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AMD's position in the graphics market continues to be a tricky one. Although the company has important design wins in the console space—both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are built around AMD CPUs with integrated AMD GPUs—its position in the PC space is a little more precarious. Nvidia currently has the outright performance lead, and perhaps more problematically, many games are to a greater or lesser extent optimized for Nvidia GPUs. One of the chief culprits here is Nvidia's GameWorks software, a proprietary library of useful tools for game development—things like realistic hair and shadows, and physics processing for destructible environments—that is optimized for Nvidia's cards. When GameWorks games are played on AMD systems, they can often do so with reduced performance or graphical quality.

To combat this, AMD is today announcing GPUOpen, a comparable set of tools to GameWorks. As the name would suggest, however, there's a key difference between GPUOpen and GameWorks: GPUOpen will, when it is published in January, be open source. AMD will use the permissive MIT license, allowing GPUOpen code to be used without any practical restriction in both open and closed source applications, and will publish all code on GitHub.

Making the libraries open source should make AMD's library much more appealing than it currently is. AMD already has offerings in this space; in particular, its TressFX library handles fur and hair generation in a manner comparable to Nvidia's HairWorks. Developers can, if they take the time and effort, even include both; the PC release of Grand Theft Auto V has both TressFX and HairWorks support. But this is extra work, and many developers won't bother. This tends to leave one or other GPU vendor at a disadvantage.

As you may have heard, this week a new Star Wars film is coming out. Chances are, it may even be good. Or, if you're as excited about The Force Awakens as I am, you know it will be good. The trouble is, between now and the time that most people see the film this Thursday, the Internet will be awash with chatter from the film's recent premiere in Los Angeles, and from early press screenings. There's a chance, however unlikely, that said chatter will say the film is bad.

Obviously, those people will be wrong. Fortunately, the Internet has come up with a way of blocking naysayers and negative nancys until the rest of us can watch the film and give it the positive reception it so clearly deserves. A new Chrome extension, Force Block: the Star Wars spoiler blocker, blocks pages containing what it thinks might be spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, replacing them with various Star Wars quotes. There's even a whitelist should any regular Star Wars content get blocked.

Having just tried out the extension on a Guardian article about the premiere, I can confirm it works as described. You can of course choose to ignore the spoiler warning and continue to view the content, but remember that for most part, these people will all wrong and in reality Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the best Star Wars since Star Wars. Definitely.

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

Fossil knows watches: its wide selection of timepieces are made of quality materials and with a consistent style while remaining on the affordable side of luxury. Now the fashion company is bringing its watch expertise to Android Wear with the Q Founder smartwatch. The most expensive device in the new line of Q wearables from Fossil, the Q Founder represents the first Google-powered smartwatch to come from a company that focuses more on style rather than specs.

That doesn't mean Fossil forgot about technical details: the Q Founder has a bright LCD display, it's powered by an Intel Atom processor, has a 400mAh battery, and works with both Android and iOS devices (as limited as Android Wear for iOS is, at least it's an option). It looks great on paper—and in person—but despite nice specs and even nicer looks, Fossil's Android Wear watch doesn't do anything to set itself apart from the other Google-powered options out there. No one was expecting it to revolutionize Android Wear, though. Instead, it could do something much more important for smartwatches and Android Wear as a whole.

Design: Very beautiful, very big

The Q Founder is, quite literally, the big sister of the Q collection. It has a 46mm round case, and my review model had a stainless steel, metal link band. There is a model with a genuine leather band that's a little less expensive at $275, but the all-silver model is the stunner and will cost you $295. The crown sits in the middle of the right side of the case on its 13mm-thick edge.

We got a ride in Jonny Smith's latest labor of love, the Flux Capacitor. Video shot by Elle Cayabyab Gitlin. (video link)

Jonny Smith is a British car journalist (you may know him best from Fifth Gear) with an interesting perspective on all things automotive. His current project—called the Flux Capacitor—is no exception. The idea is simple: take one 1970s electric vehicle—the kind that (fairly or not) gave electric cars a bad name—and replace the running gear and batteries with something much more up-to-date, making Europe's fastest street-legal EV in the process. We've been eagerly following Smith's project for a while now, and while visiting the UK last month finally we got the opportunity to take a closer look and go for a ride.

Is it surprising that we love the Flux Capacitor here at Ars? After all, overclocking older hardware and the color orange are two things intimately associated with this site. The Flux Capacitor started life as an Enfield 8000, an EV commissioned by a Greek tycoon following the oil shock of 1973. It was designed by John Ackroyd—also responsible for the Thrust 2 land speed record car—and featured an aluminum body, eight 12v batteries, and a direct drive 8hp (6kW) electric motor. It had a top speed of 40mph (64km/h), hit 30mph (48km/h) in 12.5 seconds, and had a range of between 35 and 55 miles (56-89km).