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But the question or even just blanket statement we keep seeing pop up relates to DLSS. Is it worth buying the RTX 2080 for DLSS?, or is DLSS the killer feature for the RTX cards? As with ray tracing, we won’t really know until we have more to test with, but today we’re doing an early investigation into DLSS using the current DLSS demos we have within reach. We weren’t going to cover DLSS so soon because there are only two Nvidia-provided demos available that allow us to see DLSS in action....

The “new” GeForce RTX 3080 12GB is launching today, but you’re unlikely to find a single review of it anywhere informing you in regards to how it performs. This is because Nvidia has deliberately blocked all day-one reviews. It’s hard to say why, and as far as we can tell it makes very little sense, though we do have a theory. But before I get to that, let’s rewind a little bit… About 4 weeks ago, the first AIB partners started to reach out informing us of multiple product releases in January, one of which was a new version of the RTX 3080 with 12GB of VRAM....

We tested Ashes of the Singularity with both DX11 and DX12, and the GTX 1070 matched the Titan X once again. While this made the 1070 quite a bit faster than the Fury X when using DX11, it was a good bit slower under DX12. Again, we see the GTX 1070 delivering comparable performance to the 980 Ti and Titan X as it can be found sitting between the pair....

This configuration performed well, delivering 11% more performance over the standard GTX 660 Ti and 7% more performance than Gigabyte’s offering when testing with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, enough to overtake the GTX 670 and put the GTX 660 Ti within striking distance of the HD 7970. In Crysis 2, our manual overclock boosted performance by 11% over Nvidia’s specification and 8% over Gigabyte’s factory overclock for an average of 41fps, a measly 2fps slower than the GTX 670....

The key change is a 20% increase in memory bandwidth and capacity. With all said and done, the 12GB 3080 will land between the original 3080 and 3080 Ti in terms of performance, and we suspect it will often be closer to the 3080 Ti, so a nice little upgrade there. But the pressing issue with the 12GB RTX 3080 is the same problem we face with all graphics cards right now: pricing and availability....

Over a year ago, Nvidia launched Lite Hash Rate (LHR) versions of most of its RTX 3000 lineup, which it designed to significantly reduce the mining performance for Ethereum and other GPU-minable cryptocurrencies. Since then, miners have been trying to bypass this limiter with varying degrees of success. A couple of months ago, an unlocker tool was released that claimed to restore the full mining performance, but it turned out to be just malware....

The lack of NCQ support once again has the OCZ Enyo performing quite poorly in the AS SSD Benchmark 4K-64 thread test. Although it is faster than conventional hard drives, it is also much slower than today’s high-speed SSDs. Both the read and write access times of the Enyo are a little on the slow side for an SSD, but they are still leaps and bounds superior when compared to a traditional hard drive....

But the OCZ Enyo is really designed to replace existing portable storage solutions such as USB 2.0 hard drives and flash memory sticks. So how did it fare against those? As you can see, the A-DATA SH93 took a staggering 7 minutes to transfer the single 6GB file, making it seven times slower than the Enyo when using the MCCI drivers. Even when limited to the USB 2.0 bus the Enyo was still quite snappy, at least as far as USB 2....

For that reason, we have maintained for years that the single most important upgrade you can make to an enthusiast-grade machine is adding an SSD for your operating system and applications. The key downside to SSD technology is its cost per gigabyte, which is significantly higher than traditional mechanical hard drives. When we published our first SSD roundup in 2009, Intel’s X25-M 80GB was the best option available and cost a crazy $4....

When I was using the Oppo R5 as my daily driver, I noticed that the phone didn’t last for particularly long, often dying or coming very close to dying before a typical day was complete. It’s been a long time since I’ve used a smartphone that has completely died at around 3pm, which was after just 7 hours of typical moderate use. This isn’t a great result at all, and going by the benchmarks below, the Oppo R5 has one of the worst battery lives of any smartphone I’ve recently reviewed....

