TechPowerUP NEWS

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Today, Logitech G, a brand of Logitech and leading innovator of gaming technologies and gear, announced the G515 LIGHTSPEED TKL Wireless Gaming Keyboard, a keyboard that offers advanced technologies and high-performance features in a low-profile, modern design. Low-profile keyboards provide a cleaner, more aesthetically pleasing look and deliver a high-performance typing experience. The G515 enables a more efficient and comfortable typing experience by combining low-profile switches with a slimmer design.

"With the iconic G915 gaming keyboard, Logitech G delivered a first-of-its-kind low-profile keyboard renowned for its exceptional quality, top-tier performance, and premium design features. With the G515 low-profile design, we have pushed the boundaries even further," said Arnaud Perret-Gentil, Head of PC Gaming, Logitech G. "With the G515, we've maintained the sleek design while also including our latest technology innovations, such as LIGHTSPEED, LIGHTSYNC, and KEYCONTROL, to give gamers an advanced and high-performance gaming keyboard experience."
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As Intel gears for the launch of Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors, the company appears to be preparing a new line of high-performance processors for gaming laptops. Recent developments suggest that the company is adapting its desktop-grade Arrow Lake-S chips for use in ultra-high-performance notebooks. The buzz began when X user @InstLatX64 spotted Intel testing a peculiar motherboard labeled "Arrow Lake Client Platform/ARL-S BGA SODIMM 2DPC." This discovery hints at the possibility of Intel packing up to 24 cores into laptop processors, eight more cores compared to the 16 cores expected in standard Arrow Lake-H mobile chips. By utilizing the full potential of Arrow Lake-S silicon in a mobile form factor, Intel aims to deliver desktop-class performance to high-end notebooks in a BGA laptop CPU.

The leaked chip would likely feature eight high-performance Lion Cove P-cores and 16 energy-efficient Skymont E-cores, along with an integrated Xe2 GPU. This configuration could provide the raw power needed for demanding games and professional applications in a portable package. However, implementing such powerful hardware in laptops presents challenges. The processors are expected to have a TDP of 45 W or 55 W, with actual power consumption potentially exceeding these figures to maintain high clock speeds. Success will depend not only on Intel's chip design but also on the cooling solutions and power delivery systems developed by laptop manufacturers. As of now, specific details about clock speeds and performance metrics remain under wraps. The test chip that surfaced showed a base frequency of 3.0 GHz, notably without AVX-512 support.

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[NextPowerUP]

In the competitive world of gaming chairs, AutoFull stands out by offering the best in comfort and support for gamers. With gamers worldwide struggling with poor posture and discomfort from long hours of gaming or working. Announcing the AutoFull M6 gaming chair, the AutoFull M6's unique design and superior performance offer the perfect solution. By delving into the innovative technology and features of the AutoFull M6 gaming chair, it's clear why AutoFull M6 is a market leader, surpassing most competitors.

Heating and Ventilation Cushion
Traditional gaming chairs often combine foam and leather, which can become hot and sticky during long summer sessions. To solve this issue, AutoFull has creatively integrated air conditioning-like temperature control into their gaming chair. The Heating and Ventilation Cushion uses heating and cooling elements, with built-in dual fans that can lower the seat temperature by up to 56% at the highest setting, making it perfect for hot summer days. Additionally, AutoFull has addressed winter needs with dual heating blades that can increase the seat temperature by about 67%, keeping you warm during cold winters.
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[NextPowerUP]

LIAN LI Industrial Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of chassis and PC accessories, launches the HydroShift LCD 360 AIOs, that allow for a nearly tubeless aesthetic once installed. There are three options available: HydroShift LCD 360S, HydroShift LCD 360R, and HydroShift LCD 360TL. Each option comes with a 2.88" LCD display at the pump block which is fully customizable via L-Connect 3.

Minimal Tubing
The HydroShift 360S, 360R, and 360TL liquid cooling AIOs have a unique design that conceals tubing to the side of the radiator, creating a clean look. The tubing is designed to sit flush against the sides using ribbed tubing commonly found in water-cooled servers, providing durability and flexibility to bend around the radiator without affecting flow. Two pre-installed retention brackets help with tubing routing, and the system includes a full-length brushed aluminum plate and left/right tube cover plates for a polished appearance. Additionally, a pump mounting hardware cover is provided for a sleek finish.
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TrendForce reports that while the enterprise sector continues to invest in server infrastructure—especially with the rising adoption of AI driving demand for enterprise SSDs—the consumer electronics market remains lackluster. This, combined with NAND suppliers aggressively ramping up production in the second half of the year, is expected to push the NAND Flash sufficiency ratio up to 2.3% in the third quarter, curbing the blended price hike to a modest 5-10%.

