Gadgetory

welcome back to the hard run box news corner my first video in a little while as Steve said in some of his other videos I've been sick this week still pretty sick now but I couldn't leave you guys without a news corner this week so here I am hopefully I'll be a bit better by this time next week gonna try to keep this one short let's get into the news quick update to begin with on the wealth of NVIDIA GeForce RT X super rumors that have hit the news over the last few days most of which you can find on video cards right now there have been alleged pictures specifications release dates and all that sort of thing plus various moral names for partner cards from all sorts of companies we've been getting a lot of questions about super so I did want to make brief mention of it here but unfortunately we can't say anything on the topic so sorry guys we just have to wait until the official release to hear our thoughts or any further discussion on super but clearly it's coming and coming soon so you shouldn't have to wait too much longer in other interesting news an internal memo from Intel was published to Reddit a few days ago detailing the company's thoughts on the upcoming battle with AMD the long profile was posted to their employee only portal and doesn't really give any new insights but it's an interesting read for those that want to see how Intel are discussing AMD with their own employees I'm not going to read the entire thing here you can do that if you want to via the source links below but there are some interesting sections I wanted to highlight for starters Intel clearly are aware of what AMD are doing they don't have their heads in the sand or anything like that this document clearly states that especially for high-end desktop and server products they expect competition to be fierce in fact for service they say competition is expected to be the most intense in about a decade Intel's AMD competitive expert Steve Collins is quoted as saying Intel will be facing tough competitive challenges Intel still believe that they will have a performance advantage with their ninth gen core products when it comes to lightly threaded productivity workloads and many gaming benchmarks but expects to lose in multi-threaded workloads until goes on to say that they don't like Cinebench and feels the tool is not representative of real-life workloads and say they will work with the press to each other they're using what they claim are real applications for evaluating performance but if it interesting when they're given Cinebench is a benchmark tool for a real-world app in cinema 4d Intel also expect to be challenged in the service space especially for throughput oriented benchmarks the scale well with core count they do however expect to maintain the lead in workloads to make heavy use of cash or require low memory latency until also say they have a competitive position in notebooks and business pcs as customers value specific aspects such as productivity performance battery life and overall manageability where Intel has a clear advantage versus the competition Intel believe that their software will be a key advantage to their fight against AMD which is a bit of a strange one not sure how that will actually play out in practice until also banking on their overall profile of products and technologies to give customers the best experience some of the most telling comments come in the Q&A section with Steve Collins Collins admits that AMD will likely price their parts significantly below Intel and that will translate into good performance per dollar a lot of his suggestions as to how until welcome Peter interesting not sure whether Intel's claims of having a better platform overall will hold up but this is a repetitive theme throughout a few super interesting quotes are found throughout the document Collins believes that performance challenges absolutely exist and that some of Intel's innovations may not always result in high performance benchmark scores and that they price to what our customers value he also says that we might dip below on performance like the second half of this year but then at other times they could deliver three times the performance collins also says Intel's focus needs to be on getting our execution in shape as soon as possible we're in a competitive time partly because of our execution issues where that's right into our process technology node or to our products that intercept those nodes of course this whole memo really isn't Intel saying they are screwed or anything like that it's just to let employees know that they are aware of the issues facing the company and that the executive team are working to make Intel competitive in the short and long term still for us and non-employees it's an interesting read to see where Intel thinks they are currently positioned Razer has announced DisplayPort 2.0 which is bringing a massive increase in bandwidth that will facilitate an entire new generation of displays in its fastest configuration called uhb r20 DisplayPort 2.0 will offer 80 gigabits per second of raw bandwidth which thanks to more efficient coding results in a huge 77 point three seven gigabits per second of effective bandwidth just shy of three times the bearment the existing DisplayPort 1.4 protocol with HP r3 this is all facilitated by replacing the physical interface layer with Thunderbolt 3 although DisplayPort 2.0 will work through both