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As you might recall, Nanite vastly expands the number of polygons developers can use without taking a heavy frame rate toll. Epic says every brick, stone, wooden plank, and wall trim in the houses are individually modeled in real-time from millions of polygons. Natural environments are similarly rendered. Every stone, flower, and blade of grass is a stand-alone model. Trees now have poly counts of around 300,000. Unreal Engine’s Lumen technology handles just about everything involving the lighting of a scene — global illumination, ray tracing, bounce lighting, and more....

Not sure which ones? Well, let us help. We’ve compiled a list of essential programs to get you started. Many of these apps are also available as web services, but app versions have the advantage of offline access. Downloading movies or music to local storage can be useful when you are expecting hours with no connection. Even if you just want to write emails when an internet connection isn’t available, you may want to be able to read the messages that you are writing replies to....

The New York City Fire Department reports that as of last week, it has investigated significantly more fires caused by e-bike batteries than in all of 2021. City authorities have proposed multiple solutions, including regulations and partial bans. Electric bike batteries have caused a suspected 174 fires in NYC in 2022. That’s an average of about four per week. By the end of the year, that number may hit double last year’s total of 104 and quadruple the 44 reported in 2020....

The Japanese gaming giant was attempting to rebound from the disappointment that was the Wii U with yet another portable console at a time when traditional, more powerful systems from Microsoft and Sony were battling for supremacy. Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata, who led development on the Switch, died suddenly in July 2015, casting even more uncertainty over the device and Nintendo’s future. Nintendo marched on, launching the Switch on March 3, 2017, for $299....

This refinement is visible in all aspects of the card, not least of which is raw performance. Based on Fermi’s second-generation Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) architecture, the GTX 580 has 512 CUDA cores, 48 ROP (Raster Operations) units and 64 TAU (Texture Addressing Units). The GTX 680 ramps that up to a massive 1536 CUDA cores, 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs, bringing loads of horsepower to the race. A few changes have been made to the clock speeds while the Shader clock has been removed entirely....

The big issue with GPUs today is of course pricing and availability. Months ago we started recommending the RX 580 as an alternative to spending over $1,000 on a new and heavily scalped Ampere or RDNA2 product. The Radeon RX 580 could be had for ~$300 on eBay used, and although that’s roughly twice what you might have paid for a new one just a year prior, we’re living in very different times....

A single GTX 960 rendered just 21fps at 2560x1600 in Crysis 3, while adding a second using SLI technology boosted performance by 62% resulting in an average of 34fps. Ideally, we hope for scaling efficiency of at least 80%, so there could be some driver work to be done here. Still, this is better than the 49% boost the GTX 970s saw when using SLI. The GTX 960 SLI cards were just 3% faster than a single GTX 970 and 11% slower than the GTX 980 along with being 6% faster than the R9 290 and 8% slower than the R9 290X....

Not only was it already possible to buy an HD 7970 running at those speeds and beyond, but AMD wasn’t truly able to nab the performance crown back from Nvidia as the HD 7970 GHz Edition and the GTX 680 are about equal. Additionally, it was hard to get excited about such a marginal performance bump when it’s associated with a $50 price hike. To date, there are no official HD 7970 GHz Edition cards available and in hindsight, AMD could have collaborated with a board partner to deliver something more impressive....

The camera is undoubtedly the Nexus 5X’s standout feature. The 12.3-megapixel shooter with large 1.55 micron pixels delivers quality photos in most situations, and does an especially good job when photographing inside. The camera app could use some work, and the lack of optical image stabilization sees the it fall behind the best phone cameras (Galaxy S6, for example), but I think users will still be very happy with what the Nexus 5X brings in....

But have these factors had any impact in the market yet? Let’s find out. Follow up: October 2022, November 2022, December 2022 Nvidia’s new GPUs and graphics cards (check this out for a full breakdown) are going to be expensive. The GeForce RTX 4090 will be $1,600 coming on October 12, followed by the RTX 4080 16GB at $1,200 and RTX 4080 12GB at $900, both expected in November. These are premium priced products that in the current market would be two of the three most expensive GPUs you can buy....

