Benchmarks of NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 (formerly known as the RTX 4080 16 GB) are already out as the leaky taps in the Asian tech forumscape know no bounds. Someone with access to an RTX 4080 sample and drivers on ChipHell forums, put it through a battery of synthetic and gaming tests. The $1,200 MSRP graphics card was tested on 3DMark Time Spy, Port Royal, and games that include Forza Horizon 5, Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, Cyberpunk 2077, Borderlands 3, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

The big picture: the RTX 4080 is found to be halfway between the RTX 3090 Ti and the RTX 4090. At stock settings, and in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme (4K), it has 71% the performance of an RTX 4090, whereas the RTX 3090 Ti is 55% that of the RTX 4090. With its "power limit" slider maxed out, the RTX 4080 inches 2 percentage-points closer to the RTX 4090 (73% that of the RTX 4090), and with a bit of manual OC, it adds another 4 percentage-points. Things change slightly with 3DMark Port Royal, where the RTX 4080 is 69% the performance of the RTX 4090 in a test where the RTX 3090 Ti does 58% that of the RTX 4090.

Intel's ambitious XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) performance enhancement formally launched, with the latest "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" patch dated September 27. The patch release notes describes this feature addition as "Added XeSS graphics support for DX12-compatible systems." This means that XeSS not only works in its native XMX code-path for Arc "Alchemist" GPUs, but also the agnostic DP4a code. CapFrameX confirmed that XeSS works with Radeon RX 6000 RDNA2 GPUs, which means the DP4a fallback has been implemented. The XeSS feature-addition to SoTR comes just in time as reviews of the Arc A770 are expected to go live early next month, with availability slated for October 12. You can learn more about XeSS in our older article.

Intel XeSS is a second-generation upscaling technology that's at par with DLSS 2.0 and FSR 2.0, says Digital Foundry, which got an exclusive early-access an Arc A770 graphics card along with XeSS, and the latest version of "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," which features XeSS besides DLSS. The publication compared the A770 + XeSS with a GeForce RTX 3070 + DLSS, and in its testing, found XeSS to offer comparable or better image quality at low frame-times. XeSS uses a AI-ML algorithm to reconstruct details, which is accelerated by the XMX cores on Xe-HPG "Alchemist" GPUs. XeSS hence currently only supports Arc GPUs, however, the company is working on a DP4a (programming model) version so XeSS could work on other GPU architectures, across brands.

An upscaling algorithm by design adds to frame-times (time taken to render a frame to display), and in Digital Foundry's testing, the most aggressive preset of XeSS, Performance, which upscales 720p to 1440p, adds 2 ms to the frame-time. A 1080p to 4K upscaling in the same mode, adds 3.4 ms to the frame-time, which jumps from 8.8 ms to 12.2 ms (an increase of 3.4 ms). The increase in frame-times is a good trade-off when you consider the performance gained—a staggering 88 percent increase in frame-rates for 1080p to 4K upscaling, and 52 percent increase with 720p to 1440p upscaling. Frame-times increase as you move up the presets toward the Quality mode, which renders the game at resolutions closer to native-resolution, so the performance-gained is smaller. XeSS offers a preset it calls "Ultra Quality," which renders the game at a resolution closest to native, while still yielding a 16-23 percent frame-rate gain, with an output that's practically indistinguishable from native-resolution.

AMD in its Computex 2022 presentation announced several design wins for its Ryzen 6000U line of high-performance processors for ultra-thin notebooks. With configurable TDPs of 15 W and 28 W, these processors feature an 8-core/16-thread "Zen 3" CPU, an iGPU with up to 12 RDNA2 compute units, and a modern I/O that combines DDR5 memory with PCI-Express Gen 4, to bring gaming to ultra-thin form-factors without the need for a discrete GPU. The iGPU meets DirectX 12 Ultimate feature requirements, and AMD leverages technologies such as FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), to further improve gaming performance.