USB C and DisplayPort connectors however despite port 2.0 is more complicated than just offering 77 gigabits per second of bandwidth there are actually three modes you HP r 10 which delivers 38.7 gigabits per second uhb are thirteen point five which ups that to 52 point 2 gigabits per second and then the top end you HP are 20 mode as seventy seven point four gigabits per second the key thing to note here is that only you HP are ten will work over standard passive copper cables similar to those we're using today for DisplayPort devices to access the higher bitrate modes at least for now those're is pointing towards either tethered setups or active cables to maintain the necessary to signal qualities so with that in mind DisplayPort 2.0 uhb r10 is around the same level of bandwidth as hdmi 2.0 which delivers forty two point six gigabits per second and both will compete for usage in similar devices for now another cool thing is that DisplayPort 2.0 introduces mandatory support for display stream compression or DSC which further extends the capabilities of the protocol so what can DisplayPort 2.0 do well with the standard passive you HP are 10 mode we're going to be able to achieve a lot 4k 144 Hertz with HDR over a single cable and possibly with no DSC 8k 60 Hertz with DSC and even up to 8k 120 Hertz provided you don't want HDR and then as well knock you HP are thirteen point five and you HP are twenty down the line which will be able to do crazy stuff like 1080p at 1000 Hertz 16 K at 60 Hertz and unthinkable stuff for now like 8k 144 Hertz with HDR the first devices to use display point 2.0 are expected to hit the market in the late paths of 2020 of course we will need new display devices such as new cheap used to be released with support for the protocol but it is a big step forward for DisplayPort and the stuff we can do with displays a Google researcher discovered a flaw with the way AMD's epic server chips provide secure encrypted virtualization which would and I'm calling an antique here because I'm not a security expert allow an attacker to recover a secure key there would provide access between previously isolated VMs on a system the good news is this floor has been addressed through a firmware update version 0.17 bill 22 which is now available to all customers this 4 was first disclosed to Amory in February the firmware was released in June and now we're hitting public disclosure if you injure security stuff I suggest reading me an outtake article to get the juicy details but since it has been corrected through a firmware update and doesn't require ongoing mitigation efforts it all sounds a bit easy compared to some of the stuff Intel has recently been facing MSI have launched a low profile GeForce GTX 16 50 graphics card some people out there still enjoy building half-height systems where this sort of card can come in handy and MSI is delivering that through this new GPU which offers Justin HDMI and DVI port it's a dual slot card to accommodate the cooler and offers stock performance could be handy for HTPC applications where size is an issue unfortunately no word on pricing or availability yet Intel are set to support an integer scaling option with upcoming general Evan GPUs through a drive update that will launch around the end of August apparently general Evan is required for this feature due to hardware that isn't present in older designs integer scaling may be a niche feature for some but it's key for those that want to upscale say emulated games or older games designed to run at a specific and much lower resolution than modern displays integer scaling results in no loss to quality when implemented properly take a game running at say in native 540 P normal scaling would upscale that to 4k using a 7.1 times scale factor knew something like a bilinear algorithm to do it which doesn't look amazing and introduces some artifacts integer scaling would instead run at a 7 time scale factor and present black bars Ram image to preserve the cleanest possible presentation unfortunately Intel weren't clear about whether their integer scaling method is pure integer scaling or just nearest neighbor the announcement did come with some talk of nearest-neighbor hopefully they get it right because it would be a great feature for gamers that want to play emulated or older games with the best visual quality final topic for this week EVGA are offering a trading program for owners on older GPUs to get a discount when purchasing a new r-tx graphics card if you have an EVGA gtx 980ti gtx 980 GTX 970 GTX 780 Ti GTX 780 or GTX 770 you might be eligible for between 50 and 150 US dollar discount when purchasing a new GPU if you send the old Cardy in first depending on the card at hand the deal is either slightly better or slightly worse than sewing the card on somewhere like eBay for example you can get a little more than $75 for a GTX 970 on eBay but you'll be lucky to get $100 for a GTX 780 Ti so it really depends on the card you have the main issue for people wanting to use this deal is you will have to send in your old card before EVGA will send out your new r-tx purchase and it will go through a validation process it's also only available for those in the US but still could be handy for some that's it for this week's news corner as always you can subscribe to get the segment in your inbox every week consider supporting us on patreon and I'll catch you in the next one