Month: May 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

If you’ve ever looked at a 360 Hz monitor and thought, “This isn’t fast enough,” here’s something to look forward to. While we’ve seen monitor prototypes surpass 360 Hz, the highest native refresh rate you’ll find on a PC display these days, it seems that AU Optronics (AUO) is working on panels that’ll be available with an even snappier 480 Hz refresh rate.

Of course, not many would look at a screen updating with new information 360 times every second as lagging. But for very fast-paced action—like in a competitive game where words and items whizz by in an instant or where a few milliseconds of a delay could be the difference between a win or a loss—more speed may be imperative.

AUO highlighted a 480 Hz panel when promoting its presence at SID Display Week. (credit: AUO/YouTube)

As spotted by TFT Central this week, AUO announced via a YouTube video that it’s working on a 24-inch PC monitor panel with a 480 Hz refresh rate and response time that’s under 1 ms (the brand didn’t get any more specific there). And it’s aimed at gamers.

Enlarge / 2021’s iPhone 13 still uses Apple’s proprietary Lightning port. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple is testing iPhones that use the industry-standard USB-C port, according to a report in Bloomberg citing people with knowledge of the situation.

Since 2012, Apple’s smartphones have used the company’s proprietary Lightning connector. But more recently, the slightly larger USB-C port has come to dominate consumer electronics, including most of Apple’s other products. Consumers, reviewers, and even government regulators have called for Apple to drop Lightning in favor of USB-C in recent years.

This has led Apple to a tough spot, with three possible paths forward, each with some significant downsides.

Enlarge / AMD’s artistic interpretation of how FSR works. It’s a bit more complicated than this four-box rendering implies—especially when we consider how much better FSR 2.0 is.

Out of all the battles between graphics card manufacturers, the fight over image upsampling and reconstruction is the most interesting to follow, mostly because more gamers can actually take advantage of the results. This week, that battle has become even hotter, thanks to AMD finally landing a considerable blow.

Despite only working on one game as of press time, AMD’s new FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) feature finally passes the sniff test that its “1.0” version flunked last year. This week’s updated “2.0” version works on a larger number of GPUs in the wild than Nvidia’s comparable option, and it lets players get closer to good-enough pixel counts when running on 1440p or 4K panels. But the caveats in play leave us viewing the results as good news for older or mid-range GPUs rather than the solution to the supply issues everyone is facing.

A brief explainer on Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR

Image upsampling, as delivered by the likes of Nvidia and AMD, can take a game with a smaller pixel resolution and intelligently blow it up to fill popular screen resolutions like 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. If these systems work as advertised, they’ll produce something comparable to raw pixels—or sometimes look sharper since they also include an anti-aliasing pass to remove “jaggies” and other visual defects.