Items tagged with drivers
Today is a pretty big day for gamers on the go—it marks the launch of GeForce RTX 30 series laptops sporting the company's latest generation Ampere GPUs, in mobile form. And right on cue, NVIDIA has released a driver update and a bolstered version of its GeForce Experience utility, the latter of which brings support for WhisperMode 2.0. There is a bit to unpack there. Let's start with the laptop GPUs, of which there are three main versions: GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3070, and GeForce RTX 3060. Each one can be configured to different power profiles and clockspeeds by the OEMs. And if you are curious what to expect, have a look at our GeForce RTX 3080 laptop performance preview, as well...
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Virtual assassins will be pleased to know that Hitman 3 is now available, and if you plan to play on PC, it is available exclusive in the Epic Games Store. The latest entry wraps up the World of Assassination trilogy. And if you happen to be gaming on a Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card, AMD's latest GPU driver promises a big performance boost. According to the release notes, the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.1.1 driver release (what a mouthful) provides up to a 10 percent performance gain in Hitman 3, when playing at a 4K resolution with the visual quality settings configured to Ultra. That is a significant jump. It's not clear what kinds of gains can be had on other Radeon SKUs, but...
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NVIDIA is pushing out a new 'Game Ready' driver for its GeForce GPUs (WHQL 456.55), and with it comes Reflex support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Warzone, along with optimizations for Star Wars: Squadrons. The GPU maker also claims its latest driver "improves stability in certain games on RTX 30 series GPUs" as well. Consider yourself lucky if you managed to pick up a GeForce RTX 3080 or GeForce RTX 3090 (and have not been running into any issues with cheap capacitors). Those cards are in super high demand, and as a result, NVIDIA and its retail partners quickly sold out of initial inventories, leading to silly prices on eBay. More supply will come, of course, as well as...
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Support for an interesting feature has recently found its way into the latest graphics drivers from NVIDIA, and now from AMD as well. It is called hardware accelerated GPU scheduling, and in theory, it could improve the performance of select graphics cards when playing certain games. AMD has added support for the feature in its latest Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.5.1 beta driver. There are some caveats that accompany the feature, one of which is when and where it applies. Not only do users need the latest graphics driver, they must also have the May 2020 Update for Windows 10 applied. In addition, this only works on a handful of graphics cards. "AMD is excited to provide beta support...
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NVIDIA's driver team is pushing out a hotfix for users who are experiencing unusual levels of brightness in games when HDR is enabled, with the latest GeForce 'Game Ready' 445.87 driver release. The hotfix bumps up the driver version to 445.98, and also addresses a few other niggling issues, like instability in Overwatch. Hotfix releases are entirely optional, but can also be a boon if experiencing issues they are designed to address. All of the fixes in the 445.98 hotfix will be rolled into the next Game Ready driver release anyway, and while you can sit back and wait if you wish, having access to the hotfix driver means you can benefit from certain bug fixes right away. Here are the ones the...
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Windows 10 users have been encountering more problems with updates in recent months, with the optional KB4535996 causing the most recent problems. However, some Windows 10 users have also been facing issues when manually installing drivers, which has prompted a warning from Microsoft. We're not talking about drivers that are downloaded and installed automatically from Windows Update; this specifically pertains to drivers that you have downloaded directly from a device maker and choose to install yourself. Updated drivers are the lifeblood to keeping your system running at peak performance, and can provide critical boosts to performance or enhancements to security. So, anything that...
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AMD has gone all-in with 7-nanometer manufacturing, with both its Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU architectures being built on a 7nm node. And for the most part, the move to 7nm has served the company well. There is just one hiccup—a growing chorus of Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT owners are complaining of black screen issues. This does not appear to be an issue with the node itself or any kind of faulty hardware, and instead is very likely tied to sloppy driver code. AMD has even acknowledged the issue in some of its Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver releases. "Some Radeon RX 5700 series graphics users may intermittently experience a black screen while gaming or on desktop. A...
