Posts

But beyond these announcements from the big three names in the console market, E3 is known for getting audiences buzzing about the hottest games of the show as trailers and gameplay footage are shown for the first time. With the conference now over we’ve put together a collection of trailers for upcoming PC games that caught our attention. by Gearbox Software Release Date: Q1 2012 | Genre: First-person shooter | Also on: PS3, Xbox 360 | Website by Ubisoft Release Date: Q4 2011 | Genre: Third person action adventure | Also on: PS3, Xbox 360 | Website by Rocksteady Studios Release Date: October 21, 2011 | Genre: Action | Also on: PS3, Xbox 360 | Website by DICE Release Date: October 25, 2011 | Genre: First-person shooter | Also on: PS3, Xbox 360 | Website by Irrational Games Release Date: 2012 | Genre: First-person shooter | Also on: PS3, Xbox 360 | Website

While a slowdown in PC shipments was always expected—the result of China’s covid lockdowns and weak demand as consumers tighten their purse strings over fears of a recession—the double-digit decline was worse than expected. “Fears over a recession continue to mount and weaken demand across segments,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC’s Mobile Device trackers. Macroeconomic global trends such as rising inflation and fuel prices also impacted the market....

Dell led the way in the third quarter with 4.7 million systems shipped in the US followed by HP at 4.1 million and Apple at three million. Among the top five vendors by volume, only Apple and Acer experienced positive annual growth. HP saw sales slide more than 23 percent year over year and Lenovo’s US shipments were down 22.2 percent. Despite the dips, manufacturers and retailers are doing everything they can to spur sales including ramping up promotions during the holidays....

Phison has just shown off a PCIe 5.0 reference SSD based on its new PS5026-E26 controller and 1TB of Micron’s 3D TLC NAND. In CrystalDiskMark, this SSD reached a sequential read speed of over 12 GB/s and a sequential write speed of about 10 GB/s. Those are extremely impressive numbers, considering flagship PCIe 4.0 drives top out at around 7 GB/s for sequential transfers. Meanwhile, 4K random reads at QD1, arguably the more important metric for everyday usage, is limited to about 16....

The R9 390 sees a 93% performance jump from ultra to very high though it only hit 87fps with all the visuals wound down. As the fastest 2GB graphics card tested, the GTX 1050 provides an interesting result. Here we see a massive 116% performance jump and that’s down to the fact that the ultra quality settings overwhelmed the 2GB frame buffer by a massive margin at 1080p. That bottleneck is alleviated using the low quality settings and now quite shockingly it’s able to match the RX 570....

Cameo lets customers pay for a personalized video message from celebrities, be it for a special occasion, milestone, or just because it’s pretty cool. Prices tend to reflect the personalities’ level of fame: Caitlyn Jenner is the most expensive at over $2,500 per message, while Richard Dreyfuss and Brian Cox are both close to $700. The lockdown saw Cameo’s popularity explode, resulting in staff numbers increasing from 100 to 400, and its revenue was 4....

The incident took place during the Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS) Championship on Saturday, an Apex Legends LAN event in which teams compete for a $2 million prize pool. During one match, Philip “ImperialHal” Dosen and his TSM teammates spotted a lone player standing out in the open and not moving. ImperialHal recognized that the player had likely lost their connection. While there are no rules against shooting opponents in this situation, ImperialHal instructed his teammates not to take advantage of the player’s misfortune....

Google has a plan to compete with the most recent and popular standards for audio and video contents controlled by Dolby, and it is internally known as “Project Caviar.” During a presentation held behind closed doors for hardware manufacturers, Caviar was described as a means to create a “healthier, broader ecosystem” for premium media experiences without royalties. Dolby was never mentioned during the confidential meeting, and yet Google seems to have targeted the San Francisco company and its proprietary technologies once more....

When a router reaches its end-of-life (as the units affected by this vulnerability have) exploits become far more serious. Manufacturers bear the responsibility to address these problems with fresh patches, but they generally don’t push out updates for EOL devices (with a few rare exceptions). The issue in question here is a “Remote Code Execution” vulnerability that exists in D-Link DIR-810L, DIR-820L/LW, DIR-826L, DIR-830L, and DIR-836L routers. According to Malwarebytes Labs, attackers can take advantage of “diagnostic hooks” to make a Dynamic DNS call without proper authentication, allowing them to take control of affected routers....

