All posts tagged: Graphics

I unlocked Nvidia’s professional GPU features on my consumer graphics card

I unlocked Nvidia’s professional GPU features on my consumer graphics card

Published by skeptic

Nvidia has maintained both a popular consumer and professional lineup for its GPUs for the longest time. While these GPUs might share the same underlying architecture, that’s about where the similarities end. Professional-grade Nvidia cards use specialized, signed Nvidia drivers, which “unlock” additional features. This led me down a rabbit hole, and I emerged with a solution to split my aging GTX 1050 Ti into multiple vGPUs to use with a virtual machine. Unfortunately, as you’ll soon find out, this is not an intuitive process and has severe hardware restrictions. Related Your Linux PC can handle HDMI 2.1 — the law is what’s holding it back When proprietary is practical. So, how does vgpu_unlock work? And a bit of a history lesson Amir Bohlooli / MUO There have been numerous attempts to crack this lock wide open, perhaps most notably DualCoder’s (Dual95) vgpu_unlock on GitHub. Essentially, it works by hooking code during the Nvidia kernel module compilation process you’d see at installation. After the script runs, it “tricks” the host system into believing you have …

Your Next Mobile Games Will Get AI Graphics Boosts That PCs and Consoles Have Had for Years

Your Next Mobile Games Will Get AI Graphics Boosts That PCs and Consoles Have Had for Years

Published by skeptic

Gaming on phones has gotten good enough that graphics and gameplay are beginning to approach what players expect on PC and console. Those more established platforms maintain the edge, with massive GPUs and energy budgets that power AI enhancements that render smoother experiences. While there will never be enough room on a smartphone to fit a full-size graphics card, next year’s top handsets will finally get those AI boosts — and mobile gaming will never be the same. It’s all because of technology making its debut on the latest phone chips. At its Snapdragon Summit 2026 recently, Qualcomm debuted the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, which comes with GPU upgrades, including new Adreno Neural Fusion tech that uses AI to upscale resolution, generate frames to increase frame rate and extend battery life while gaming.  On stage at the Snapdragon Summit, Chris Patrick, Qualcomm’s SVP and general manager of handsets, shows off the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6’s graphics gains with Adreno Neural Fusion.David Lumb/CNET How AI gameplay improvements can come to mobile …

M5 Ultra and M6 Chip Benchmark Results Reveal Graphics Performance

M5 Ultra and M6 Chip Benchmark Results Reveal Graphics Performance

Published by skeptic

The first GPU benchmark results for Apple’s new M5 Ultra and M6 chips have surfaced, ahead of the new Mac Studio and Mac mini models launching on Tuesday. If you are interested in CPU results, we shared those earlier this week. So far, the M5 Ultra has achieved up to a 59% higher Metal score (366,744) on Geekbench 7 compared to the M3 Ultra’s average score of 230,420, and the chip’s OpenCL score is roughly in line with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4080. As for the M6 chip, it has so far achieved up to a 34% higher Metal score (93,217) compared to the M5 chip’s average score of 69,563. Chip Metal Score M5 Ultra 366,744 M3 Ultra 230,420 M5 Max 225,606 M2 Ultra 201,144 M4 Max 189,301 M1 Ultra 150,098 M3 Max 146,550 M5 Pro 130,896 M2 Max 130,091 M1 Max 107,711 M4 Pro 107,354 M6 93,217 M2 Pro 77,176 M3 Pro 72,637 M5 69,563 M1 Pro 63,531 M4 51,818 M3 46,033 M2 40,529 M1 27,277 As always, real-world performance will vary. Popular Stories M6 …

I tried the internet’s most notorious graphics card, and it caught me off guard

I tried the internet’s most notorious graphics card, and it caught me off guard

Published by skeptic

The GeForce RTX 4060 is easily one of Nvidia’s most divisive GPU releases. On paper, the 4060 isn’t a bad card, but it certainly feels like an objective downgrade compared to its immediate predecessor — the RTX 3060 — especially in the VRAM department. However, over the last year and a half, the 4060 has been my primary GPU for all my gaming and productivity needs, and its raw gaming performance just caught me by surprise. Related 4 reasons your monitor’s refresh rate matters more than its resolution Always go for more Hz over Ultra HD if your budget allows it. My RTX 4060 test bench and games The Ryzen 5 5600X with RTX 4060 eliminates most CPU-related bottlenecks For the RTX 4060 test bench, I chose the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, a decent AM4 CPU, paired with 16GB of DDR4 memory. I kept the CPU in its stock configuration and paired it with a single PCIe Gen3 M.2 NVMe drive to complete my AM4 setup. This more or less makes this test bench a …

2027 Android Phones Could Boost Gaming Graphics and AI Tasks With Arm’s New Chip Tech

2027 Android Phones Could Boost Gaming Graphics and AI Tasks With Arm’s New Chip Tech

Published by skeptic

Arm debuted its new CSS for Mobile 2 technology for chipmakers to include on future silicon powering smartphones. The primary upgrade is around the GPU, which has been redesigned to allow AI to upscale graphics and improve the framerate for a better mobile gaming experience on premium Android phones coming next year. Arm has also improved its CPU clusters for AI agent processing. Every smartphone needs a CPU and GPU, but more processing power is needed at the top end of the phone market. Phones using MediaTek chips often have Arm CPU cores and GPUs, with last year’s Oppo Find X9 Pro packing a MediaTek Dimensity 9500 chip that uses a Mali G1-Ultra GPU to render graphics. Now, Arm is announcing the Mali G2-Ultra NX, which the company says is its first AI-native GPU, using AI to improve rendered visuals directly in the graphics pipeline, lowering latency and improving power efficiency. Typically, graphics data is ported to and from other AI-dedicated areas, such as the neural processing unit, to enable AI acceleration, but integrating this …

