - and an Imagination Technologies GPU that supports OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan. The VisionFive 1 was fixed at 8GB of RAM, and didn’t have a GPU.

Thanks to that video processor, VisionFive 2’s visual outputs are more useful than its predecessor, which was stuck at 1080p. The VisionFive 2 can output 4K over its HDMI port, and can decode video at the same resolution in either H264 or H265. There's a MIPI display output too, which can do 2K at 30FPS. Storage comes via an eMMC socket, or a micro SD card.

There's no built-in wireless networking on the VisionFive 2, but you can slot in a Wi-Fi / Bluetooth M.2 networking module. Ethernet fans can specify a board with either one or two ports, one gigabit, the other 10/100 - though a dual-gigabit version has also been promised. There's a pair of USB 3.0 ports for further expansion, plus some 2.0 sockets for a mouse and keyboard, and you can connect cameras via MIPI CSI. The board measures 100 x 72mm (3.9in x 2.8in) and comes with a 5V USB-C power adapter. A 40-pin GPIO header can be seen sprouting from the PCB too.

Linux support for RISC-V boards continues to expand. The original VisionFive launched with just Fedora support, but the VisionFive 2 has that and Debian at launch, with Ubuntu and openSUSE to come, according to the Kickstarter. 

The VisionFive 2 is available for pre-order now, starting at $65, from stores including AmeriDroid and Allnet China. Delivery is expected in December this year for some variants, and February 2023 for others.

Chinese GPU start-up Moore Threads has taken the very significant step of shipping its first graphics cards, according to a report published by PC Watch. The fledgling MTT S10 graphics card is listed on Taobao, a Chinese retail site for 800 Chinese Yuan, noted the source, but didn’t provide any seller links. Moore Threads is a particularly interesting Chinese “unicorn” start-up, as it is well funded and aims to market “fully featured” domestic GPUs. Moreover, its core engineering team is purportedly laden with ex-Nvidia talent. Conversely, Chinese GPU rival MetaX Tech is said to be majority staffed with engineers who have previous experience at AMD.

Moore Threads isn’t afraid of announcing products, but so far this MTT S10 graphics card appears to be the first to actually hit retail. Back in March, Moore Threads announced the MTT S60 for PC desktop and the MTT S2000 for server markets. Neither of those products have been seen since, but now the little MTT S10 is here we could shortly see some independent third party views on the abilities and performance of the underlying MUSA graphics architecture.

The Moore Threads MTT S10 is an admittedly low-power discrete GPU and highly unlikely to make our list of best gaming GPUs. According to the official website’s product pages, the MTT S10 targets “digital office” workloads. It is small in size, and low power consumption. Nevertheless it still supports multiple 3D graphics APIs such as OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan – as well as accelerating online WebGL. It has 2D appeal too, with support for HDMI 2.1 output to 4K 60HZ monitors, accelerated support for AV1, H.265, and H.264 video codecs and video conferencing.

When the Moore Threads MTT S60 and MTT S200 launched we managed to dig up some key tech specs but we aren’t so lucky with the perhaps low-key launch of this entry-level product. All we know about the MTT S10 is that it: uses the 12nm MUSA architecture for wide 3D, 2D, and codec support; it has a TDP of just 30W; the GPU clock is 1 GHz; it uses LPDDR4 memory; has a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface; and the half-height board pictured comes with just one HDMI 2.1 port and one D-Sub VGA connector. Sadly, we can’t find the MTT S10’s quota of GPU cores, estimated TFLOPS performance, nor even its VRAM amount.

Remember, the MTT S60 is being heralded by Moore Threads as an all rounder, capable enough for content creation and enjoying PC gaming. It was demonstrated at launch playing League of Legends with various enhanced graphics features and filters applied. The newly released MTT S10 might only offer half the GPU cores and VRAM though, we don’t know at the time of writing. We will be watching Chinese sources and social media for further information and any tests of More Threads first available GPU.

If you unearth the MTT S10 on Taobao and it ships to your location, it reportedly costs 800 Chinese Yuan, equivalent to approximately $112 or £100.

Deskspace comes at a premium these days — at least, that’s what you might think with the way gaming companies are dropping mini keyboards left and right. Gamers looking for the best gaming keyboard aren’t usually considering ultra-compact 60 or 65 percent form factors, but maybe they should be as companies are packing these mini-boards with features.

Roccat’s new Vulcan II Mini is a 65 percent wired keyboard with bright, eye-catching per-key RGB, which it shows off with unique Dual-LED smart switches and Roccat’s attractive “organic” Aimo lighting experience. The Vulcan II Mini features the company’s Titan II optical red (linear) switches which have n-key rollover (NKRO) with 100% anti-ghosting, as well as an anodized aluminum top plate. The keyboard comes in both black and white (we requested our review model in white — just to mix it up), and is available now for $150.

