Nvidia overwhelmingly dominates the list of the best graphics cards, and that largely comes down to its feature set that’s been enabled through DLSS. AMD isn’t sitting idly by, however. The company is researching new ways to leverage neural networks to enable real-time path tracing on AMD graphics cards — something that, up to this point, has only really been possible on Nvidia GPUs.
AMD addressed the research in a blog post on GPUOpen, saying that the goal is “moving towards real-time path tracing on RDNA GPUs.” Nvidia already uses AI accelerators on RTX graphics cards to upscale an image via DLSS, but AMD is focused on a slightly different angle of performance gains — denoising.
When enabling path tracing in a game like Alan Wake 2 or Cyberpunk 2077, you’re only getting a small fraction of the rays cast into the scene. In a real-time context, only a handful of samples per pixel are cast into the scene, and they bounce around, but rarely go back to a light source within the scene. That leads to a noisy image — see the top left of the image above — that needs to be cleaned up with denoising. AMD is applying a neural network to the denoising process.
Nvidia has this technique covered already with Ray Reconstruction, which is a DLSS feature that’s sorely underrated. It makes a massive difference in image quality, preserving details in path tracing that would normally take minutes or hours to render for a single frame offline. AMD is looking at something similar: taking a small number of samples per pixel and reconstructing the fine details of path tracing using a neural network.
The technique AMD is researching, however, combines upscaling and denoising into a single neural network. “We research a Neural Supersampling and Denoising technique which generates high-quality denoised and supersampled images at higher display resolution than render resolution for real-time path tracing with a single neural network,” the blog post reads. “Our technique can replace multiple denoisers used for different lighting effects in rendering engine by denoising all noise in a single pass, as well as at low resolution.”
This looks like some foundational research for the next version of AMD’s FSR, which could finally match Nvidia on performance and image quality. The lingering question is if these techniques require any bespoke hardware. Nvidia claims that dedicated accelerators on its RTX graphics cards are necessary for AI-assisted upscaling and denoising with DLSS, so AMD may need dedicated hardware on its GPUs, too.
However, there is a world where AMD could open up FSR 4 — or whatever the next version is called — to all graphics cards while still leveraging a neural network. RTX GPUs already have the hardware, and we’ve seen with features like Intel’s XeSS that it’s possible to run AI models on GPUs through separate instructions, though usually with a hit to image quality and performance.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.