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As we approach the end of the calendar year, we will also wave goodbye to the 2019 Edition of AMD's Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition, which will be updated to a 2020 release. We know this because logic dictates as much, and also because advertising banners are already showing up for the next major release of AMD's GPU driver ecosystem. So, it is fair to say AMD is teasing its Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 2020 release, whether on purpose or by mistake. Whatever the case, the banners were spotted by Reddit forum member PKBeam64, as well as Twitter user Blaze (@BlazeK_AMDRT). pic.twitter.com/4ZyGHgYruF — Blaze (@BlazeK_AMDRT) December 7, 2019 There's not much in the way of details, though...
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Unlike a few years ago, GPU makers are not really pushing the use of multiple graphics cards, at least not as heavily as they once were. Even so, NVIDIA has not abandoned the technology. Incidentally, recent driver releases seem to support a checkerboard rendering scheme that can improve performance on SLI setups. This is not a brand new technique. The developers of Rainbow Six Siege used it as a form of anti-aliasing. In addition, Sony added hardware to the PlayStation 4 Pro to support checkerboard rendering. And if you go all the way back to 1993, Doom used a similar technique in the low detail mode. As for NVIDIA, 3DCenter forum member Blaire wrote up a post on his discovery of a checkerboard...
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It'd be a gross understatement to say that retro gaming has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. Nintendo's NES Classic and SNES Classic mini-consoles or the Switch Online's NES and SNES catalogs might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about older games, but the House of Mario is hardly alone. Sony stumbled into the retro scene last year, and both the Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16 (by way of rights-holder Konami) will get their respective official love letters shortly. We'd be remiss, however, if we didn't think about the technology at the heart of all of these fun old games—good old software-based emulation. If it wasn't for SNES9x or Gens,...
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Intel is pushing out a new graphics driver with support for integer scaling, a feature that could come in handy when playing retro video games. Appropriately enough, Intel is calling the feature "Retro Scaling" in its Graphics Command Center utility. This is intended to make classic (read: old) PC games render better on today's higher resolution displays. "We're listening to our community. You wanted a way to experience pixel-art games at their best so we created Retro Scaling. Enhance the latest indie releases and timeless classics so they look their best on modern HD displays," Intel explains. At its best, Retro Scaling can take a blurry or fuzzy image and restore the graphics to their pixelated...
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There are two main trains of thought when it comes to updating drivers. One is to always install them right away to ensure you are protected from the latest threats, and that everything is working as intended. The second is to wait a bit to make sure there are not any unintended side effects, like sending your system into a reboot loop (it happens). If you prescribe to the latter philosophy and own a GeForce GPU, you may still want to go ahead and install the latest driver package rather than wait any longer. NVIDIA began pushing out its GeForce 430.64 WHQL driver package last Thursday (May 9), which delivered 'Game Ready' optimizations for Rage 2, Total War: Three Kingdoms, and World War Z,...
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NVIDIA has launched a new set of graphics drivers aimed specifically at creators who use programs like Adobe Photoshop and Blender Cycles. Appropriately called "Creator Ready" drivers, these will exist alongside NVIDIA's "Game Ready" driver packages that are optimized for gaming and often tuned for the latest game releases. Similar to how AMD maintains two separate sets of graphics drivers—regular and Pro version of its Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition—NVIDIA now has two sets as well. Both contain the full feature set and application support for games, so users can choose either driver they wish, depending on which they do more often—play games or create content. The primary...
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AMD may have hit a home run with its Zen architecture, but when graphics are thrown into the mix, there is definitely room for improvement. One of the big complaints with AMD's Ryzen Mobile products is that graphics drivers are slow to roll out. It's drawn so much attention that AMD has now publicly acknowledged the issue, and promises to do better in the near future. Driver releases are an important part of any product that requires or benefits from custom tailored drivers (versus generic ones), and it is especially critical when dealing with enthusiasts, gamers, and graphics professionals. That's why the situation has been so disappointing with Ryzen Mobile, an otherwise exciting product that...
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In a move that is sure to disrupt the gaming industry and throw the tech community into a state of chaos, it appears AMD is discontinuing 32-bit driver support for its GPUs. Oh no, right? Right!? Kidding aside, this is not going to have a big impact on Radeon users at large, though it's worth noting for anyone who is still clinging to a 32-bit version of Windows. For everyone else? No need to panic, folks. You may have noticed this already. A visit to AMD's graphics drivers page shows that only 64-bit versions of Windows and a spattering of Linux distributions are supported with the latest release, that being Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.10.1. The end of the road for 32-bit support was...
