Posts

The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red held a deep-dive stream this week (below), revealing details on a significant update for The Witcher 3. Initially announced in 2020, the upgrade arrives on December 14 for free to game owners on both PC and consoles. The first change users may notice are the graphics. The studio added ray-traced global illumination, ray-traced ambient occlusion, improved textures, improved character models, better LOD distance, and other visual improvements....

Schmooey was regarded by many as an elite Guitar Hero player, despite the fact that occasionally, minor questionable things would crop up in his gameplay videos. Nobody ever really took the time to investigate the matters with a fine tooth comb. But that would change in December 2021 when Schmooey posted a video of a run of the song 9 Patterns of Eternal Pain without missing a single note. This feat had never been accomplished before, and that fact alone made some suspicious of his accomplishment....

For this review we tested at 1366x768, 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 resolutions. We are yet to incorporate 4K resolution benchmarks in our reviews because there isn’t a single GPU solution available that provides playable performance at this resolution. System Specs Intel Core i7-4790K (3.60GHz) x2 4GB Crucial DDR3-2400 (CAS 11-13-13-28) Asrock Z97 Extreme6 (Intel Z97) OCZ ZX Series (1250W) Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB) Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB) Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB) Microsoft Windows 8....

Musk had cited the number of fake accounts on Twitter as major point of contention. The world’s richest man previously claimed Twitter’s alleged refusal to reveal bot numbers constituted a material breach of the deal and allowed him to avoid the $1 billion breakup fee. In a public filing, Twitter said Musk’s claims were “a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive once the stock market and along with it, his massive personal wealth, declined in value....

The Department of Justice is charging 20-year-olds Ethan Nguyen and Andre Llacuna for allegedly running the Frosties NFT project, which saw its 8,888 NFTs, each priced at around $180, sell out within an hour of their public launch. Like similar NFT collections, buyers were promised rewards such as a “metaverse” game, giveaways, 3D versions of their avatars, etc. There was also the potential to make a lot of money by reselling their NFTs at a higher price....

The Ryzen 5 1600 was released in April 2017 for $220, and at the time it was a cracking good deal, especially if you were building a PC for both productivity and gaming. The nearest Intel competitor was the Core i5-7600K and while it was a solid gaming CPU in 2017, about a year later it was starting to become inadequate. Although the R5 1600 has unquestionably aged better, in 2022 its performance is very much entry-level....

Just yesterday I had to go into Google Authenticator for a code and when I logged into my GitHub account from my husband’s laptop, I needed to enter the code I got by text. But there is another way, and it’s a tiny FIDO U2F security key that I’ve now put on my keychain. The key I bought is the one on the far right. Next I plugged the key into my PC, it blinked a few times....

Sebastian Staacks’ latest creation is a perfect example of this. The YouTuber recently created a Game Boy cartridge that adds Wi-Fi to the classic console. In his latest video, he used the custom cart to stream Grand Theft Auto V to the vintage game system. Staacks goes into great detail explaining how he is able to stream at 160 x 144 pixels at 20 frames per second. He’s even able to actually play GTA V using the Game Boy’s controls, but as you can imagine, there are quite a bit of limitations....

This got me thinking about the Surface. It’s a great device, yet did so poorly in the perception game. What could Microsoft have done differently with a mulligan? When the Surface RT was launched alongside a Surface tablet running full Windows, Microsoft’s haters and fans could agree on something for once: Surface RT had no future. What was the point of a device that had both the limitations of Windows (no tablet apps) and none of its strengths (no PC apps)?...

Microsoft has announced a “multibillion-dollar” investment in OpenAI, the artificial intelligence firm behind the wildly popular ChatGPT service and other projects like DALL-E and GPT-3. The reveal comes hot on the heels of massive layoffs that affected almost every team that had previously been working on Microsoft’s metaverse and mixed reality efforts. The two companies have been quietly collaborating for years, and the latest move signals Redmond is deeply interested in OpenAI’s tech as a way to improve its software and cloud services ecosystems....

The surging profitability of cryptocurrencies is likely the biggest contributing factor to the sudden hike in GPU pricing. The price of Ethereum has skyrocketed from ~$450 to well over $1,000 in the last month. At the time of writing, the value had hit just over $1,200, or a 170% increase in about a month and a half, so it’s no wonder miners are snapping up every last GPU they can get....

The above screen shot shows the main menu which offers information such as UEFI version, CPU type/speed and various other specifications. The OC Tweaker menu is obviously where all the overclocking related settings are hidden and above you’ll see a great deal of voltage and frequency options. Fine-tuning the system memory with the Z77 Extreme6 is very easy and the board recognized and loaded all our XMP profiles correctly....

Benchmarking was mostly conducted with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, which is currently the world’s fastest gaming GPU. We tested titles 1080p and for the most part we weren’t maxing out the visual quality settings, so in our opinion these results really show a realistic worst case – worst case would be a lower resolution with lower quality settings. So let’s talk realistic settings with a GTX 1080 Ti. Ashes of the Singularity is a good example for this because it fully utilizes six-core/12-thread processors and here the 8700K was quite a bit faster than the 4770K, even with the old fourth-gen Core i7 overclocked....

Although there are no serious design flaws with the board’s layout, there are a few nits that we wouldn’t mind picking. For example, the DIMM slots feature no gapping between each channel which can cause compatibility issues with memory heatsinks. We also noticed that the P67H2-A2 has limited expansion slots with just a single PCIe x1 slot, two PCIe x16 slots and two PCI slots. ECS has occupied the space of two expansion slots with the CMOS battery, making it difficult and annoying to access....

What’s more confusing, ECS claims the X79R-AX 14 SATA ports with 10 connected to the X79 chipset, which is only supposed to support six. The board supposedly has six SATA 6Gb/s ports and four SATA 3Gb/s ports wired to the X79, but Intel’s block diagrams clearly says the chipset supports two 6Gb/s ports and a total of six SATA ports – two 6Gb/s and four 3Gb/s ports, in other words....

This was thanks in part to the timely launch of supported devices from multiple vendors, rapidly declining prices of 5G compatible devices compared to their early 4G counterparts and China’s early 5G deployments. Ericsson further reports that 5G subscriptions grew by 70 million during the first quarter of this year to reach 620 million worldwide. That figure is expected to surpass one billion by the end of 2022, with North America and North East Asia leading the charge....

For movies, the Predator X34 was an absolute treat. The slightly curved nature of its screen lends to the overall illusion of immersion. The vast width of this display allows high-end 21:9 cinematic content without letterboxing (i.e. black bars on top and bottom). This makes for a spectacular widescreen experience. And while this type of content will bring you much joy, more pedestrian 16:9 content will be pillarboxed (i.e. black bars on the sides)....

To see what’s available to watch, you have to open apps individually and have a look around. Each app has its own unique interface to learn and if you use an antenna to capture free over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts, you have to switch inputs on your TV to tune into them. Cord-cutting proponents may dismiss the inconveniences as minor in nature - the cost of not doing business with expensive cable and satellite providers - but they’re valid nevertheless....

Even the largest-screen modern laptops are lighter and smaller than their predecessors—check out our best picks right here. The Alienware 18 series was quite the opposite. The M18x R2 with its 18.4-inch screen weighed 12.6 pounds—its power brick alone was 2.4 pounds—and came with an incredibly bulky chassis, making it a machine not really designed for portability or laps. For comparison, the Razer Blade 17, our pick as the best desktop replacement laptop, is around 6 pounds....