An anonymous reader shares this thought-provoking article by a graphics reporter at The Washington Post who was part of its Pulitzer Prize-winning Explanatory Reporting team: The scientific paper published in the June 2021 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change was alarming. Between 1991 and 2018, the peer-reviewed study reported, more than one-third of deaths from heat exposure were linked to global warming. Hundreds of news outlets covered the findings. The message was clear: climate change is here, and it's already killing people. But that wasn't all that was happening. A month later, the same research group, which is based out of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine but includes scientists from dozens of countries, released another peer-reviewed study that told a fuller, more complex story about the link between climate change, temperature and human mortality. The two papers' authors were mostly the same, and they used similar data and statistical methods.

Published in Lancet Planetary Health, the second paper reported that between 2000 and 2019, annual deaths from heat exposure increased. But deaths from cold exposure, which were far more common, fell by an even larger amount. All told, during those two decades the world warmed by about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit, and some 650,000 fewer people died from temperature exposure....

But whose lives? Projections indicate milder temperatures may indeed spare people in the globe's wealthy north, where it's already colder and people can buy protection against the weather. Yet heat will punish people in warmer, less wealthy parts of the world, where each extra degree of temperature can kill and air conditioning will often remain a fantasy....

What about the long term? A groundbreaking peer-reviewed study, published in November in Harvard's Quarterly Journal of Economics, gives us a glimpse. In the study, a team of researchers projected how mortality from temperature would change in the future. The worldwide temperature-linked mortality rate is projected to stay about the same, but you can see enormous geographic variation: colder, wealthier countries do well, while hotter, poorer countries suffer.

System76 is announcing a "fully redesigned" version of its AMD-only Linux-powered "Pangolin" laptop with an upgraded memory, storage, processor, and display.

9to5Linux reports: It features the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor with up to 4.7 GHz clock speeds, 8 cores, 16 threads, and AMD Radeon 680M integrated graphics.... a 15.6-inch 144Hz Full HD (1920 x 1080) display [using 12 integrated Radeon graphics cores] with a matte finish, a sleek magnesium alloy chassis, and promises up to 10 hours of battery life with its 70 Wh Li-Ion battery. It also features a single-color backlit US QWERTY Keyboard and a multitouch clickpad. Under the hood, the Linux-powered laptop boasts 32 GB LPDDR5 6400 MHz of RAM and it can be equipped with up to 16TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD storage. Another cool feature is the hardware camera kill switch for extra privacy....

As with all of System76's Linux-powered laptops, the all-new Pangolin comes pre-installed with System76's in-house built Pop!_OS Linux distribution featuring the GNOME-based COSMIC desktop and full disk-encryption or with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

BetaNews: Yesterday, Microsoft announced it would be bringing AI to its Edge browser thanks to a partnership with ChatGPT owner OpenAI. Today the software giant adds something that many people will be less keen on -- Acrobat PDF technology. Describing the move as the next step to in their "commitment to transform the future of digital work and life," Microsoft and Adobe say this addition will give uses a unique PDF experience with extra features that will remain free of charge. By powering the built-in PDF reader with the Adobe Acrobat PDF engine, Microsoft says users will benefit from "higher fidelity for more accurate colors and graphics, improved performance, strong security for PDF handling, and greater accessibility -- including better text selection and read-aloud narration."

An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica: The month before Dwarf Fortress was released on Steam (and Itch.io), the brothers Zach and Tarn Adams made $15,635 in revenue, mostly from donations for their 16-year freeware project. The month after the game's commercial debut, they made $7,230,123, or 462 times that amount....

Tarn Adams noted that "a little less than half will go to taxes," and that other people and expenses must be paid. But enough of it will reach the brothers themselves that "we've solved the main issues of health/retirement that are troubling for independent people." It also means that Putnam, a longtime modder and scripter and community member, can continue their work on the Dwarf Fortress code base, having been hired in December.

The "issues of health/retirement" became very real to the brothers in 2019 when Zach had to seek treatment for skin cancer. The $10,000 cost, mostly covered through his wife's employer-provided insurance, made them realize the need for more robust sustainability. "You're not just going to run GoFundMes until you can't and then die when you're 50," Tarn told The Guardian in late 2022. "That is not cool." This realization pushed them toward a (relatively) more accessible commercial release with traditional graphics, music, and tutorials.