Design and Construction of the Vulcan II Mini

The Vulcan II Mini is a 65 percent keyboard — it’s ultra-compact, but it’s not ultra-compact. Unlike a keyboard with a 60 percent layout, such as the SteelSeries Apex Pro Mini or the Corsair K70 Pro Mini Wireless, the Vulcan II Mini’s layout retains arrow keys and a handful of navigation keys (delete, home, page up, and page down). This makes it slightly longer than a 60 percent board, but at 12.75 inches long by 4.57 inches deep, the Vulcan II Mini is still pretty tiny. It’s also slimmer than both of the aforementioned 60 percent boards (1.22 inches thick vs the Apex Pro Mini/K70 Pro Mini Wireless’ 1.59 inches) and lighter (1.1lbs vs the Apex Pro Mini’s 1.2lbs and the K70 Pro Mini Wireless’ 1.42lbs), so it feels pretty lightweight overall. 

The Vulcan II Mini is housed in a lightweight plastic chassis topped with an anodized aluminum backplate. The underside of the chassis features dual flip-out feet for angle adjustment, as well as long rubber strips for grip — allowing the keyboard to stay put (despite its relatively light weight) through aggressive bouts of typing and gaming.

The Vulcan II Mini comes in both black and white colorways; I requested a review model in white because all of the black mini keyboards are starting to blend together at this point. However, I don’t think even the black version of the Vulcan II Mini would look like recent competitor drops, as Roccat’s slim keycaps and exposed switches definitely make this keyboard stand out visually. 

The keyboard features white ABS keycaps with translucent legends — including translucent secondary legends for the board’s 30 multi-function keys with preset secondary functions. Secondary functions are a must on an ultra-compact keyboard, but a couple of this keyboard’s secondary functions used symbols that weren’t immediately intuitive 

According to Roccat, this keyboard features the world’s first Dual-LED smart switches, which is...basically what it sounds like: Two LEDs in one switch. Is it revolutionary? Not really. Does it work? Yes — each Dual-LED smart switch can display two different LED colors (north and south). This causes the primary legend (north) and secondary legend (south) to light up in different colors (or at different brightness levels), so you can quickly see which secondary functions are active. 

It’s not totally seamless, however: Because the Vulcan II Mini’s switches are exposed, the south-facing LEDs are very visible to the user. This isn’t an issue if those LEDs are turned off/down, but it does make for a somewhat jarring aesthetic if they’re set to a different color. This is a pretty minor overall concern, but it was jarring enough that I initially thought some of the keys were experiencing a hardware malfunction.

The keyboard’s per-key RGB is otherwise very attractive, assuming you are an RGB enthusiast. The RGB is bright and vibrant, and the keyboard’s exposed switches let you basically bathe in it. It ships with Roccat’s Aimo lighting profile, which is a “state-of-the-art intelligent lighting system” that allegedly reacts “organically” to your behavior as well as the apps and devices you use. I didn’t necessarily see it reacting to my behavior beyond animations that followed my keystrokes (which doesn’t seem particularly intelligent), but the colorful, non-uniform patterns were pretty regardless. 

The Vulcan II Mini is a wired keyboard and has a USB-C port at its top-center. It comes with a six-foot braided USB-C to USB-A cable which has a couple of nice touches — an attached velcro cable tie, and its USB-A connector is labeled with a keyboard icon for easy cable identification.

Specifications

Typing Experience and Gaming Experience on the Vulcan II Mini

The Vulcan II Mini sports Roccat’s Titan II Optical Red linear switches; optical means they’re actuated by light (not force), while linear means there’s no click or tactile bump — just a smooth, uniform keypress. The switches are rated for 100 million keystrokes, and have an actuation point of 1.4mm and a travel distance of 3.6mm.

Typing on the Vulcan II Mini was a little better than expected, but this isn’t a keyboard I’d recommend for overall typing experience. The keyboard’s thin ABS keycaps are a little too lightweight and fluttery for the type of loud, decisive typing I’m prone to, and as a result my speed took a hit (104 wpm, down from 120 wpm — similar to my typing speed on the SteelSeries Apex Pro Mini). My accuracy remained pretty high, however (97.1%, which is typical for me), and I think it’s because the space between the keys — which is slightly larger than average — managed to prevent my fingers from hitting adjacent keys even as they slipped. 

The Vulcan II Mini’s Titan II Optical Red linear switches are much better-suited to gaming. The linear lack of resistance and snappy optical responsiveness — even the speedy bounceback of the lightweight keycaps — allows you to make lightning-quick keypresses and fly around the keyboard without missing a stroke. Speed and (relative) accuracy are especially important on keyboards like the Vulcan II Mini if you play any games that require more than what the ultra-compact layout allows for — you need to be able to zip in and out of the first and second (and third) layers of functionality. 

The only small complaint I had regarding gaming on the Vulcan II Mini is with its keycap material. The keycaps themselves are very lightly dished — enough to keep your fingers comfortable while typing — but caps’ ABS surface is pretty slick to begin with and only gets slicker as gaming ramps up. I actually sweat very little (in gaming, and also in general), and the Vulcan II Mini’s keycaps were frustratingly slippery during fast-paced action. If you sweat at all, this may not be the keyboard (or, well, these may not be the keycaps) for you.

