Posts

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat was tested with Tessellation enabled, the SSAO mode set to HBAO, and with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled. As a result ATI graphics cards tend to get punished in this game. For example, the single GeForce GTX 460 can roughly match the more expensive and generally better performing Radeon HD 5870. When adding a second GeForce GTX 460 we saw a performance boost of 81%, good enough to beat all single card offerings including the Radeon HD 5970 before overclocking....

Still there are those who will be looking to purchase not one but rather two high-end graphics cards, taking the GPU budget from the $400-500 range to nearly a thousand bucks. In this situation, we saw an opposite direction with Nvidia claiming the crown of who is who in the PC graphics world. In our tests ATI’s Crossfire technology didn’t scale nearly as well as Nvidia’s SLI technology. Although historically we have seen far worse results from dual GPU configurations, in this ocassion Crossfire provided with an average frame per second improvement of 62%....

The Optical Flow Accelerators behind Nvidia’s new DLSS 3 feature won’t just increase video game framerates. Content creators can also use the technology to artificially increase framerates in the videos they encode. While DLSS 2.0 uses the Tensor Cores in Nvidia’s RTX 2000 and 3000 GPUs to generate new pixels through machine learning, DLSS 3 uses the 4000 series’ Optical Flow Accelerators to build entire new frames. PC games that support DLSS 3 can double their framerates on top of DLSS 2....

I had the opportunity to see it in person at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show as well as get some hands-on time with its little brother, the Mini Three. The hype was real and the technology very cool indeed. I wanted one, as did nearly everyone else – that is, until the company revealed how much it would cost. Priced at over $1,400, the Optimus Maximus remains more fantasy than reality, as the closest most users will come to it are the photos and videos available online....

When compared to other budget SSDs the Trion 150 looks quite impressive when comparing sequential read performance. The sequantial write performance is also strong and this is something we saw in previous synthetic tests.

There are plenty of positives to the OnePlus 5, and as always that starts with the hardware. The Snapdragon 835 inside is extremely powerful, topping performance charts for Android devices, and it’s complemented with plenty of RAM and fast storage here. OnePlus has also gone pedal to the metal with performance, sacrificing temperatures for lower-than-average throttling over lengthy gaming sessions. While performance is solid, the phone is missing a few features....

A couple of weeks ago, AMD delivered its Computex keynote, where it shared more details on its upcoming Zen 4 CPUs. The new generation of processors arrive this fall, yet an unnamed overclocker seems to have laid their hands on an early sample and decided to delid it. The IHS appears to be glued to the interposer in seven spots. Its underside is gold plated, and there are solder marks above the I/O die and the two chiplets....

If you read our previous article on the matter, it came within 24 hours of the emergency Windows 10 patch release intended to address the Meltdown vulnerability. We ran tests that made sense from the perspective of a desktop user and we found there was virtually no impact on gaming performance and no impact for content creators. There were however a few troubling results for NVMe storage devices, mostly impacting 4K read performance....

At this stage, patches for laptops are much more widely available than on desktops, especially from big name manufacturers. This makes it easier to test older hardware platforms, so today we’ll be looking at the impact on both the latest 8th gen Intel U-series parts, along with a 3 year old 5th gen Broadwell-based laptop. Both of the laptops I’m using for this test are Dell XPS 13, which should be representative of most premium ultraportable systems with 15W CPUs inside....

In the US, it’s illegal for record labels to pay radio stations to play their music without informing listeners. This month, a PR CEO and an FTC spokesperson told Bloomberg that, regarding payola law, doling out money to a podcast for an appearance without disclosure falls into a gray area at best. Nonetheless, multiple podcasting companies facilitating such deals are thriving. Guestio CEO Travis Chappell said many guests pay PR companies to introduce them to podcast hosts, though he thinks it’s better to go directly to the podcasts without the middleman....