This year, NAND Flash prices saw a robust rebound as manufacturers kept production in check during the first half, helping them regain profitability. However, with a noticeable ramp-up in production and sluggish retail demand, wafer spot prices have dropped significantly. Some wafer prices are now over 20% below contract prices, casting doubts on the sustainability of future price hikes.
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[NextPowerUP]

AMD announced FSR 3.1 in March 2024, and its first implementations are being announced. FSR 3.1 is a step up from FSR 3.0, in that it not just has frame generation, but also improvements to its upscaler up from FSR 2.2. If you recall, FSR 3.0 had only introduced frame generation, but its upscaler was carried over from FSR 2.2. The newer FSR 3.1 introduces image quality improvements to every performance preset of the upscaler, and introduces new presets, including the Native AA mode that's analogous to NVIDIA's DLAA. The game is rendered at native resolution, but the upscaler attempts to enhance details, making it an advanced AA mode. AMD today announced that FSR 3.1 is implemented with "Horizon: Forbidden West," "Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart," "Ghost of Tsushima," "Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered," "Spider-Man: Miles Morales," and "God of War: Ragnarök."

AMD also recounts that FSR 3.0 now spans over 60 available and upcoming games (which includes the above titles with FSR 3.1). The company is announcing implementation for "Dragon's Dogma 2," "EVERSPACE 2," "Gray Zone Warfare," "House Flipper 2," "NARAKA: BLADEPOINT," "Pax Dei," "Senua's Saga: Hellblade II," "Ships At Sea," "Still Wakes the Deep," and" The Thaumaturge." Recently added upcoming titles include "Concord," "Creatures of Ava, Dungeon Stalkers," "Farming Simulator 25," "inZOI," "Nobody Wants to Die, Preserve," and "The First Descendant."

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Hori, a veteran Japanese peripheral maker, is set to release a Valve-licensed Steam controller in Japan on October 31. Priced at ¥7980 (about $50), the controller will come in four vibrant colors: Neon Yellow, Luminous Violet, Shiny White, and Midnight Black. This Japan-exclusive launch represents an intriguing development in the Steam Controller's evolution and potentially signals Valve's ongoing efforts to capture the Japanese gaming market, long known for its affinity for portable gaming. Unlike its predecessors, the Hori Steam Controller avoids trackpads in favor of traditional analog sticks and D-pads, a design choice that may appeal to console gamers, particularly Nintendo Switch users.

Despite this significant change, the new controller retains several key features from earlier Valve designs. It boasts dual analog sticks with touch sensitivity, a feature inherited from the Steam Deck that enables precise gyro aim toggling. The controller offers comprehensive Steam Input configuration options in its "Steam Mode," as well as an "XInput Mode" for non-Steam games. It supports both Bluetooth and wired USB connectivity and includes built-in gyro functionality. Additional features include four programmable buttons, rapid-fire capability, and dedicated Steam and Quick Access buttons for use in Steam Mode. While its availability beyond Japan remains uncertain, this release shows Valve's commitment to expanding its footprint in the global gaming hardware market.

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Intel today released the latest version of its Arc GPU Graphics drivers for its A-series discrete GPUs and Arc Graphics iGPUs powering its Core Ultra processors. Version 101.5593 Beta comes with optimization for "The First Descendant" and "Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail," which includes support for ray tracing in the former. The company did not fix any issues with this release, but identified a few new ones to fix in future releases. These include application crashes with "No Man's Sky" and "Enshrouded," intermittent flickering and display corruption in the game menu of "Doom Eternal," and Topaz Video AI throwing up errors when exporting videos after using some models for video enhancements. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.5593 Beta
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[NextPowerUP]

AMD is developing a new technology that promises to significantly reduce the size on disk of games, as well as reduce the size of game patches and updates. Today's AAA games tend to be over a 100 GB in size, with game updates running into tens of gigabytes, with some of the major updates practically downloading the game all over again. Upcoming games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is reportedly over 300 GB in size, which pushes the game away from those with anything but Internet connections with hundreds of Mbps in speeds. Much of the bulk of the game is made up of visual assets—textures, sprites, and cutscene videos. A modern AAA title could have hundreds of thousands of individual game assets, and sometimes even redundant sets of textures for different image quality settings.

AMD's solution to this problem is the Neural Block Compression technology. The company will get into the nuts and bolts of the tech in its presentation at the 2024 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (July 3-5), but we have a vague idea of what it could be. Modern games don't drape surfaces of a wireframe with a texture, but also additional layers, such as specular maps, normal maps, roughness maps, etc). AMD's idea is to "flatten" all these layers, including the base texture, into a single asset format, which the game engine could disaggregate into the individual layers using an AI neural network. This is not to be confused with mega-textures—something entirely different, which relies on a single large texture covering all objects in a scene. The idea here is to flatten the various data layers of individual textures and their maps, into a single asset type. In theory, this should yield significant file-size savings, even if it results in some additional compute cost on the client's end.

