Enlarge / The Framework Laptop 13. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Since Framework showed off its first prototypes in February 2021 , we've generally been fans of the company's modular, repairable, upgradeable laptops.

Not that the company's hardware releases to date have been perfect—each Framework Laptop 13 model has had quirks and flaws that range from minor to quite significant , and the Laptop 16's upsides struggle to balance its downsides. But the hardware mostly does a good job of functioning as a regular laptop while being much more tinkerer-friendly than your typical MacBook, XPS, or ThinkPad.

But even as it builds new upgrades for its systems, expands sales of refurbished and B-stock hardware as budget options , and promotes the re-use of its products via external enclosures , Framework has struggled with the other side of computing longevity and sustainability: providing up-to-date software.

Enlarge / The TSMC facility in Phoenix, Arizona. (credit: The Washington Post / Contributor | The Washington Post )

The US Department of Commerce has proposed another round of CHIPS Act funding up to $6.6 billion for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which President Joe Biden hopes will "support the construction of leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing facilities right here in the United States."

With this award—which includes additional funding up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans—TSMC has agreed to increase funding in Arizona fabrication plants to $65 billion. That's the largest foreign direct investment in a new project in US history, the Commerce Department said, and it will fuel construction of TSMC's third Arizona fab.

According to Biden, "these facilities will manufacture the most advanced chips in the world," putting the US "on track to produce 20 percent of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors by 2030."

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

Last summer, AMD debuted the latest version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology . While version 2.x focused mostly on making lower-resolution images look better at higher resolutions, version 3.0 focused on AMD's "Fluid Motion Frames," which attempt to boost FPS by generating interpolated frames to insert between the ones that your GPU is actually rendering.

Today, the company is announcing FSR 3.1 , which among other improvements decouples the upscaling improvements in FSR 3.x from the Fluid Motion Frames feature. FSR 3.1 will be available "later this year" in games whose developers choose to implement it.

Fluid Motion Frames and Nvidia's equivalent DLSS Frame Generation usually work best when a game is already running at a high frame rate, and even then can be more prone to mistakes and odd visual artifacts than regular FSR or DLSS upscaling. FSR 3.0 was an all-or-nothing proposition, but version 3.1 should let you pick and choose what features you want to enable.

Enlarge / AMD's depiction of a game playing without FreeSync (left) and with FreeSync (right). (credit: AMD )

AMD announced this week that it has ceased FreeSync certification for monitors or TVs whose maximum refresh rates are under 144 Hz. Previously, FreeSync monitors and TVs could have refresh rates as low as 60 Hz, allowing for screens with lower price tags and ones not targeted at serious gaming to carry the variable refresh-rate technology.

AMD also boosted the refresh-rate requirements for its higher AdaptiveSync tiers, FreeSync Premium and FreeSync Premium Pro, from 120 Hz to 200 Hz.

Here are the new minimum refresh-rate requirements for FreeSync, which haven't changed for laptops.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Any Linux user trying to send the highest-resolution images to a display at the fastest frame rate is out of luck for the foreseeable future, at least when it comes to an HDMI connection.

The licensing group that controls the HDMI standard, the HDMI Forum , has reportedly told AMD that it does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 (or HDMI 2.1+) specification, blocking tools such as AMD's FreeSync from working over HDMI connections at resolution/rate combinations like 4K at 120 Hz, or 5K at 240 Hz.

Linux blog Phoronix noted in January 2021 that the HDMI Forum did not offer public access to the HDMI 2.1 specification. Alex Deucher, an AMD engineer who has long contributed to the company's open source offerings, has kept a related bug thread alive for at least two years , only to deliver the negative outcome yesterday.

Enlarge / Midrange GPUs like AMD's Radeon RX 7600 or Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 can benefit a lot from DLSS and FSR upscaling, which can improve image quality and framerates beyond what the hardware can render natively. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

One of the most interesting developments in 3D gaming in the last half-decade or so is the advent of advanced upscaling technologies—features like Nvidia's Deep-Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and Intel's Xe Super Sampling (XeSS). These technologies all aim to provide better, sharper image quality when playing at non-native resolutions, and when they're working well, they can boost frame rates and help squeeze a bit more life out of an older or lower-end GPU.

The problem has been that game developers need to actually support these technologies in their games, and it's incumbent on developers to support each individual upscaling technology. DLSS usually looks a bit better than FSR, but it requires an Nvidia GPU; FSR works on just about anything but doesn't look quite as good. (Intel's XeSS exists somewhere in the middle, in that it works with any modern GPU but looks best when it can leverage Intel's GPU hardware.)

Microsoft is stepping in to try to straighten up this muddle of conceptually similar, executionally different technologies with a new API called DirectSR (the SR is for Super Resolution). The new API was announced in a blog post about Microsoft's 2024 Game Developers Conference sessions, and it was developed by Microsoft "in partnership with GPU hardware vendors."

Enlarge / ASRock's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

In July 2023, AMD released a new GPU called the "Radeon RX 7900 GRE" in China. GRE stands for "Golden Rabbit Edition," a reference to the Chinese zodiac, and while the card was available outside of China in a handful of pre-built OEM systems, AMD didn't make it widely available at retail.

That changes today—AMD is launching the RX 7900 GRE at US retail for a suggested starting price of $549. This throws it right into the middle of the busy upper-mid-range graphics card market, where it will compete with Nvidia's $549 RTX 4070 and the $599 RTX 4070 Super, as well as AMD's own $500 Radeon RX 7800 XT.

We've run our typical set of GPU tests on the 7900 GRE to see how it stacks up to the cards AMD and Nvidia are already offering. Is it worth buying a new card relatively late in this GPU generation, when rumors point to new next-gen GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel before the end of the year? Can the "Golden Rabbit Edition" still offer a good value, even though it's currently the year of the dragon?