In an age where the search for deeper meaning in our interactive entertainment pursuits begins after the first trailer — where more thought goes into post-game critical analysis than development — a game that bears its shallow soul for all to see is a blessing. “The game is stupid,” Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon creative director Dean Evans proudly proclaimed during a recent press event — not foolish pride, but pride in foolishness....
My trouble in switching cable companies was not unique. Multi-unit property owners all over the country have sweet profit-sharing deals set up with cable companies. The practice stifles competition (where it exists), allowing providers to charge tenants whatever they want for substandard service. Then the landlords take a cut of the profits. It’s a very shady setup. Fortunately, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is stepping in to put an end to these slimy deals....
A sensor in the center of the ball, meanwhile, broadcasts inertial data 500 times per second. The data points are processed by AI in real time, allowing video operators to know the exact position of players and the ball at any given moment. An alert is automatically triggered whenever an offside position is detected, at which time the review officials will check the footage to confirm or deny the call and signal down to the on-field ref....
Ashley Velez and Reece Young filed a class-action lawsuit against TikTok and parent company Bytedance, writes NPR. They worked through third-party contractors Telus International and New York-based Atrium. The suit claims that TikTok and ByteDance violated California labor laws by failing to provide Velez and Young with adequate mental health support in a job that involved viewing “many acts of extreme and graphic violence.” They also had to sit through hate speech and conspiracy theories that lawyers say had a negative impact on their mental well-being....
Fortnite is the first free-to-play game to come to Xbox Cloud, with more planned. Playing it doesn’t require a Game Pass subscription either. All that users need is a Microsoft account. Just head to the Xbox Cloud website in a browser to play Fortnite on mobile devices or even PCs with no installation required. Since last year, free-to-play multiplayer games no longer require a paid Gold subscription on Xbox. That policy extends to the cloud version of Fortnite along with any other free-to-play games Microsoft may add to its cloud service, like Halo Infinite, Rocket League, Destiny 2, Apex Legends, or Call of Duty Warzone....
Cinebench is pretty much the go-to CPU benchmarking tool for many enthusiasts, as it provides a nice breakdown between single- and multi-threaded scores. Starting with multi-threaded as that’s the main point of difference between Kaby Lake and Kaby Lake-R, we see significant gains when comparing the Core i7-8550U and the Core i7-7500U. In this test, we’re seeing a Kaby Lake-R outperform its predecessor by around 55 percent, which is an enormous generational gain....
This allowed for a 24% performance boost in Company of Heroes, 26% in Left 4 Dead 2 and 17% for Far Cry 2. When overclocked, the GeForce GT 240 was generally faster than the Radeon HD 4650. It also matched the Radeon HD 4770 in Far Cry 2 at 1920x1200, but its performance was still noticeably slower than the latter in the first two tested games.
SpaceX said it deploys satellites into a lower orbit so that in the rare case that something goes wrong, they will be deorbited by atmospheric drag. The storm last Friday heated up the atmosphere, causing atmospheric drag to increase as much as 50 percent compared to previous launches. The Starlink team attempted to ride out the storm by putting the satellites into a safe mode where they would “fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag....
Over the years, the Mountain View-based company has been enhancing its search engine not only to provide quality and relevant results, but also let users be more particular about their searches with dozens of special features and operators. Despite this, I am willing to bet that most people just use the vanilla search as is. Fair enough. I mean Google is supposed to be easy to use, so why complicate it?...
Gigabyte’s Radeons couldn’t match the GTX 780 Ti JetStream’s 62.8fps or the standard GTX 780’s 47.4fps with the R9 290X OC being 26% slower than the former and the R9 290 OC being 12% slower than the latter. This time the Gigabyte R9 290X OC was only a few frames per second (6%) slower than the Palit GTX 780 Ti JetStream while the R9 290 OC’s 34fps managed to outpace a standard GTX 780 by 12%....
A similar situation is seen when looking at the random 512K performance, except time the Intel SSD 311 20GB provides massive read and write performance gains. The Kingston SSDNow V+ 180 64GB was not as fast when measuring read performance while it provided considerably better write performance. The random 4K-QD32 test kills conventional hard drives and as a result, the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3iSSD with the SSD cache disabled struggles to deliver a read or write throughput of just 1MB/s....
