Enlarge / Artist's illustration of two satellites performing rendezvous and proximity operations in low-Earth orbit. (credit: True Anomaly)

The US Space Force announced Thursday it is partnering with two companies, Rocket Lab and True Anomaly, for a first-of-its-kind mission to demonstrate how the military might counter "on-orbit aggression."

On this mission, a spacecraft built and launched by Rocket Lab will chase down another satellite made by True Anomaly, a Colorado-based startup. "The vendors will exercise a realistic threat response scenario in an on-orbit space domain awareness demonstration called Victus Haze," the Space Force's Space Systems Command said in a statement.

This threat scenario could involve a satellite performing maneuvers that approach a US spacecraft or a satellite doing something else unusual or unexpected. In such a scenario, the Space Force wants to have the capability to respond, either to deter an adversary from taking action or to defend a US satellite from an attack.

Enlarge / Aerial view of the Pentagon on March 31. (credit: Photo by Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images)

A strategy document released by the Pentagon this week lays out where the US military can most effectively rely on the commercial space industry and what missions should remain in government hands.

"This marks a new effort to harness the remarkable innovation of the commercial space sector to enhance our resilience and strengthen integrated deterrence as a department," said John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy.

The Space Force already buys a lot from the commercial space industry. The military doesn't build or own satellite launch vehicles—those come from commercial companies. While the Space Force operates government-owned reconnaissance and surveillance satellites, it also buys supplementary data and imagery from the commercial industry.

Enlarge / Do you ever wonder why no contractor has been able to deliver to the Empire a standardized blaster rifle that shoots right where the crosshairs are aiming? Is this covered in the "Legends" extended universe? (credit: Nightdive Studios/LucasFilm)

I remember Dark Forces, or Star Wars: Doom, as a slog. Running a demo of the 1995 game on a Gateway system with an Intel 486DX at 33 MHz, I trudged through seemingly endless gray hallways. I shot at a steady trickle of Stormtroopers with one of their own (intentionally) semi-accurate blaster rifles. After a while, I would ask myself a pertinent, era-specific question: Why was I playing this low-energy nostalgia trip instead of actual Doom?

Dark Forces moved first-person shooters forward in a number of ways. It could lean on Star Wars for familiar sounds and enemies and tech, and a plot with a bit more complexity than "They're demons, they gotta go." It let the player look up and down, jump, and crouch, which were big steps for the time. And its level design went beyond "find the blue key for the blue door," with some clever environmental puzzles and challenges.

Not that key cards don't show up. This game is from 1995, so there are key cards, there are hidden wall-doors, and there are auto-spawning enemies. It's not like the Dark Forces designers could entirely ignore Doom. Nobody could.

Enlarge / ASRock's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

In July 2023, AMD released a new GPU called the "Radeon RX 7900 GRE" in China. GRE stands for "Golden Rabbit Edition," a reference to the Chinese zodiac, and while the card was available outside of China in a handful of pre-built OEM systems, AMD didn't make it widely available at retail.

That changes today—AMD is launching the RX 7900 GRE at US retail for a suggested starting price of $549. This throws it right into the middle of the busy upper-mid-range graphics card market, where it will compete with Nvidia's $549 RTX 4070 and the $599 RTX 4070 Super, as well as AMD's own $500 Radeon RX 7800 XT.

We've run our typical set of GPU tests on the 7900 GRE to see how it stacks up to the cards AMD and Nvidia are already offering. Is it worth buying a new card relatively late in this GPU generation, when rumors point to new next-gen GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel before the end of the year? Can the "Golden Rabbit Edition" still offer a good value, even though it's currently the year of the dragon?

Enlarge (credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia has announced a public beta of a new app for Windows, one that does a few useful things and one big thing.

The new app combines the functions of three apps you'd previously have to hunt through—the Nvidia Control Panel, GeForce Experience, and RTX Experience—into one app. Setting display preferences on games and seeing exactly how each notch between "Performance" and "Quality" will affect its settings is far easier and more visible inside the new app. The old-fashioned control panel is still there if you right-click the Nvidia app's notification panel icon. Installing the new beta upgrades and essentially removes the Experience and Control Panel apps, but they're still available online.

But perhaps most importantly, Nvidia's new app allows you to update the driver for your graphics card, the one you paid for, without having to log in to an Nvidia account. I tested it, it worked, and I don't know why I was surprised, but I've been conditioned that way. Given that driver updates are something people often do with new systems and the prior tendencies of Nvidia's apps to log you out, this is a boon that will pay small but notable cumulative dividends for some time to come.

Enlarge / SpaceX's fully stacked Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster on a launch pad in South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

One of the largest launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will become vacant later this year after the final flight of United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy rocket. SpaceX is looking to make the sprawling facility a new home for the Starship launch vehicle.