Among the new design wins are the ASUS Zenbook S 13 OLED, a 13-inch ultra-thin weighing only 1 kg, and capable of average 60 FPS in "Godfall," taking advantage of FSR. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro X is another notebook in this class capable of 1080p gaming, powered by the Ryzen 7 6800HS, with up to 122 FPS in CS:GO, up to 266 FPS in "League of Legends," up to 59 FPS in "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," up to 64 FPS in "Final Fantasy: XIV," and up to 46 FPS in "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided."

XanxoGaming has now posted its first game benchmark with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, paired with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition. They put it up against an Intel Core i9-12900KS and Core i9-12900K. However, as you might have deduced from the headline of this news post, so far, they've only run a single game, but are promising to deliver more results shortly. That single game so far is Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 720p and using low settings, which means that this is a far cry from a real world scenario, but it does at least give a first taste of what's to come. For whatever reason, the Core i9 systems are using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and the CPUs are paired with DDR5 memory rated at 4800 MHz CAS 40. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D has been given another pair of 8 GB modules, so it's now using dual rank memory, but still at 3200 MHz and CAS 14.

In their test, the Core i9-12900K averages around 190 FPS, which they place as their baseline. The Core i9-12900KS manages around 200 FPS, or a bit over a five percent improvement. These benchmark numbers are provided by CapFrameX that claims that due to the low resolution used, the GPU doesn't really matter and although it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, it's very close. So what about the Ryzen 7 5800X3D? Well, it gets an average FPS number of 231, which is a bit odd, since the Intel CPU benchmarks are rounded and the AMD ones are not. Regardless, that's over a 20 percent increase over the Core i9-12900K and over 15 percent of the Core i9-12900KS. XanxoGaming is promising more benchmarks and those will be delivered at 1080p at Ultra settings according to the publication. In other words, this is still not what most of us have been waiting for.

NVIDIA DLSS adoption is growing rapidly, accelerated by easy-to-use Unreal Engine plugins and native support in Unity. This month 10 new games get DLSS, and a number of others, including Cyberpunk 2077, get upgraded to the new NVIDIA DLSS 2.3 SDK for even better image quality. With an AI model that continuously improves through training on NVIDIA's supercomputer, NVIDIA DLSS offers the best image quality and performance for over 130 games and applications.

To deliver a level of performance and image quality far above that of traditional upscaling technologies, NVIDIA DLSS utilizes an AI model trained on supercomputers, deep game integrations, and GeForce RTX Tensor Cores. Our DLSS AI model is always learning, and our newest update, NVIDIA DLSS 2.3, is available now. It makes smarter use of a game's motion vectors to improve object detail in motion, particle reconstruction, ghosting, and temporal stability.

NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology has been one of the main selling points of GeForce RTX graphics cards. With the broad adoption of the technology amongst many popular game titles, the gaming community has enjoyed the AI-powered upscaling technology that boosts frame-rate output and delivers better overall performance. Today, the company announced that DLSS arrived in 10 additional game titles, and those include today's release of Back 4 Blood, Baldur's Gate 3, Chivalry 2, Crysis Remastered Trilogy, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Sword and Fairy 7, and Swords of Legends Online.

With so many titles receiving the DLSS update, NVIDIA advertises using the latest GeForce driver to achieve the best possible performance in the listed games. If you are wondering just how much DLSS adds to the performance, in the newest Back 4 Blood title, RTX GPUs see a 46% boost in FPS. Similar performance gains translate to other labels that received the DLSS patch. You can expect to achieve more than double the number of frames in older titles like Alan Wake Remastered, Tomb Raider saga, and FIST.For more information about performance at 4K resolution, please see the slides supplied by NVIDIA below.