On Tuesday's fourth-quarter earnings call, Snapchat maker Snap revealed that its future AR glasses will be powered by generative AI technology. TechCrunch reports: Social media company and Snapchat maker Snap has for years defined itself as a "camera company," despite its failures to turn its photo-and-video recording glasses known as Spectacles into a mass-market product and, more recently, its decision to kill off its camera-equipped drone. [...] Snap CEO Evan Spiegel agreed that, in the near term, there were a lot of opportunities to use generative AI to make Snap's camera more powerful. However, he noted that further down the road, AI would be critical to the growth of augmented reality, including AR glasses.

The exec said that, initially, generative AI could be used to do things like improve the resolution and clarity of a Snap after the user captures it, or could even be used for "more extreme transformations," editing images or creating Snaps based on text input. (We should note that generative AI, at least in the way the term is being thrown around today, is not necessarily required to improve photo resolution.) Spiegel didn't pin any time frames to these types of developments or announce specific products Snap had in the works, but said the company was thinking about how to integrate AI tools into its existing Lens Studio technology for AR developers. "We saw a lot of success integrating Snap ML tools into Lens Studio, and it's really enabled creators to build some incredible things. We now have 300,000 creators who built more than 3 million lenses in Lens Studio," Spiegel told investors. "So, the democratization of these tools, I think, will also be very powerful," he added, in reference to the future integrations of AI tech.

What's most interesting, perhaps, was the brief insight Spiegel offered about how Snap foresees the potential for AI when used in AR glasses. Though Snap's Spectacles have not broken any sales records, the company continues to develop the product. The most recent version, the Spectacles 3, expands beyond recording standard photos and video with the addition of new tools like 3D filters and AR graphics. Spiegel suggested that AI could have an impact on this product as well, thanks to its ability to improve the process of building for AR. "We can use generative AI to help build more of these 3D models very quickly, which can really unlock the full potential of AR and help people make their imagination real in the world," Spiegel added.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As the PC industry flounders, Intel suffered from such disastrous sales last quarter that it instituted pay cuts and other extreme measures going forward. AMD's client PC sales also dropped dramatically -- a whopping 51 percent year-over-year -- but the company managed to eke out a small profit despite the sky falling. So why aren't CPU and GPU prices falling too? In a call with investors Tuesday night, CEO Lisa Su confirmed that AMD has been "undershipping" chips for a while now to balance supply and demand (read: keep prices up). "We have been undershipping the sell-through or consumption for the last two quarters," Su said, as spotted by PC Gamer. "We undershipped in Q3, we undershipped in Q4. We will undership, to a lesser extent, in Q1."

With the pandemic winding down and inflation ramping up, far fewer people are buying CPUs, GPUs, and PCs. It's a hard, sudden reverse from just months ago, when companies like Nvidia and AMD were churning out graphic cards as quickly as possible to keep up with booming demand from cryptocurrency miners and PC gamers alike. Now that GPU mining is dead, shelves are brimming with unsold chips. Despite the painfully high price tags of new next-gen GPUs, last-gen GeForce RTX 30-series and Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards are still selling for very high prices considering their two-year-old status. Strategic under-shipping helps companies maintain higher prices for their wares.

Phoronix compares the performance of Firefox and Chrome on the Linux desktop. They used recent releases (at default settings) for both browsers on an Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" system with Radeon RX 6700XT graphics, concluding "out-of-the-box Google Chrome continues performing much better overall than Mozilla Firefox."

One area where Firefox does better out-of-the-box is around the HTML5 Canvas such as measured via the CanvasMark test case. For the demanding JetStream 2 benchmark as one of the most demanding browser tests currently, Chrome on Linux was 67% faster than Firefox on this same Intel Raptor Lake desktop.

Firefox did have a small win in the rather basic JavaScript Maze solver benchmark. Firefox at least was in a competitive space for the WebAssembly (WASM) benchmarks, but aside from that Google Chrome continues holding strong on Linux in the performance department.

Apple has announced new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, featuring its latest M2 Pro and Max chips. From a report: The M2 Pro model will launch with a 12-core CPU, up to 19-core GPU, and up to 32GB of unified memory, while the M2 Max includes up to 38 cores of GPU power and support for up to 96GB of unified memory. The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro starts at $1,999, with the 16-inch model starting at $2,499. Both are available to order online today and will start shipping and appearing in Apple stores on January 24th.

Apple says the M2 Pro has double the amount of transistors the M2 shipped with and nearly 20 percent more than the M1 Pro. It also features 200GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, twice what's available on the regular M2. All of this power should result in better performance in apps like Adobe Photoshop and Xcode. Apple claims the MacBook Pro with M2 Pro "is able to process images in Adobe Photoshop up to 40 percent faster than with M1 Pro, and as much as 80 percent faster than MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 processor." The M2 Max chip has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro, but much like the M1 Max, it really pushes the GPU power more. Apple claims the M2 Max is up to 30 percent faster than the M1 Max in graphics and can apparently "tackle graphics-intensive projects that competing systems can't even run." Chips aside, the latest MacBook Pro models now include Wi-Fi 6E3 and a "more advanced HDMI" (probably HDMI 2.1) that supports 8K displays up to 60Hz and 4K displays up to 240Hz.

Jacob Ridley writes via PC Gamer: MSI Afterburner is an app used the world over for graphics card monitoring, overclocking, and undervolting. It's become pretty synonymous with general GPU tinkering, yet the app's developer has suggested it might not have long left to live in a forum post earlier this month. MSI disagrees, telling us "we fully intend to continue with MSI Afterburner." MSI Afterburner is developed by Alexey 'Unwinder' Nicolaychuk, a Russian national who has kept the overclocking app functioning over many years. Nicolaychuk is also responsible for the development of RivaTuner Statistics Server, which is part of the foundational software layer powering Afterburner. In a post on the Guru3D forums (via TechPowerUp), Nicolaychuk suggests that Afterburner's development has been "semi-abandoned." "...MSI afterburner project is probably dead," Nicolaychuk says.

"War and politics are the reasons. I didn't mention it in MSI Afterburner development news thread, but the project is semi abandoned by company during quite a long time already. Actually we're approaching the one year mark since the day when MSI stopped performing their obligations under Afterburner license agreement due to 'politic [sic] situation'." Nicolaychuk says development of the app has continued over the past 11 months, but that may also be ending soon. "I tried to continue performing my obligations and worked on the project on my own during the last 11 months, but it resulted in nothing but disappointment; I have a feeling that I'm just beating a dead horse and waste energy on something that is no longer needed by company. "Anyway I'll try to continue supporting it myself while I have some free time, but will probably need to drop it and switch to something else, allowing me to pay my bills."

Development of the RivaTuner Statistics Server -- software is pivotal to many of the functions of Afterburner -- is materially separate from Afterburner and will continue, Nicolaychuk notes. Nicolaychuk suggests the issue comes down to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and we've since confirmed with MSI that this is the case. MSI has stated to PC Gamer that the payments were halted due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, saying: "payments had been put on hold due to the RU/UA war and the economic regulations that entailed." [...] On this being the end for Afterburner, MSI disagrees. "We fully intend to continue with MSI Afterburner," MSI tells PC Gamer. "MSI have been working on a solution and expect it to be resolved soon."

Alienware is unveiling a refreshed lineup of its M- and X-series gaming laptops at CES 2023. Like some other laptop companies, including Razer and Acer, Alienware is shifting focus away from 15- and 17-inch laptops toward thin, powerful 16- and 18-inch models. From a report: The brand is going big with the new M18, an 18-inch model that's being pitched as a desktop replacement. This is actually a resurrection following the M18's previous spec update way back in 2015. The 2023 model will feature Intel's 13th Generation HX CPUs and Nvidia's RTX 4090 mobile graphics card. The latest processors and graphics options from AMD will be available in the M18 later in 2023. Not only is the M18 massive and powerful -- it's a big deal in other ways. It can be configured with an 18-inch QHD Plus screen in the taller 16:10 aspect ratio and set up to include a ton of ports, including two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, an SD card reader, and many others. It supports user-upgradeable dual DDR5 RAM slots, and you can also cram up to 9TB of NVMe M.2 storage in it. This model starts at $2,099, but the first configuration it's releasing will cost $2,899.

Nvidia unveiled the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card using its latest graphics processing unit (GPU) chip. It also showed off laptops with a whole family of 40 Series GPUs. From a report: The 4070 desktop GPU will sell for $800 and will be available on January 5 for custom add-on boards. The Santa Clara, California-based company said the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is faster than the predecessor GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, at nearly half the power, thanks to its new Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture innovations and Nvidia DLSS 3 (deep learning super sampling) technology. The GPUs are part of the 40 Series family that the company began introducing last fall, and they will compete against the latest offerings from Advanced Micro Devices' Radeon GPU family. Nvidia made the announcement at an online event ahead of the CES 2023 tech trade show in Las Vegas.