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[NextPowerUP]

SK hynix announced today that it developed PCB01, an SSD product with the industry's best specifications, for on-device AI PCs. The product marks the first case where the industry adopts the fifth generation of the 8-channel PCIe technology and brings innovation to performance including the data processing speed. The company expects the latest advancement in the NAND solution space to add to its success stories in the high-performance DRAM area led by HBM, enhancing its leadership in the overall AI memory space.

With a validation process with a global PC customer underway, SK hynix plans to mass produce and start shipping the products to both corporate customers and general consumers within this year. PCB01 comes with the capabilities of sequential read and write speeds of 14 GB and 12 GB per second, respectively, bringing the performance of an SSD to the level unseen before. The speeds allow the operation of a large language model or LLM, for AI training and inference, in a second.
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[NextPowerUP]

Steam has officially launched its Summer Sale, and there are plenty of good game titles to be found across all genres. In addition, Steam is also doing a neat promotion on Steam Deck LCD models.

We had a quick look through the list and picked out a few that have caught our eye, but there are a lot of titles so we might have missed a few. As said, Steam is also running a promotion for its Steam Deck LCD models, the 64 GB and 512 GB one, which are 15 percent off during Steam Summer Sale. This year, Steam also launched a list of "extra-deep discounts", which is a selection of games that you just might not want to miss.
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At Xbox, we're committed to bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone. Today, we're announcing a collaboration with Amazon where Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members in over 25 countries can play games directly from the Xbox app on select Fire TV devices via cloud gaming, giving people even more choice in how they play their favorite games. In July, the Xbox app will be available on the Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023) ($59.99) and Fire TV Stick 4K (2023) ($49.99). For people new to console gaming, or for those looking for another way to play, it's a great low-cost, convenient, and portable option to enjoy a huge library of incredible games.

To get started, players just need a Fire TV Stick, a Bluetooth-enabled wireless controller, and an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership to gain instant access to hundreds of phenomenal games, including Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Starfield, and Forza Horizon 5, among others. Plus, Bethesda Game Studios' beloved Fallout games are also available with Game Pass Ultimate, including Fallout 76 and Fallout 4. Fallout fans will be able to play these games on select Amazon Fire TV devices alongside the acclaimed Fallout TV show on Prime Video, which released in April.
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More than 500 games and applications feature RTX technologies, and each week new games integrating NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex and advanced ray-traced effects are released or announced, delivering the definitive PC experience for GeForce RTX players. Following yet another week of excellent DLSS game launches and announcements, we've got even more DLSS news to share this week - PAYDAY 3 and TRIBES 3: Rivals have upgraded from DLSS 2 to DLSS 3, and the Riven remake has launched with support for DLSS 2! And next week, The First Descendant launches with day-one support for DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, ray tracing, Reflex, and DLAA. Learn more about each integration of our experience-enhancing technologies below.

The First Descendant Launches July 2nd, Featuring DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, Reflex & Ray Tracing
The First Descendant is a free, third-person cooperative action-RPG shooter powered by Unreal Engine 5. Experience the fun of strategic boss fights through 4-player co-op, using an extensive range of unique characters, with exciting gunplay, and looting. Battle through the engrossing story, and tackle World Missions against huge bosses in The First Descendant.
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Today we've launched Steam Game Recording into Beta, a new built-in system for creating and sharing your gameplay footage, that works on any game on Steam. From capturing highlights to documenting entire campaigns, there are many ways to use this all-new set of features.

The Steam Game Recording Beta can record, replay, clip, and share all your favorite gameplay. You can set it to record automatically in the background every time you start playing or record on demand. Although still in Beta phase, there are plenty of features with promise of more to come.
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Schneider Electric, the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, has today announced the availability of its APC Back-UPS Pro Gaming uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) in Europe. Celebrating 40 years of Legendary Reliability and leadership in critical power protection during 2024, the new, stylish, and state-of-the-art UPS has been designed to protect gaming equipment from power outages and deliver a robust power connection, despite energy spikes and failures.

Back-UPS Pro Gaming has been specifically designed with gamers, streamers, and influencers in mind, delivering uninterruptible power protection, even in regions where the grid is unstable, keeping GPU-powered PCs, leading consoles, streamers, and gamers connected to both their online gaming experiences and audiences, regardless of power disruptions. To deliver robust protection, APC Back-UPS Pro Gaming UPS features sine wave battery backup power - delivering the smooth electrical current required by sensitive electronics and AVR (Automatic Voltage Regulation), and helping to protect against power irregularities that can result in glitches and buffering during an outage to extend the lifespan of gaming equipment.
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