Based on the current state and feedback surrounding the PC port of the iconic PlayStation title The Last of Us Part I on PC, the game will need more than an "optimized" driver release to get it into shape.

Still, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 22.40.43.05 has been released, offering game optimizations for The Last of Us for Radeon GPU owners. The driver release looks to have been pushed out early, with AMD noting in the release notes that a subsequent AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.4.1 driver will be made available in the future.

And with that, optimizations for this one game look to be the extent of the latest Radeon driver update - but that makes sense. Currently, AMD is offering a free copy of The Last of Us Part I for new Radeon buyers, so it's unfortunate that the game's poor state on PC is outside of its control.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology is now officially a part of the 3DMark benchmarking suite, with a new AMD FSR feature test available in the 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions.

AMD FSR 2 test in 3DMark, image credit: UL Benchmarks.

The test is a tool to gauge the potential performance improvements gained from enabling AMD FSR 2 technology. It also lets users compare the image quality between FSR and traditional rendering like TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing).

Image comparison is available via the 3DMark frame inspector tool that lets users compare image quality with an interactive side-by-side presentation that includes FSR and native rendering. The tool allows users to pan and zoom up to 32 times for a super close inspection which is excellent.

NVIDIA's RTX 4070 graphics card, which is expected to debut in April (likely in a couple of weeks), will be priced at $599 in the US, or so the latest rumor holds.

The RTX 4070 Ti is $200 more than the vanilla 4070, if this speculation turns out to be correct (Image Credit: NVIDIA)

While that's not exactly affordable - far from it, really, you can still buy a whole (budget) PC for that - it's a lot less than previous speculation contended.

The GPU grapevine has been rife with mutterings about the RTX 4070 being priced as high as $750, or maybe $699, with those hoping for a $599 price tag being on the most optimistic end of the spectrum.

Google is shifting things about to cater more for its Bard AI rather than Google Assistant, according to a new report.

Google's pretty clear that Bard remains 'experimental' thus far (Image Credit: Google)

CNBC tells us that an internal Google reshuffle is detailed in a memo entitled 'Changes to Assistant and Bard teams' that details changes to 'heavily' prioritize the development of Bard at the expense of Assistant.

Direct personnel changes include the departure of Jianchang Mao, who was vice president of engineering at Google Assistant. Mao will be replaced by Peeyush Ranjan, who was vice president in Google's commerce organization, the CNBC report claims.

ChatGPT has only just been upgraded to version 4, and we're already hearing leaks about the next-gen incarnation of the chatbot which we're told will be 'indistinguishable' from the experience of chatting to a human.

The next incarnation of ChatGPT, GPT-5, is being worked on by OpenAI and should be ready to roll towards the end of 2023.

According to a new report aired by BGR - citing Siqi Chen, a developer and entrepreneur on Twitter (see above) - GPT-5 might be set to reach a big milestone, namely achieving AGI or artificial general intelligence.

Images snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope have led to the discovery of what could be the biggest black hole known to date.

The team of astronomers analyzed images snapped of the Abell 1201 galaxy cluster by the Hubble Space Telescope and, from those images, used gravitational lensing to magnify the background objects. Notably, gravitational lensing is a phenomenon that occurs when the gravity of an object bends the light that is passing through it, causing a magnification effect. Astronomers commonly use this natural phenomenon to see much further into the cosmos than they could if they were exclusively using human-made telescopes such as Hubble.

Using gravitational lensing, astronomers were able to spot the giant black hole in the background of one of Hubble's images. According to statements from the astronomers, this black hole has an estimated mass of approximately 30 billion suns and is one of, if not the largest black hole ever discovered. Astronomers made these conclusions after simulating how much light was bending around the foreground galaxy and analyzing the gravitational lensing magnification. Before arriving at their conclusion, researchers tested the size of thousands of black holes and eventually found a solution to what they were observing.

The AI race has spawned the apparent need for companies to acquire individuals that have skills with artificial intelligence systems, with some companies paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to people that can confidently teach other individuals how to effectively use the software.

It's no surprise that the rush to develop the most advanced artificial intelligence system has created the need for individuals capable of teaching company employees how to leverage these systems to their advantage properly. A new report from Bloomberg outlines new positions under a "prompt engineer", which are people that are very good at getting chatbots such as ChatGPT or Bing Chat to respond with the desired answer to a problem. Essentially, these people are good at asking the AI the right questions to generate the best answers.

Individuals capable of this are becoming extremely valuable as companies around the world watch closely at the emergence of AI and ponder how it will impact their industry and how they can best position themselves to adapt to it. Individuals capable of teaching other people how to use these systems effectively are very valuable to these companies.

Hubble has snapped a new image that has recently been released of a mysterious object located approximately 390 million light years away from Earth. This object is called Z 229-15.

Z 229-15

Z 229-15 resides in the constellation Lyra, and according to a blog post by the European Space Agency (ESA), the more researchers look into Z 229-15, the more difficult it becomes to classify it. According to the blog post, Z 229-15 falls into a special category of celestial object that fits multiple definitions at once. As the ESA writes, researchers have classified Z 229-15 as a galaxy but also an AGN, an active galactic nucleus. A galaxy is given this classification when it harbors an active supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center.

The powerful gravitational pull of the supermassive black hole pulls large amounts of matter toward it, forming a disk around the black hole that emits a bright light across the electromagnetic spectrum when it's heated up. The definitions or classifications don't stop there, as Z 229-15's AGN is also a quasar, which astronomers label as a specific subtype of AGN, that is only given to a galaxy when it displays an extreme level of brightness over a very long distance. Since Z 229-15 is located 390 million light-years away from Earth and Hubble's image showcases an extremely bright center, Z 229-15 fits this classification also.

The artificial intelligence race has already begun, and now leading technologists, along with AI experts, are calling for it to grind to a halt.

The recent launch of OpenAI's new language model, GPT-4, has made waves across the internet, with countless reports demonstrating its impressive capabilities. Perhaps what is most impressive is just how much better GPT-4 is compared to its predecessors and just how fast OpenAI's developers were able to achieve this. Notably, OpenAI released its GPT-3 in 2020, which was superseded by GPT-3.5, which was released in November 2022 alongside ChatGPT. GPT-4 was released on March 14, 2023, and is the newest OpenAI model.

The improvements between each of these iterations are simply staggering. GPT-4 was trained on a much larger and more diverse data set than GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 and features 100 trillion parameters, compared to GPT -3's 175 billion parameters. This leap in parameters and an increased dataset size enables GPT-4 to provide much more accurate responses, overall be more reliable, creative, and handle more nuanced instructions. Furthermore, OpenAI threw in a new feature with GPT-4, text-to-image capabilities.

NASA has taken to its blog to announce that a study has been conducted on what is being described as the "brightest of all time" explosion that recently hit the solar system.

The space agency writes that on October 9, 2022, a pulse of intense radiation known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB) passed through the solar system and that this wave, which is known as the most powerful type of explosion in the universe, blinded NASA's eyes in space. NASA writes that the event named GRB 221009A was so bright that it effectively blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, which means that NASA was unable to detect the true intensity of the explosion.

However, the space agency says that researchers were able to reconstruct the data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and compared their results against data being worked on by teams of researchers in China and Russia. NASA writes that research suggests an event such as this occurs once in every 10,000 years and that it was 70 times brighter than any other GRB humans have detected yet. So, where did it come from?