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The tech industry and even the general press have been discussing the concept and early implementations of AI for a long time, but real-world examples have been relatively hard to find. To be clear, AI-powered functions have been in use for several years in things like computational photography on smartphones as well as high-end cloud-based data analytics applications. However, many of these are essentially invisible to most people. This year, however, both consumers and businesses should expect to see many blatant examples of AI-powered capabilities in their day-to-day activities....

Fundamentally, the AW3423DW uses the same kind of self-lit organic LED pixels as we’ve seen from other OLED displays, meaning there is no backlight required. As you can expect, the AW3423DW is fully geared towards gaming, and more specifically HDR gaming. It packs Nvidia’s G-Sync Ultimate hardware module, though to be clear this monitor works with all GPUs including AMD’s, even for adaptive sync. It also arrives certified for VESA DisplayHDR True Black 400, which unlike the regular DisplayHDR 400 certification, isn’t complete junk....

The AMD A4-5000 took 30.3 seconds to complete our Excel 2013 workload, making it 9% slower than the Intel Pentium 2117U and 22% slower than the Celeron 1020M. When compared to the A4-5300 desktop processor the A4-5000 was 12% slower. The AMD A4-5000 was just 3% slower than the A4-5300 when measuring multi-threading performance with WinRAR. However keep in mind the A4-5000 is a quad-core processor that comes clocked at just 1....

Although it wasn’t much faster than its predecessor, the Athlon II X4 645 offers exceptional value to those using video transcoder software such as HandBrake. For just $99 the Athlon II X4 645 is not a great deal slower than the Phenom II X4 and Core i5 processors while it outperformed the Core i5 650. The Athlon II X3 445 matched the Core i5 540 while the dual-core Phenom II X2 560 and Athlon II X2 265 were competitive with the Pentium G9650 and Core 2 Duo E8500 processors....

AMD recently posted a job listing for a system-on-chip verification engineer. The person they are seeking will work with the team behind the chip that powers the PlayStation and Xbox at AMD’s Markham location to help develop its next-gen SoC design. The successful candidate will be responsible for working closely with front-end and physical designers on multiple verification efforts. They’ll also need to interact with internal and external design verification dev teams and communicate directly with tool vendors and silicon IP holders....

Several Windows 10 and Windows 11 users have reported over the past few months that they’ve experienced stuttering issues, freezes, and performance drops on AMD Ryzen-powered systems. It turns out there is an issue with the way fTPM works, which can impact performance at seemingly random times during a gaming session or while running demanding software. According to official AMD documentation, the problem is caused by an unexpected behavior on “select” Ryzen platforms, but user reports suggest this affects all systems with Zen+, Zen 2, and Zen 3 processors....

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition showed a huge performance gain over the standard 7970 when testing with Alan Wake at 2560x1600. Here it was 15% faster, making it 21% faster than the GeForce GTX 680 and 31% faster than the GTX 670. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition averaged 25fps in King Arthur II making it 4% faster than the standard 7970. Moreover it was 14% faster than the GeForce GTX 680 and 19% faster than the GTX 670....

The GPU core is clocked at 925MHz, 5% higher than the HD 6970, and the GDDR5 memory operates at the same frequency of 1375MHz (5.5GHz DDR). Still, pairing that frequency with a 384-bit memory bus gives the HD 7970 264GB/s of theoretical bandwidth, a 50% advantage over the HD 6970. While the HD 6970 came loaded with a 2GB frame buffer, the 7970 has been upgraded to 3GB. We’ve found that when using multi-monitor setups at extreme resolutions, the larger buffer of AMD’s cards provide a significant advantage over Nvidia’s, which are limited to 1536MB for the most part....

AMD’s release notes claim that DirectX 11 optimization for Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs could result in up to an 8% performance improvement for the Radeon RX 6950 XT, versus the previous software driver version 22.5.1. And while they used the 6950 XT as an example, the claim is that all RX 6000 GPUs should see improved DX11 performance. The notes also claim optimizations for SAM (Smart Access Memory) in Death Stranding and Watch Dogs Legion, with gains as high as 24%....

