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Submission + - AMD RX 480 offers Best-in-class performance for $199/$239

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: It's been a terribly long news cycle, but today is finally the day reviews and sales start of the new AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card based on the company's latest Polaris architecture and built on 14nm FinFET process technology. With a starting price tag of $199 for the 4GB model and $239 for the 8GB, the RX 480 has some interesting performance characteristics. Compared to the GeForce GTX 970, currently selling for around $280, the RX 480 performs +/- 5-10% in DX11 games but PC Perspective found that the RX 480 was as much as 40% faster in DX12 titles like Gears of War, Hitman and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Compared to previous AMD products, the RX 480 is as fast as a Radeon R9 390 but uses just 150 watts compared to 275 watts for the previous generation! Chances are that NVIDIA will have a competing product based on Pascal available sometime in July, so AMD's advantage may be short lived; but in the meantime the Radeon RX 480 is clearly the best GPU for $200.

Submission + - New tool offers look at performance of UWP games on Windows

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: One of the concerns surrounding the recent debate of the Unified Windows Platform and games being released on it, such as the recent Gears of War Ultimate Edition, was the inability for media and consumers, and even entry level developers, to properly profile the performance of those applications. All of the standard testing applications like Fraps, FCAT and other overlays are locked out of UWP games. A Intel graphics engineer released a tool called PresentMon on GitHub yesterday that accesses event timers in Windows to monitor Present commands in any API, including DX11, DX12, Vulkan as well as games built on the Windows Store platform. Using this data, PC Perspective was able to profile the performance of the new Gears of War on PC, comparing frame time variability between the two flagship parts from NVIDIA and AMD. While it's not a perfect utility yet, there is hope now that this open source code will allow for performance metrics on any and all gaming titles.

Submission + - Microsoft Losing Ground on Windows Store and UWP for Gaming

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Microsoft has big plans to try and merge the experiences of the Xbox One and Windows for gaming but the push back from the community and from major developers and personalities is mounting. Earlier this week PC Perspective posted a story that detailed the controversy around DX12 performance analysis without an exclusive full screen mode, changes to multi-GPU configurations and even compatibility issues with variable refresh that crop up from games from the Windows Store. Microsoft's only official response so far as been that it is listening to feedback and plans to address it with upcoming changes. Now today, Epic's Tim Sweeney has posted an editorial at The Guardian with an even more dramatic tone, saying that UWP (Unified Windows Platform) "can, should, must and will, die..." Clearly the stakes are being placed in the ground and even damage control from Phil Spencer on Twitter isn't likely to hold back angry PC users.

Submission + - Valve releases SteamVR Perf Test to measure your PC (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Valve took another step to prepare the world for VR gaming by releasing the SteamVR Performance Test today. This application that is free to download through Steam, runs a portion of the Aperture Science Robot Repair demo originally built for the HTC Vive VR headset, and reports back performance metrics and a grade for your PC's hardware. Scores include a Not Ready, Capable and Ready result as well as an "average fidelity" numeric score that is even more interesting. Valve integrated a dynamic fidelity feature "that adjusts image quality of the game in a way to avoid dropped frames and frame rates under 90 FPS" — a target for an acceptable VR experience. Early results put the GeForce GTX 980 Ti at the top of the GPU stack though AMD's Radeon products do very well at every price point below $600. Is your wallet ready?

Submission + - Samsung Returns to 2D, releases 250GB 750 EVO for $75

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Even with Samsung pushing forward into 3D NAND with 32-layer technologies used in SSDs like the 850 Pro and the recently released M.2 PCIe NVMe 950 Pro, there is still plenty of traditional 2D planar memory being fabbed on production lines. To utilize that inventory Samsung is shifting its low capacity SSDs back to it, announcing the 750 EVO drives today available in 120GB and 250GB capacities. Though based largely on the very popular, but sometimes troubled, 840 EVO specs, the new drives are faster and start with some impressively low prices. The starting MSRP for the 250GB 750 EVO will be just $75.

Comment Re:You forgot something (Score 3) 73

by AllynM (#51416381) Attached to: Triple M.2 NVMe RAID-0 Testing Proves Latency Reductions

PC Perspective's new testing demonstrates the triple RAID-0 array having just 1/6th of the latency of a single drive.

That was with a queue depth of 16. Not exactly representative of a normal desktop user.

It's reasonable for peak power user load. Folks running / considering triple SSD RAIDs are not exactly 'typical desktop users' :)

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