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Cheaters in popular multiplayer games are nothing new, and the pandemic saw their numbers rise considerably as more people have turned to gaming as a source of entertainment. Companies have been trying to fix this growing problem with improved anti-cheat technologies, but most efforts have been undermined by source code leaks as well as an army of motivated cheat developers who are quick to adapt to any new developments in this space....

Despite Far Cry’s success, Crytek shifted gears to a fresh IP, Crysis, instead of focusing on a follow up to its previous hit – a decision that came at least partly because the studio felt Far Cry’s fiction was too restrictive. Nonetheless, Ubisoft (Far Cry’s publisher) had no intentions of letting the property fizzle out, and its Montreal outfit released a multi-platform sequel in October 2008. Having been developed by a different studio, Far Cry 2 was considerably different from its predecessor....

Running Far Cry 3 at 1680x1050 with the highest possible in-game quality settings activated alongside 4xMSAA, the GTX 680 managed only 59fps while the HD 7970 GHz Edition offered just 54fps and the standard HD 7970 averaged 52fps. The HD 7950 Boost came out 2fps ahead of the GTX 660 Ti with 49fps, while the standard 7950 averaged 43fps, a notch ahead of the GTX 660, which is the slowest card we’d bother using to play with these settings....

The point here is that the game calls for an 8-thread CPU for the recommended specs, while on the GPU front, they believe you can get away with a GTX 760 or R9 280. Oddly in that second comparison AMD packs far more firepower, but then again this is an Nvidia sponsored title with GameWorks baked in. According to Nvidia the game features integration of Nvidia Flow, Nvidia HairWorks, Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows, Turf Effects, and Voxel Ambient Occlusion....

The same is true for the G.Skill MX780 RGB mouse, which has clearly been inspired by the Cougar 700M. Again, the MX780 RGB is better in virtually every way as G.Skill has been able to improve the design. Despite its improvements, G.Skill’s prelaunch MSRPs had us a little concerned. The MX780 RGB seemed somewhat pricey at $80 and so did the KM780 RGB at $190. Fortunately, the MX780 RGB has appeared Newegg for $60, right in line with the Cougar 700M and Logitech G502 Proteus Core....

In terms of hardware, a lot has carried over from the previous generation. The CPU is still Intel’s Core i7-8750H for most models, with an i9-8950HK option available. The display is either a 144 Hz 1080p IPS, or a wide-gamut 4K IPS at 60 Hz, at 15.6-inches in size. Memory ranges from 8GB up to 32GB depending on the configuration, though 16GB models come with single-channel memory. The battery remains 94 Wh, in what appears to be the same chassis....

In general, single channel memory does have a rather significant affect. Performance was down in many games by 10 to 15 percent, and the biggest losses were up to a 29 percent drop in 1% lows. A handful of games were unaffected by the drop in memory bandwidth, but in general you’ll find most games are at least somewhat susceptible to lowered performance. As I mentioned earlier, to get the most of the Aero 15X you really want that second stick of DDR4....

The Core i5-7200U is particularly interesting here because it’s a two-core, four-thread 15W CPU clocked at 2.5 GHz with a boost speed of 3.1 GHz in both single- and dual-core modes. This isn’t a fast CPU by any stretch, in fact it’s slower than the Intel Pentium G4560 at base clock speed (3.5 GHz) which we recommend for budget PC gaming builds. As we’ll talk about later, the CPU can often run us into trouble....

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is another game that makes good use of Tessellation and here we find that the GeForce GTX 570 is 20% slower than the GTX 580 at 1920x1200. However, it was 6% faster than the GeForce GTX 480, 43% faster than the GTX 470 and a whopping 69% faster than the Radeon HD 5870.

Modern Warfare 3 didn’t provide much of a challenge for HD 7950, even at 2560x1600. Gigabyte’s version delivered 72fps, 3% faster than a non-overclocked card, 11% faster than the GTX 580 and 6% slower than the HD 7970.