The environmental review for SpaceX's proposal to take over Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral is getting underway now, with three in-person public meetings and one virtual meeting scheduled for March to collect comments from local residents, according to a new website describing the plan.

Then, federal agencies, led by the Department of the Air Force, will develop an environmental impact statement to evaluate how Starship launch and landing operations will affect the land, air, and water around SLC-37, which sits on Space Force property on the Atlantic coastline.

Enlarge (credit: Nvidia)

On Tuesday, Nvidia released Chat With RTX, a free personalized AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT that can run locally on a PC with an Nvidia RTX graphics card. It uses Mistral or Llama open-weights LLMs and can search through local files and answer questions about them.

Chat With RTX works on Windows PCs equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 or 40 Series GPUs with at least 8GB of VRAM. It uses a combination of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM software, and RTX acceleration to enable generative AI capabilities directly on users' devices. This setup allows for conversations with the AI model using local files as a dataset.

"Users can quickly, easily connect local files on a PC as a dataset to an open-source large language model like Mistral or Llama 2, enabling queries for quick, contextually relevant answers," writes Nvidia in a promotional blog post.

A screenshot of Chat With RTX, which runs in a web browser window. (credit: Benj Edwards)

Using Chat With RTX, users can talk about various subjects or ask the AI model to summarize or analyze data, similar to how one might interact with ChatGPT. In particular, the Mistal-7B model has built-in conditioning to avoid certain sensitive topics (like sex and violence, of course), but users could presumably somehow plug in an uncensored AI model and discuss forbidden topics without the paternalism inherent in the censored models.

Also, the application supports a variety of file formats, including .TXT, .PDF, .DOCX, and .XML. Users can direct the tool to browse specific folders, which Chat With RTX then scans to answer queries quickly. It even allows for the incorporation of information from YouTube videos and playlists, offering a way to include external content in its database of knowledge (in the form of embeddings) without requiring an Internet connection to process queries.

Rough around the edges

We downloaded and ran Chat With RTX to test it out. The download file is huge, at around 35 gigabytes, owing to the Mistral and Llama LLM weights files being included in the distribution. ("Weights" are the actual neural network files containing the values that represent data learned during the AI training process.) When installing, Chat With RTX downloads even more files, and it executes in a console window using Python with an interface that pops up in a web browser window.

Several times during our tests on an RTX 3060 with 12GB of VRAM, Chat With RTX crashed. Like open source LLM interfaces, Chat With RTX is a mess of layered dependencies, relying on Python, CUDA, TensorRT, and others. Nvidia hasn't cracked the code for making the installation sleek and non-brittle. It's a rough-around-the-edges solution that feels very much like an Nvidia skin over other local LLM interfaces (such as GPT4ALL). Even so, it's notable that this capability is officially coming directly from Nvidia.

On the bright side (a massive bright side), local processing capability emphasizes user privacy, as sensitive data does not need to be transmitted to cloud-based services (such as with ChatGPT). Using Mistral 7B feels similarly capable to early 2022-era GPT-3, which is still remarkable for a local LLM running on a consumer GPU. It's not a true ChatGPT replacement yet, and it can't touch GPT-4 Turbo or Google Gemini Pro/Ultra in processing capability.

Nvidia GPU owners can download Chat With RTX for free on the Nvidia website.

Enlarge / File photo of an X-37B spaceplane. (credit: Boeing)

It turns out some of the informed speculation about the US military's latest X-37B spaceplane mission was pretty much spot-on.

When the semi-classified winged spacecraft launched on December 28, it flew into orbit on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which is much larger than the Atlas V and Falcon 9 rockets used to launch the X-37B on its previous missions.

This immediately sparked speculation that the X-37B would reach higher altitudes than its past flights, which remained in low-Earth orbit at altitudes of a few hundred miles. A discovery from Tomi Simola, a satellite tracking hobbyist living near Helsinki, Finland, appears to confirm this suspicion.

Enlarge (credit: Gigabyte)

Nvidia launched three new GPUs last month, part of a Super overhaul of the RTX 40-series designed to improve the value of the company's $600-and-up graphics cards.

But today, the company is quietly doing something that it hasn't done in over four years: launching a sub-$200 graphics card. As spotted by TechPowerUp, Nvidia partners like Gigabyte have begun officially announcing a 6GB version of the old RTX 3050 graphics card, albeit with less memory and memory bandwidth, fewer CUDA cores, and lower power requirements.

The announcement follows a few days of leaked retail listings, which generally point to an MSRP of roughly $179 for the new-old card. This would make it Nvidia's first sub-$200 graphics card launch since the GeForce GTX 1650 Super came out in late 2019, a four-year gap caused partially by a cryptocurrency- and pandemic-fueled GPU shortage that lasted from late 2020 into mid-to-late 2022.