Graphics cards and other devices could face 25% import tariffs starting January 1, 2023, if the US Trade Representative’s office (USTR) doesn’t reinstate exceptions set to expire at the end of this year. The USTR so far hasn’t indicated its decision on the matter. The issue started when the Trump administration enacted tariffs on Chinese-made goods. In March, the USTR reinstated exemptions on hundreds of products, including printed circuit boards (PCBs), a definition under which devices like motherboards and GPUs fall....

As you can see, GTA V is quite CPU bound and this is evident by the performance gains seen when moving from the Core i3 to the Core i5 (around 20%). The Core i5-4690K was just 3fps slower than the Core i7-5960X, so it is safe to say investing in a Core i7 processor for GTA V isn’t money well spent. Unfortunately, AMD’s processors had a fairly rough time in this title....

According to a new report by Trendfocus, worldwide HDD shipments dropped to approximately 45 million units in the second quarter, a 33 percent decline YoY. To put this into perspective, HDD vendors shipped over 650 million units in 2010, or about 162 million per quarter on average. Demand for performance enterprise HDDs dipped slightly to around 2.5 million units as OEMs reportedly carried over inventory from the previous quarter. Continuing shortages for other components also hampered sales of HDD-equipped systems....

Out of those just a few of them have impressed us, largely because most of them have been console ports that were rushed out the door to the PC, or so it seemed. Therefore it comes as little surprise that the most impressive game we have tested this year was The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, a game designed exclusively for the PC. On a side note, my favorite game right now is still StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, which is another game designed exclusively for the platform....

The overclocked HIS R9 290X Hybrid IceQ averaged 44pfs in Metro Redux at 2560x1600, making it the fastest card tested while being 13% faster than a standard R9 290X. It was also 10% faster than the GTX 980 and 22% faster than the GTX 780 Ti. It’s difficult to come close to the 63fps of the GTX 980 in Tomb Raider and the overclocked HIS R9 290X Hybrid IceQ was 2% slower than the GTX 780 Ti and 11% slower than the GTX 980....

Concluding our gaming benchmarks we have Wolfenstein, one of the newest games we tested. Here the HIS Radeon HD 5850 comes home strong defeating the GeForce GTX 285 by a 19% performance margin at 2560x1600. The card was 18% slower than both the dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2 and Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards at the same resolution.

1440p smartphone displays have now matured to the point where they’re bright enough for regular use, and the increased sharpness and clarity makes viewing text a pleasure. The higher resolution also has advantages in virtual reality applications, which is quickly becoming a great use case for high-end devices like the HTC 10. HTC’s Super LCD technology has typically been one of the better LCDs on the market, and this is no exception with the HTC 10....

The Sensation’s Android (2.3 Gingerbread) platform will offer a familiar experience for anyone who has previously used an Android handset, albeit with a few upgrades here and there. Whilst the Android platform is quickly evolving, it still manages to remain logical and familiar, even between devices from different manufacturers. For example, the notifications bar at the top still shows the time, battery status, and signal strength, as well as housing any incoming notification icons....

My favorite aspect of this device is the design. The Huawei P9 is a relatively compact 5.2-inch smartphone that’s thin and light, making it easy and comfortable to use. The metal unibody chassis is seamless and looks fantastic, with curves in all the right places and just enough highlights to keep the rectangular slab from looking too familiar. Plus, Huawei has worked in USB-C and a microSD card slot, two must-have features in 2016....

Valve hasn’t released all the details yet on the official channels for Steam Deck repairs, but it did announce that iFixit is one of the groups authorized to sell replacement parts. The self-repair website will also offer components for the Valve Index VR headset and related items. In its official teardown earlier this week, iFixit gave the Steam Deck a seven out of 10 reparability score. The techs noted how easily replaceable the thumbsticks are....