Puget notes that as every part it uses in its systems goes through a comprehensive qualification process, the failure rates reported here are likely lower than the industry average. “This means that our relative failure rates between certain hardware groups may not match up with what you would see if you were to build your own system, or even buy a workstation from other computer manufacturers,” it states. Additionally, Puget does not include any failures it believes were caused accidentally by employees or customers, or anything related to shipping damage....

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst provides more typical results, though the overclocked GTX 980 Ti does look impressive. At its stock clock speeds, the 980 Ti was actually 3% slower than the Fury X, but with both cards overclocked the 980 Ti established a commanding 11% lead and also out-edged the Gigabyte GTX 1070 G1 Gaming again. The Division was tested using the DirectX 12 API and here and GTX 980 Ti really struggled with an average of just 51fps, just 5fps faster than the RX 480 and 15% slower than the Fury X....

Something that stings a little is this comment from last year’s article: “…system memory has hit new lows in 2016 which makes it very accessible even in budget builds.” That’s no longer the case, of course, so we suspect those of you with 8GB of memory will just make do until later next year when prices hopefully come down. On the last go around we looked at a number of applications and found memory usage varies massively, so what you’re doing with your PC will ultimately decide just how much memory you need....

With Razer’s refreshed Blade notebook, the gaming peripheral specialist aims to strike a blend of portability and power in a chassis that anyone would be proud to own. It’s not the fastest gaming notebook on the planet but at just 4.5 pounds with a profile that’s thinner than a dime standing on its side, you’ll have no trouble tossing it in your backpack as you walk out the door....

Outside of its own applications, the Blade didn’t ship with any extra unnecessary applications or bloatware (or adware, for that matter). This practice is one that separates the mass production PC makers from the elite, boutique-class builders that value shipping a vanilla system over putting a few extra bucks in their pockets through partnerships with various software makers. Our review unit shipped with a 256GB Samsung NVMe MZVLV256 solid state drive and while its read times were quite speedy, I can’t say the same about its write performance....

The new Capcom remake is set for release on April 3rd, so in just a few more days. It will arrive to Windows PCs, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It will have an multiplayer mode and so far it’s gathered generally favorable reviews from critics. Resident Evil 3 is based on the RE Engine, the same engine used by Resident Evil 7, Devil May Cry 5 and the Resident Evil 2 remake....

Given how demanding the game is at 1440p using the high quality preset we weren’t expecting to find playable performance at 4K even with the GTX 980 Ti. Although the card did manage an average of 31fps, we couldn’t enjoy the gameplay with 24fps minimums. Even with SLI scaling at 100%, the GTX 980 Ti would be good for just a 60fps average at 4K using the high preset, the same is true for Crossfire Fury X cards as well....

Since memory frequency has little to no impact on overall system power consumption, I only included the 2666 RAM figures here along with the 7820X’s 4.5GHz overclock. Clock-for-clock, the Core i7-6900K was very efficient pushing total system consumption to just 206 watts in Cinebench R15’s multi-threaded test. The Ryzen 7 1700 also performed well at 248 watts while the 7820X was a bit hungrier, hitting 268 watts. Once overclocked to 4....

Microsoft Excel is a short workload that favors high boost clocks. Here, Ryzen is also slower than Kaby Lake Refresh, to the tune of 27 percent. Again, this isn’t a hugely surprising result considering the 8550U holds a clock speed advantage, and Intel’s Kaby Lake architecture has higher IPC as we showed in our coverage of desktop Ryzen. MATLAB is one of the worst results for Ryzen. In fact it’s so bad I’m not quite sure what the reason for this performance delta is....

Foldable devices are in a weird place right now. Some people are drawn to them as a novelty item after Samsung and several other manufacturers, mostly from China, have managed to sell millions of them already. The rest of the market has yet to embrace the new paradigm, while Apple likely won’t have a foldable iPhone or MacBook until 2025. That won’t stop display manufacturers like Samsung and LG from exploring more foldable and “slidable” concepts, from devices that can be folded twice, to rollable displays that allow you to set the desired width based on the content you consume....

Samsung is clearly positioning the Note 5 as a power user’s device, with features like the S Pen designed for heavy phone users. This makes the decision to cap the device’s storage at 64 GB, without a microSD card slot and without a 128 GB model, rather strange. On top of this, making the battery non-removable was a poor choice for users who, in the Note line in particular, might want to swap out batteries on the go....