The smartphone industry wasn’t the only one booming in 2021 as PC shipments reached 92 million units in the fourth quarter, surpassing the 90 million mark for the second year in a row. Drilling deeper, Canalys said notebooks and mobile workstations continued to lead the charge with shipments totaling 275 million units. Desktop and desktop workstation shipments accounted for the remaining 66 million units shipped last year. Lenovo led the way both in terms of Q4 and full-year shipments at 21....
On the front is a five-megapixel sensor with an f/2.0 lens and 1.4 µm pixels. The front camera is only capable of 1080p video capture, while the rear can record 4K, although neither camera comes with optical image stabilization. While the Nexus 5X doesn’t come with OIS, the combination of a wide f/2.0 lens and large 1.55 micron pixels means that general performance across the board is excellent. Whether you’re shooting in bright sunlight or indoors and under artificial lighting, the Nexus 5X captures enough light to accurately expose and represent a scene....
Hungary-based researcher David Schütz reported the high-severity bug, tracked as CVE-2022-20465, which is described as a lock screen bypass due to a logic error in the code that could lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. Although the exploit does require an Android device to be in the attacker’s possession, it’s an effective way of circumventing a screen lock secured by a PIN, shape, password, fingerprint, or face....
Over the past few months, we’ve seen a positive trend when it comes to both the pricing and availability of new and used graphics cards. After a crazy two years with scalpers and miners driving prices into the stratosphere, we’re inching closer to MSRP and you can now find most of Nvidia’s RTX 3000 and AMD’s RX 6000 series graphics cards in stock at major retailers. However, as our own Tim Schiesser points out in his monthly GPU pricing and availability analysis, it’s hard to ignore the fact that we’re only now seeing more sane prices just as Nvidia and AMD are getting ready to launch a new generation of GPUs....
Of all the encodes I produced, here is the list from best to worst in terms of quality: H.264 Custom x265 HEVC Medium/x265 HEVC Slow x265 HEVC Faster Nvidia HEVC CQP x264 H.264 Very Fast x265 HEVC Ultrafast Nvidia HEVC VBR Low Bitrate With Medium HEVC encodes occupying the least space of everything I encoded, it clearly takes the crown for the ultimate encoding profile that you should be using above all else....
Levitation is a new mini campaign mod for Half-Life: Alyx that adds roughly three to four hours of content to the base game. The action picks up right after the main game, and sees protagonist Alyx return to City-17 to investigate a mysterious levitating building where two members of the resistance - Barry and Maya - have gone missing. It will be up to Alyx to save her friends and perhaps, the entire resistance....
We’ve already seen several solutions for mobile VR, most notably Samsung’s Gear VR, which only works with high-end Samsung devices; and Google Cardboard, which is a cheap and limited option available to anyone. But Google is taking things to the next level with Daydream: a new virtual reality ecosystem for Android and the most compelling case for accessible VR I’ve seen to date. I’ve spent the last few days with Daydream and Google’s corresponding headset, the Daydream View, to check out the ecosystem ahead of its launch....
The Radeon HD 6970 was also 2fps slower than the GeForce GTX 570 which averaged 66fps. In fact a pair of Radeon HD 6970 Crossfire graphics cards were just 5fps faster than a single GeForce GTX 580. Further down the graph we find the GeForce GTX 460 and Radeon HD 6850 delivering the same performance with 43fps each. Below them we are getting into very unplayable territory as the Radeon HD 5830 managed just 38fps and the GeForce GTX 550 Ti just 33fps....
The Radeon R9 390X delivered exactly what you’d expect for a slightly beefed up R9 290X with 20% faster GDDR5 memory. Before we began testing we felt it was unrealistic for the R9 390X to offer more than a 10% performance boost over the R9 290X and that assumption appears correct. From the eight games we tested, the R9 390X was on average 9% faster than the R9 290X, 8% faster than the plain R9 390 and 6% slower than the GeForce GTX 980....