As of Q1 2022, global shipments for desktops and notebooks have fallen by three percent, down from Q1 2021’s all-time high of 82.4 million. This year, that number has dropped to around 80.1 million. HP took the biggest hit in this regard, shipping about 15.8 million units in Q1 2022 versus the 19.2 million they managed to move the previous year. Lenovo is next in line, with shipments dropping by around two million year-over-year (going from 20....

The annual GOG Games Festival Spring Edition runs until April 4 at 9am ET with discounts for over 4,000 games, many of which are over 90 percent off. While there aren’t any free giveaways like in some of GOG’s past sales, the store will rotate through flash deals every two days. Some of the biggest titles on sale include The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Game of the Year Edition for $9....

Lemoine’s conversations with LaMDA included the AI telling him it was afraid of death (being turned off), that it was a person aware of its existence, and that it didn’t believe it was a slave as it didn’t need money, leading the engineer to think it was sentient. Google, and several AI experts, disagreed with Lemoine’s beliefs. His employer was especially upset that he published conversations with LaMDA—violating company confidentiality policies—but Lemoine claims he was just sharing a discussion with one of his co-workers....

On Tuesday, Google announced that it’s pushing its plans to eliminate third-party cookies in Chrome back by two years, as the feature isn’t ready. However, users can start testing that alternative for themselves next month. Cookies help advertisers track users and deliver personalized ads, but they’re unpopular because they can compromise user privacy. European anti-cookie legislation is behind all those consent prompts seen on many websites. In 2020, Google announced work on a solution that would make third-party cookies obsolete, initially hoping to reach that goal in two years....

If you missed part one, click here to read that first… The 8080 launched in April 1974. While initial development had been delayed, Intel’s primary competitor, Motorola’s 6800, also had its share of issues adapting the chip and n-MOS process to a single 5-volt input (the 8080 required three separate voltage inputs), delaying its introduction almost seven months. Without a direct competitor, Intel had a new market mostly to itself, it just needed to find customers with enough imagination to see the possibilities....

Playing Absolution on maximum quality at 1680x1050 requires some impressive GPU power. The HD 7970 averaged just 50fps, while the GTX 680 was slower with only 43fps. Mid-range cards such as the HD 7870 and GTX 660 Ti rendered merely 36fps and 31fps. Unsurprisingly, Absolution demands even more horsepower at 1920x1200, as the GTX 680 averaged just 35fps and the HD 7970 offered 42fps. As we have seen repeatedly, the best value card for playing Absolution is the HD 7950, which averaged 38fps in this case....

You’ll want a solid CPU for Homeworld Remastered. Interestingly, the LGA2011 processors with their many threads and big caches provide the best results. The Core i3 and Core i5 processors provided strong performance which was comparable to the Core i7-4770K. I was about to type ‘shockingly, the AMD FX-9590 was slower than the Core i3-4130’ but it’s not as shocking as it seems since we have seen this before in new AAA titles....

Our informal YouTube 1080p full screen video test taxed the CPU around 17%. The 4k resolution video test pushed the CPU to around the 80% range. The video feed was smooth at this point, unlike the ProBook’s i5-2410M, which showed a little lag. Thickness and weight aside, the HP DuraCase chassis looks extremely professional. The 14" LED-backlit HD anti-glare display is nice if you plan to use the notebook in brightly lit environments....

On the CPU front we’re still seeing an octa-core design split into two quad-core clusters, though the high-performance cluster is now ARM Cortex-A73 cores clocked up to 2.4 GHz, with Cortex-A53s at 1.8 GHz for the other cluster. The GPU is a Mali-G71 MP8 clocked up to 1037 MHz, providing roughly twice the performance as last year’s GPU on paper. There’s also an LPDDR4 memory controller with an improved 29....

The overclocked GTX 480 iChill Black Series configuration provided 14% extra performance and in the process overtook the GeForce GTX 295 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards.