When testing Tomb Raider, the R9 290 averaged 42fps or 9% slower than the R9 290X, which is about as big of a difference as we expect to see between these two cards. It was also 12% slower than the GTX 780 but 13% faster than the GTX 770. Despite trailing the GTX 780 by 12% in Tomb Raider’s fps testing, the R9 290 isn’t that much slower when measuring frame time performance, taking just 30....
The Radeon R9 380X is a power hungry graphics card consuming just 2.5% less power than the R9 390 in Battlefield Hardline. This means that the R9 380X also consumed 7% more power than the GeForce GTX 970 and 12% more than the GTX 960. These figures certainly aren’t shocking but they are higher than we were expecting. The R9 380X system peaked at 293 watts in Dragon Age Inquisition which was again only slightly less than the considerably more powerful R9 390....
As of writing, the Ryzen 5800X is selling for around $420 and it appears to be in stock just about everywhere, so things are looking promising. Then we have the Core i7-11700K which is a brand new product and has only been available for about 2 months now, currently selling for $399. For the price, the Core i7-11700K should offer more than decent value and certainly nothing like the i9-11900K, which in this generation is essentially a binned version of the same chip to be sold for $600....
Cook’s pay reduction comes after the Say-on-Pay vote held at Apple’s annual advisory meeting for shareholders in 2022. Just 64% of votes relating to compensation for executives were in favor of execs retaining their 2021 pay packages. That marked a drastic decline compared to the 94.9% of in-favor votes recorded a year earlier. Despite the majority of shareholders voting in favor, Apple took the Say-on-Pay’s declining support into consideration when calculating Cook’s compensation for 2023....
Late last week, developer Protopop Games tweeted that Apple planned to remove its game, Motivoto, from sale on its app store because it hadn’t updated it in over three years. Apple’s email said Potopop could keep the game on the store by submitting an update within 30 days. Apple’s support page confirms this is part of a new policy to evaluate older apps. Apple has started to evaluate apps it thinks may be outdated....
The Washington Post reports that Apple and Google officials in Russia had been threatened with arrest in September 2021 unless they removed Navalny’s “Smart Voting” app from their respective stores ahead of Russia’s legislative election. The app contains over a thousand endorsements of political candidates and is designed to help citizens register votes against Putin and his ruling United Russia party. A spokesperson for the Russian President previously called the app “illegal....
Apple is said to be working on several new Macs including a revised Mac mini, a larger-screened iMac Pro and a MacBook Air that could feature the biggest redesign in the product’s history. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman expects Apple to share plans for finalizing its transition from Intel hardware to Apple silicon as early as WWDC 2022 in June. Related reading: Intel wants to get Apple’s business back by outcompeting it On the iPhone front, most believe we’ll see a 5G version of the iPhone SE debut sometime in the first half of the year followed by the usual main line refresh in the fall....
Apple began introducing Force Touch (aka 3D Touch) to its devices in 2014 with the Apple Watch. It subsequently brought it to the MacBook’s trackpad and the iPhone 6S. However, in 2018 Cupertino engineers decided to start phasing it out, starting with the iPhone XR and then the Apple Watch Series 6. A hard press became a long press, and before we knew it, it was gone except on the MacBook trackpad....
The Verge’s Sean Hollister took the service for a test run this week and found that it’s even worse than it appears on paper. It has many problems, the most outrageous of which is the pricing: he paid $69 for a new battery for his iPhone Mini, the same price that the Apple Store charges for a battery and its installation; and $49 to rent the Apple certified toolkit for seven days....
Apple CEO Tim Cook last week sent out a memo to all employees informing them that they must return to the office for at least three days a week starting September 5. Workers were told to come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a third day to vary depending on each team—a previous plan involved employees coming in on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Cook said in the memo that he wants to preserve the “in-person collaboration that is so essential to our culture....
Asrock’s recently launched M8 barebones system, which we are reviewing today, may not be the best value for a Micro-ITX machine, but it may be one of the most attractive we’ve seen in years and that counts for something. Even if the M8’s style is not your thing, there’s less room to argue that this is a unique gaming PC barebones kit and that was enough to earn our attention....
Far Cry 2 uses the DirectX 9 rendering mode and when using medium quality settings, the Asrock Vision 3D delivered playable performance at 1440x900, which is quite impressive given its size. The Asrock Core 100HT-BD on the other hand averaged 7fps while the AMD Phenom II X2 560 averaged 9fps. Company of Heroes is a bit dated now, but it’s still a very good looking real-time strategy title that uses DirectX 10....
Upon release a few media outlets scrambled to the benchmarks and it quickly became apparent that the game was extremely CPU intensive and not in the way that ARMA 3 or Planet Coaster are. Rather than just taxing a few threads heavily the game eats up cores, lots of cores. There are reports of it using up a Threadripper 1920X for example. As a result modern quad-cores were getting slayed and there were reports that the game was simply unplayable on the Core i5-7600K....
Thanks to films like Deep Impact, the not-so-funny Don’t Look Up and countless other entertainment experiences, modern audiences are very much aware of the (theoretical) threat an asteroid impact could present for Earth. With Asteroid Launcher, theory can become a bit more practical by giving interesting tidbits of data about the extent of such an impact. Programmed by Neal Agarwal, Asteroid Launcher simply does what it says. The website lets you simulate an asteroid impact everywhere on Earth and provides information about the resulting crater, the level of energy released in “Gigatons of TNT,” the fireball dimension and more....
Those who have used Android based smartphones, or iPhones for that matter, will have no trouble finding their way around the Honeycomb 3.2. The desktop, if you will, can be customized across numerous windows which the user can swipe through. Each window or screen can be filled with icons or widgets depending on how the user wishes to set it up. Asus has added a weather app to the primary screen and can be manually set to a certain location or left on auto and will update as you move around....
Intel Core i5-7400, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD - $896 Intel Core i5-7400, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD - $970 Intel Core i7-7700, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD + 1TB HDD - $1,197 All models also come with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with 3GB of GDDR5, plus an Intel Wi-Fi ac and Bluetooth 4.0 combination. All come with Intel H110 motherboards, and as I stated earlier, neither the CPU nor GPU can be upgraded in this system....
As a result this card should generate little noise and likely overclock very well, while taking as much estate as its higher performing siblings. Compared to the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 that measure 28cm and 24cm, respectively, the Radeon HD 5770 is just 21cm long. This is similar to existing Radeon HD 4850 and 4770 graphics cards and therefore AMD’s latest card should fit in any case that can support a mATX motherboard....
At 1920x1200 the Radeon HD 5830 spat out an impressive 71fps on average, allowing it to match the performance of the GeForce GTX 285. It was 17% slower than the Radeon HD 5850, but still outperformed the Radeon HD 4890 by a comfortable 13% margin.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars employs the original id Tech 4 game engine. Despite it being quite old and testing with maximum in-game quality settings as well as 8xAA/16xAF enabled, the Radeon HD 5970 averaged a staggering 158fps at 2560x1600. This translated to a 49% performance margin over the Radeon HD 5870 and 55% over the Radeon HD 4870 X2.
