The Full Nerd: AMD and Sony join forces to improve gaming for everyone

Welcome to this week’s issue of The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardcore hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. In it, we dive into the hottest topics from our YouTube show, plus hot news from across the web.

This week, Adam and Will have a couple of revelations: AMD and Sony’s upscaling partnership, and a startling challenge to a long-held belief about Windows. Oh, and it’s time to expand our gaming backlogs via a Steam sale again.

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In this episode of The Full Nerd…

In this episode of The Full Nerd, Adam Patrick Murray, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, Will Smith, Willis Lai, and guest intern Glenn Mah discuss new details about AMD and Sony’s Project Amethyst, the discovery that a clean install of Windows doesn’t have performance benefits, and our favorites in this year’s Steam Summer Sale.

• I have to admit, Project Amethyst shocks me a bit. But that has more to do with the open approach to machine learning-based frame generation and ray regeneration—historically, Sony loved proprietary tech. So this new collab with AMD to work on machine learning-based features like FSR 4 signals a different world in tech, one where Microsoft (who is not part of this effort) could benefit from the upscaling improvements. As our crew discusses, this reflects the whole industry’s understanding that gaming performance improvements won’t be purely in GPU hardware advances, as we’re used to seeing, but through software optimization, too.

  Adam of course sees this as a win for handhelds, but for me, it makes me wonder what long-held expectations and assumptions we’ve had around tech will become upended by this decade’s end.

• Speaking of completely overturned wisdom—Will’s been busy revolutionizing our understanding of long held cherished norms. If your PC’s feeling wonky and sluggish, it may not be because you haven’t refreshed your OS. He actually pitted a clean install vs a one-year Windows 11 install, and the performance results put them still equal. In fact, by the numbers, the older install came out slightly ahead. A lot of questions remain (I for one want to know if an in-place reinstall of Windows has the same results), and viewers on our YouTube video that dives into this also had bones to pick over optimizations on the “dirty” install. But still, maybe this once-relevant piece of advice is now outdated.

• I have to confess, I didn’t mark the passing of the seasons until the Steam Summer Sale popped up in my notifications. To celebrate the arrival of BBQ days, each of us on the show give our top recommendations from among the deep discounts. (You can find the full list of game titles in a pinned YouTube comment for this week’s episode.) Turns out Will knows all the best indie games, Adam leans into mashups of horror + random other genres, Brad loves 80s cyberpunky vibes, and I’m into testing (stressing) friendships.

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This week’s best nerd news

Tech journalists may seem like a touchy bunch, but we want what’s best for consumers—so this week’s news out of Nvidia and Comcast’s corners was disappointing. But it’s not all gloom, thankfully. Fast SSDs, retro audio gear, and awesome thrift store finds still put a smile on my face.

• Nvidia’s RTX 5050’s benchmarks are in, and they’re not great: I was hoping for better news for budget gamers, but Intel’s B580 can beat this new GPU in raw performance at the same MSRP. (Plus, Intel’s card comes with much more memory.) Yeah, you can turn on frame generation to boost your FPS, but that’s not the win I was hoping for.
• I want this modern Walkman: Count on Japan to keep nostalgia (and old tech) alive. Sure, Bluetooth, USB-C, and a rechargeable battery all sound nice, but I’m jazzed for that 3.5mm aux jack. I never digitized a few cassettes with special radio edits of favorite songs, and this is easy to store in my tiny SF apartment. (Plus, no one’s going to mug me for this if I ever take with me on a walk.)
• 3D V-Cache war incoming? Rumor has it that Nova Lake, Intel’s next-gen LGA1954 desktop chips, will sport low-latency L3 cache. That addition could put Team Blue’s CPUs on equal footing with AMD’s X3D gaming chips—we’ll have to see what happens next year.
• So apparently, the Atari 2600 is OP as heck: At least, it is when it comes to putting the beatdown on AI models in chess right now. First it was ChatGPT, and now it’s Microsoft Copilot. Rekt.
• Comcast finally lifts data caps on plans…sorta: Most of us hate Comcast for a reason—and its paltry 1.2TB of included data use per month is one of them. The company is now promising to offer unlimited data, but naturally there’s a catch. Only new subscribers automatically get the perk. If you’re an existing subscriber, you’ll have to contact customer service to negotiate, which you definitely should do, because it could save you hundreds of bucks per year. (Pro tip: Try the Xfinity customer care team on Reddit, rather than calling.)

• Pour one out for the GOAT: Retirement is likely coming for Nvidia’s GTX 1080 Ti, if the Unix support schedule is any indicator. If the reaper comes for all platforms, it’ll happen with the 580 release of Nvidia’s graphics driver package. A somber thought, but I guess I can finally secure it a rightful spot in TFN’s Hardware Hall of Fame.
• SK Hynix’s new Platinum P51 goes zoom zoom: Feel the need for speed? SK Hynix is about to drop its first PCIe 5.0 SSDs, with sequential read speeds of up to 14,700MB/s. Nice.
• Check your Anker power banks again: Six more Anker models were recalled for the risk of melting, smoke, and fire. Time to squint at teeny print to verify my model numbers again. (Aging sucks.)
• Lucky Goodwill shopper pays $30 for a RTX 3080 Ti gaming PC: This Redditor’s dad is definitely better at thrift shopping than me. Here I am, thinking a $7 Anthropologie dress was a pretty decent score.
• User accidentally ejects graphics card in Windows, breaks PC for over an hour: I remember poking around in Windows as a young’un, confident in my ability to figure out what I could and couldn’t mess with. So while I can empathize with this French PC user’s impulse to see what ejecting a GPU like a USB drive would do, I can’t say I didn’t still wince. (Shout out to Mark Tyson at Tom’s Hardware for this gem of a quote: “The tragedy is made all the more poignant by the user’s faint cries of ‘Oh merde,’ which broadly translates as French for ‘Oh bother.’”)

That does it for this week—for all my fellow Americans, happy 4th of July. May your BBQs stay sizzling and your fingers intact. ’Murica.

Alaina