Features and Software of the Vulcan II Mini

The Vulcan II Mini ships with a number of preset secondary functions (as indicated by the secondary legends) and Roccat’s Aimo RGB lighting profile. But because some of the secondary legends aren’t inherently intuitive, most people will probably want to dig a little deeper and download Roccat’s companion app, Swarm. Swarm is Roccat’s universal peripherals app for remapping keys, setting up onboard profiles, checking for firmware and driver updates, and customizing your device’s RGB lighting.

Like most peripheral apps, Swarm is not the most straightforward or intuitive piece of software you’ll ever use. The Vulcan II Mini does have onboard storage (five profiles), however, so you don’t need to use Swarm for anything past initial configuration. Swarm has some general features you probably won’t use, such as sound feedback — including typing sounds (yes, through your PC) that you can turn on if you...really want to.

But for the most part, you’ll want to turn to Swarm to program (and decipher) the Vulcan II Mini’s many secondary functions. I say “many,” because there are...many — too many. The Vulcan II Mini has three types of secondary keybinds — Fn keys, Game Mode, and Easy-Shift — and yes, they overlap and yet are all still somehow...secondary.

For the keyboard’s default secondary functions (the ones labeled on the keys), you’ll use the Fn key. These keys’ secondary functions can be remapped, though the legends will obviously remain the same. There are 30 Fn keys, all of which have Dual-LED lighting and secondary legends. Only 27 can have their secondary functions remapped (the the three that cannot be changed are the Windows key, which toggle Game Mode; the tab key, which switches onboard profiles; and the right Ctrl key, which turns off the keyboard’s RGB lighting.

Pressing the Fn key plus the Windows key toggles Game Mode. Game Mode is something you’ll find on a lot of gaming keyboards. There’s no universal standard, but Game Mode usually disables keys that, if accidentally pressed, would disrupt your gaming experience. This almost always includes the Windows key, and may also include combinations such as Alt + F4 or Alt + Tab. Roccat’s Game Mode disables the Windows key but is otherwise customizable — you can program almost all of the Vulcan II Mini’s keys in Game Mode, though there are some limitations — non-Fn keys can only be remapped with single keys. Your Game Mode keybindings will be primary while Game Mode is toggled on.

While Game Mode is toggled on, you can access Roccat’s Easy-Shift, which is a second...secondary layer of functionality. You can use Easy-Shift to add a secondary keybind to any non-Fn key, and you can access that secondary keybind using the Easy-Shift key, which is the Caps Lock key by default (you can disable this but you can’t change it, except to swap Easy-Shift for an Easy-Shift toggle). Again, this only works for non-Fn keys — you can still access secondary Fn functionality, you’ll just need to use the Fn key.

Does this sound incredibly confusing? Yes, it’s incredibly confusing and completely unintuitive, all to end up with essentially the same features and programmability competitors offer. SteelSeries’ Apex Pro Mini, for example, lets you remap almost all primary and secondary keybinds (all secondary keybinds are accessed with just one “SS” (Fn) key). The Vulcan II Mini lets you remap almost all primary keybinds — but only in Game Mode, and with limitations on non-Fn keys — and almost all secondary keybinds — but splits it into approximately half with the Fn key, and half with the Easy-Shift key, which is only accessible in Game Mode.

The Bottom Line

Software-based frustrations aside, the Roccat Vulcan II Mini is unexpectedly appealing. It doesn’t look quite as, I don’t know, business-chic as the all-black minimalist bricks we’ve been seeing from other companies, but I kind of like the Vulcan II Mini’s slim, lightweight design, exposed switches, and pretty but admittedly ostentatious RGB lighting. I understand there’s not a lot of room for design creativity in an ultra-compact 60 or 65 percent layout, but you can’t tell me the Apex Pro Mini (and the recently-launched Apex 9 Mini), K70 Pro Wireless, HyperX Alloy Origins 65, and Asus ROG Falchion NX (to name a few) are easily distinguishable.

In addition to being slightly different-looking and very well-lit, the Vulcan II Mini is comfortable for typing, speedy and responsive for gaming, and while its keycaps might be a little too slick, they can always be swapped out. Also, while I found Roccat Swarm to be clunky and convoluted, I can’t say I’m a big fan of any other company’s peripheral software. If you’re looking for an ultra-compact keyboard, the Vulcan II Mini is pretty and a solid performer — for something more unique-looking, you’ll probably need to move onto a custom kit such as the IRISLabs Jris65.

Intel Arc A750 and A770 are about to reset pricing expectations on October 12. Intel Arc Alchemist has been in development for several years, and after delays and misstarts, we're finally in the home stretch. The Arc A770 and A750 will launch on October 12, and they're setting their sights firmly on the midrange market for the best graphics cards.

Intel provided additional details on what we'll see when the cards arrive in just a couple of weeks. Earlier this week, during the Intel Innovation keynote, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed a starting price of $329 for the A770. But which A770 was Pat referring to?