ASRock has released a BIOS update for their Z490 Taichi motherboard which implements a Clever Access Memory (CAM) system (might I say that's as clever as it sounds?) CAM is basically ASRock's own marketing push based on AMD's SAM, which is in itself a marketing push based on PCIe's Resizable BAR feature (the amount of marketing names employed to describe the same set of features is becoming mind-boggling). The feature is available through the 1.72 BETA Bios for the Z490 Taichi motherboard, and WCCFTech ran some quick and dirty tests on a Z490-based system with an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card to verify what (if any) performance differences arose.

The tests were done at 4K resolution for Shadows of the Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, running on an Intel Core i7-10700K processor and 2x 8 GB sticks of DDR4-2666 memory. The results? 3.32% performance improvement under Shadows of the Tomb Raider, and an impressive 11.54% improvement for Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (images to the left feature CAM on, and images on the right show CAM off). It seems it's only a matter of time until this amazing feature that's been available (yet untapped) for years now brings some very considerable and widespread performance improvements to users independent of platform. Kinda like finding a $10 bill in an old pair of jeans.

It's only tomorrow that reviewers will take the lids off AMD's latest and greatest Navi-powered graphics cards, but it's hard to keep a secret such as this... well... secret. Case in point: Videocardz has accessed some leaked slides from the presentation AMD has given to its partners, and these shed some light on what raytracing performance users can expect from AMD's RX 6800 XT, the card that's meant to bring the fight to NVIDIA's RTX 3080 graphics card. AMD's RDNA2 features support for hardware-accelerated raytracing from the get go, with every CU receiving on additional hardware piece: a Ray Accelerator. As such, the RX 6800 XT, with its 72 enabled CUs, features 72 Ray Accelerators; the RX 6800, with its 60 CUs, features 60 of these Ray Accelerators.

The RX 6800 XT was tested in five titles: Battlefield V, Call of Duty MW, Crysis Remastered, Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. At 1440p resolution with Ultra Settings and DXR options enabled according to the game, AMD claims an RX 6800 XT paired with their Ryzen 9 5900X can deliver an average of 70 FPS on Battlefield V; 95 FPS on Call of Duty MW; 90 FPS in Crysis Remastered; 67 FPS in Metro Exodus; and 82 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. These results are, obviously, not comparable to our own results in previous NVIDIA RTX reviews; there's just too many variables in the system to make that a worthwhile comparison. You'll just have to wait for our own review in our normalized test bench so you can see where exactly does AMD's latest stand against NVIDIA.

German publication Heise.de got its hands on a Radeon RX 5500 (OEM) graphics card and put it through their test bench. The numbers yielded show exactly what caused NVIDIA to refresh its entry-level with the GeForce GTX 1650 Super and the GTX 1660 Super. The RX 5500, in Heise's testing was found matching the previous-generation RX 580, and NVIDIA's current-gen GTX 1660 (non-Super). When compared to factory-overclocked RX 580 NITRO+ and GTX 1660 OC, the RX 5500 yielded similar 3DMark Firestrike performance, with 12,111 points, compared to 12,744 points of the RX 580 NITRO+, and 12,525 points of the GTX 1660 OC.

The card was put through two other game tests at 1080p, "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," and "Far Cry 5." In SoTR, the RX 5500 put out 59 fps, which was slightly behind the 65 fps of the RX 580 NITRO+, and 69 fps of the GTX 1660 OC. In "Far Cry 5," it scored 72 fps, which again is within reach of the 75 fps of the RX 580 NITRO+, and 85 fps of the GTX 1660 OC. It's important to once again note that the RX 580 and GTX 1660 in this comparison are factory-overclocked cards, while the RX 5500 is ticking a stock speeds. Heise also did some power testing, and found the RX 5500 to have a lower idle power-draw than the GTX 1660 OC, at 7 W compared to 10 W of the NVIDIA card; and 12 W of the RX 580 NITRO+. Gaming power-draw is also similar to the GTX 1660, with the RX 5500 pulling 133 W compared to 128 W of the GTX 1660. This short test shows that the RX 5500 is in the same league as the RX 580 and GTX 1660, and explains how NVIDIA had to make its recent product-stack changes.

