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Sultim_t says in the description of his trailer for Half-Life: Ray Traced that he will add real-time path tracing to Valve’s seminal 1998 first-person shooter. The ray-traced effects include global illumination, reflections, refractions, and soft shadows. Path tracing is similar to ray tracing but far more comprehensive and computationally expensive. The ray tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Resident Evil Village is mixed with traditional rasterization, only handling effects like global illumination or reflections....

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has decided to effectively ban the sale and importation of telecom products made by five Chinese tech companies. The “no sale” list includes Huawei, ZTE, Hytera Communications, Hikvision and Dahua, and according to FCC commissioners it would shield the US from the “unacceptable risks to national security” posed by the aforementioned product makers. The FCC’s decision concerns the authorization of devices sold in the US....

There were raised eyebrows this week when Apple unveiled the Studio Display, a 27" 5K retina screen with a resolution of 5120 x 2880 (218 PPI) that cost less than half the $5,000 it charges for the Pro Display XDR; admittedly, the more expensive monitor is five inches larger and features HDR. Another very welcome aspect of the Studio Display is that the $1,599 price ($1,899 with nano-textured glass) includes a monitor stand or VESA wall mount, unlike the Pro Display, which charges $1,000 for such a privilege....

The single large file upload performance again saw the WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB maxing out the gigabit network connection with a throughput of 106MB/s. The My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB matched the Synology DS715 and 215+ and it wasn’t a great deal slower than the DS216+ in our game upload test. The program upload performance was below average at 29MB/s, and given the previous results it was surprising to see the WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB fall so far behind the Synology DS215j for example....

But as much as SSDs continue to become more attractive and affordable solutions, they still have some way to go before replacing hard drives. Price and storage capacity in today’s HDDs make for an extremely low cost per gigabyte when compared to SSDs. Comparing the performance of the Black 4TB to other hard drives it becomes clear Western Digital has developed a very speedy, high capacity drive. Unfortunately we don’t yet have a 4TB version of the WD RE, or more importantly, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 4TB which can be had for ~$305....

The Black2 SSD delivered 22.9MB/s in the PCMark 7 importing picture test, 22% slower than the 840 Evo 250GB but almost four times faster than the Black2’s HDD. The Black2’s SSD matched Samsung’s 840 Evo with a transfer speed of 23.1MB/s in the video editing test, though that was only 39% faster than its disk drive. The “starting applications” test saw the Black2’s SSD deliver a staggering 24 times the performance of its HDD with 51....

When activated, Windows 11’s enhanced phishing protection will notify users when they’re entering Microsoft account information into websites or programs known for phishing scams. It also protects against deceptive advertising. You can activate the feature by heading to Windows Security > App & Browser Control > Reputation-based Protection > Phishing Protection. Optionally, phishing protection can also warn users about reused and insecurely stored passwords. Image: Website for Students One scheme in February involved impersonating financial service Intuit with false security notices....

There’s four Kryo 280 cores clocked at 2.45 GHz, along with four Kryo 280 efficiency cores clocked at 1.9 GHz. There’s also an Adreno 540 GPU clocked at 710 MHz. Both the CPU and GPU are designed in-house at Qualcomm, and the SoC is fabricated at 10nm. My Envy x2 review unit has 8GB of RAM, although many units include just 4GB. There’s also a 256GB SSD inside. Starting off with PCMark 8’s Home test, and immediately it’s not good news for Windows on ARM’s emulated performance....

On Wednesday, Wizards of the Coast’s parent company Hasbro announced that it has offered to purchase the digital toolset D&D Beyond for $146.3 million. The website and tools are currently owned by Fandom, which is more widely known for its comprehensive wiki pages like Star Wars fan site Wookieepedia. In 2017, Fandom created a website called D&D Beyond, which features rules for the game and tools for creating characters and running campaigns....

