AMD

Microsoft's Project Zenith reconfigures Windows 11 for developer-class PCs with 64GB or more of memory, debuting exclusively on AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ platform before any other silicon partner.

AMD's free-game bundle for Capcom's Onimusha: Way of the Sword only covers Ryzen X3D chips and the Radeon RX 9070 family, meaning it rewards buyers already spending big rather than lowering the price of entry.

AMD's new Adrenalin 26.8.1 driver adds day-one FSR 4 support for Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, claiming up to 3x FPS gains on RX 9000 cards, plus support for STAR WARS Zero Company, the Modern Warfare 4 Open Beta, and the Radeon RX 9050.

AMD says it has reached a 4x AI energy efficiency gain since 2024, ahead of its own roadmap pace toward a 20x improvement by 2030, though the figure rests on modeled estimates rather than independent benchmarks.

AMD's new $279 Radeon RX 9050 brings RDNA 4 ray tracing, FSR upscaling and AV1 encoding to the budget GPU tier, a segment usually stuck with older silicon. The 92W card ships alongside a new Adrenalin driver with early access to Gears of War: E-Day's multiplayer beta.

At its Advancing AI 2026 keynote, AMD launched Helios, its new rack-scale AI platform, alongside MI400 GPUs and sixth-gen EPYC CPUs. The more telling detail: Anthropic is committing up to 2 gigawatts of AMD chips, and in return AMD's engineers get access to Claude to help build ROCm, the software stack AMD needs to compete with Nvidia. OpenAI, Meta and Cerebras also confirmed Helios deployments.

AMD is making the case that CPU power, not just GPU or NPU, decides how fast AI coding agents actually get work done. In its own test, an ASUS ProArt system with a Ryzen AI Max+ processor delivered up to 6 times the CPU throughput of a four-year-old laptop while running six concurrent AI agents through a tool-heavy coding workflow.

Shockbyte, the hosting provider behind 65+ games including Rust and Discord's dedicated servers, rebuilt its global infrastructure on AMD CPUs. The switch cut its machine count by more than half while lifting single-thread performance over 50 percent, and it's now powering the company's expansion into the competitive Dallas, Texas data center market.

AMD found that HandBrake was leaving high-core-count Threadripper CPUs underused during transcoding, sometimes losing up to 60% performance instead of scaling. Its fix, now merged into HandBrake 1.11.0 and later, delivers gains of up to 181% on Threadripper PRO 9995WX and 215% on Threadripper 7980X systems, with no workflow changes required from users.

The ROG Strix B850-F Gaming WiFi7 NEO brings PCIe 5.0, WiFi 7 and strong power delivery to a B-series board. We tested it with a Ryzen 7 9850X3D and RTX 5080 to see if it delivers X870-class behavior without the price.

The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D pairs Zen 5 with 3D V-Cache for gaming. We benchmarked seven titles, frame times and synthetics on an RTX 5080 rig to see if the smoothness justifies the premium.