The idea of getting work done from a Chromebook seemed unlikely when my editor first asked me about reviewing one. Much to my surprise, a browser-based operating system isn’t as boxed in as I thought it would be, while $200 worth of hardware isn’t as underwhelming as I expected for everyday performance. For our experiment, we picked Asus’ Chromebook C202SA based on several factors, but mainly two of them: price and ruggedness....

According to Atto’s write results, the TS-412 suffers when dealing with 1K and 2K data while again peaking early at 8K and finishing with only 30MB/s – the slowest of the lot.

But it’s 2019 now, we have new components from Intel and Nvidia and we were looking forward to see if a new Razer design could improve upon the previous generation. We’re not looking at the direct successor to the Razer Blade, instead we’ve stepped up a size bracket and today’s review is focused on the new Razer Blade Pro 17 with Intel 9th-gen CPUs and RTX graphics. All new Blade Pro 17 models are powered by the new six-core Core i7-9750H which we’ve tested before....

Like many PC gamers, I’ve often wished a machine capable of putting the power of a gaming rig in a portable device. Gaming laptops are lovely and have their place, but that place is often on top of a desk. After a week with Razer’s new Edge gaming tablet, I realize what I really wanted was to play Bioshock Infinite in the bathroom without burning my thighs. All hail Razer, deliverer of dreams....

The new Blade 15 will ship with a 12th gen Intel Core i9-12900H processor, a 14-core chip with 20 threads. It will be paired with 32GB of DDR5 memory, a 1TB PCIe SSD and up to an Nvidia GeForce 3070 Ti laptop GPU. There’s also an extra M.2 PCIe slot for further storage expansion, an SD card reader and per-key RGB lighting. Razer said the panel will reach up to 400 nits of brightness, boast a 1ms response time and will cover 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color space....

The game has been built upon Capcom’s RE Engine, which was originally built for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, but has since been used for Devil May Cry 5 as well. Fun fact: the “RE” stands for the first two letters of the engine’s full name, “Reach for the moon.” Told you it was fun. Before the RE Engine, Resident Evil titles used the MT Framework engine. This includes 2012’s Resident Evil 6....

It provides a glimpse of what a 90s-era VR headset could have looked like had the Pi existed back then. The artist told Designboom that he originally wanted to make a lot of super detailed textures for the project, but really liked how the wood stood out in contrast to the white plastic case. The clear cover showing off the internals is a nice touch, too. Virtual reality did exist back in the 90s but it was quite rudimentary and involved bulky hardware with extremely limited capabilities....

A standard R9 280X averages 45.7fps in Battlefield 4 while the GTX 770 is good for 44fps. The MSI R9 280X Gaming 6GB was just a tad faster than a standard R9 280X with 46fps, the HIS R9 280X iPower IceQ X² Turbo averaged 47.7fps while Sapphire’s Vapor-X Tri-X OC R9 280X, Asus’ R9 280X DirectCU II TOP and Gigabyte’s R9 280X WindForce 3X OC all averaged 48fps, just 5fps slower than the GeForce GTX 780....

SandForce’s second-generation controller got off to a rocky start. OCZ’s Vertex 3 stormed out of the gates in April, seizing control of our performance graphs. Despite an impressive showing, early adopters reported many glaring bugs with SF-2200-based drives. Those claims sent OCZ and other manufactures scrambling to release a series of firmware updates. Fortunately, most of the major kinks seem to have been ironed out now and that’s given even more vendors, such as Patriot and Kingston, the confidence to launch SandForce-flavored SSDs....

The program copy test is comprised of many small non-compressed files (6104 files totaling 2.75GB). It appears that smaller files pose more of a problem for the Samsung 830 Series as the transfer rate dropped to 184.3MB/s. The drive was 6% slower than the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB while it dominated the Crucial m4 256GB by a 32% margin. The game copy evaluation which uses a mixture of small and large compressed and uncompressed files boosted the Samsung 830 Series 512GB figures....