Enlarge (credit: Iryna Imago | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

eBay has agreed to pay $59 million after the US Department of Justice accused the online marketplace of selling thousands of pill presses and encapsulating machines, some of which were used by rings trafficking in illegal counterfeit pills.

It's the fourth largest settlement under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and the first-ever settlement with an e-commerce company, a DOJ press release noted.

“Through its website, eBay made it easy for individuals across the country to obtain the type of dangerous machines that are often used to make counterfeit pills," Nikolas Kerest, US attorney for the District of Vermont, said. "Our investigation revealed that some of these machines were even sold to individuals who were later convicted of drug-related crimes."

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  PNY's version of the RTX 4080 Super. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Nvidia's new RTX 4080 Super is technically faster than the regular 4080, but, by an order of magnitude, the most interesting thing about it is that, at its launch price of $999, it's $200 cheaper than the original 4080. I am going to write more after this sentence, but that's basically the review. You're welcome to keep reading, and I would appreciate it if you would, but truly there is only one number you need to know, and it is "$200."

All three of these Super cards—the 4070 Super, the 4070 Ti Super, and now the 4080 Super—are mild correctives for a GPU generation that has been more expensive than its predecessors and also, in relative terms, less of a performance boost. The difference is that where the 4070 Super and 4070 Ti Super try to earn their existing price tags by boosting performance, the 4080 Super focuses on lowering its price to be more in line with where its competition is.

Yes, it's marginally faster than the original 4080, but its best feature is a price drop from $1,199 to a still high, but more reasonable, $999. What it doesn't do is attempt to close the gap between the 4080 series and the 4090, a card that still significantly outruns any other consumer GPU that AMD or Nvidia offers. But if you have a big budget, want something that's still head-and-shoulders above the entire RTX 30-series, and don't want to deal with the 4090's currently inflated pricing, the 4080 Super is much more appealing than the regular 4080, even if it is basically the same GPU with a new name.

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  Our specific RTX 4070 Ti Super is a PNY model, the RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB Verto. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Of all of Nvidia's current-generation GPU launches, there hasn't been one that's been quite as weird as the case of the "GeForce RTX 4080 12GB."

It was the third and slowest of the graphics cards Nvidia announced at the onset of the RTX 40-series, and at first blush it just sounded like a version of the second-fastest RTX 4080 but with less RAM. But spec sheets and Nvidia's own performance estimates showed that there was a deceptively huge performance gap between the two 4080 cards, enough that calling them both "4080" could have lead to confusion and upset among buyers.

Taking the hint, Nvidia reversed course, "unlaunching" the 4080 12GB because it was "not named right." This decision came late enough in the launch process that a whole bunch of existing packaging had to be trashed and that new BIOSes with new GPU named needed to be flashed to the cards before they could be sold.

Enlarge / A delegation of French military officers visited the Combined Space Operations Center in 2022 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. (credit: US Space Force/Tech. Sgt. Luke Kitterman)

Late last year, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed a memo to overhaul a decades-old policy on how the Pentagon keeps sensitive military space programs secret. However, don't expect defense officials to openly discuss everything they're doing to counter China and Russia in orbit.

John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, revealed the policy change in a roundtable with reporters on January 17. For many years, across multiple administrations, Pentagon officials have lamented their inability to share information with other countries and commercial partners. Inherently, they argued, this stranglehold on information limits the military's capacity to connect with allies, deter adversaries, and respond to threats in space.

In his statement last week, Plumb said this new policy "removes legacy classification barriers that have inhibited our ability to collaborate across the US government and also with allies on issues related to space."

Enlarge / The GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Judging by the comments on YouTube reviews, you'd think Nvidia's RTX 4070, launched in April 2023 for $599, was a terrible graphics card. The reaction wasn't as brutal as it was among commenters and reviewers for the 4060 Ti a month later (a "waste of sand," declared Gamers Nexus), but you'd usually find praise for its power efficiency but criticism of its price (high for a xx70 card) and its performance improvement relative to the previous generation (only about as fast as an RTX 3080, sometimes less).

Those are all largely valid criticisms. But the 4070 is Nvidia's most popular RTX 4000-series desktop GPU, at least according to the (admittedly flaky and opaque) Steam Hardware Survey data for December 2023. It's not in the top 10—this is dominated by older midrange GeForce cards that have been out a lot longer—but it's doing better than Nvidia's other 40-series desktop cards and better than every one of AMD's RX 7000-series cards put together.

The release of the RTX 4070 Super should help bring the enthusiast commentariat version of reality and the Steam Hardware Survey's version of reality into closer sync with one another. At the same $599 price—still more than the $499 of the 2070 Super or 3070, but not higher than the 4070—you get performance that Nvidia says is more in line with the RTX 3090. And the power efficiency remains quite impressive, though power use overall is up just a bit from the regular 4070.