Bruce Willis has become the first Hollywood star to sell his rights to allow a “digital twin” of himself to be created for use on screen. From a report: Using deepfake technology, the actor appeared in a phone advert without ever being on set, after his face was digitally transplanted onto another performer. Willis allowed US firm Deepcake, which makes “digital twins,” to use his face. In a statement on its website, Willis said: “I liked the precision with which my character turned out. It’s a mini-movie in my usual action-comedy genre. For me, it is a great opportunity to go back in time. With the advent of modern technology, even when I was on another continent, I was able to communicate, work and participate in the filming. It’s a very new and interesting experience, and I thank our entire team.”

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Source: Slashdot – Deepfake Tech Allows Bruce Willis To Return To the Screen Without Ever Being on Set

Already the world’s biggest gambling nation in terms of loss per person, Australia has seen a shift in betting behavior since the pandemic-forced closure of public venues. From a report: Gamblers’ losses on poker machines shrank for the first time during the pandemic, but at a rate far slower than an unprecedented increase in money lost on apps, data showed. That means more players are being exposed to an industry that is harder to regulate than traditional gambling. Australia’s gambling industry has been in the spotlight in recent years, with public inquiries lashing its biggest casino operators due to lapses in money laundering protections. Online gambling has also been the focus of inquiries, but with its increasing prevalence, the government has answered consumer advocates with a pledge to take a deeper look.

App providers are mostly foreign such as London-listed Flutter Entertainment — owner of the most popular betting app in Australia, Sportsbet — and Entain, owner of third-ranked app Ladbrokes. Unlike venues, they benefit from marketing methods such as text message-based promotions falling outside the scope of gambling advertising restrictions. Gamblers’ loss on poker machines was A$11.4 billion ($7.3 billion USD) in 2021, shrinking A$1.1 billion or 17% from 2019, the year before lockdowns began, showed data from Monash University’s School of Public Health & Preventive Medicine. But gamblers’ loss in online sports betting swelled A$3.2 billion or 80% to A$7.1 billion in the same period, showed figures supplied by industry consultancy H2 Gambling Capital, which excluded credit often rewarded in promotions.

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Source: Slashdot – Pandemic Sends Australia’s Gambling Problem Online

Most development effort in graphics drivers these days, whether you’re talking about Nvidia, Intel, or AMD, is focused on new APIs like DirectX 12 or Vulkan, increasingly advanced upscaling technologies, and specific improvements for new game releases. But this year, AMD has also been focusing on an old problem area for its graphics drivers: OpenGL performance. From a report: Over the summer, AMD released a rewritten OpenGL driver that it said would boost the performance of Minecraft by up to 79 percent (independent testing also found gains in other OpenGL games and benchmarks, though not always to the same degree). Now those same optimizations are coming to AMD’s officially validated GPU drivers for its Radeon Pro-series workstation cards, providing big boosts to professional apps like Solidworks and Autodesk Maya. “The AMD Software: PRO Edition 22.Q3 driver has been tested and approved by Dell, HP, and Lenovo for stability and is available through their driver downloads,” the company wrote in its blog post. “AMD continues to work with software developers to certify the latest drivers.” Using a Radeon Pro W6800 workstation GPU, AMD says that its new drivers can improve Solidworks rendering speeds by up to 52 or 28 percent at 4K and 1080p resolutions, respectively. Autodesk Maya performance goes up by 34 percent at 4K or 72 percent at the default resolution. The size of the improvements varies based on the app and the GPU, but AMD’s testing shows significant, consistent improvements across the board on the Radeon Pro W6800, W6600, and W6400 GPUs, improvements that AMD says will help those GPUs outpace analogous Nvidia workstation GPUs like the RTX A5000 and A2000 and the Nvidia T600.

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Source: Slashdot – Rewritten OpenGL Drivers Make AMD’s GPUs ‘Up To 72%’ Faster in Some Pro Apps