“Intel & NVIDIA working together” will surely raise eyebrows, but this isn’t similar to how AMD and Intel recently worked to make Hades Canyon. Rather than work together on a product, the two companies sent high-ranking researchers and engineers to meet with the US Government, alongside numerous other AI and machine learning organizations. Intel and nVidia are the most relevant to our line of work, and the representatives at each organization worked to educate government officials on the needs of AI and machine learning development.

In addition to this news, Intel also is working on a $5B expansion for 10nm production, covered further down, and the company’s new Coffee Lake Pentium CPUs have been rumored and assigned specs.

Show notes below the video, if you prefer to read.

NVIDIA’s Battlefront II Game Ready driver version 388.31 shipped this week in preparation for the game’s worldwide launch. In possibly more positive news for the vast number of redditors enraged by EA’s defense of grinding, the driver is also updated for Injustice 2 compatibility and boasts double-digit % performance increases in Destiny 2 at higher resolutions.

Battlefront 2 is the headliner for this driver release, but this chart is about all NVIDIA has to say on the subject for now:

NVIDIA just posted its 388.10 drivers for Wolfenstein II, building on the earlier-launched 388.0 driver update for Destiny II. Aside from hotfixes, the driver package does not change any core functionality or performance of nVidia GTX cards. This is similar to AMD's latest hotfix for its Vega cards on Destiny II: Only download and install 388.10 if you are actively running into issues with the game at hand.

On its forums, an nVidia representative posted:

There’s no doubt that most the news circulating right now will pertain to AMD’s new driver update – and it’s an impressive update, one which we’ll discuss below, but we wanted to revive the “gaming” & “pro” mode discussion.

In speaking with AMD about its “Gaming” and “Pro” toggle switch in the Vega drivers – something we previously demonstrated to be a UI-only switch – we learned that the company intends to do something more meaningful going forward. As of now, the toggle is nothing more than a psychological switch, limiting its usefulness to removing the WattMan button from the UI – not all that useful, in other words. Functionally pointless for Vega: FE as it launched, and symptomatic of a driver package which was either woefully incomplete or intended to encourage a placebo effect.

Another day, another GPU driver update. This one comes from AMD, with Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition update version 17.5.2. The new version fixes several bugs and also improves Prey’s performance on the RX 580.

Bugfixes include a NieR: Automata crash, long Forza: Horizon 3 load times, an issue with CrossFire systems where the main display adapter could appear disabled in Radeon settings, and a system hang when entering sleep or hibernate with the RX 550.

Radeon Software Crimson Edition version 17.4.1 is now live. Along with some bug fixes, the bulk of this release is additional VR support.

AMD is making good on their promise to support asynchronous reprojection for both Oculus Rift and SteamVR. Oculus’ “Asynchronous Spacewarp” is now usable on R9 Fury, 290 and 390 series cards, while SteamVR’s “Asynchronous Reprojection” is usable on RX 480 and 470s with Windows 10.

AMD is set to roll out 17.3.2 Radeon drivers bound for the highly anticipated Mass Effect: Andromeda, for which we recently discussed graphics settings and recommended specs.

The new drivers mostly prime the RX 400 series cards for the upcoming Mass Effect launch—most demonstrably the RX 480 8GB, of which AMD notes a 12% performance increase when compared to drivers 17.3.1. Additionally, the drivers will add an “AMD optimized” tessellation profile.

This week's hardware news recap covers two sets of rumors on GPU hardware, the Fractal Define C enclosure, and driver updates from both AMD and nVidia (which we've already written about on the site).

The GPU news is probably the most interesting. AMD looks to be positioning an "RX 470D," also called "RX 465" and "RX 470 SE," to compete more directly with the GTX 1050 Ti. Our GTX 1050 & 1050 Ti review noted that the 1050 gives the RX 460 a tough fight, but that the RX 470 handily outpaces the 1050 Ti in all tested scenarios. The only problem, as always, is the price gap -- it's a $30 jump from entry-level GTX 1050 Ti cards to the entry-level RX 470 cards. That's where the 470D is supposed to land, and should fight the 1050 Ti directly.

Video below for the news discussion, or find the script below that:

NVidia's most recent round of drivers exhibited a few issues for Windows 10 mail application users -- something we didn't see, since we don't use those apps on our test platform -- and for high-refresh display users. These bugs cropped-up around the time of the Battlefield 1 release drivers, but have largely been resolved in the last couple of hotfixes.

AMD's new driver package will push "very shortly," and may already be live, and will add day-one support for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, and post-launch improvements for Titanfall 2.

AMD users hoping to run COD: MW or COD: IW this weekend will want to update to 16.11.1 for optimum performance. Titanfall 2's updates are primarily built around new CrossFire profiles, which will improve performance for multi-GPU systems. The TF2 update also contains various bug fixes.