NVIDIA late Tuesday pushed out a Hotfix to its GeForce Software against glaring bugs that can't wait for the next driver release to be fixed. Hotfix 441.34 fixes a bug with "Red Dead Redemption 2" stalling on machines with 4-core and 6-core CPUs, when the Vulkan API is used. The drivers also fix a game crash with "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" launching in DirectX 12 mode. The rest of the driver's change-log is identical to that of the recent 441.20 WHQL drivers. Grab the hotfix from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Hotfix 441.34

"Shadow of the Tomb Raider" received support for AMD FidelityFX through a patch. The latest Patch 18 update adds the FidelityFX toggle, letting you improve frame-rates by slightly reducing resolution-scale, resulting in higher frame-rates, and compensating for the image quality loss with the image-sharpening feature. NVIDIA GeForce users still have the option to use the Image Sharpening toggle in NVIDIA Control Panel introduced with GeForce R440 drivers. The patch also removes the restriction on character outfits when exploring the Hidden City location in game.

NVIDIA today released GeForce 431.36 WHQL software, which adds support for the new GeForce RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super graphics cards that went on sale from 9th July. The drivers also improve optimization for "Tom Clancy's The Division 2," "Strange Brigade," and "Metro Exodus." The drivers add SLI support for "F1 2019." The drivers address the issue of performance counts appearing over the Windows 10 1903 Start menu (since the Start menu is now its own 3D-accelerated process). A "Code 43" error that appears on Windows 1903 machines with Intel "Sandy Bridge" processors has also been fixed. Another critical bug where Windows 1903 doesn't write a crash-dump on BSOD has been fixed.

Among the game-specific fixes are screen flickering noticed in "Grand Theft Auto V" with MSAA enabled; a game-crash experienced in "Forza 4" when driving through tunnels; "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" may experience a TDR crash on GeForce "Pascal" GPU; and staying with this title, its internal benchmark may quit when ray-tracing is enabled. Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 431.36 WHQL

NVIDIA released their latest driver package version, updating the software number up to 431.18. The new hotfix driver builds upon the previous 430.86 release, already fixed upon by another, previous hotfix driver 430.97.

This new release fixes BSODs on hibernation wake-up for ASUS' ASUS GL703GS/Asus GL502VML notebooks; game crashes or TDR on Shadow of the Tomb Raider when launching the game on Pascal GPUs; Shadow of the Tomb Raider's benchmark exiting abruptly should ray tracing be enabled; and flickering issues on Grand Theft Auto V when MSAA is enabled. Look below for the updated driver.NVIDIA GeForce 431.18 Hotfix Driver

The 9.75 TFLOPs figure in the leaked specifications slide of the Radeon RX 5700 XT "Navi" graphics card from earlier today got many guessing if AMD is essentially putting RX Vega-level performance into a GPU that sips a fraction of its power. It turns out that AMD's claim of the RX 5700 XT being faster than the GeForce RTX 2070 wasn't just specific to the odd super-optimized game title, but a whole selection of games, many of which some with GameWorks varnish, some of which even support NVIDIA RTX.

AMD's [leaked] performance slide for the Radeon RX 5700 XT sees the card beat the RTX 2070 in "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey," "Battlefield V," "CoD: Black Ops 4," "Far Cry: New Dawn," "Metro Exodus," Tom Clancy's "The Division 2," "The Witcher 3," and Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon: Wildlands." The card is also striking distance behind the RTX 2070 at "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," and Sid Meier's "Civilisation 6." All games in this slide are tested at 1440p resolution, with in-game settings maxed out (although we're waiting to read the Endnotes on whether "max out" in NVIDIA's context means turning on RTX on some of these games). The RX 5070 XT beats the RTX 2070 by as much as 22 percent in "Battlefield V," and 15 percent in "Metro Exodus," and is claimed to be within single-digit percentage ahead of the RTX 2070. There's another picture of the RX 5070 XT reference board in this slide, and unless we're mistaken, we spy two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. We'll learn more about this card in a few hours from now.

