Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware box news corner with Thanksgiving in the United States this week there hasn't been a ton of news but it wouldn't be an episode of news corn without at least a few interesting stories so I guess let's get right to it one of the more controversial issues to emerge this week concerns AMD's rise in mobile and its drivers support there hasn't been a lot of public discussion about rising mobile drivers but anyone that owns or has owned a rise in mobile laptop knows that the drivers situation is a complete mess while rising mobile does include a radeon GPU anywhere from vega 3 up to vega 11 most systems using the apu haven't seen a single driver update for the platform since launch this is problematic for a number of reasons firstly rising mobile as a first generation platform shipped with quite a few bugs some which I noted in my review of the APU almost a year ago things like Premiere and blender not supporting GPU acceleration some weird graphical effects in games issues with changing resolutions VLC issues and more to not get a single driver update since launch means all of these issues are still present in laptops using Rison mobile right now secondly buyers of rising mobile systems are missing out on the numerous Drive optimizations that AMD has included in their drivers over the past year which are fully accessible to those with desktop aps or discrete GPUs from the company so any performance uplifts in games or even proper support for games in the first place and not available for rise in mobile that's basically where rise of mobile drivers are currently at and naturally this has been a source of frustration for buyers well I guess I say frustration that's putting it a bit nicely I guess judging by reddit comments people are absolutely furious at the state of drivers right now which I guess is fair enough considering the issues anyway AMD made rising mobile owners even more furious with a statement this week suggesting they're working with OEMs to deliver a twice annual update of graphics drivers specifically for all AMD rising mobile processor based systems they go on to say that because the drivers are ultimately controlled by OEMs this may vary from platform to platform but we want to put out clear goal for us and our OEM partners and that drivers would be available through om websites not AMD comm now on face value to drive updates is better than zero but clearly two updates a year isn't really good enough and considering they're still going to be delivered by OEMs who are completely hopeless when it comes to these things who knows whether that will even eventually and it seems the community agrees with this because one of the top upvoted posts on our AMD right now is a big complaint about the state of drivers and this response from AMD however there is may be some good news for rising bar bar owners I spoke with someone from AMD earlier this week who was a bit frustrated with the company's official response because of its vague wording which seems to have caused the community to go into meltdown the vagueness comes from the final sentence which reads in addition AMD will continue to evaluate ways in which we can offer validated graphics drivers for AMD rising mobile processor based notebooks aligned to the latest AMD software updates and we will provide updates as soon as we are able now if you read that part of the statement it just sounds like a nothing fluffy promise with no specifics whatsoever AMD is always working towards better drivers so it's not exactly a groundbreaking announcement however I have a lot of additional information on how rising mobile drivers are shaping up in the future so let's talk about what it sounds like the plants are firstly AMD are without a doubt working towards getting rising mobile graphics drivers released in line with their discrete desktop cards this means that at some point in the future rising them about GPU drive updates will be available from AMD comm and will be launched around the same time of their desktop equivalents this is basically how it works with both Intel and NVIDIA GPU drivers for laptops the twice annual driver update is referring to a separate update package that will be available through OEMs the way was described to me this sounds like a long term driver with full om support something that you could revert back to in case of any issues you know that sort of thing again this is I guess fairly typical in the OEM space the OEM itself will provide a baseline supportive driver through their website while each component manufacturer for example real tech with HD audio drivers might offer a newer version that users can download through their website currently the issue is OMS occasionally update their supported drivers for things like audio and Wi-Fi but they have not been updating the APU and GPU drivers so the twice annual update is a way to accelerate that process but the big change will come when Andy begins offering a separate GPU update package through AMD comm this is what the final line of their statement is supposed to be referring to it might say the company is merely evaluating ways in which they can offer those drivers and will provide updates as soon as they are able but from what Andy told me those driver releases am more a case of when not if now you might be asking yourself why can't AMD just upload rising mobile GPU drivers to AMD calm right now we know we can hack current drivers to install and rise and robot and they work just fine I think that's a pretty good question so the issue comes down to a number of themes but the primary one is the way om drivers are distributed specifically om drivers are often tied into the Windows Update framework so when you purchase a laptop that say I've been sitting on the shop for a while it will automatically update to the latest om supported drivers some OEMs also have separate utilities that will download official OEM drivers the main obstacle appears to be in this om driver delivery system AMD said that there are issues where even if you installed an official GPU driver from AMD comm the OEM system whether that's windows update or an OEM utility would simply overwrite and reinstall an older om supported driver instead so anybody needs to work with OEMs and presumably Microsoft as