It's the A770 8GB model, to the surprise of no one, but the other Arc A700-series cards are priced equally aggressively. Intel's own Arc A770 16GB Limited Edition will cost $349, just $20 more than the baseline A770 8GB. $20 for double the memory? Yes, we'll take that in a heartbeat, even if it probably won't matter that much in most games, at least today. But the bigger deal is arguably the Arc A750, which will have 8GB and a starting price of just $289.

Intel's not being shy about performance comparisons, going straight after Nvidia's nominally $329 RTX 3060 — except that actual GPU street pricing for that card still starts at $369. Amazon has the PNY RTX 3060 XLR8 for $377, while Newegg has the MSI RTX 3060 Ventus for $369 (plus a 15% off code right now if you hurry). That might be the first time we've seen an RTX 3060 go for less than its MSRP since it first launched in January 2021.

Even at price parity, though, Intel still thinks it may have the upper hand. To that end, it provided a full suite of 67 gaming benchmarks with the A770, A750, and RTX 3060. The games were tested at both 1440p high and 1080p ultra, which seems a reasonable target for midrange hardware.

Intel also provided several "bang for the buck" slides showing the A770 and A750 going up against the RTX 3060, but the catch is that it used a "current" price of $418 for the RTX 3060. That might have been the going rate for the card last month, but GPU prices are quite volatile right now, and we're able to find much better prices just one week after Intel collected its data.

As with all manufacturer-provided benchmarks, we can't vouch for the performance data shown in this slide. Intel tested both cards with a Core i9-12900K, 32GB of memory, and an Asus Z690 DDR5 motherboard. While it didn't show the raw framerates, even the lower-priced Arc A750 showed generally better performance across the test suite.

Intel made a point of testing games that use all three major graphics APIs as well: DirectX 12, Vulkan, and DirectX 11. Games that support DX12 or Vulkan were tested using that API, as for Intel that generally means better performance. That might not be true of the RTX 3060, however, where DX11 at times still runs better than DX12 or Vulkan — again, a dose of skepticism is certainly warranted.

DX11-only games not surprisingly remain the lowest performing class overall, with about ten of the 17 games in that group showing better performance on the 3060. The DX12 titles meanwhile showed Intel Arc A750 leading in 32 of the 43 tested games, and in Vulkan the A750 was ahead in six of the seven games.

Unlike AMD, Intel isn't obviously avoiding comparisons in ray tracing games. It also showed off performance in 17 different games that use ray tracing. Even there, an area where Nvidia has traditionally reigned supreme for the past four years, the Arc A770 was faster in 13 of the tests.

Intel also discussed how building the Arc drivers using the integrated drivers as the starting point proved problematic. It's worked hard over the past several months to improve the situation, and that's beginning to pay off. The DX12 Optimized titles are games where Intel has specifically delivered targeted performance improvements, while the other DX12 games are just using standard code. As time passes, a lot more games should start to fall into the "optimized" category, with commensurate performance.

The full details of the Arc desktop lineup remain unchanged, but it's nice to see the A580 still waiting in the wings. That won't be launching on October 12 alongside the A700 cards, but given the $289 price point on the A750, we can't help but wonder how low Intel will go. $249 would put it right against the RTX 3050 and RX 6600, though AMD's card easily outclasses the 3050 at that price point.

That brings up another interesting topic: How do the Arc A750 and A770 fare against AMD's RX 6650 XT starting at $300? That's typically 10–20% faster than the RTX 3060, according to our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, at least in our standard non-ray tracing test suite. (In the DXR suite, the 3060 ends up being 25–30% faster.) Things could be close, which is why we still need to run the benchmarks ourselves. That will be happening over the next two weeks as we prepare for the retail launch.

There are other things to consider as well. Standard apples-to-apples gaming performance is a good starting point, but Nvidia has a lot of games with DLSS support now available. At present, there are only a few XeSS-enabled games. Intel showed performance improvements ranging from 37% to as much as double the fps with XeSS Performance mode at 1440p.

We tested Shadow of the Tomb Raider with XeSS earlier this week, and a few other games are now publicly available with XeSS support (like Death Stranding). On the A380, XeSS was a bit problematic, but Intel says a lot of that might be due to trying to scale down the algorithm to a significantly slower GPU. We'll see how it does on the faster Arc GPUs soon enough.

But now Nvidia has DLSS 3 waiting in the wings, clearly trying to stay one step ahead of the competition. That's not coming to RTX 3060, however, and who knows when we'll see an RTX 40-series competitor to Arc A770 (our guess: next spring).

Intel Arc GPUs are set to launch in just a couple of weeks, and we're excited to test them out and see how they stack up to the AMD and Nvidia competition. We're also glad to see a potential true mid-range GPU launch for the first time in far too long. Intel almost certainly wouldn't have priced Arc this low had it been ready six months ago, but fears that it might try to stick to earlier rumored pricing are at least safely put to rest now.