Square Enix is excited to confirm that TOMB RAIDER, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and FINAL FANTASY XV will all be available on Stadia when the new platform launches this November.

TOMB RAIDER explores the intense origin story of Lara Croft and her ascent from an untested young woman to a hardened survivor. Armed only with raw instincts and the ability to push beyond the limits of human endurance, Lara must fight to unravel the dark history of a forgotten island to escape its relentless hold.

NVIDIA today introduced their latest hotfix driver. Driver number 430.53 addresses reported issues of high CPU utilization (due to NVDisplay.Container.exe) on NVIDIA's previous 430.39 WHQL driver, which added support for their latest GTX 1650 graphics card as well as Windows' 1903 release.

A number of fixes have also been introduced by this driver version. Namely, flickering observed when 3DMark Time Spy is launched; BeamNG application crash on games launch; SLI freezes in Shadow of the Tomb Raider; and monitor flickering on the desktop when videos are being played on a secondary monitor. You can grab this latest hotfix driver release on the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 430.53 Hotfix Driver

NVIDIA today announced that it is extending DXR (DirectX Raytracing) support to several GeForce GTX graphics models beyond its GeForce RTX series. These include the GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1070, and GTX 1060 6 GB. The GTX 1060 3 GB and lower "Pascal" models don't support DXR, nor do older generations of NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA has implemented real-time raytracing on GPUs without specialized components such as RT cores or tensor cores, by essentially implementing the rendering path through shaders, in this case, CUDA cores. DXR support will be added through a new GeForce graphics driver later today.

The GPU's CUDA cores now have to calculate BVR, intersection, reflection, and refraction. The GTX 16-series chips have an edge over "Pascal" despite lacking RT cores, as the "Turing" CUDA cores support concurrent INT and FP execution, allowing more work to be done per clock. NVIDIA in a detailed presentation listed out the kinds of real-time ray-tracing effects available by the DXR API, namely reflections, shadows, advanced reflections and shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination (unbaked), and combinations of these. The company put out detailed performance numbers for a selection of GTX 10-series and GTX 16-series GPUs, and compared them to RTX 20-series SKUs that have specialized hardware for DXR.Update: Article updated with additional test data from NVIDIA.

After the oddity that was its GeForce 419.67 WHQL Creator Ready drivers, NVIDIA launched new GeForce drivers with the same 419.67 version number, but with "Game Ready" branding. It's now clear that Creator Ready is a fork of the GeForce software, released at a slightly lesser frequency, targeting creativity and productivity software that don't quite need Quadro feature-set or certifications. GeForce 419.67 WHQL Game Ready, on the other hand, add day-one optimization for "Battlefield V: Firestorm," a new update that brings the highly addictive Battle Royale gameplay mode to the Battlefield franchise. Optimization is also added or refined for "Anthem," "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," and "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice." NVIDIA expanded the list of Adaptive Sync monitors that are now capable of G-Sync.

Among the bugs fixed are a performance drop noticed in DaVinci Resolve, overexposed brightness and color seen in "Far Cry: New Dawn" with HDR turned on; performance issues with "Total War: Warhammer 2" with AA turned on; artifacts seen in certain Adobe applications; screen corruption when switching display modes with HDR turned on in "Apex Legends," FOV reduction when recording with GeForce Experience; flickering noticed in "Star Citizen" followed by a CTD on "Turing" GPUs, abnormal time taken on GeForce GTX 980 responding to NVAPI calls; TITAN RTX overheating when enabling TCC mode via NVLink; and second monitor flickering with two monitors connected to an RTX 2070. Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 419.67 WHQL Game ReadyThe change-log follows.

