TL;DR: Windows 11 Pro is 14.97 -- AI-powered features, DirectX 12 for gaming, and top-tier security Want to squeeze every last drop of power from your PC? Microsoft Windows 11 Pro is a quick and easy upgrade offering exceptional gaming performance, AI-powered productivity tools, or enterprise-grade security. Windows 11 Pro introduces DirectX 12 Ultimate, delivering higher frame rates, improved ray tracing, and lower latency for a smoother gaming experience. If you want faster load times and better graphics, this is your chance to optimize your rig. Plus, with AutoHDR and DirectStorage, Windows 11 Pro ensures snappier gameplay and richer visuals. On the AI side, Windows Copilot, powered by OpenAI, acts as your built-in assistant, helping with everything from system settings to generating text and images on demand.

"The year of the AI PC" got off to a strange start. All the "AI PCs" sold by manufacturers for the first half of the year are now effectively out of date. They won't be able to run Windows Recall, the Windows Copilot Runtime, or all the other AI features Microsoft showed off for its new Copilot PCs. Microsoft's Copilot PC certification just taught us a valuable lesson in buying PC hardware: Never buy hardware based on the promise of what it might be able to do in the future. Only buy PC hardware because of what it can actually do today.

Welcome back to the high end, AMD. After years of being mired in second place, far behind the top GeForce offerings, the $580 Radeon RX 6800 and $650 Radeon RX 6800 XT deliver blistering performance on a par with--or better than--than Nvidia's flagship gaming graphics cards in everything but ray tracing, as we covered in our AMD Radeon RX 6800-series review. You need a pixel-packed monitor to push these graphics cards to their limits, however (though AMD's RDNA 2 architecture scales down to 1080p much better than rival Nvidia GPUs). For most people, that means a 4K or 1440p display. But there's another option: 3440x1440 ultrawide monitors split the performance difference between a 4k and 1440p display in terms of raw pixel count, and provide a level of immersion you just can't achieve on a standard rectangular display. Better yet, AMD's latest graphics cards come stuffed with a massive 16GB of onboard memory that can handle any high-resolution textures your games can throw at it, even under strenuous ultrawide conditions.

These introductory courses play a key role in educating the future of machine learning professionals. DirectML is a high-performance, hardware-accelerated DirectX 12 library for machine learning. DirectML provides GPU acceleration for common machine learning tasks across a broad range of supported hardware and drivers, including all DirectX 12-capable GPUs from vendors such as AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. When used standalone, the DirectML API is a low-level DirectX 12 library and is suitable for high-performance, low-latency applications such as frameworks, games, and other real-time applications. The seamless interoperability of DirectML with Direct3D 12 as well as its low overhead and conformance across hardware makes DirectML ideal for accelerating machine learning when both high performance is desired, and the reliability and predictability of results across hardware is critical.

Just in time for Windows 7 to die, Microsoft is porting DirectX 12 to it -- on a game-by-game basis. The first game to deliver will be World of Warcraft, with others to follow. Microsoft's latest graphics API has actually been around since 2015. But Microsoft typically reserved its latest features for Windows 10, the latest OS that already demands the latest hardware. DirectX 12's support for multithreading, for example, already generates "substantial framerate impriovement," Microsoft says.

Gamers who remain on Windows 7 can now play World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth with the added boost of DirectX 12. Microsoft announced that Blizzard would be the first game developer to offer DirectX 12 support for Windows 7. This will be good news for stubborn Windows 7 users who still haven't upgraded to Windows 10. Thanks to the API's support for multi-threading, players can expect a framerate boost even on the older OS. Microsoft has tried to remain firm on the end of Windows 7's lifecycle, which is scheduled to end in January 2020. Windows 7, first released in winter of 2009, is still a popular desktop OS for many PCs despite no longer being sold on new computers.

Microsoft is using artificial intelligence and Windows Machine Learning (ML) to improve its products, including Office 365. During the third Build keynote, corporate vice president of the Windows Developer Platform Kevin Gallo used Microsoft Word as an example, stating that the company's goal is to make everyone a better writer. How? Through grammar checking powered by Windows ML and artificial intelligence. "Some areas are very, very hard to detect with traditional algorithms," he said. "For example, you get into a car, but onto a train. There is a shadow on the road versus there is fog on the road."

When it comes to performance, most people think that Radeon graphics cards hold an edge over Nvidia's GeForce army in DirectX 12 games on account of the dedicated asynchronous shaders lurking inside AMD's hardware. That's never been the universal truth that some people think it is--async compute is just one, not-always-utilized feature of DX12--and today Nvidia's busting the myth even more with a driver update designed to supercharge GeForce performance in DirectX 12 games. "By refining the code in our own driver, and working side-by-side with game developers, Nvidia has delivered performance increases by an average of 16% across DirectX 12 titles," senior PR manager Brian Burke said in a press release. The stated performance increases in Hitman and Rise of the Tomb Raider are the sort of massive leaps you'd normally see by upgrading your graphics card, say, from the GeForce GTX 1080 to the ferocious new GTX 1080 Ti. Speaking of which, the DirectX 12 improvements were present in the review drivers Nvidia sent to the press for GTX 1080 Ti testing.

This year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) set the battleground for another skirmish between long-time Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) foes AMD and NVIDIA. NVIDIA is the reigning champ in discrete desktop graphics chips with 72.4% market share (per Mercury Research), while AMD has announced its new GPU architecture, called Vega, which will attempt to gain additional market share when it launches in Q2. But NVIDIA is not content to sit back and wait for AMD to catch up – it has gone on the offensive with a new high-performance GPU based on a tweaked version of its existing high-performance Pascal GPU architecture. NVIDIA's new performance champ is the GTX 1080 Ti and preorders have already sold out. NVIDIA hosted an Editors' Day with industry analysts, press, and tech enthusiast sites to introduce updates to its extensive set of developer tools.

When Firaxis launched the underrated Civilization: Beyond Earth two years ago, the game served as a showcase for what was possible using AMD's revolutionary "close to the metal" Mantle API, featuring unorthodox "split frame rendering" to deliver extraordinary smoothness in systems with multiple Radeon graphics cards. Two years later, Mantle is dead, subsumed by Vulkan and rivaled by Microsoft's own DirectX 12. But the close ties between AMD and Firaxis is not. Wednesday morning, the two companies revealed that they've partnered up yet again to bake DirectX12 support into the hotly anticipated Civilization VI. Split frame rendering won't be returning, sadly, but the game will feature a pair of DX12 highlight features: Explicit multi-adapter and asynchronous compute.