As Intel shifts from the Alchemist launch over to Battlemage, which it once again reiterated is where most of the graphics team is now working, we can only hope it will execute better on Arc. The A750 and A770 both look promising right now, and we'll see them in action soon enough. But at this point, we're now looking on to AMD RDNA 3 and Nvidia Ada Lovelace. The sooner Battlemage can join the fray, the better.

The full presentation deck can be viewed below. Again, performance per dollar data needs to be taken with a healthy helping of salt, as the 3060 prices have dropped potentially $40 or more in the interim. And who knows where they'll be in two more weeks when Intel's competing cards officially arrive?

TeamGroup has introduced its first memory modules specifically designed for AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7000-series 'Raphael' processors. The company's Vulcanα DDR5 memory lineup not only features a DDR5-6000 speed bin — which AMD claims to be the sweet spot for the Raphael CPUs — but also comes with Extended Profiles for Overclocking (EXPO) settings to simplify high-speed memory modules setup. 

TeamGroup's Vulcanα (Vulcan Alpha) family of memory modules includes three dual-channel kits: 16GB DDR5-5200 CL38 at 1.25V, 32GB DDR5-5600 CL40 at 1.20V, and 'sweet spot' 32GB DDR5-6000 CL38 at 1.25V. The modules are equipped with serial presence detect chips containing AMD-specific EXPO profiles that enable optimized high-performance settings and JEDEC standard profiles for compatibility.

All of TeamGroup's Vulcanα DDR5 memory modules — which might end up in our best memory modules list — are based on DRAM chips that are capable of working at high data transfer rates and come equipped with aluminum heat spreaders that are meant to cool down the memory devices, power management IC (PMIC), and voltage regulating module. 

AMD's Ryzen CPU architectures have specific requirements for optimal memory performance when overclocked. For years, it was almost vital to maintain a 1:1:1 ratio with the Infinity Fabric Clock (FCLK), unified memory controller clock (UCLK), and memory clock (MEMCLK). With the Ryzen 7000-series, it is essential to maintain a 1:1 ratio for UCLK and MEMCLK, whereas FCLK may be set to Auto. Avid PC enthusiasts know that DDR5 memory has to work at high data transfer rates to show tangible performance improvement over DDR4. However, making a memory controller run at extreme speeds may be tricky.  

AMD believes that DDR5-6000 mode may be the sweet spot for its Ryzen 7000-based platforms as it provides high performance and does not stress the memory controller too hard. However, remember that this is still overclocking, and its results are never guaranteed. Yet, with AMD's EXPO profiles, setting up DDR5-6000 modules with the correct timings and voltages should be easy. 

TeamGroup did not reveal when it plans to start sales of its Vulcanα dual-channel DDR5 memory kits. Still, something tells us that the company is motivated to release these parts sooner rather than later as enthusiasts will be eager to buy modules with AMD's EXPO profiles for their shiny new AM5 platforms running Ryzen 7000-series processors. 

As for pricing, it will depend on exact market conditions (read supply-demand balance and competitors' prices). However, expect Vulcanα offerings to belong to the premium segment of TeamGroup's product lineup.

Regarding the best graphics cards, compatibility is just as important as performance. While AMD and Nvidia don't have many issues in that department, Intel's Arc Alchemist still has some kinks to work out since the company's graphics cards struggle with legacy APIs.

Unlike other publications focusing on the Arc A380's performance, German news outlet PC Games Hardware took the graphics card for a spin through 50 games that launched between 1999 and 2022. The site used Gunnir's Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC for the tests, one of three custom Arc A380 models available on the market.

Overall, the Arc A380's compatibility across the 50 titles was pretty decent, considering the state of Intel's Arc drivers. The graphics card only had problems with nine games out of the 50 that PC Games Hardware tested. If we want to simplify the results, Arc A380 would have issues with every 1 out of 5 games. It's not an awful ratio, but Intel's drivers ultimately have a lot of optimization headroom.

It did surprise us that the Arc A380 didn't play nice with Doom Eternal, Quake 2 RTX, Halo Infinite, or Spider-Man Remastered, considering that these titles leverage the Vulkan or DirectX 12 APIs. Of course, Arc should work remarkably with games on modern APIs. But then again, let's not confuse performance with compatibility.

PC Games Hardware's results also revealed that Arc runs flawlessly on APIs that precede DirectX 12. Popular games, such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (DirectX 9) or The Witcher 3 (DirectX 11), worked without hiccups. However, it's surprising that the German publication left out other most-played Steam, including Dota 2 (DirectX 11), Apex Legends (DirectX 11), and Lost Ark (DirectX 11), out of its testings.

Do remember that PC Games Hardware tested for compatibility. Performance, on the other hand, is another story. Intel has admitted that Arc performs poorly on DirectX 11 and older APIs. The chipmaker aims to close the performance gap between legacy APIs and DirectX 12, but it's a long work in progress or a "labor of love forever," as Intel Fellow Tom Petersen calls it.

The Arc A380 has been available in China for a couple of months now. The ASRock Challenger Arc A380 model recently arrived on U.S. soil via Newegg for $139.99, and it's already sold out. We're still waiting for Intel's Arc A5 and A7 series, which will hopefully land before the end of the year.