New M6 Mac Mini and Mac Studio With M5 Ultra Promise Needed Boost for AI and Graphics

New M6 Mac Mini and Mac Studio With M5 Ultra Promise Needed Boost for AI and Graphics

Published by skeptic

As if a new range of iPhones expected in the coming weeks wasn’t enough, Apple broke from its usual announcement timing to debut new chips and configurations of its Mac Mini and Mac Studio desktops. In addition to launching a Mac Mini with a new M6 chip and Mac Studio with a new M5 Ultra, Apple brings its desktops into line with its MacBook Pro offerings, adding M5 Pro configurations for the Mini and M5 Max models for the Studio. Both the Mini and the Studio are identical to their predecessors physically: The performance and capabilities of the updated chips are the only changes.  That and the prices. With the exception of the M5 Max Mac Studio, which starts at the same $2,499, the prices for the base models of both systems have gone up. Prices have increased by $100 for the Mac Mini, which now starts at $899 for the M6 and $1,699 for the M5 Pro. The M5 Ultra Mac Studio has gone up by $200 to $5,499. Those are on top of …

NPU vs GPU for Local AI: Why Graphics Cards Dominate

NPU vs GPU for Local AI: Why Graphics Cards Dominate

Published by skeptic

As the demand for local AI workflows grows, understanding the differences between Neural Processing Units (NPUs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) is increasingly important. NPUs are designed for efficiency in lightweight tasks like noise suppression and real-time transcription, making them ideal for consumer devices. However, for resource-heavy applications such as running large language models (LLMs) or generating high-resolution images, GPUs remain the preferred choice due to their superior computational power and flexibility. In this feature, PC Sense explores the distinct roles of NPUs and GPUs, emphasizing how their capabilities align with various AI workloads. Discover how to evaluate hardware choices based on your specific AI needs. This breakdown highlights the critical role of VRAM in GPU performance, particularly for managing complex models and avoiding bottlenecks. You’ll also gain insight into scenarios where NPUs excel, such as enhancing video calls and audio clarity and learn why GPUs dominate in tasks like model fine-tuning and video AI. Whether you’re a developer, creator, or hobbyist, this guide offers practical considerations to help you make informed decisions about your …

Visualizing a trillion in graphics as SpaceX IPO makes Musk a trillionaire

Visualizing a trillion in graphics as SpaceX IPO makes Musk a trillionaire

Published by Sam Flores

While SpaceX may stand out against historical benchmarks, the rapid growth of AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic, each with a valuation hovering around $900 billion, suggests that a trillion dollars could become a new standard. Numbers of this scale are rare in everyday life. Google tracks word usage across millions of books and its data shows that references to “trillion” remained scarce for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries before increasing after World War II. “Up until relatively recently, we had no real reason to talk about such numbers,” said John Allen Paulos, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Temple University. “So it’s not surprising that they don’t make much sense to people.” In his 1988 book “Innumeracy,” Paulos argues that humans are especially bad at reasoning when it comes to very large numbers. Part of the difficulty stems from our inability to intuitively grasp exponential growth. As a result, figures such as 1 billion (1,000,000,000) and 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) can feel deceptively close. In reality, the gap is enormous: 1 trillion equals …

Your new graphics card is disappointing because of one hardware mistake

Your new graphics card is disappointing because of one hardware mistake

Published by skeptic

Buying a new GPU is the ultimate thrill when it comes to putting together a rig. Though be sure you’re not slipping into eight catastrophic mistakes first-time PC builders make. Yet no matter how powerful that shiny new graphics card is, if you don’t pair it with a suitably beefy gaming CPU, you’re asking for a world of performance problems. CPU bottlenecking sometimes goes under the radar. There are a bunch of processor-intensive Steam games that will happily punish your system if your chip isn’t up to scratch, so it’s important that you don’t undercut your PC by investing in an underwhelming CPU. If you are experiencing processor bottlenecking, I have some tips below on how to get around your CPU issues. Related Your CPU isn’t slow—your RAM settings are holding it back A factory default is slowing down your entire PC. Why do CPU bottlenecks in games happen? Uneven hardware setups can cause poor performance Dave Meikleham \ MakeUseOf The main reason CPU bottlenecks occur in PC games is normally due to a performance …

Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart

Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart

Published by skeptic

Waymo is now providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across 10 U.S. cities, the company shared in a post on X this week. The eye-popping figure is reflective of the Alphabet-owned company’s accelerated commercial expansion. But it’s Waymo’s rate of growth in ridership and markets that offers a more compelling story.  In less than two years, the company’s average weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today. Over that same two-year timespan, Waymo has expanded within its initial markets of Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — and beyond them to Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. Those seven cities in the Sun Belt were all added in just the past year. Waymo’s robotaxi fleet has also grown, although the company has guarded those numbers and rarely provides updates. Data provided in December 2025 to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows the company had 3,067 robotaxis equipped with its 5th generation self-driving system. The company still uses that …