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Trump announces mandate forcing AI data centers to pay energy dividends to the local community

President Donald Trump has issued a call for data center builders and AI hyperscalers to pay communities a dividend in order to overcome energy-related price hikes, or even to reduce prices, in order to make data centers more palatable to local communities. In a post on Truth Social post, he warned that data centers would be mandated not only to make their own electricity, as he has previously stated, but also to give or sell excess energy back to the local community.

Local communities all over the United States have protested against AI data centers, often owing to their outsized impact on local communities. Rising electricity costs, noise pollution, water shortages, air pollution, deforestation, and more are the things that small communities have to deal with because of these companies.

To ease the pain of local communities, Trump is demanding that these large companies provide the communities they affect with something that will hopefully make their presence more acceptable. The Trump Administration is keen to stay ahead of China in the AI arms race and is looking for solutions to win back some favor by making the data centers pay something back to the affected communities; how that will practically transpire is yet to be seen. Considering the electricity-focused post, the dividend might be in the form of partially paying rising electricity costs to alleviate a pain point that directly affects many homes within the vicinity of data centers. The Trump Administration had ordered these companies to make their own electricity, as we’ve covered previously. Excess electricity from their generation could be used to further lower the electricity cost for the locals, including a recently passed act that orders data centers to shoulder the cost for grid upgrades to avoid taking it from the taxes of local communities.

“Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck.” Trump further says in his post, aiming to have more data centers built, “MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!!," the President said in closing.

Whether the dividends will be enough to win over communities is yet to be known, as the economic aspect is only one facet of the problem. There are still plenty of problems to face; enormous water consumption, ecological damage, and pollution are still major challenges that make AI data centers a hard sell anywhere they’re located.

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Mods can almost double DLSS 5 performance through Foveation, reducing resolution at the edges of frames

Popular graphics post-processing injector software ReShade, commonly used to mod DLSS 5 into unsupported games, now has a foveated imaging add-on, including another standalone project that doesn't need precursor software, allowing DLSS 5 to affect only what's in view, reducing GPU load and increasing FPS.

Foveated imaging is nothing new; it's a technique that's been used in VR to increase performance. It works by only rendering what's in view, often increasing the resolution in the center and reducing it at the edges. Our eyes work in a similar way, with the clearest image in a small area in the center of your vision, blurring on the edges. With foveated rendering, you barely notice the lower-resolution edges as the peripheral vision is less concerned with fine details.

I made a foveated rendering mod for DLSS5 than can double performance by reducing the resolution inputs near the edges
 from r/DLSS

Instead of varying the resolution of the image, however, it varies the level of detail in DLSS 5 Neural Rendering. DLSS NR loads a whole AI model into your GPU and renders images in real time, making it a resource-intensive task; but the task is minimized greatly when most of the detail is only asked for in the middle of the image. That's what projects like maximedgoulet’s Foveated DLSS5 and ClarkCheekyKent’s CheekyFoveatedDLSS aim to do; with Foveated DLSS being a ReShade add-on and CheekyFoveatedDLSS capable of being a standalone integration.

Both implementations allow you to adjust the size of the center area with the highest rendering quality, with independent width and height adjustments to suit your personal situation, as some people have a larger focus area than others or have a different monitor distance. You can also adjust the render fall-off rate, so the image quality lessens more quickly or slowly past the focus area.

As Maximedgoulet's implementation is an add-on for an injector, the pipeline is quite long compared to the standalone integration of CheekyFoveatedDLSS, which Reddit comments claim is more convenient and more polished. Though both show a big improvement in performance, Maximed's Reddit post on Foveated DLSS5 claims an improvement from 48 to 80FPS in The Witcher 3 with 2x Multipass at ultrawide 7680x2160p on an RTX 4090. Considering Maximedgoulet’s 4090 could not handle DLSS-NR on an ultrawide, this implementation might genuinely be feasible to make Neural Rendering more playable.

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You can now modify the vBIOS on Nvidia gaming GPUs without flashing thanks to a solo developer’s project

Panchovix on GitHub recently released a VBIOS configurator for RTX 30-to 50-series cards that doesn’t require flashing. The loader provides a UI for easy configuration and lowers the risk of bricking your GPU by avoiding a risky flash process, and it's available for Linux, too.