The Arc A380 may not be one of the best graphics cards around. However, Intel's entry-level Arc Alchemist graphics card has what it takes to run Crysis, which was the golden standard for gaming.

YouTuber PCGH Benchmarks & Analysis recently took the Gunnir Arc A380 for a spin in Crysis, which didn't faze the budget Arc graphics card. Do note that this is the original Crysis, which came out 15 years ago, and not Crysis Remastered, which debuted two years ago. Notwithstanding, the decade-old title didn't faze the Arc A380 at all.

The Arc A380 performed admirably in Crysis, delivering over 60 FPS at 1080p (1920x1080) on very high settings and anti-aliasing set to 4x MSAA. We also saw glimpses of the Arc A380 peaking over 80 FPS. Unfortunately, it's public knowledge that Arc doesn't offer outstanding performance outside DirectX12 or Vulkan titles. Nonetheless, the Arc A380 still offered great performance numbers in Crysis, a title that leverages DirectX 10. The YouTuber reported that the game ran beautifully, and we didn't see any frame stuttering.

Intel's current Arc drivers are holding the Arc A380 back, so the graphics card could still have some performance in the tank. Currently, the drivers lack optimization for legacy APIs and require more development to tackle APIs before DirectX 12. However, Intel recently admitted to reusing its integrated graphics software for Arc, which explains why the drivers gimp the performance on Arc Alchemist's discrete graphics card.

At the beginning of the year, Intel had promised to ship river four million discrete graphics cards in 2022. So far, the chipmaker has only released the Arc A380, which is only available in China. The company is still optimistic that it'll be able to get desktop Arc into gamers' hands later this year.

In a new video on its YouTube channel, Intel has shared fresh benchmarks of the chipmaker's upcoming Arc A750 Limited Edition graphics card. According to Intel's 1080p and 1440p results, the Arc A750's performance is on the same level as Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060, one of the best graphics cards.

The cumulative results claim that the Arc A750 delivered up to 3% higher performance than the GeForce RTX 3060 at 1080p and up to 5% in 1440p across 43 DirectX 12 titles. The Arc A750 performed slightly faster than the GeForce RTX 3060 in games that use the Vulkan API as well. Intel recorded up to a 4% performance delta at 1080p and 5% in 1440p in favor of the Arc A750.

Intel hasn't officially revealed the specifications for the Arc A750. However, the graphics card will likely come with 24 Xe cores, 3,072 shaders, and 12GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit interface. In addition, the boost clock speed probably hovers around the 2,300 MHz mark. Meanwhile, Intel used EVGA's GeForce RTX 3060 XC Gaming for comparison, one of the faster custom GeForce RTX 3060 on the market, flaunting a 1,882 MHz boost clock.

Intel benchmarked the Arc A750 and GeForce RTX 3060 identical systems powered by the Core i9-12900K, the current Alder Lake flagship. The testbeds also had 32GB of (2x16GB) Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5-5200 C38 downlocked to 4,800 MHz memory, MP600 Pro XT 4TB SSD. Intel used Windows 11 and the balance power plan for the tests.

One thing to note is that the Arc A750 was on Intel's engineering driver, whereas the GeForce RTX 3060 used the GeForce 516.59 WHQL driver. Arc Alchemist's drivers are still a work in process, so that could be holding the Arc A750 back in the gaming benchmarks. Intel has admitted that Arc underperforms in older APIs, so the company only used DirectX 12 and Vulkan titles.

Intel still has a lot of time to get its driver act together. The company hasn't committed to a specific timeframe for desktop Arc Alchemist's launch. However, the chipmaker stated in a recent blog post, "Intel Arc GPUs are scheduled for release later this year."

According to a recent Intel Q&A, the company confirmed that driver optimizations for Arc GPUs -- relating to poor performance in DirectX 11 and 9 games -- is going to be a constant work in progress with no end goal in mind. Basically, Intel's lack of experience in the discrete GPU driver space will prevent their GPUs from being competitive with older APIs for quite some time.

This was made very apparent by a review from LinusTechTips, where he saw a 50% performance delta between the DX11 and DX12 versions of Shadow of the Tomb Raider running on an Arc A770. In DirectX 11, the A770 only saw around 38FPS, while in DirectX 12 mode, that frame rate bumps up to a whopping 80 FPS.

For the uninitiated, DirectX 11, Direct X 9, and other older APIs behave very differently from the modern ones like DirectX 12 and Vulkan. These older APIs rely heavily on the GPU driver itself to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to tweaking and configuring lower-level GPU settings unseen by the user. 

This behavior was intentional in an effort to reduce some additional heavy lifting for game developers. As a result, driver optimizations play a massive role in dictating the gaming performance of a GPU with these older APIs. 

This is a night and day difference compared to DirectX 12 and Vulkan, where a lot of this driver baggage has been transferred to the game engine itself, with game developers being responsible for handing lower-level optimizations such as video memory allocation (this is why DirectX 12 and Vulkan are referred to as "low level" APIs).

