JUMP REPORT

Hedge Funds and other institutional investors have just completed filing their 13Fs with the Securities and Exchange Commission, revealing their equity portfolios as of the end of September. At Insider Monkey, we follow nearly 900 active hedge funds and notable investors and by analyzing their 13F filings, we can determine the stocks that they are […]

3 Sales & Earnings Growth Winners

Anyone with a passing interest in video games will be aware of the acronym-peppered minefield that comes with the territory. It takes some doing to know your GPUs from your CPUs, your AI from your AA and even your FPS (frames-per-second) from your, well, FPS (first-person shooter). The latest collection of letters causing a stir comes from graphics chip giant Nvidia. DLSS –or deep-learning super-sampling– has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue as it starts to make its influence felt throughout the industry. It has just been announced that DLSS will help boost the graphical prowess of Activision’s hugely popular Call of Duty: Warzone for PC players, while rumours abound that it will also power the visual boost in Nintendo’s as yet unannounced Switch console upgrade. But what is DLSS? And what impact is it set to have on the industry? At its heart, it is an artificial intelligence technology that improves the performance of your gaming machines beyond the hardware’s in-built capability. Nvidia’s new RTX graphics chips (or GPUs) will initially render a game’s image at a lower resolution, taking pressure off the hardware, before DLSS uses AI to ‘fill in the gaps’ and upscale the image, making it sharper and more detailed when it appears on your screen. With the demands on the hardware reduced, it means that games can run at higher frame-rates for faster action and enable fancy graphic effects such as ray-tracing which hugely improves lighting and shadow. Ray-tracing has also garnered much attention as the most significant step forward in real-time graphics over the past few years, but the demand it places on hardware is partly the reason for Nvidia developing DLSS. “Ray tracing — or tracing the path of light across a 3D scene — has been a breakthrough in the quality of real-time graphics, but places steep processing demands on the GPU for each pixel rendered,” says Nvidia’s Vice President of Platform Marketing, Jason Paul. “Our high-end RTX GPUs can now deliver high frame rates without DLSS in a number of situations. But what DLSS really enables is better frame rates and higher resolutions across a wider range of GPUs.” I can testify to the impact of the technology on some modern games. It allowed me to run Cyberpunk 2077 at a solid frame-rate with full ray-tracing and graphical effects at 4K resolution. A level of performance that my PC’s graphics card has no business attempting on its own specifications. Upon announcing the update for Call of Duty, Nvidia are claiming a 70pc boost in 4K performance.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 100 points Thursday, as jobless claims dropped. Apple and Tesla stock traded lower in morning trade.

Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) stock has headed south in 2021, as investors seem to be concerned about the stiff competition the chipmaker may face from rivals Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA). Analysts from Raymond James and Bank of America have an outperform rating on AMD stock with a price target of $100. Both firms have reminded investors that the chipmaker will continue to hold a competitive edge over Intel for the next few years.