quickstart
10 MAXIMUMPC JAN 2022
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IF YOU REALLYWANT to shift great gobs of
data inside a PC you use PCIe. The latest
generation of processors support version
4.0, which can shift nearly 2 GB/s on a
single lane. There’s almost nothing that
you can plug into it that will hit the buffers.
When NVMe appeared, it was the obvious
place to go for performance, it makes SATA
III look positively pedestrian at 60 0MB/s.
Seagate has taken the logical step
and demonstrated the first commercial
hard drive that can connect to PCIe using
the NVMe protocol, which added HDD
support this summer. The result is an
experimental drive with SAS, SATA, and
NVMe controllers that works ‘seamlessly’,
according to Seagate. Much of the impetus
for the move comes from data centers,
where NVMe is increasingly king, and
moving everything to a single interface
would be simpler, and cheaper.
Do spinning discs need a new bus on
a home rig? Not yet, even the fastest still
can’t saturate SATA III, but it is getting
closer by the year. The multi-actuator
drives we’ve been promised for a while,
and other improvements will outgrow
their current home. Switching to a ready-
made interface with acres of headroom is
an obvious step. It’s at the experimental
stage for now, but ‘key customers’ will
be getting the new drives next fall. It is
expected to trickle down from the servers
to the desktop as prices reach parity with
the existing kit. SATA isn’t going anywhere
just yet—it’s useful if you want to connect
a whole stack of drives, but its days as the
primary interface are looking numbered in
the long-term. Witness the dearth of news
on the possibility of SATA IV. –CLSeagate begins move
to faster data transferHARD DISKS
TO GO PCIE
Haswell kills
DX12 games
Still running one of Intel’s Haswell
chips and playing DX12 games
using integrated graphics? Then
it’s game over—the latest driver
has pulled DX12 support. For
anyone still needing support, Intel
suggests reverting to an older
driver. Haswell was a 4 th-gen
chip introduced in 20 13, the range
included a couple of tasty eight-
core ‘enthusiast’ chips and clock
speeds of up to 4 .4GHz. It lived
on after Skylake, and you could
still buy a Haswell-based Pentium
Gold earlier this year. We have
become used to the rapid pace of
technology, but eight years from
cutting-edge to obsolescence is
still impressive. – CLQualcomm
backs ARM
Last year, Qualcomm bought
Nuvia, a company founded by
former Apple chip designers, for
$1.4bn. With its own ARM-based
SnapDragon chips making little
headway outside smartphones,
Qualcomm quickly got to work
on new ARM designs. Apple has
shown that a well-executed ARM
design can work and Qualcomm
has stated that a move to ARM-
based chips is “inevitable”. That
may come as news to Intel and
AMD, who are squeezing every
drop out of x 86 designs. The aim
is to have samples of the next-gen
SnapDragon chips ready by the
summer, with commercial sales of
notebooks following in 20 23. – CLNvidia open-sources upscaling techNO NEW CARDS, BUTwe’ve had a few software updates from Nvidia. Most interesting is
that the new version of Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS) is going open source. Nvidia Image
Scaling does the same job as DLSS without the AI, which means you don’t need a fancy
latest-gen Nvidia card. This version uses a six-tap filter with four-directional scaling
and adaptive sharpening, it doesn’t include any anti-aliasing, that’s down to the game.
As with DLSS, NIS squeezes extra frames out of higher resolutions, so you can set
a game to 144 0p, and let NIS crank it up to match your 4 K monitor, and it should get
close to the same frame rates as running in 14 40p flat. Going open-source effectively
means letting it run on AMD and Intel graphics. That sounds great, but without direct
game support (none have this) it will require driver support. Until then, applications
such as Lossless Scaling have already added NIS support.
DLSS has also received an update to version 2.3. Nvidia says it makes “smarter use
of motion vectors to improve object detail in motion, particle reconstruction, ghosting,
and temporal stability”. The new version has already been added to a slew of AAA
titles, including Crysis 2/ 3 , Rise of the Tomb Raider, Cyberpunk 2077 , and Farming
Simulator 22. Nvidia has also released its Image Comparison and Analysis Tool (ICAT)
as a free download. It puts up to four screenshots or videos side-by-side for direct
comparison, making it easier to see what’s going on as you play with the settings. –CLA neat side-by-side of DLSS, Nvidia has released a utility so you can create these
at home. More importantly,it has open-sourced its Nvidia ImageScalingengine.