The bad news for Intel is they have very little experience with these APIs surrounding discrete graphics (in comparison to iGPs). Nvidia and AMD, on the other hand, have more than a decade of experience in the field and know all the little details and odd behaviors DX 11 and DX 9 might have.

As a result, Tom Petersen from Intel says the road towards better performance in APIs like DirectX 11 will be a "labor of love forever." It is a sad truth, but a truth nonetheless. These optimizations don't happen overnight, and there are infinite ways to optimize GPUs for DirectX 11 and its predecessors. This fact holds true even for experienced companies like AMD, which has seen big DirectX 11 driver gains in recent years.

Integrated Graphics Experience Has Made Things Worse for Intel

At first glance, it's easy to assume Intel's experience with integrated graphics would be beneficial. But unfortunately, it has not helped matters and has even made things worse for the company.

In a report we covered a week ago, CEO Pat Gelsinger noted that it made a fatal error on the driver side of development and falsely assumed that it could take its integrated graphics driver stack and apply it to its discrete Arc GPUs.

This strategy showed Intel that its integrated graphics driver stack was utterly inadequate to run Intel's much more powerful Arc GPUs since the architectural differences between its iGPs and dGPUs are massive.

We suspect this could be a big reason Intel's Arc GPUs suffer exceptionally in Direct X 11. If Intel had started from scratch with a dedicated GPU driver stack, the developers would have had more time to optimize for older APIs.

Innosilicon has introduced its second-generation standalone graphics processor, the Fenghua II (aka Fantasy II). The new GPU has a power consumption between 4W and 15W, so it does not require either auxiliary PCIe power or active cooling, which is why it can target entry-level desktops and notebooks.  

Despite expectations, Innosilicon's second-generation discrete GPU does not offer higher performance than its predecessor. In fact, with raw compute performance of 1.5 FP32 TFLOPS/12 INT8 TOPS, the Fantasy II is actually more than three times slower than single-chip Fantasy I graphics card (which offers up to 5 FP32 TFLOPS/up to 25 INT8 TOPS performance), according to 163.com (via @Loeschzwerg_3DC) .The indisputable advantage of the new graphics card is its power consumption that ranges between 4W and 15W as opposed to 20W to 50W for single-chip Fantasy I. Meanwhile, performance-per-watt of the novelty remained at the same level with its bigger sibling.

Innosilicon's Fantasy I and Fantasy II Graphics Cards

Given the compute performance of the Fantasy II GPU, it will compete against Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1630 graphics board that uses the TU117 GPU originally introduced in April 2019. In fact, even AMD's Radeon RX 6400 might outperform the Fantasy II, based on its compute capabilities (and something tells us that this one will never find itself in our list of the best graphics cards available today). Meanwhile, Innosilicon does not publish performance results of its new graphics chip in real games. The only thing it says is that it hits 6500 in the outdated GLMark2 benchmark, according to ITHome. 

Innosilicon does not disclose which architecture powers its Fantasy II GPU, though we may speculate that the new graphics chip uses the same ImgTec's PowerVR architecture which is used for the Fantasy I GPU. That said, the new graphics processor supports DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, and even OpenGL ES application programming interfaces (APIs). Meanwhile, the new graphics processor has a built-in RISC-V security core with physical unclonable function (PUF). 

The Fantasy II GPU can support 2GB, 4GB, 8GB LPDDR4/4X/5/5X memory configurations with an up to 10 GT/s data transfer speed. The chip supports a DisplayPort/eDP 1.4, two HDMI 2.0, LVDS, and D-Sub/VGA outputs, though there is no word how many display pipelines it has (i.e., how many monitors it can support simultaneously). As for host interface, the chip uses a PCIe 3.0 x8 bus. 

While Innosilicon's Fantasy II is definitely not the best entry-level GPU around, it has another advantage over discrete graphics products from AMD, Intel and Nvidia (in addition to its low power consumption): it supports the vast majority of Linux distributions (including those exclusively used in China), such as CentOS, Kirin, KylinOS, Tongxin, UOS and Ubuntu. Furthermore, it supports all Chinese CPU platforms (something that GPUs from leading vendors do not support), such as Loongson, Huawei Kunpeng, Hygon Dhyana, Shenwei (Sunway) and Zhaoxin Feiteng. Furthermore, Innosilicon plans to release Windows 10 drivers for its Fantasy-series GPUs.

Raspberry Pi owners who want to use the surprisingly versatile SBC as an everyday computer rejoice - again! - as yet another new operating system drops. Unsurprisingly, as reported by Phoronix, it’s another flavor of Linux: Fedora, one of the biggest names in free operating systems. It's also, supposedly, the distro Linus Torvalds himself uses. Fedora has signed off on support for the Raspberry Pi 4, as well as the Pi 400, and the Compute Module 4.

Fedora comes in three different versions, and it’s the Workstation release (which uses Gnome as its default environment) that’s being aimed in the Pi 4’s direction. The change proposal for the OS to support the Pi went through about a month ago, with the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee signing it off at the beginning of August. This means it should come together for inclusion in the upcoming Fedora 37 release, expected in October.