On Tuesday, Wyze launched a new subscription tier for its smart home cameras, starting at as little as $0. Cam Plus Lite adds person detection, 12-second cloud clips, and fast-forward and rewind controls. It is also removing the 32GB limit on microSD card storage. Cam Plus Lite is just a stripped-down version of Wyze’s Cam Plus subscription, which saved the company from bankruptcy during the pandemic. Cam Plus subscribers enjoy unlimited cloud recording and object recognition that includes people, packages, pets, and vehicles....

Next up we have F1 2017 and although the 2600K does trail behind the pack by quite a large margin it also provided well over 100fps at all times, so highly playable performance then. Still, if we use F1 2017 as a measuring stick with the medium quality settings the 2600K was 23% slower than the 8700K and 27% slower once both CPUs are overclocked. Jumping up to the high quality settings and here we see that once overclocked the 2600K is able to nudge ahead of the 4770K this time....

Surprisingly, despite weighing very little, most of the case has been constructed from steel. Only the facade and window are made of plastic. The key to the lightweight design is the compact size, and once we get inside the 100R you’ll see there aren’t many steel accessories to be found. The Carbide 100R is available exclusively in black with or without a case window. For review we have the case window model which is known simply as the 100R....

Although the board’s cooling setup looks puny, it’s actually probably more realistic in terms of what is actually required by the VRM and P67 chip. You’d expect this to provide extra elbow room than the competition, but MSI’s entry still feels a bit cramped. The CPU socket is very close to the DIMM slots which are offset about 4cm from the edge of the board. That said, this has likely been done to follow Intel’s design specifications for the motherboard....

Last week, researcher Kağan Çapar found and published a zero-day vulnerability in 7-Zip that can grant privilege escalation and command execution. Designated CVE-2022-29072, it affects Windows users running version 21.07 — the latest version as of now. As the video below shows, an attacker with limited access to a system can activate the vulnerability by opening the “Help” window in 7-Zip under Help->Contents and dragging a file with the ....

The last couple of ultrabooks we’ve reviewed weren’t without fault but then again, both sold for less than $900. This led me to ponder what sort of product would be possible if Intel’s proposed $1,000 target price wasn’t a limitation. Could a few hundred bucks tacked on the top end make a difference between a vanilla ultrabook and something truly special? That’s something Acer is willing to gamble on with its latest flagship ultrabook....

Today we’ll be looking at another tablet built around Android, this time coming from a traditional PC maker, meet the Acer Iconia Tab A500. Acer has been one of the leading netbook manufacturers in the past few years, a position that gave them the chance to grow sales in North America and in Europe. With tablets eating up on netbook sales at an accelerated pace, we can clearly see where Acer is headed with the Iconia offerings....

Our last peripheral roundup looked at affordable gaming headsets and those were relatively easy to differentiate – some delivered strong bass, others had balanced mid-ranges, and after sampling them it was pretty easy to identify the headsets simply by listening to them. Unlike a majority of mechanical keyboards, the headsets were powered by various driver solutions and housing designs that changed sound dynamics. However with mechanical keyboards, the vast majority of them share the same switch hardware from Cherry MX and those that don’t still tend to have knock-off Cherry MX switches from Kailh, which do a pretty good job of replicating the Cherry MX feel....

The first thing to note about the Amplifier is that it’s huge. It’s not the same size as a fully-fledged desktop PC, but it’s certainly larger than a simple graphics card. Most of the internal space is occupied by the full ATX power supply, and there’s quite a bit of free space inside the case that’s not used for anything. I’d have liked to see some hard drive ports or something in there, just to use up that wasted space....

As part of its CES 2022 lineup, Alienware is showing off Concept Nyx. The idea is pretty simple: it’s a powerful computer for a user’s home that can stream games to different devices. It pulls in user-owned titles from Steam, Epic Games, etc. using Dell’s own propriety software. In the demo, Alienware showed Cyberpunk 2077 moving seamlessly between a smart TV, a laptop, and a PC while using the same controller....