graphics

When showing off new graphics tech, you'd usually be treated to glorious photorealistic visuals that hint at the complex calculations that both software and hardware go through. In that context, NVIDIA's decision to use id Software's popular Quake II shooter is an odd one. At the same time, however, it is the perfect example of even an old game like Quake II can feel new and modern with NVIDIA's to new fully path-traced ray-tracing technology.

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Smartphones today have gotten so powerful that they're theoretically capable of running desktop-grade software. For years, however, phone makers and developers have been boasting about "console-level graphics", particularly in games but, truth be told, they are nowhere near that level at all. We might still be decades from phones reaching that status but Samsung may have just taken one small step forward by partnering with AMD to imbue its Exynos chips with some Radeon graphics powers.

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Laptops are getting thinner and some PCs are getting smaller. While that may be a boon for portability and space economy, there's only so much you can cram inside of them. Thanks to technologies like Thunderbolt 3, however, you can keep computers small and slim and offload the brunt of the work to external components. With Razer's latest Core X Chroma, Windows laptop and MacBook users can not only offload graphics intensive work to the GPU enclosure but even charging and data transfer as well.

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Graphics card sales have long been dominated by two companies - but that might well be about to change. Intel held an inaugural event for its new program called The Odyssey at GDC 2019 this week. This program is made to connect Intel with enthusiast users - gamers particularly, but other high-end hardware buyers, too. They got the opportunity to see the first Intel graphics card in a very brief set of slides.

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There's a new Anthem trailer out there today, the big one, the launch trailer, the one with Ozzy in it. The Ozzy is subtle, and it's not strictly Iron Man, exactly, but it's close enough. The trailer today looks lovely, it should serve to get you onboard for the game itself, which launches on February 22nd, just a couple days after Samsung reveals their Galaxy S10 and all that good stuff. For now, look at all this battling!

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AMD has officially revealed the AMD Radeon VII, a graphics card featuring the first 7nm gaming GPU, at CES 2019 today. Set to go head to head with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080, the new AMD card marks the company's next big push to take on its GPU nemesis and give gamers the graphics potency they demand.

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The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 was revealed at CES 2019 this evening, and with it, a whole bunch of Turing architecture and ray tracing and all sorts of other good stuff too. This GPU has 52T Tensor FLOPs, 5 gigarays per second, and 6GB G6. And while generally I'd wait until the end of the article to include the price, here it's too extremely important - RTX 2060 costs $349 - imagine that!

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A full version of Photoshop was announced for release on the iPad inside the year 2019. This version of the full Photoshop CC experience was "redesigned for a modern touch experience" and should give the iPad a considerable boost in legitimacy as the dominant tablet in the world - the most dominant fully-mobile tablet in the world, that is to say, as devices like the Microsoft Surface already have a full version of Photoshop because they run a full version of Windows 10. This version of Photoshop will be fully integrated with the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite of apps on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.

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Lenovo's given the ThinkPad X1 a super-charged moment with the ThinkPad X1 Extreme, with included discrete graphics. This machine has an Intel CFL-H series CPU inside with up to 6 cores and up to 64GB memory. This laptop comes with a body quite similar to its predecessor, coming with a cool four layers of reinforced carbon fiber up top - it's far less bustable than most.

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Video games you play use rasterization while videos you watch use ray tracing - or that's the way it's been in the past. Ray tracing focuses on each pixel's color and how light in the scene made that color so. Rasterization focuses on the objects in the frame at any given time, deciding how light affects the color and brightness of objects therein. Rasterization can be very low-compute-power, while ray tracing is at the moment requires high-compute-power.

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With just a few hours away from NVIDIA’s grand but totally not unexpected unveiling of its GeForce 20 series video cards, one last leak arrives to complete the picture. And it might actually be the one most important one, at least for those who want a taste of that AI-powered ray-tracing that NVIDIA is promising with its new Turing architecture without going bankrupt. That would be the GeForce RTX 2070, which seems to be poised as the entry-level option for its new RTX platform.

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Chip maker giant Intel has seen its kingdom slowly shrinking from the combined onslaught of ARM on the mobile side and AMD’s resurrection on the PC side. While it still has some things to boast about over its long-time rival, the one thing can’t claim is having a superior graphics solution the way AMD has ATI. At SIGGRAPH, Intel is reminding PC makers and users that it won’t be the status quo for too long. It also inadvertently reminded them that it’s not the first time Intel tried to come up with a discrete GPU of its own.

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