Nvidia said that the GPUs will be built into more than 170 laptop models. The laptops use the new 4070, 4060 and 4050 GPUs from Nvidia. And 4090- and 4080-based laptops will start shipping for $2,000 on February 8. Other 40 Series RTX laptops (4050/60/70 starting at $1,000) will start shipping on February 22. Nvidia said the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will max out a 1440p monitor, delivering over 120 FPS in modern games like A Plague Tale: Requiem, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, and F1 22. Nvidia showed off a bunch of games that will take advantage of the hardware. Other titles that will use RTX's ray tracing include Cyberpunk 2077, Portal with RTX, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and many more.

Intel has finally pulled the proverbial trigger on its non-K series SKUs, with sixteen new Raptor Lake-S series processors for desktops. AnandTech: Varied across a mixture of bare multiplier locked SKUs such as the Core i9-13900 and Core i7-13700 with a TDP of 65 W, Intel has also announced its T series models with a TDP of just 35 W for lower powered computing, including the Core i9-13900T. Furthermore, Intel has launched its Core i3 series family, offering decent performance levels, albeit with just performance (P) cores and no efficiency (E) cores, at a more affordable price starting from $109. Although the overclockable parts typically get consumers' attention when they launch, most of Intel's sales come through its regular non-K parts. Despite not being world record holders regarding performance or overclocking ability, the non-K series SKUs account for most system builders and OEM systems across the entry-level and mid-range offerings.

Intel's non-K launch offerings as part of its Raptor Lake-S architecture all come with a TDP of 65 W or lower, with variants representing the Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5; Intel has also now pulled the trigger on its 13th Gen Core i3 series. Intel has sixteen new desktop processors with varying performance, specification, and price levels, ranging from 24-core (8P+16E) to quad-core (4P+0E) options. Memory support on the Core i9 and Core i7 series includes both DDR5-5600 and DDR4-3200, while the new Core i5 and Core i3 series support DDR5-4800 and DDR4-3200 as per JEDEC specifications. There are three new Intel 13th Gen Core i9 series processors to select from, starting at $549 with the Core i9-13900. All Core i9 series non-K parts include 8P+16E cores for 32 threads, and 36 MB of Intel Smart L3 cache, with the Core i9-13900 ($549) and Core i9-13900F ($524) sharing the same 5.6 GHz turbo clock speed and a base frequency of 3.3 GHz on the performance (P) cores. Both models also include a base TDP of 65 W and a turbo TDP of 219 W, which is plenty of power budget for turbo clock speeds on both the P and E cores. The only caveat is that the Core i9-13900F doesn't include Intel's UHD 770 integrated graphics (32 EUs); consequently, it has a $25 lower MSRP.

The third of Intel's Core i9 non-K series chips is the Core i9-13900T, with the T signifying that it's a 35 W part. A lower power envelope means it sacrifices plenty of MHz to account for the drop in power. The Core i9-13900 has a P-core base frequency of 1.1 GHz, with a turbo clock speed of up to 5.3 GHz; the E-core specifications are similar, with a base frequency of 800 MHz and a turbo of 3.9 GHz. Even though the Core i9-13900T ($549) comes with a 35 W base TDP, it has a turbo TDP of 106 W. Moving onto the Core i5 family, Intel has three new Raptor Lake-S desktop processors, including two 65 W and one T series (35 W) part. All three include 30 MB of Intel The Core i7-13700 and Core i7-13700F both feature a P-core turbo clock speed of 5.2 GHz, while the restrictions in power mean that the P-core base frequency sits at just 2.1 GHz. For the efficiency (E) cores, this means that they have a base frequency of 1.5 GHz and a turbo clock speed of 4.1 GHz, while both conform to Intel's interpretation of 65 W; they both have a turbo TDP of 219 W. The Core i7-13700T, as per the specifications, has a base TDP of 35 W, but it has a turbo TDP of 106 W. As with other T-series family products, the lower TDP puts constraints on raw frequency, with a P-core base frequency of just 1.4 GHz, but the eight performance cores boost to 4.9 GHz, while the eight efficiency cores turbo up to 3.6 GHz. It shares the same level of 30 MB of L3 cache as the other Raptor Lake-S desktop Core i7 processors and includes Intel's UHD 770 integrated graphics chip.

