Daily Tech News 23 June 2021

• AMD's FidelityFX upscaling solution is here and it kind of works. (Hot Hardware)
  
  The way this works is you select your target resolution - say, 3840x2160, if that's the native resolution of your display - and your desired quality level ranging from Performance to Ultra Quality - and it renders at a lower resolution and does intelligent upscaling.
  
  Downside is that it's not an automatic feature of the drivers; it needs to be implemented in games. Upside is that games can use the upscaling for 3D content and render menu overlays at native resolution.
  
  Performance gains can be better than 50% even at the highest quality settings, and it works on older cards like the Radeon 5500XT - and even older Nvidia cards like the GTX 1650, both of which are benchmarked here.
  
  It also works with integrated graphics, providing a health performance boost with minimal impact to image quality.
  
  
  
  
  

• It you want a TV that doesn't spy on you - because it physically can't - you might want to get a gaming monitor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can get computer monitors in sizes up to 55", with no WiFi, no Ethernet, no smart features at all.
  
  
  
• SiFive has a new high performance core - where high performance is equivalent to an Arm A75. (SiFive)
  
  Which is not bad at all, but is four generations behind Arm's latest designs.
  
  On the other hand, four of these SiFive cores are the same size as one A75 core, which is already pretty small.
  
  
  
• Brave now has its own search engine. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Sort of. They say they run their own engine for common queries, and have links to Google, Bing, and Mojeek (who?) if they don't find many (or any) hits. That works, probably.
  
  
  
• A bug found last year in 800,000 firewalls only got partly fixed. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• The beatings will continue until the smiles improve. (PetaPixel)
  
  Canon deployed AI cameras in the offices of a Chinese subsidiary that will only unlock the doors if you smile.
  
  What could possibly go wrong?
  
  
  
• Microsoft has reached a market cap of $2 trillion. (GeekWire)
  
  Money printer continues to go brrr.
  
  
  
• Iran is claiming that the US State Department seized the websites of some of their state-run propaganda media outlets. (Bloomberg)
  
  Presumably because the content was insufficiently inflammatory.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:59 AM

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