Week 7 HW News Review

New drivers for graphics cards from AMD significantly improve performance

Since the December release of a new series of graphics cards in the form of the Radeon RX 7000, built on the RDNA 3 architecture, AMD has focused only on them, and there have been no driver updates for older GPUs. This finally changed a few days ago when an update tagged 23.2.1 was released.

The wait seems to have paid off as the new driver promises a significant performance boost for RX 6000 series cards over November’s gaming drivers. The profit is usually a few percent, but for example in F1 2022 it should even reach 19%.

However, at the same time, there were alarming reports that installing the update could cause serious problems. Some users reports obsessed with fatal errors that forced them to reinstall the entire operating system. Therefore, think carefully before switching to new drivers and it is better to backup your data.

RTX 4060 specs leaked

Last time we wrote about the upcoming RTX 4070 card, which has not yet been officially announced, but according to behind-the-scenes information, it should arrive in April. However, well-known insider kopite7kimi has published details about an even younger model in the form of RTX 4060. And I must say that the characteristics do not look too optimistic.

It is expected to offer 3072 CUDA cores (a drop of 512 cores compared to the RTX 3060), 8GB GDDR6 (4GB less than the RTX 3060), and 24MB L2 cache. The most surprising thing is that the card should be built on the AD107 chip, which is almost never remembered in history. The last generation 60 series has always used chip number 106. The worst chip 107 was used in the last generation, for example, only for the RTX 3050 and its mobile version.

So we’ll see what price Nvidia comes up with, but the bottom end of the 40th Gen RTX line is definitely not looking very attractive yet.