A new leak could confirm rumors that Nvidia's planning on releasing the "unlaunched" 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card as the RTX 4070 Ti. From a report: The company briefly posted the specs for its upcoming RTX 4070 Ti GPU on its website, but Twitter user @momomo_us managed to snag a screenshot before Nvidia pulled the page down. So far, the leaked specs look identical to that of the 12GB RTX 4080, with the chip sporting 7,680 CUDA cores, a 2.61 GHz boost clock, and 12GB of memory. It also says the GPU could run 4K at up to 240Hz or 8K at 60Hz with DSC and HDR, while an included chart indicates that the RTX 4070 Ti could outperform the RTX 3080 by about 3.5 times when playing Cyberpunk 2077 with its new Ray-Tracing: Overdrive mode. In October, Nvidia faced criticism over its decision to launch the 12GB RTX 4080 GPU under the RTX 4080 moniker because of how much it differs from its much more powerful 16GB counterpart.

VentureBeat's lead gaming writer made 10 predictions for 2023. Prediction #8? "Gaming will become more open in 2023." There are many forces at play that will make gaming more open. The web browser is poised for a comeback. Companies are working on ways to get around the restrictions of the app stores by turning to the open web. In the past, this meant bad graphics and limited interactivity. But new standards like glTF and proprietary technologies could enable speedier delivery.

The open web could be succeeded one day by the open metaverse. That won't happen real soon, but enough people are talking about this that the conversation is top of mind at some of the biggest and most important companies in the industry....

Gatekeepers who create platforms still take a 30% cut of royalties. Matthew Ball, author of the bestselling book The Metaverse, has argued that this stands in the way of progress as it weakens the developers who are in the best position to push forward ideas like the metaverse. While the industry isn't going to change overnight, the added awareness to the costs of closed platforms is a catalyst for change.

Epic isn't fighting for this all by itself. The Open Metaverse Standards group has formed to push for better open standards, and USD is making progress as an interoperable 3D file format. Forte and Lamina1 have raised a lot of money and they believe that blockchain technology infrastructure can also improve the openness of sectors such as gaming, enabling players to finally own their stuff.

Overall, more business models and technologies — like Web3 or cloud gaming or subscriptions — will yield more choice for both developers and consumers.

Demand for graphics cards significantly increased during the pandemic as some people spent more time at home playing games, whereas others tried to mine Ethereum to get some cash. But it looks like now that the world has re-opened and Ethereum mining on GPUs is dead, demand for desktop discrete GPUs has dropped dramatically. From a report: In fact, shipments of discrete graphics cards hit a ~20-year low in Q3 2022, according to data from Jon Peddie Research. The industry shipped around 6.9 million standalone graphics boards for desktop PCs -- including the best graphics cards for gaming -- and a similar number of discrete GPUs for notebooks in the third quarter.

In total, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia shipped around 14 million standalone graphics processors for desktops and laptops, down 42% year-over-year based on data from JPR. Meanwhile, shipments of integrated GPUs totaled around 61.5 million units in Q3 2022. In fact, 6.9 million desktop discrete add-in-boards (AIBs) is the lowest number of graphics cards shipped since at least Q3 2005 and, keeping in mind sales of standalone AIBs were strong in the early 2000s as integrated GPUs were not good enough back then, it is safe to say that in Q3 2022 shipments of desktop graphics boards hit at least a 20-year low.

HandBrake, the popular free and open source video transcoder, has been updated to version 1.6.0. This major point upgrade is notable for facilitating AV1 video encoding for the first time in a general release. Moreover, those with Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) enabled processors, and those with Intel Arc GPUs will be able to encode AV1 video with hardware acceleration. From a report: HandBrake 1.6.0 can encode AV1 videos on any of its supported systems. In the current release its SVT-AV1 encoder offers the widest support, encoding on your processor through software. However, those with Intel QSV supporting CPUs or discrete Arc graphics can use the QSV-AV1 encoder for hardware accelerated processing. QSV isn't supported if your CPU is an 'F' suffixed model (i.e. it doesn't have an iGPU), or it is older than the Skylake generation. If you are lucky enough to have multiple QSV accelerators in your system, support for Intel Deep Link Hyper Encode should accelerate processing further. While AMD and Nvidia have AV1 encoders available for their latest GPUs, they currently aren't integrated with HandBrake. AV1 video is set to become the dominant codec across app-based streaming services and the wider internet, offering attractions such as; an open and royalty-free architecture, improved compression enabling efficient 8K video streaming, and support for the newest HDR standards.

