Enlarge / The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Last week, AMD announced what are probably the last major GPU launches of this generation of graphics cards: the $449 Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT . AMD's pricing and performance numbers pit the cards against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (specifically the $499 16GB version) and the $599 RTX 4070 .

AMD's pricing is aggressive enough that Nvidia is quietly cutting the prices of some 16GB RTX 4060 Ti cards to $449, to match the RX 7700 XT. The announcement about the $50 reduction was buried toward the bottom of an email that Nvidia sent to GPU reviewers ahead of AMD's launch next week; it also drew attention to Nvidia-specific features like DLSS upscaling and frame generation, which compete with AMD's GPU-agnostic FSR , plus recent DLSS improvements that improve ray-tracing performance.

"Finally, as a reminder, market prices can vary from the original launch MSRPs," Nvidia's Brian Burke wrote. "Today, GeForce RTX 4070 is widely available at $599, and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is now available at $449. Both of these GPUs are great upgrade choices for gamers seeking their next GPU for the upcoming 2 to 3 years."

Enlarge / The specs of AMD's Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT. (credit: AMD)

AMD has been slower than Nvidia to fill out its next-generation GPU lineup, and for months there has been a huge gap between the Radeon RX 7900 XT (currently retailing between $750 and $850) and the Radeon RX 7600 (holding steady at $270ish). Today, the company is finally filling in that gap with the new Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, both advertised as 1440p graphics cards and available starting at $449 and $499, respectively. Both cards will be available on September 6. And most Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 GPUs sold between now and September 30 will come with a free copy of Bethesda's upcoming " Skyrim in space " title, Starfield.

AMD kept the prices of both cards under wraps while pre-briefing members of the press about the announcement, which is unusual but not hard to explain. AMD's RX 7600 launch was spoiled a bit by Nvidia, which preempted the 7600's announcement by offering a more powerful GeForce RTX 4060 at the same $299 price that AMD had planned for the 7600. This prompted AMD to cut the 7600's price to $269 before it was even announced; we'll have to wait and see if Nvidia chooses to change its prices in response to the new Radeon cards' launch.

The full lineup of RX 7000-series graphics cards. AMD pictures a reference version of the 7700 XT, though it won't be selling one. (credit: AMD)

The RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT are based on the same RDNA 3 graphics architecture as the other 7000-series GPUs, which means a more efficient manufacturing process than the RX 6000 series, DisplayPort 2.1 support, and hardware acceleration for encoding with the AV1 video codec, which promises game streamers either higher-quality video at the same bitrate as older codecs or the same quality with a lower bitrate. AMD compared the 7800 XT and 7700 XT favorably to Nvidia's $600 upper-midrange RTX 4070 and the $500 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti .

Enlarge / AMD's FSR 3 will compete with Nvidia's proprietary DLSS Frame Generation feature starting in September. (credit: AMD)

Even if you're not interested in buying one of the new Radeon graphics cards AMD announced today , the company still has some software-related announcements of interest to anyone who plays games on their PC. And that includes not just owners of older AMD GPUs but people who use Nvidia GeForce or Intel Arc cards, too.

First, AMD is finally ready to reveal more details about FidelityFX Super Resolution version 3, the latest major update to the company's open source upsampling technology. A competitor to Nvidia's proprietary Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Intel's GPU-agnostic but nascent XeSS, all of these technologies attempt to generate a high-resolution image by rendering a lower-resolution image, blowing it up and filling in the gaps algorithmically to approximate what a natively rendered image would have looked like.

What GPUs support FSR 3?

Last year, FSR 2.0 went a long way toward making the technology more competitive with DLSS while also working on a wider range of graphics hardware from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. Contrary to some prior speculation, FSR 3 will continue to support a wide range of old and new GPUs from all three major GPU companies. AMD has confirmed to us that the following graphics hardware should all support FSR 3:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson)

On top of Wednesday's news that Nvidia earnings have performed far better than expected, Reuters reports that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expects the AI boom to last well into next year. As a testament to this outlook, Nvidia will buy back $25 billion of shares—which happen to be worth triple what they were just before the generative AI craze kicked off .

"A new computing era has begun," said Huang breathlessly in an Nvidia press release announcing the company's financial results, which include a quarterly revenue of $13.51 billion, up 101 percent from a year ago and 88 percent from the previous quarter. "Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI."

For those just tuning in, Nvidia enjoys what Reuters calls a "near monopoly" on hardware that accelerates the training and deployment of neural networks that power today's generative AI models —and a 60-70 percent AI server market share. In particular, its data center GPU lines are exceptionally good at performing billions of the matrix multiplications necessary to run neural networks due to their parallel architecture. In this way, hardware architectures that originated as video game graphics accelerators now power the generative AI boom.

Enlarge / A press photo of the Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU. (credit: Nvidia )

The US acted aggressively last year to limit China’s ability to develop artificial intelligence for military purposes, blocking the sale there of the most advanced US chips used to train AI systems.

Big advances in the chips used to develop generative AI have meant that the latest US technology on sale in China is more powerful than anything available before. That is despite the fact that the chips have been deliberately hobbled for the Chinese market to limit their capabilities, making them less effective than products available elsewhere in the world.

The result has been soaring Chinese orders for the latest advanced US processors. China’s leading Internet companies have placed orders for $5 billion worth of chips from Nvidia, whose graphical processing units have become the workhorse for training large AI models.

Enlarge / Asus' Chromebook Flip CX5 was one of the streaming-oriented gaming Chromebooks announced late last year. (credit: Asus)

Google and some of its Chromebook partners decided to try making " gaming Chromebooks " a thing late last year. These machines included some gaming laptop features like configurable RGB keyboards and high refresh rate screens, but because they still used integrated GPUs, they were meant mostly for use with streaming services like Nvidia's GeForce Now and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming .

But there were also apparently plans for some gaming Chromebooks with the power to play more games locally. Earlier this year, 9to5Google spotted developer comments earlier this year pointing to a Chromebook board (codenamed Hades) that would have included a dedicated GeForce RTX 4050 GPU like the one found in some Windows gaming notebooks. This board would have served as a foundation that multiple PC makers could have used to build Chromebooks.

But these models apparently won't be seeing the light of day anytime soon. Developer comments spotted by About Chromebooks this week indicate that the Hades board (plus a couple of other Nvidia-equipped boards, Agah and Herobrine) has been canceled, which means that any laptops based on that board won't be happening.

Enlarge / Intel is playing up the cumulative performance improvements for DirectX 11 games since its Arc GPUs launched almost a year ago. (credit: Intel)

When they launched last fall , Intel's drivers for its Arc dedicated graphics cards were in rough shape. The company's messaging at the time—and for months beforehand—was something along the lines of, "We're aware, and we're working on it."

I tend to be skeptical of these kinds of " we'll fix it in post " promises; you should buy products based on what they do now and not what the manufacturer promises they will one day be able to do, especially for something like consumer graphics cards where there are plenty of alternatives. But credit where it's due, Intel has put quite a bit of work into improving its drivers in the year or so since the first Arc cards launched.

Today the company has rounded up a collection of improvements made to its DirectX 11 drivers since launch, with a collection of games that run about 19 percent faster on average than they did last October. Though Arc's performance in modern DirectX 12 and Vulkan games has always been good for the price, older APIs like DirectX 9 and 11 were particular weak points of Arc's when compared to competing cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and 3060 series and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and 6600 series.