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Sit down for this, we have some shocking news. Are you ready for it? An independent testing firm hired by AMD to evaluate the stability of GPU drivers has determined that AMD builds the most stable graphics drivers in the industry. Through a series of tests, AMD's GPU drivers were shown to fail far less than frequently than NVIDIA's drivers. AMD commissioned QA Consultants, a software testing and quality assurance solutions company based in Toronto, Canada, to evaluate the graphics drivers of both companies in a sort of head-to-head match up. Obviously there is cause to raise an eyebrow when a company with vested interests in the results is the one paying for the analysis. That doesn't necessarily...
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One of the keys to success is developing good habits. Intel, the most successful semiconductor company on the planet, knows a thing or two about this, though up to this point the company hasn't been all that successful in its attempts to crack the discrete graphics market. That might change with the arrival of Arctic Sound, a discrete GPU that will purportedly take aim at gaming (among other segments). In the meantime, Intel has released another GPU driver update with gaming optimizations, and in the process is developing a habit that could serve the company well down the line. Just as AMD and NVIDIA are known to launch new GPU drivers when new games arrive, Intel has begun doing the same thing....
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A few days ago, AMD started pushing out a new Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.4.1 driver release that, according to the release notes, introduced support for the April 2018 Update for Windows 10. Other than a handful of bug fixes, there didn't appear to be anything else special about the latest driver package—no game optimizations and no additional features, or so we thought. While not listed in the release notes, AMD's latest GPU drivers enable streaming 4K Ultra HD video from Netflix on your PC. The added functionality was first spotted by Hardware.info, which noticed that latest driver release has built-in support for Microsoft's PlayReady 3.0, a digital rights management (DRM)...
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The time has come for gamers and enthusiasts to ditch their 32-bit operating system (assuming you haven't already), because NVIDIA has announced that it will no longer support drivers for these operating systems. If you have been hobbling along on an old 32-bit version of an OS to save some money, perhaps Santa can bring you a 64-bit OS. NIVIDIA says that support will end after the 390 driver release. NVIDIA writes, "Later driver release versions will not operate, nor install, on 32-bit operating systems. Driver enhancements, driver optimizations, and operating system features in driver versions after Release 390 will not be incorporated back into Release 390 or earlier versions. This impacts...
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Just last week, AMD rolled out a Crimson ReLive software update in preparation for its official unveiling of Radeon RX Vega graphics cards for consumers, which it announced over the weekend at SIGGRAPH. Now it is doing the same for new professional grade Vega cards that were introduced as well, and with it comes some nifty features. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature upgrade that AMD's Radeon Pro Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.8 brings to professionals is driver switching. Here is the thing—professional graphics cards based on Vega are fully capable of playing games, but the driver packages they run on are tuned for work-level applications, not pumping out fast framerates in games. This...
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AMD is heading into 2017 with a major new graphics driver refresh called Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition, or Radeon ReLive for short. Even better, we'll just call it ReLive from here on out. More than a name change or yet another incremental update, this is a complete retooling of Crimson right down to the user interface. There are several highlights to the new driver family, as this is AMD's biggest driver release ever, but it's the new built-in video capture and streaming tool (ReLive) that it is named after. Having kicked its Gaming Evolved app to the curb, AMD has gone and integrated a DVR solution solution for capturing and sharing epic gaming moments. "Capture, stream and share your...
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AMD is working on a driver fix that will address the power draw of the Radeon RX 480, its first Polaris part and a graphics card we determined is easily the best value in its price segment (see our full review for more in-depth coverage). The driver, Radeon Software 16.7.1, is in the final testing stage and will release to the public within the next 48 hours, AMD said in the wee hours of the morning. The Radeon RX 480 was designed to give gamers a potent and affordable option for VR gaming. Pricing starts at $199 for the 4GB model and $239 for the 8GB variant, both of which represent excellent price-to-performance ratios. However, it was recently discovered that the Radeon RX 480 was pulling...
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