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Since Unreal Engine 5 went into early access last year, developers have experimented with and shown off incredible next-gen graphics features like the micro-polygon Nanite system and the real-time global illumination system Lumen. Now that the engine is in preview, Epic Games says it’s ready to test all the features intended for the final release. The game engine isn’t production-ready quite yet. Epic warns developers to continue using copies of projects to experiment with the preview’s additions....

Valve’s Steam Deck is already winning over gamers with its unique blend of power, portability and pricing. It’s the go-anywhere PC gaming system that many have been waiting on, and from $399, it’s the same price as the digital edition of the PS5 and only $50 more than a Nintendo Switch with OLED screen. It’s versatile, too. Using the Steam Deck Docking Station due out later this year or an existing powered USB-C hub, you can connect the handheld to an external display and use standalone peripherals....

On Wednesday, Riot Games rolled out Valorant patch 4.01. Headlining the patch notes are changes to the chat settings. Players should note a new section titled “Muted Word List.” This setting allows Valorant players to mute specific words at the local level. The list serves a few purposes. The first and most obvious use is for players to mute specific words they find annoying without entirely muting the player. Perhaps you have a friend that insists on calling you “Dude....

But why do we need so many file types? How are they different, and how are newer formats better? Which should you use when saving an image? Here’s a primer on the most relevant and mainstream image file formats, so you can get to know them a bit better and where their advantages lie. GIF: web-friendly animations The Graphics Interchange Format was introduced in 1987 by Compuserve with an ambitious goal: making colored images popular online....

Apple’s Software Engineering Senior Vice President Craig Federighi told a Redditor via email that Apple intentionally delays auto-update on new iOS releases so that it can gather feedback from early adopters first. The Apple boss said that the delay between initial rollout and enabling auto-update could range between one and four weeks. Although Federighi (or whomever answers his emails) did not elaborate any further, it stands to reason this approach allows developers to tweak things before those who auto-update receive the patch....

For the last 25 years, Microsoft has had a simple (and sometimes messy) way of pushing updates to Windows and to the millions who rely on the operating system across the globe. Since Windows 98, Microsoft started to push OS updates out over the internet, to improve performance, fix bugs, or simply add new features. Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft also had “Service Packs” that would collect lots of these smaller updates and changes and bundle them into one large update....

A woman from Japan became enamored with a man on Instagram who claimed to be a Russian cosmonaut stationed on the International Space Station (ISS). Japanese news outlet Yomiuri Shimbun reports that during the very long-distance relationship, the man convinced her that he could not get back home because he could not afford a “return ticket to Earth.” They began their romance on Instagram on June 28, and as love scams go, he was the first to say those three little words that mean so much — I love you....

The owner of Apple WWDC Videos, Brendan Shanks, tweeted that Apple had issued a number of takedown requests due to copyright infringement against his channel. YouTube’s Terms and Conditions state that any channel subject to just three copyright strikes is subject to termination, will have all its videos removed, and its owner can’t create new channels. Shanks tweeted that his channel contained hundreds of Worldwide Developer Conferences (WWDC) videos reaching as far back as the early 2000s....

Once again Kailh switches are being used and the Tizona comes with either Black, Red, Brown or Blue switches. Compared to the Excalibur, the Tizona looks more like a gaming keyboard and a lot less like something used in an office setting. There is a fancy purple decal above the arrow keys that features a few status LED lights which gives the Tizona a certain flare. Disappointingly the Tizona doesn’t feature any kind of backlighting, but then it does only cost $70....

One of my favorite aspects to Alienware laptops is their design, especially in recent years. The Alienware 15 R3 looks like a performance workhorse, but it doesn’t go overboard with ‘gamer’ elements. The consistent use of soft-touch black plastic around the chassis looks understated and impressive, while the silver metal lid retains Alienware’s signature design. There’s a ludicrous amount of LED lighting around this laptop, too, although it can all be used to customize the design to suit your style....

Proteus needs to regularly recharge its batteries or it will stop working, a bit like people h/t: Insider

The core experience delivered by adaptive sync is inherently the same regardless of whether you choose FreeSync or G-Sync. Wherever possible, the display will refresh itself at the instant a frame from the GPU has finished rendering, removing stuttering, tearing and general jank that is present from fixed-refresh solutions. The result is smoother, more responsive gameplay, which makes playing at 40 FPS feel just as good as 60 FPS....

The follow up to the R700 architecture was the highly anticipated R800, which paved the way for the Radeon HD 5000 series. The king of that series was the Radeon HD 5870, released on September 2009, the card packed some 2150 million transistors produced using a 40nm manufacturing process. The Radeon HD 5870 was a solid success for AMD, as it remained their flagship single-GPU product for roughly 15 months, and it is only being replaced today....

The Radeon HD 7790 performed surprisingly well in Tomb Raider at 1680x1050 using the ultra-quality preset with an average of 42.3fps. Yet despite that it was 13% slower than the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, Nvidia has certainly ironed out the performance hiccups of their previous driver. The Radeon HD 7790 was also slower than the GeForce GTX 650 Ti when measuring frame time performance, 8% slower to be exact....

Next to Nvidia’s offerings, the Nano was just 6% faster than the GTX 980 at 1600p, but had a more comfortable 13% lead at 4K, while consuming 12% more power. In terms of efficiency the GTX 980 and Nano are about par and the GeForce is very competitive considering it can be had for less than $500 these days. Forgetting about the Nano’s tiny size and focusing squarely on price and performance, it’s the $650 GTX 980 Ti that we’re interested in....

Some reviewers have called the Radeon RX 470 pointless because a mere $20 more buys the 4GB RX 480, but we found that the 470 could be overclocked to match the 480. Additionally, the Asus RX 470 Strix card runs rather cool and quiet while we’ve yet to see custom RX 480 cards. But nevermind all that… next in line is a Polaris 11 part that starts at only $109....

Today we’re taking a look at the Radeon RX 6800M, the flagship laptop GPU in the series which we’ve had on hand for some time ahead of the official launch. From the get go, some good news. AMD is being sensible about naming their mobile parts with the “M” suffix, distinguishing this GPU from its desktop counterparts in the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT. And that’s an important point, because the RX 6800M is based on Navi 22 silicon, the same GPU die as used in the RX 6700 XT on desktop....

When you look at AMD’s Ryzen 4000 line-up, this isn’t the lowest-end part, there is a Ryzen 3 4300U on the market with just four cores, but the 4500U is the next step up. AMD’s segmentation in the U-series mostly deals with core and thread counts, so this Ryzen 5 4500U gets an impressive 6 cores, but without SMT. The 4600U, one step higher adds back in SMT. Then Ryzen 7 parts both have 8 cores, which we’ll hopefully get some hands-on time with soon....

The Ryzen 7 4700U is AMD’s mainstream Ryzen 7 mobile processor, as it’s the most widely available chip in the series along with the Ryzen 5 4500U. You get 8 cores and 8 threads, so like the 4500U, there’s no SMT support, but we do get that increase from 6 to 8 cores. With that comes a small base clock decrease down to 2.0 GHz, but a boost increase up to 4....