We knew this was coming, especially after Google's teaser from earlier this month. Project Stream was a proof-of-concept in collaboration with Ubisoft, to see whether AAA gaming was possible over the internet. Things were smooth most of the time in our own experience, but there remained questions over how the concept would translate over to a finished product, especially with infrastructure challenges on the client side of things. Google's keynote at GDC just wrapped up, and the main focus was Stadia- the now named cloud gaming service borne out of Project Stream.

Stadia is built with instant access in mind. An example demo came in the form of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which was used in the public test before. It is integrated with partner YouTube channels such that a trailer for a supported game would have an option to play said game, which would then launch immediately. Stadia is built with support from a wide partner network including AMD, Unity, id Software, and more, with details seen past the break.

A new patch has become available for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which updated the game to the latest graphical technologies in the form of RTX and DLSS. The PC port of the game has been handed by developer Nixxes, which partnered with NVIDIA to work on adding ray-tracing enabled shadows to the game (there's a thematic coherence there if I've ever seen one).

NVIDIA had their customary GTC keynote ending mere minutes ago, and it was one of the longer keynotes clocking in at nearly three hours in length. There were some fascinating demos and features shown off, especially in the realm of robotics and machine learning, as well as new hardware as it pertains to AI and cars with the all-new Jetson Nano. It would be fair to say, however, that the vast majority of the keynote was targeting developers and researchers, as usually is the case at GTC. However, something came up in between which caught us by surprise, and no doubt is a pleasant update to most of us here on TechPowerUp.

Following AMD's claims on software-based real-time ray tracing in games, and Crytek's Neon Noir real-time ray tracing demo for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, it makes sense in hindsight that NVIDIA would allow rudimentary DXR ray tracing support to older hardware that do not support RT cores. In particular, an upcoming drivers update next month will allow DXR support for 10-series Pascal-microarchitecture graphics cards (GTX 1060 6 GB and higher), as well as the newly announced GTX 16-series Turing-microarchitecture GPUs (GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Ti). The announcement comes with a caveat letting people know to not expect RTX support (think lower number of ray traces, and possibly no secondary/tertiary effects), and this DXR mode will only be supported in Unity and Unreal game engines for now. More to come, with details past the break.

In the never-ending war between crackers and DRM company Denuvo, the latest victim has been (as it always tends to be) the later's efforts. Version 5.2 of Denuvo's anti-tampering protection has been cracked, opening the floodgates to cracked versions of Mega Man 11 and just-released Football Manager 2019.

Considering the proximity of release for both Hitman 2 (November 13) and Battlefield V (November 20th), it's likely both of those games will ship with the same 5.2 version. The group that cracked Denuvo's 5.2 protection are using the moniker FCKDRM'', which is likely a homage to GOG's FCK DRM movement. This, I'm sure, is well above hat the initiative's objectives were, and is sure to be frowned upon.

AMD today released version 18.9.2 of their Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition Graphics Drivers. This update brings with it improved or added support for F1 2018 (up to 3% faster performance on Vega 64 at 2560x1440); Fortnite (up to 5% faster performance at 1080p under a Vega 64); Shadow of the Tomb Raider (up to 4% faster performance on Vega 64 at 2560x1440); and Star Control: Origins, with up to 14% faster performance with a Vega 64 running at 4K.

Fixed issues include some particle corruption seen in Star Control: Origins. Catch up with known issues after the break. You can download these drivers right here from your favorite website in the galaxy.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.9.2

AMD today released Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.9.1 beta. The drivers introduce optimization of "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" and "Star Control: Origins." A number of issues are also addressed with this release. To begin with, a bug that prevented FreeSync from enabling in "Monster Hunter: World" has been fixed. Radeon Link not connecting to devices running Android 9 Pie has been fixed. Radeon ReLive not properly recording DirectX 12 games on R9 290 and R9 390 series GPUs has been fixed. A cursor lag noticed on multi-display systems with one of the monitors turned off has been fixed. The Radeon Settings context-menu item not appearing after driver installation has been fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.9.1The change-log follows.