well to stop that from happening before they're willing to provide drivers through AMD calm it might be an excuse but this is something I've had issues with on some laptops not necessarily for GPU drivers but certainly Windows Update attempting to revert back to older drivers that issue does crop up from time to time as for a timeline on when this might get resolved it sounds like AMD is targeting the launch of next-generation Rison mobile processes sometime in 2019 yep that could be some time away but it's a better time frame than the complete lack of a time frame aimed he gave in their statement and to clarify this doesn't mean only next-gen rising mobile app drops will be able to download these only provided drivers rather that's just around the time his drivers should be available to all now I'm not saying that all of this will definitely happen it's just what ambi was telling me when I asked a number of clarifying questions about this statement and with Rison mobile I'm not sure we're in a position where we can fully trust what they are saying but if what they are saying is the truth it sounds like there is genuine work being made towards fixing the rise of mobile driver ecosystem as with first-generation ecosystems which are very raw there has been certainly a lot of early-adopter pain with this one and a lot of the blame does have to go to the OEMs as well which are generally hopeless at getting out these driver updates but we'll see how it progresses and hopefully there's good news coming in 2019 and I've talked about drivers content adaptive shading also known as variable rate shading has come to Wolfenstein to the new courses this new shading technology is exclusive to Nvidia strewing architecture for now and it works in quite an interesting way it basically allows the shading engine to shade some areas of the screen at non-native rates if it's appropriate to do so so for example some areas of the screen that would exhibit no quality loss from less than native rate shading like say the sky in a game could be shaded at a quarter of the rate or perhaps even 1/16 of the right with no difference to visual quality however by shading at a lower rate performance could be improved anyway this feature is now available in the latest version of Wolfenstein 2 and the tech report have tested it it's worth reading their entire article to get a full description of how this tech works and the full performance breakdown but their benchmarking showed up to a 7 percent performance improvement with the feature enabled for practically no quality loss even using the performance preset they gave the highest performance uplift they're certainly very impressive they're of course using this feature requires developers to implement support Nvidia are bundling battlefield 5 with select GeForce r-tx graphics card purchases if you buy an RT x 2080 TI r TX 2080 or RT x 2070 between now and January 7th 2019 at a participating retail while stocks last you will receive a game code for battlefield 5 that can be redeemed up until January 31st 2019 that's a nice value add to GeForce r-tx cards if you happen to wanna play battlefield 5 and also you don't already clearly Nvidia are bundling this game because it includes ray-tracing support though I imagine most people play with our Tex enabled for a few seconds before disabling the feature and just enjoying the very decent performance you'll get in the game with invidious current generation GPUs asa has unveiled seven new k g1 gaming displays or with apparently sub one millisecond response times these displays do use TN panels to achieve these types of responses and it appears the metrics a Sura quoting do refer to greater gray responses not black frame insertion thanks specs or anything like that these monitors range from 0.5 milliseconds to 0.8 millisecond response times depending on the exact model or feature 1000 to 1 contrast ratios weak viewing angles which is typical for a TN and freesync brightness ranges between 250 and 400 nits again depending on the model as for the exact 7 models the lineup is split into three sizes a single twenty three point six inch display three twenty four point five inches and three twenty seven inches the twenty three point six insure has a maximum 144 Hertz refresh rate while the twenty four point five and 27-inch variants are available in 75 144 and 240 Hertz models g.skill has officially launched their Trident 0 l-r gb memory they first announced at Computex the ddr4 Ram is available from 3000 CL 16 speeds up to 4600 CL 18 speeds with the usual steps available in between both 8 gigabyte and 16 gigabyte modules are available in a variety of kits the interesting thing about this memory is the use of either shiny silver or gold metal heat spreaders with a crystal top section for shimmery RGB effects certainly that'll add a bit of bling for her that like bling in there builds I guess no word on pricing for the memory just yet but we expect it to be G skills the most expensive memory in their lineup final story from this week and NVIDIA GeForce RT X 2060 was spotted in the Final Fantasy 15 benchmark database this could be affect entry or it could legitimately be a card that's in the works that someone accidentally benchmark publicly in any case it's a little unusual that the card is our TX branded considering the Arctic's 2070 isn't really suitable for ray tracing as it is I'd certainly hate to think how an RT X 26 would perform with even more arty cores removed from the equation maybe in video just using our Tech's across their entire lineup maybe this leak isn't a legitimate leak if it turns out the product is real the r-tx 2060 is positioned just below the gtx 1070 in the charts but handily above the gtx 1066 gigabyte so we'll see how that pans out if the card ever comes out as an RT X 2060 anyway that's it for this week's news corner as always you can subscribe to get this segment in your inbox every week well I guess I say every week but some weeks we actually don't push out a news corner and instead cover other more interesting stuff and then there was that one week where I made two news corners so well I guess just subscribe you get news corner from time to time you can also support us on patreon to get access to our discord chat and monthly live streams and I'll catch you in the next one