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For the past year, we’ve asked ourselves whether it was a good time to buy or build a new PC, considering the market was plagued with component shortages and skyrocketing prices. Today, we are asking the same question for a different reason, with next-gen products such as AMD’s 7000-series Ryzen CPUs and Nvidia’s 4000-series GeForce GPUs around the corner. But first, let’s take a look at how the market has changed in the past few months… AMD has mostly retaken the gaming throne with the revolutionary Ryzen 5800X3D, at least when using affordable DDR4 memory....

According to Telegram founder Pavel Durov, Apple is “intentionally crippling” web apps on iPhones to cause more people to download native versions of the app so it can collect its 30-percent commission. While Telegram does have an app listed in the App Store, Apple guidelines do not allow it to have unrestricted public channels. As a workaround, Telegram developed a web-based app that bypasses these rules. However, it allegedly does not run smoothly because of known issues in WebKit that Apple has ignored to fix for as long as 15 years....

The recall report was issued by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) for specific 2023 Model 3 and 2020-2023 Model Y electric vehicles. The report states that affected vehicles may experience randomly illuminating rear taillights on one or both sides of the vehicle, resulting in a potentially increased collision risk. The random illumination is the result of a firmware anomaly causing false fault detections during the vehicle’s startup sequence....

Testing at 1080p using the highest quality in-game settings along with 4xMSAA, the GTX 980 Ti is still able to just edge out the Fury X in both the DX11 and DX12 modes. The Fury X was just a single frame slower when using DX12 while it was 7fps slower in the DX11 test. The larger margin under DX11 is believed to be down to the fact that Nvidia has optimized its driver for DX11 performance in Ashes of the Singularity whereas AMD hasn’t....

Last year’s GTX 980 featured 2048 CUDA cores, which now looks underwhelming put against the Titan X’s whopping 3072 CUDA cores, a nice 50% bump for the architecture. Nvidia also went the other way, releasing the $160 GTX 950 which sports just 768 CUDA cores. All told, Nvidia released four new GPUs in 2015, while AMD delivered eight cards if you’re willing to be loose with the definition of “new” and three if you’re not, namely the Radeon R9 Fury X, Fury and Nano....

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti was far superior to its competition when testing with Dragon Age II at 1680x1050 where it averaged 41fps. In comparison the Radeon HD 6870 was 37% slower while the 7770 trailed by a 58% margin. At 1920x1200 the GeForce GTX 680 was the card to beat with an average of 64fps, making it 19% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 and 8% faster than the 7970 GHz Edition....

Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz) x4 2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600(CAS 8-8-8-20) Asrock X79 Extreme11 (Intel X79) OCZ ZX Series (1250w) Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB) AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7950 Boost (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 7770 (1024MB) HIS Radeon HD 7750 (1024MB) HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB) Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Nvidia Forceware 310....

For those that missed it, late last year Intel announced new ‘Silver’ and ‘Gold’-branded Celeron and Pentium processors. On the desktop, these were Kaby Lake parts with a refreshed named. Standard desktop Pentium CPUs are now known as Pentium Gold and since this started with the Kaby Lake generation you got Hyper-Threading support over previous Pentium models. Pentium Silver is for chips found in mobile and low-powered devices using the BGA mounting method....

Moving on to the Blender test, in this real-world application we see an incredible 49% reduction in render time when moving from the Pentium G5400 to the 2200G. That’s very much in line with what we saw when looking at multi-threaded performance with Cinebench R15. We see less of a margin between these two CPUs in the V-Ray benchmark but even so, the 2200G was still 33% faster and 37% faster once overclocked....

This week the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) fined Apple 5 million euros (almost $5.7 million) for continuing to effectively block apps from using third-party payment methods. It is the fifth €5 million fine in as many weeks, bringing the total so far to 25 million (around $28 million). Last year, the Dutch antitrust regulator ordered Apple to let the country’s dating apps use alternate payment methods, ultimately setting the deadline for the middle of last month....

The PS4, Xbox One and Wii U are all very different consoles, but there’s one thing I wish all three had in common: their digital pricing. Something they could learn from the PC. Steam gets a lot of credit for rejuvenating the PC gaming market, and there’s one area it deserves more praise than anywhere else: its regular, highly-discounted sales. I say this not because I like things to be cheap....

Once inside we find a number of chips crammed onto a tiny 6.5 x 6.1-inch PCB, including the Intel Atom N270. The processor features Intel’s “Diamondville” architecture which is a single-core design that operates at 1.60GHz (12x133) and sports a 512KB L2 cache. Thecus added a single SO-DIMM slot occupied by a 1GB DDR2-800 (CL6) memory module. The CPU and RAM are connected by Intel’s 945GSE chipset which houses an integrated GMA 950 graphics core, though this isn’t used by the N3200XXX....

Newzoo’s latest Global Games Market Report shows that the number of people playing games around the world is up 4.6% this year. That’s especially impressive given how more people were gaming during the lockdowns when stay-at-home entertainment, such as video games and streaming, exploded. Not only were more people trying games for the first time, but lapsed players were also returning. The Middle East & Africa saw the largest jump in players, up 8....

Misleading product names After the GTX 970 mess, we thought Nvidia would want to play it cool with the GeForce 10 series. But considering that was one of their best selling GPUs, they clearly didn’t see the need. Nvidia started off strong in May 2016 with the GTX 1080, followed up by the 1070 in June and 1060 in July. It was a strong line up covering the $250, $400 and $600 price points....

Finding subtitles for ripped or downloaded videos isn’t terribly complicated. Most of the time it involves a quick search at sites like OpenSubtitles or Subscene for a particular TV show or movie, and filtering through language options. It’s not a lot of work but it isn’t the most efficient either when dealing with a large video library. Subtitles by Rainy Cape can shave a few seconds off the whole process by making it as simple as dragging and dropping a video file....

Unfortunately, the game is still suffering from several issues, though Ubisoft does appear determined to solve them quickly. Just one day after release the game was offline for a few hours for server maintenance, which is not great timing especially since the game can’t be played in any capacity without server connectivity. Even with the teething issues the game has been a heap of fun so far. If only I had more time to explore it…...

Testing Crysis 2 at 5040x1050 saw the GTX 660 Ti SLI cards average 32fps, which was surprisingly identical to the HD 7850 Crossfire setup, making both dual-GPU configurations 19% faster than the HD 7970 and 33% faster than the GTX 680. The GTX 660 Ti in SLI managed to separate itself from the Crossfire cards this time with 13% more performance, in addition to 17% more frames than HD 7970 and 29% more than the GTX 680....

Ubisoft Scalar aims to establish a unique, platform-agnostic game development framework that allows seamless world-building within the ongoing game environment. Imagine having content delivered without downloading and installing of DLC. Instead, content suddenly appears since development and the player experience are happening simultaneously in the cloud. Ubisoft Scalar is built on a microservice architecture. Each component and system of traditional game engines are modularly in the cloud (AI, audio, physics, etc) across multiple machines....

Reuters reports that the US launched a security probe into Kaspersky Lab last year. It was referred to the Commerce Department by the Department of Justice, but Commerce made little progress on the case. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, however, the White House urged the Commerce Department to move forward with the probe as it feared federal contractors and operators of critical US infrastructure who use Kaspersky Lab software could be at risk of infiltration....