When it comes to making video games, few do it as well as Blizzard. Although they aren’t known for creating first-person shooters, it seemed like everyone walked away loving the beta and simply couldn’t wait to get back in. I personally spent a number of hours playing and found the game to be flawless; the online multiplayer was satisfying and lag free. Tapping its vast experience with competitive real-time strategy games, Blizzard has made something of a first-person strategy game with 21 heroes split between offense, defense, tank and support classes....

Indian-born Estavi bought the non-fungible token of Dorsey’s tweet, the first one to be sent via the service back in 2006, with a winning bid of $2,915,835.47 in March last year. CoinDesk writes that Estavi announced his intention to sell the NFT last week, pledging to give 50% of the sale, which he believed would exceed $25 million, to charity. It was put up for auction on OpenSea for $48 million, ready for the multi-million-dollar bids to come rolling in....

You might’ve already seen 12VHPWR replacing some 8-pin Molex connectors on the newest power supplies. It can deliver 600W across 12 rails, four times as much as an 8-pin connector. It’s about the same size as an 8-pin to boot. PCI-SIG is happy with the 12VHPWR standard — that’s not the problem. The problem is with the cheap 8-pin to 12VHPWR adapters that vendors are beginning to bundle with some power supplies....

Although the M6e does use an M.2 socket SSD, it is actually a PCIe 2.0 x2 SSD. The PCI Express card is used as an adapter for systems that don’t have a motherboard supporting an M.2 socket. The M6e was released because Intel’s 9-series chipsets and therefore no motherboards at the time offered an M.2 socket. Unfortunately, Plextor is not affording users the ability to detach the M.2 SSD from the PCIe adapter and install it directly into a PCIe slot, at least not without completely voiding their warranty....

The transition to a free-to-play model resulted in a resurgence in PUBG’s player base, showing an increase of more than 480% within a week of the transition. The surge rivaled the game’s growth rates recorded during its original release back in 2017. On Friday Krafton released their latest earnings report, which boasts an impressive spike in profit and overall revenue. According to the report, the PUBG parent company’s Q1 revenues grew by more than $400 million, while operating profits grew to $241....

QTS is an extremely well-polished operating system with features include the ‘Linux Station’ app. As we saw with the TS-853A this app essentially converts your QNAP NAS into a Linux workstation/desktop computer by installing Ubuntu. This feature tied in nicely with the TS-853A’s ability to accept a mouse, keyboard and monitor. That said this is a feature TS-1635 users won’t be looking at taking advantage of, namely because this model lacks a display output and more importantly doesn’t work with ARM-base processors....

Battery life appears to be roughly on par with the old model, as you can see in this couple of benchmarks. The result is average battery life, not particularly impressive, but not unusable either. It does get soundly beaten by both the HP Spectre x360 and Dell XPS 13 though, which is disappointing considering the similar hardware in both laptops.

Last September, Nintendo confirmed that GoldenEye 007 was “coming soon” to the Switch Online N64 emulator. Since then, fans have been waiting with bated breath for more info, particularly when they could get their hands on it, but we got nothing but silence from MI6. On Wednesday, Nintendo finally announced a release date for GoldenEye via Twitter and YouTube. It says the game hits its Expansion Pack subscription service on Friday....

But none were quite like 3d gaming industry pioneer Rendition – a great first product, followed by two less-than-average ones, before fading into total obscurity, and all within five years. Now that’s a story worth telling! Did you know? (Editor’s note) TechSpot started life in 1998 as a personal tech blog called “Pure Rendition” to report news on the Rendition Verite chip, one of the first consumer 3D graphics processing units....

Luke Plunkett: The thing that impresses me the most about Rocket League, and I guess it’s the thing that keeps me coming back to it so often, is how it’s a multiplayer game, but it’s not a multiplayer game. I normally avoid traditionally multiplayer titles; the last thing I want to deal with when playing video games is the grating sound and erratic behaviour of other human beings. But with Rocket League, it just doesn’t matter....