Fry’s is gone, CompUSA is gone, Radio Shack is a zombie, but Micro Center is finally coming back. On May 30th, the store will host its grand opening at 5201 Stevens Creek Blvd in Santa Clara — and it tells me it’s bringing 4,000 GPUs to mark the occasion! (It might not put them all on sale right away.)
If you happen to have early access, you might see me there... I’ll be dropping by on the 29th around 10AM.
The RX 9070 and 9070 XT came with AMD’s new AI-assisted brand of upscaling, FSR4, right out of the gate — this summer, they’ll also get a new “FSR Redstone” with three extra machine learning techniques. Like Nvidia’s DLSS, Redstone will add Neural Radiance Caching, Ray Regeneration, and a new Frame Generation model that uses both temporal and spatial data to generate fake frames.
All three should make “Full Ray Tracing” games easier to run on today’s GPUs.
The gaming GPU market desperately needs real competition — perhaps Intel will bring it to Computex? Officially, the company’s only teasing new Arc Pro GPUs for pros, but its X account mysteriously keeps saying “stay tuned” to commenters who ask about an unannounced B770 gaming GPU!
If the Arc B770 is real — and follows the path laid out by the B580 and B570 before it — it could give Nvidia and AMD a run for the money.
I tried the Bambu Lab $63 kit that lets you 3D print your own magnetic levitating toys complete with wireless power for their lights! It’s part of its Maker’s Supply initiative where it stocks electronic and mechanical components to design around.
I printed DjangoCashflow’s BttF hoverboard and Doctor Who Tardis, fana’s floating light bulb, and N3D’s pokeball. You can also find designs for the house from Up, a Millennium Falcon, an Iron Man Arc Reactor, and more!
You can turn on your Steam Deck LCD from across the room with a Bluetooth controller (only the OLED model did that at launch!) and I’m personally excited to finally use my Bluetooth headset’s microphone for chat while I game (sadly just in Desktop mode for now). Plus much more!
All these changes already arrived in the Preview branch back in March and in April, but there be dragons that way. Much more accessible now.
[store.steampowered.com]
AMD, like Nvidia, is becoming an AI chip company. In February, I showed you how even Nvidia’s networking business is now bigger than gaming. Today, AMD’s (largely rosy!) Q1 2025 earnings show how far gaming has shrunk compared to its desktop and laptop CPUs.
Gaming used to be its own reporting segment, but that just changed this quarter. Gaming is also now smaller than AMD’s embedded business, which did $0.8B in revenue.
