Viewers willing to put up with ads for a cheaper Netflix subscription can do so starting November 3 at 9 am PDT (noon EDT) for $7 a month. The new basic tier will include most, but not all, of the same content as the other plans. Netflix’s new “Basic with Ads” tier will open in 12 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, the UK, and the US....
A basic Netflix account, which allows for streaming on a single device at a time and doesn’t include HD or 4K content, is now a buck more expensive per month at $9.99. Moving up to the standard tier lets you watch on two screens simultaneously and includes HD content for $15.49 per month, a $1.50 hike over the previous rate. The top-tier premium package allows for four simultaneous streams as well as 4K Ultra HD content when available....
The streaming video giant is working with German audio specialist Sennheiser on the rollout, and will use its AMBEO technology to convert standard stereo audio into an immersive surround sound-like experience. Netflix is the first streaming platform to use the tech, we’re told. The idea is to create a more enveloping experience that further brings the viewer into the story. The subtlety of sound can often go unnoticed, especially if you relying on a basic two-channel stereo system or integrated TV speakers....
Website outage tracker Downdetector began getting flooded with reports of users losing access to Instagram this morning. Thousands of users appear to have been affected. Instagram’s support team acknowledged that the platform is having unspecified “issues.” The outage started at about 9 am EDT on Monday. Many users took to Twitter, reporting several problems, including arbitrary suspension notices saying they had violated community guidelines. Others claimed that when they tried logging in, they got “user-not-found” errors....
The research team behind BaM notes the increased use of GPUs inside modern data centers for their high memory bandwidth and compute capabilities. However, they argue that the traditional model of executing applications and workloads has involved a CPU-centric approach, which can lead to excessive overhead and I/O bottlenecks between components. With BaM, GPU-accelerated applications such as analytics and AI workloads like machine learning and neural networks training could see a significant performance benefit in terms of data transfers by taking the CPU out of the equation and enabling the GPU to directly read and write small amounts of data to NVMe SSDs on-demand....
We realize that Batman: Arkham Knight might seem like a bit of a strange addition to the benchmark line up, but I have included it for a reason. I was surprised to find that the GTX 1080 was just 6% faster in this title when compared to the Titan X. With an average of 54fps at 4K it wasn’t exactly blazing fast, it would be interesting to know why the GTX 1080 isn’t its usual 20%+ faster in this game....
The GeForce GTX 1080 might only be 16% faster than the Titan X in GTA V, but that margin makes all the difference. We now have a single GPU graphics card capable of ~60 fps at 4K with frame dips never dropping below the 50 fps mark. The GTX 1080 maintained a handy 31% lead over the Fury X here as well. The Ashes of the Singularity gives us a glimpse of DirectX 12 performance, though we should note that this is a CPU intensive benchmark and not the best for measuring GPU performance....
This GeForce GTX 200mm2 die codenamed TU117 is back, but this time with 42% fewer cores (512 cores), 42% fewer texture mapping units, and half as many ROPs at just 16. The core clock frequency has been bumped up by 7% to 1,785 MHz, but we’re getting an embarrassingly small 64-bit wide memory bus with 4 GB of GDDR6 memory for a bandwidth of just 96 GB/s, a 25% reduction from the old GTX 1650....
The GeForce GTX 460 SLI graphics cards used just 141 watts at idle and 447 watts when stressed in FurMark. To put this into perspective, the SLI cards consumed about the same amount of power at idle than other single boards that were slower. The load results also look favorable on a performance vs. power consumption ratio. The GTX 460 SLI boards used 5% more power than the GeForce GTX 480 and 32% more power than the Radeon 5870, however on average they were 16% and 43% faster, respectively....
Although it’s a little pricier with an MSRP of $149 (depending on memory capacity), the GTX 650 Ti is in a decent position against AMD’s budget offering. Nvidia’s solution costs about 7% more while averaging 25% faster than the HD 7770 in the 18 games that we tested at 1680x1050. However, value-wise, the GTX 650 Ti doesn’t really overcome the HD 6870, which is slightly faster in our tests and costs about the same....
When testing with DiRT 3 we see that the GeForce GTX 780 was able to average 79.6fps at 2560x1600. This made it 15% faster than the GTX 680 and 7% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. Frame times with the GeForce GTX 780 were just 1% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition in DiRT3 running at 2560x1600, but 19% faster than the GTX 680. The GeForce GTX 780 was extremely impressive in Far Cry 3, rendering 43....
Moving to 1440p and here we see that the 2070 is just 3 fps faster than the 1080 on average, better than 3 fps slower I guess. Finally at 4K, we see similar performance from the 2070 and 1080 once again, this meant the 2070 was 24% slower than the 2080. Next up we have Strange Brigade and here the 2070 provided a nice little 7% performance boost over the 1080 at 1080p....
Reliable leaker MEGAsizeGPU posted a picture of Nvidia’s full AD104 GPU on Twitter. The chip will go into the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, expected to launch in early January. The AD104 appears to be about 295 sq. mm — half the size of the AD102 powering the RTX 4090 Ti, 4090, and 4080 Ti. Previous reports indicate the AD104 uses TSMC’s N4 process node, featuring 7,680 CUDA cores, 240 Tensor cores, 60 ray tracing units, 30 billion transistors, and up to 160 ROPs....
On average, the Exynos model outperformed the Snapdragon by a margin of 9%. This is surprising considering the dominance of Qualcomm over the past few years, and can likely be attributed to fully functional HMP, especially as it outperforms the Galaxy Note 3 N900 as well despite packing a very similar SoC. In Vellamo’s single-threaded benchmark we see the Snapdragon 801 equipped Galaxy S5 outperform the Exynos 5 Octa version by 6%....
Again the write performance of the OCZ Vertex LE is identical to that of the Vertex 2 Pro when measuring with Atto Disk Benchmark. While the Vertex LE was slightly slower than the X25-M G2 drive when working with tiny 1K and 2K files, it crushed the Intel drive when handling files 8K and larger.
The Snapdragon 810 features four ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores clocked at 1.96 GHz alongside four Cortex-A53 CPU cores at 1.56 GHz. The larger A57 cores are designed for high performance tasks, while the A53s are more frequently used for general tasks and low power processing. Both clusters are ARMv8-based, meaning they fully support 64-bit code, and Global Task Scheduling allows the SoC to act as a true octa-core processor with all eight cores operating simultaneously where necessary....
For the benchmarks we’ve grabbed a few different CPUs and tested them using the GeForce GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 at 1080p. This should give you a pretty good idea of what kind of CPU and GPU pairing makes sense for your budget and the games you plan on playing. It will also show us just how much lower-end CPUs such as the G4560 and Ryzen 3 1200 are limiting the performance of higher-end GPUs such as the GTX 1070 and 1080, should you be crazy enough to pair a $100 CPU with a $400+ GPU....
Pakistan’s Collectorate of Customs announced new plans for its taxes on imported PC graphics cards last week. The decision is supposed to counter importers who devalue GPUs to sidestep customs and taxes. Instead of valuing cards individually, Pakistan will value every GPU based solely on its VRAM capacity. The Collectorate published a chart of the values (in USD) against which it will levy its 36 percent tax in Pakistani Rupees, ranked for VRAM amounts ranging from 4GB to 24GB....
Assuming availability weren’t an issue, the RX 570 should come in at $170, which would make it more affordable than the $200 3GB GTX 1060. Right now though, more than a month since the RX 570 was released, cards are still selling for $200+ and availability is poor at best, but that should eventually improve. As of writing, it’s easier and cheaper to pick up a 3GB GTX 1060 – there are nice models selling for $180 as an example....