Software like MSI Afterburner or ASUS GPU Tweak is often the go-to tool for quickly changing your graphics card’s settings; however, those tools have hard limits to how much you can push the graphics card. If you want to tweak your GPU beyond the firmware’s set limits, you can change it by tweaking the parameters in the VBIOS. Configuring VBIOS is similar to changing BIOS settings in the BOOT menu. With the VBIOS loader, you can change settings beyond the firmware’s hard limits.

The way it works is by storing the modified VBIOS image in the GPU’s register key; as the Nvidia driver looks for a VBIOS override on startup, it finds the VBIOS image and restarts, applying the override settings. The flash chip on the graphics card is not overwritten, reducing the risk of bricking your GPU. However, this does not protect the card from any extreme settings that could destroy electrical components; it merely provides a safer and more convenient way to adjust and apply VBIOS settings, including a way to roll back to the default VBIOS settings should you face any instability.

Bricking a flash chip isn’t as catastrophic as it seems, however. As long as you have a backed-up version of the VBIOS, you can easily buy an SPI flash chip programmer or even build your own using a cheap Raspberry Pi Pico and its many clones; sometimes programming the flash chip may not even require desoldering. Programming a flash chip is very tedious and inconvenient, though, which is why avoiding the risk of a botched flash process altogether is so appealing.

Unless you’re familiar with power delivery, voltage tables, and the patience required to test for hours, we wouldn’t recommend jumping into this unless you’re prepared to risk your GPU. However, you can still safely take advantage of this software by tweaking the fan curves and other settings you’ve applied and tested in software like MSI Afterburner if, for some reason, the startup settings don’t stick. This software will give your GPU new default settings that override at every startup, so long as Nvidia doesn’t remove the registry key that allows the VBIOS override.

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Modder brings full Nvidia DLSS 5 suite to three generations of AMD gaming GPUs

The DLSS-NR project on AMD by Daniel Blanco was first released on September 3, 2026, bringing DLSS 5 Neural Rendering to Radeon GPUs; in the latest 0.8.0 update, however, it makes all the main DLSS features available, featuring DLSS SR, Frame Generation, Ray Regeneration, and the newest DLSS NR model, along with more performance improvements.

While AMD has equivalents for most DLSS features like FSR upscaling, frame generation, ray regeneration, and anti-lag, it’s not as commonly supported by most games compared to Nvidia’s offerings. Even if players could use the AMD equivalent features, Neural Rendering is one that AMD just doesn’t have an equivalent for yet, which is why mods like DLSS-NR on AMD were made.

Daniel Blanco wanted to fill the gap with NR in its initial release, but in the latest update, he added all the DLSS features: DLSS Ray Reconstruction, Super Resolution 4.5, Frame Generation, and the latest 310.9.16 improved Neural Rendering build that we covered recently with modders using it on unsupported games. Interestingly, the update notes say it includes FSR 4.1.1 upscaling; AMD GPUs already use FSR, but having FSR 4.1.1 specifically gives the mod a consistent version of FSR to work with, instead of having to be compatible with the various implementations of FSR in different scenarios.

The mod currently supports three generations of Radeon GPUs: RX 9000, 7000, and 6000 (RDNA4, 3, and 2, respectively), in any DirectX 12 game that uses FSR, DLSS, or XeSS. You can install the mod by downloading the NeuralHub mod loader, which provides a UI for you to install it into the games it detects. You then enable FSR, DLSS, or XeSS in the game, and the mod will insert itself into that upscaler pipeline, allowing it to inject any of the settings you configured for the game in the NeuralHub; it even provides an overlay to tweak the DLSS settings without leaving the game.

With a few improvements from the first version, the developer says the output quality is very similar to what DLSS produces on Nvidia GPUs natively, except for “some effects that may not be working 100%.” In the developer’s own testing, he found it to be playable at 90-100FPS at 1080p on an RX 9070 XT, while saying that he’s making improvements every day, planning to match the performance of a 5070Ti.

Real-world results are mixed, however, as Reddit users report showing no performance loss over native FSR, while others experience losing single-digit FPS to up to 25% lower FPS in various games. The developer still has to account for many factors since there are a myriad of PC configurations, but the results look promising as he bridges the gap between AMD and Nvidia GPU features — though it won’t work with anti-cheat, unfortunately.

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