Game developer Archer Maclean recently passed away at the age of 60. Maclean was a longtime programmer and designer best known for Dropzone on the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64. Game Developer reports: Born January 28, 1962, Maclean's first game was the aforementioned Dropzone. Following the success of that title, he would go on to do design and graphics for 1986's International Karate (and its 1987 sequel, International Karate+), and several snooker simulation games, including Archer Maclean Presents Pool Paradise. Several of these titles were developed at Awesome Studios, a subsidiary of the now defunct Ignition Entertainment. Maclean co-founded Awesome in 2002, and later left the developer in 2005. He went on to found Awesome Play, creators of the 2009 Nintendo Wii title Speedzone (or Wheelspin in Europe). Though Speedzone marked the end of his time as a game developer, Maclean also wrote columns for Retro Gamer Magazine.

The number of GPU startups in China is extraordinary as the country tries to gain AI prowess as well as semiconductor sovereignty, according to a new report from Jon Peddie Research. From a report: In addition, the number of GPU makers grew worldwide in recent years as demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and graphics processing increased at a rather unprecedented rate. When it comes to discrete graphics for PCs, AMD and Nvidia maintain lead, whereas Intel is trying to catch up.

Tens of companies developed graphics cards and discrete graphics processors in the 1980s and the 1990s, but cut-throat competition for the highest performance in 3D games drove the vast majority of them out of business. By 2010, only AMD and Nvidia could offer competitive standalone GPUs for gaming and compute, whereas others focused either on integrated GPUs or GPU IP. The mid-2010s found the number of China-based PC GPU developers increasing rapidly, fueled by the country's push for tech self-sufficiency as well as the advent of AI and HPC as high-tech megatrends.

In total, there are 18 companies developing and producing GPUs, according to Jon Peddie Research. There are two companies that develop SoC-bound GPUs primarily with smartphones and notebooks in mind, there are six GPU IP providers, and there are 11 GPU developers focused on GPUs for PCs and datacenters, including AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, which design graphics cards that end up in our list of the best graphics cards. In fact, if we added other China-based companies like Biren Technology and Tianshu Zhixin to the list, there would be even more GPU designers. However, Biren and Tianshu Zhixin are solely focused on AI and HPC for now, so JPR does not consider them GPU developers.

For three years Stockholm-based games studio Embark has been working on the Rust-gpu project to make Rust "a first class language and ecosystem for GPU programming." The project's latest announcement? rust-gpu now supports ray-tracing.

Their original announcement explained the rationale for this years-long dvelopment effort: Historically in games GPU programming has been done through writing either HLSL, or to a lesser extent GLSL. These are simple programming languages that have evolved along with rendering APIs over the years. However, as game engines have evolved, these languages have failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with large codebases, and have generally stayed behind the curve compared to other programming languages.

In part this is because it's a niche language for a niche market, and in part this has been because the industry as a whole has sunk quite a lot of time and effort into the status quo. While over-all better alternatives to both languages exist, none of them are in a place to replace HLSL or GLSL. Either because they are vendor locked, or because they don't support the traditional graphics pipeline. Examples of this include CUDA and OpenCL. And while attempts have been made to create language in this space, none of them have gained any notable traction in the gamedev community.

Our hope with this project is that we push the industry forward by bringing an existing, low-level, safe, and high performance language to the GPU; namely Rust. And with it come some additional benefits that can't be overlooked: a package/module system that's one of the industry's best, built in safety against race-conditions or out of bounds memory access, a wide range of tools and utilities to improve programmer workflows, and many others!
Along with ray-tracing, this week they announced plans to keep rust-gpu on the same schedule as the stable Rust release, "so you can use your favorite new language features as new stable versions of Rust are being released, by just updating your rust-gpu version."

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the news!

An anonymous reader shares a report: While AMD provided upstream open-source driver support for the Radeon RX 7900 series launch, the initial user experience can be less than desirable if running a new Radeon GPU but initially running an out-of-date kernel or lacking the necessary firmware support. With a new patch series posted AMD is looking to improve the experience by being able to more easily fallback to the firmware frame-buffer when their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver fails to properly load.

With the new IP-based discovery "block by block" approach to how the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver is managing the hardware initialization with RDNA3 and moving forward, the AMDGPU driver will try to probe all Radeon GPUs even if it might not end up being fully supported. In turn that ends up destroying the system firmware frame-buffer. But right now in the case of booting an RDNA3 GPU with a slightly out of date kernel (pre-6.0) or lacking the necessary RDNA3 firmware for hardware initialization, it can mean the screen freezing or system appearing unresponsive.