Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Google's latest blog post is all about extolling the virtues of ART, the Android runtime, and its new ability to be updated independently of the OS. ART is the engine that powers Android and is responsible for compiling Java and Kotlin into bytecode and executing it. Updates to ART have let Google improve the speed of apps, even without a full OS update. With the rollout of the Android 13 version of ART, Google said it has seen "real-world app start-up improvements of up to 30% on some devices."

ART officially became a modular part of the OS (an APEX module) in Android 12, allowing it to be updated via the Play Store instead of a system update. With the current Android distribution numbers, that means about 31 percent of users (or 600 million users) regularly get a better, faster app engine. While many components have been slowly moved into an APEX module, Google said ART is the biggest one, with "an order of magnitude more APIs than any other APEX module." Google has started versioning ART like it's a major software project, and with Android 14 will come "ART 14." The newest version of the runtime won't be limited to Android 14, though—it and most of its improvements will roll out to older OSes, too, so it's possible to run ART 14 on your neglected Android 12 phone.

ART 13 brought big app startup time improvements. (credit: Google)

As for ART 13, Google provided the above chart to show when the new update rolled out and the effect it has had on average app startup time. Google detailed some of the ART 13 changes with the release of Android 13, saying that "ART [13] makes switching to and from native code much faster, with JNI calls now up to 2.5x faster." ART "also performs more byte-code verification at install time, avoiding the expense of verification at runtime and keeping app startup times fast," Google said. The result is a 30 percent startup time boost for some devices.

Enlarge / Intel's latest Arc GPU drivers do come with a firmware update, but contrary to most reports, it's not an "overclock." (credit: Intel)

When we write about Intel's Arc GPUs, we're typically paying the most attention to the A750 and A770 because they're the cards that perform well enough that you might actually put them in an entry-level-to-midrange gaming desktop. But there's one other Arc graphics card of note: the lowly Arc A380, which snuck into some stores a few months before either high-end Arc card was released.

With its eight Xe cores (down from 32 in the A770), 96-bit memory interface, and 6GB of RAM, the Arc A380 has been (in my case, literally) nothing to write home about. It's an entry-level graphics card that competes reasonably well with ancient and low-end cards like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 1650 and AMD's Radeon RX 6400, and its hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding support makes it mildly interesting for people who work with video. It's one of the better GPUs you can get for $100, its current street price, but that's not saying much.

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  Pre-firmware update, HWInfo reports the clock speed at 2,000 MHz. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

But Intel's latest graphics drivers provided an update specifically for the A380 that seems notable because of how rare it is: the 31.0.101.4644 driver package released last week also includes a firmware update for A380 cards that seems to boost their base clock speed from 2,000 MHz up to 2,150 MHz. That's a 7.5 percent increase, supposedly being provided for free to all A380 owners with a simple firmware update. At least, it would be if it were an actual increase in the card's peak clock speed, which it isn't.

Enlarge / Ubisoft could be the new home to Activision's streaming catalog under a new proposal from Microsoft. (credit: Ubisoft)

In a major restructuring of its long-proposed acquisition plans for Activision Blizzard, Microsoft has announced that the cloud-streaming rights for current and future Activision titles will be controlled by Ubisoft rather than Microsoft itself. The move is an effort to ameliorate concerns from UK regulators who blocked the proposed acquisition in April over potential impacts on competition in the cloud-gaming space.

The newly proposed deal covers perpetual, worldwide streaming rights for all current Activision games and those released in the next 15 years, according to an announcement from Microsoft Vice Chair President Brad Smith. Ubisoft will have exclusive control of those streaming rights outside of the European Union, allowing the company to make those games available on its own Ubisoft+ service and to license them out to other cloud-gaming providers (including Microsoft itself). In the EU, Microsoft will pay to license those Activision streaming rights back from Ubisoft to satisfy promises made to the European Commission regarding free licensing to competing cloud-gaming providers.

In a statement provided to Ars Technica, Ubisoft said the deal would allow Activision titles to be offered via Ubisoft+ Multi Access on PC, Xbox, and Amazon Luna, as well as via Ubisoft+ Classics on PlayStation. "Today’s deal will give players even more opportunities to access and enjoy some of the biggest brands in gaming," said Chris Early, Ubisoft SVP of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development, in the statement.