Graphics drivers seem to be behind the move, with open source OpenGL drivers, and the recent certification of the Pi 4’s GPU for Vulkan, makes the board more suitable for Fedora Workstation. There seems to be one caveat, however: Wi-Fi support on the Pi 400 is seen as out-of-scope due to the chip’s creator, Synaptics, not providing upstream generic firmware. Support for the CM4 is being tested with the official I/O board in place.

“The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going [sic] for a number of years, but we've never officially supported it due to lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. With Fedora 37, Raspberry Pi 4 is now officially supported, including accelerated graphics using the V3D GPU,” reads the Fedora Wiki entry on the subject.

Fedora joins Debian (the basis of the official Raspberry Pi OS), Ubuntu (and its many derivatives including Pop!_OS), Manjaro and Gentoo (based on Arch), plus the various media center distributions in bringing Linux to the Pi. It’s starting to look like Windows needs a dedicated Pi build, just to provide an alternative to the growing march of penguins to Pi.

Graphics processing, and possibly machine learning applications, just took a step forward on the Raspberry Pi 4. In a blog post by Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton - that the popular single-board computer is now conformant with version 1.2 of the Vulkan graphics API.

Having hit version 1.0 in November 2020, and 1.1 in October 2021, version 1.2 integrates 23 frequently used Vulkan extensions into the standard, and is tantalizingly close to the latest version, 1.3, which was released in January.

The project to make the newest Pi boards (the Pi 4, 400, and Compute Module 4, as older models’ GPUs are not up to the job) conformant with Vulkan is actually carried out by open-source consultancy Igalia. The driver is written, and presented to Vulkan maintainer Khronos for approval. This time, Khronos said yes, a stamp of approval that should see a driver update in an upcoming OS release.

“All the changes required for this have already been merged in the upstream v3dv Mesa driver and will eventually be available in future Raspberry Pi OS updates,” says Iago Toral from Igalia. “Aside from Vulkan 1.2 core functionality, we have also been adding support for various other extensions, some of which are core in Vulkan 1.3, as well as many bugfixes and performance improvements.”

While this development doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see games such as Hades or Path of Exile on the Pi 4, but it could lead to improvements in performance for applications such as Kodi, VLC or hardware accelerated web applications. Vulkan libraries also exist for machine learning, opening up new paths to training neural networks on Pi clusters.

Upton’s post also flags up a contribution from Roman Stratiienko adding support for Android to the driver. This opens the door for Android games to run on the Pi 4 via a port of Google’s operating system such as Lineage OS. 

Intel Linux GPU driver developers have released an update that results in a massive 100X boost in ray tracing performance. This is something to be celebrated, of course. However, on the flip side, the driver was 100X slower than it should have been because of a memory allocation oversight. The news comes amid reports that Intel's shipping drivers for its Arc GPUs are fraught with issues in Windows that are akin to "[...]living in the middle of a minefield - mind you, while playing drunk." The company has also admitted that Arc performance is sub-par with older APIs, like DX11, in Windows. 

Linux-centric news site Phoronix reports that a fix merged into the open-source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver was implemented by Intel Linux graphics driver engineering stalwart Lionel Landwerlin on Thursday. The developer wryly commented that the merge request, which already landed in Mesa 22.2, would deliver “Like a 100x (not joking) improvement.” Intel has been working on Vulkan raytracing support since late 2020, but this fix is better late than never.

Even readers who aren’t (driver) developers will probably be able to understand the issue with the previous code. Usually, the Vulkan driver would ensure temporary memory used for Vulkan raytracing work would be in local memory, i.e., the very fast graphics memory onboard the discrete GPU.

A line of code was missing, so this memory allocation housekeeping task wasn’t set. Thus, the Vulkan driver would shift ray tracing data to slower offboard system memory and back. Think of the continued convoluted transfers to this slower memory taking place, slowing down the raytracing performance significantly. It turns out, as per our headline, that setting a flag for "ANV_BO_ALLOC_LOCAL_MEM” ensured that the VRAM would be used instead, and a 100X performance boost was the result.

Mesa 22.2, which includes the new code, is due to be branched in the coming days and will be included in a bundle of other driver refinements, which should reach end-users by the end of August.

The above tale reminds us of the importance of good drivers to support hardware. Intel’s discrete graphics cards and drivers are admittedly immature, and we are perhaps seeing a disconnect between the expected early performance of the Arc Alchemist line and what is being achieved. In a recent set of official benchmarks, Intel compared the Arc A750 with the GeForce RTX 3060 to show its card is a ‘winner.’ However, did it originally aim to pitch the A750 as a hammer of the RTX 3060, or was it aiming higher?

Trying to be optimistic about Intel’s Arc situation, one might hope that the GPUs have a lot of potential once driver updates start to flow.

For more Intel Arc information, please check out our guide to the Alchemist series performance, specs, release dates, and more.