To get a fuller picture, it’s increasingly apparent that you need to factor in a card’s frame latency, which looks at how quickly each frame is delivered. Regardless of how many frames a graphics card produces on average in 60 seconds, if it can’t deliver them all at roughly the same speed, you might see more brief jittery points with one GPU over another – something we’ve witnessed but didn’t fully understand....

The R9 295X2 was able to crack 100fps in Medal of Honor: Warfighter with 106fps, making it 9% faster than the GTX 780 SLI cards and 71% faster than the GTX 780 Ti. It was also 93% faster than the R9 290X while it lead the previous generation dual-GPU cards by a reasonable margin, beating the HD 7990 by 36% and the GTX 690 by 49%. The R9 295X2 displayed excellent frame time performance in Warfighter with 11....

The R9 380X fared poorly in Far Cry 4 with an average of just 49fps, making it just 2% faster than the R9 380 and 29% slower than the R9 390. The R9 380X was also 4% slower than the R9 280X and 27% slower than the GTX 970. Grand Theft Auto V was only tested with the high quality settings as we didn’t have time to update the ultra-quality results with the latest drivers....

Hitman: Absolution was very playable at 4K on the Nano as it averaged 53fps, 4% slower than the Fury and 20% faster than the GTX 980. Despite being just 8% faster than the R9 390X, the Nano was still just 5% slower than the GTX 980 Ti. The R9 Nano trailed the Fury and GTX 980 Ti by a 7% margin in Grand Theft Auto V with an average of 41fps at 4K, though the card was 14% faster than both the R9 390X and GTX 980....

Here we extracted another 7% out of the RX 460 to boost the average frame rate by 2fps in The Division. This time we see just a 5% increase from our custom overclock which once again resulted in a 2fps boost. Another almost pointless 2fps boost was seen in Star Wars Battlefront, though this was enough to match the GTX 950.

Compared to the Radeon RX 480, the RX 470 was just 10% slower at 1080p and 13% slower at 1440p. Keep in mind we are using the $240 8GB RX 480 which costs 33% more. For a 10-13% reduction in performance you save 25% off the price. That figure is reduced to 10% when compared to the 4GB RX 480. The RX 470 was 30% faster than the R9 380 at 1080p and 46% faster than the GTX 960....

The 7900 XT is essentially a cut down version of the 7900 XTX. Instead of 48 workgroup processors we get 42, for a total of 84 compute units – still an increase on the top RDNA2 model – this leads to 10,752 shader units. Clock speeds are also a little lower, at a game clock of 2 GHz with a total board power rating of 300W. Bus width is cut to 320 bit, but we get a healthy 20 GB of it....

The Watch Dogs 2 results are a little confusing because despite all 16-threads being heavily utilized on the Ryzen CPUs, their performance isn’t that impressive. The 6900K and 5960X crush the quad-core Core i7 chips and yet Ryzen doesn’t enjoy the same gains. Obviously this is an optimization issue. Ryzen isn’t even competitive at 1440p in Watch Dogs 2, which is a shame. Again, hopefully something can be done to better support the new CPUs in this title....

Power supply units don’t break headlines like the latest CPUs do, but they’re awesome pieces of technology. So let’s put on our gowns, masks, and gloves, and pull open the humble PSU – breaking down its various parts and seeing what each bit does. What’s the name of the game? Lots of computer parts have names that require a bit of technology knowledge to understand exactly what it does (e....

The latest beta build of iOS 15.4 just rolled out, and new features are starting to trickle in as testers dig into it. We already know its long-awaited, much-delayed Face ID with a mask is included. It’s also getting Tap to Pay, an Apple Card widget, and a new “gender-neutral” Siri voice. Apple is also changing how AirTags interact with iPhones to address recent concerns about stalking. As 9to5Mac notes, when setting up an AirTag, iOS 15....

Apple announced its latest iPad Pro series of tablets today. The 2022 iPad Pro design remains unchanged from the previous generation with 11-inch and 12.9-inch display options, but there are plenty of incremental upgrades to entice power tablet users. The most notable upgrade in the 2022 iPad Pro is Apple’s M2 chip. The M2 features an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU, offering a 15 percent and 35 percent improvement over the M1 chip in the previous generation....