Nvidia's new texture compression tech slashes VRAM usage by up to 95% - Related to share, copilot, drives, usage, edge

Microsoft Edge Copilot now lets you share AI chats easily

Microsoft has added a new share button to Copilot in Edge, allowing customers to share AI chat conversations with others more easily by creating a shareable link. As MSPowerUser reports. The enhancement, available now, also expands the “Think Deeper” feature to all customers, enhancing AI responses with deeper reasoning.

With this addition, Microsoft is making Copilot on Edge more like its website and. Mobile apps for a more consistent experience. For instance, on , you can chat with AI without signing up, similar to ChatGPT’s web search. However, unlike Edge’s side panel, the web version doesn’t yet support sharing AI chats, but. Let’s hope it does soon.

What does the “Think Deeper” feature do? It was trained to “think before it speaks” and offers advanced reasoning for career advice, problem-solving, STEM-related tasks like coding, advanced math problems, and more. Therefore, it takes a little longer to respond, around 30 seconds, . Microsoft is making the feature, powered by OpenAI’s o1 model, available even to free people. This is excellent news since it allows you to use it without dropping a serious coin.

This isn’t the only change Microsoft has made since last year. The software giant also updated Copilot’s design on Windows 10,11 and mobile, adding Copilot Voice and Copilot Vision functions. Time will tell what other feature will reach all clients.

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Nvidia's new texture compression tech slashes VRAM usage by up to 95%

Forward-looking: Nvidia has been working on a new method to compress textures and save GPU memory for a few years now. Although the technology remains in beta, a newly released demo showcases how AI-based solutions could help address the increasingly controversial VRAM limitations of modern GPUs.

Nvidia's Neural Texture Compression can provide gigantic savings in the amount of VRAM required to render complex 3D graphics. Even though no one is using it (yet). While still in beta, the technology was tested by YouTube channel Compusemble, which ran the official demo on a modern gaming system to provide an early benchmark of its potential impact and what developers could achieve with it in the not-so-distant future.

As explained by Compusemble in the video below. RTX Neural Texture Compression uses a specialized neural network to compress and decompress material textures dynamically. Nvidia's demo includes three rendering modes: Reference Material, NTC Transcoded to BCn, and Inference on Sample.

Reference Material: This mode does not use NTC, meaning textures remain in their original state, leading to high disk and VRAM usage.

NTC Transcoded to BCn (block-compressed formats): Here, textures are transcoded upon loading, significantly reducing disk footprint but offering only moderate VRAM savings.

Inference on Sample: This approach decompresses texture elements only when needed during rendering. Achieving the greatest savings in both disk space and VRAM.

Compusemble tested the demo at 1440p and 4K resolutions, alternating between DLSS and TAA. The results suggest that while NTC can dramatically reduce VRAM and disk space usage, it may also impact frame rates. At 1440p with DLSS, Nvidia's NTC transcoded to BCn mode reduced texture memory usage by 64% (from 272MB to 98MB), while NTC inference on sample drastically cut it to , a reduction compared to non-neural compression.

Also read: Why Are Modern PC Games Using So Much VRAM?

Building on these developments, the demo ran on a GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, where DLSS and. Higher resolutions placed additional load on the Tensor Cores, affecting performance to some extent depending on the setting and resolution. However, newer GPUs may deliver higher frame rates and make the difference negligible when properly optimized. After all, Nvidia is heavily invested in AI-powered rendering techniques like NTC and. Other RTX applications.

The demo also displays the importance of cooperative vectors in modern rendering pipelines. As Microsoft in recent times explained, cooperative vectors accelerate AI workloads for real-time rendering by optimizing vector operations. These computations play a crucial role in AI model training and fine-tuning and can also be leveraged to enhance game rendering efficiency.

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Used Seagate drives sold as new traced back to crypto mining farms

A hot potato: A widespread scandal involving used Seagate hard drives fraudulently sold as new has continued to escalate. With new evidence suggesting that the drives originated from Chinese cryptocurrency mining farms. The drives, many of which had logged 15,000 to 50,000 hours of prior use, were reportedly altered to appear unused before re-entering the retail supply chain.

The first reports of affected drives surfaced in January. When consumers noticed inconsistencies in supposedly new Seagate Exos disk drives used in data centers. The issue has since expanded globally, with over 200 confirmed cases across Europe, Australia, Thailand, and Japan. While Seagate maintains that these products did not come from its official distribution channels, the scandal raises serious concerns about unauthorized resellers and supply chain security.

An investigation by Heise indicates that the fraudulent HDDs were sourced from mining operations in China to mine Chia, a cryptocurrency that caused a surge in HDD demand before becoming economically unviable.

During the Chia mining boom, demand for high-capacity hard drives skyrocketed. Leading to shortages and price surges. However, as the profitability of Chia mining declined, many operations shut down, flooding the market with used hardware. It now appears that some of these used drives were relabeled and resold as new, deceiving both retailers and consumers.

Although standard SMART parameters track HDD usage. These values were reset to obscure the actual wear and tear. However, a more in-depth check using FARM (Field-Accessible Reliability Metrics) values can reveal a drive's true operational history. Consumers concerned about their purchases can verify their drives using Smartmontools version (use command: smartctl -l farm /dev/sda) or Seagate's SeaTools software.

Retailers impacted by the scandal have taken different approaches to address customer complaints. Some have acknowledged that they unknowingly sold these manipulated drives and are offering refunds or exchanges.

Others have set up dedicated customer service portals to handle the issue. While a few insist on verifying the affected drives before providing compensation. Many retailers stress that they purchased these HDDs from suppliers they trusted, and they were unaware of any tampering before selling them to consumers. The Heise investigation cites several German retailers (, Wortmann, Proshop, Kosatec, Galaxus, among others), however they have also tracked similar used drives being sold in other European countries and regions.

Seagate has distanced itself from the fraudulent sales. Saying that it did not distribute the affected drives. It urges affected buyers to investigation their cases via The organization has launched an internal investigation and is collaborating with retailers and. Law enforcement to track the fraudulent resellers.

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