Ben Funk
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Recent posts
Over the last few years, AMD has made big changes to its Radeon Software control panel on an almost yearly cadence. This time around it's been a little longer than that, as those updates typically launch around the end of the year, though this specific roll-out was extended to April. What has AMD's Radeon team been up...
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Mining cryptocurrency is just one small part of the problem that plagues the semiconductor industry related to chip shortages, with the increased demand for GPU compute power. However, NVIDIA has been catering to this market in hopes of alleviating demand pressure on gaming graphics cards with its CMP HX family of...
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Last year's Overwatch League was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that temporarily pumped the brakes on some interesting AI projects, as well. At the time, Blizzard and IBM were set to announce that Big Blue was about to become the cloud, AI, and machine learning analytics partner for the game's official...
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The 20-year span between 1985 and 2005 saw the release of literally hundreds of classic game titles that were -- and are still -- beloved by millions of people around the world. From Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda, to modern classics like Halo and Metal Gear Solid, most of gaming's biggest franchises...
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After a lengthy technical preview, Parallels has officially released Parallels Desktop version 16.5 which includes official support for Apple's latest Macs. That includes support for the 2020 Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro which all bear the Apple Silicon M1 processor. Supported guests include Windows 10's...
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In 1984, Hasbro and Takara-Tomy released The Transformers upon an unsuspecting world, and this six-year-old was hooked. Led by Optimus Prime, a red and blue cabover Peterbilt semi truck that turned into a friendly alien robot, the Autobots had to defend Earth from the evil Decepticons. At least, that was the case...
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Whether it's playing Duck Hunt on the NES with a Zapper or pumping quarters into Area 51 or Time Crisis in arcades, just about everyone is familiar with light gun games. The simplicity of these games is born from their "on-rails" design where players are automatically taken from area to area, and then just point and...
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The Microsoft Store Spring Sale is on, and it's running through April 15. Just about everything is on sale, from PC and Xbox Series X (and One) games to Surface PCs. Microsoft even has some really nice prices on other manufacturers' PCs with discounts on gaming notebooks Acer, Asus, and others. If all that isn't quite...
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From the beginning of the Pixel program, Google's phones have always run on Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platform silicon. In fact, you'd have to go all the way back to 2011's Galaxy Nexus, which ran on a Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 to find a Google phone that didn't have some form of Snapdragon inside. While most Pixel...
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When it comes to high-end content creation, time is money. Businesses with employees that are stuck sitting around waiting for compute-intensive tasks to finish, simply can't get as much accomplished as those with speedy hardware that can power through the most demanding tasks. Tons of parallel processing power and...
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Don't blindly click that link or assume the notification about a system update that you received is real. Zero-day exploits in popular server applications like Solarwinds and Exchange may grab headlines, but the biggest problems most users face with tech security are of the socially-engineered variety. That's the case...
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Graphics cards are in short supply at retail prices everywhere, but it hasn't stopped AMD and NVIDIA from pushing their latest tech further down the price ladder. We've heard in recent weeks about a lower-end Navi 23 GPU from AMD, and it seems that NVIDIA has a cut-down Ampere GPU on the way, too. The release of...
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Sometimes, a work of art hits our culture at just the right time, when it can transcend its medium and become something greater. Such events are exceedingly rare in video games, but we old folks remember Pac-Man Fever and Fred Savage in The Wizard playing Super Mario Bros. 3. More recently, video games have become...
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It feels like forever ago, but it's only been a few months since Apple kicked Fortnite out of the App Store and suspended Epic's developer account. Of course, you know how the rest of this story goes: Epic filed a lawsuit against the iPhone maker charging that the App Store itself represented a monopoly. In a case...
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In case you missed it, the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro smartphones are coming on March 23. That announcement seemed inevitable, since smartphones tend to launch on a roughly a production schedule. While the price of OnePlus smartphones has crept up over the years, shifting its reputation from that of value-priced flagship...
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Last year, the COVID-19 pandemic ended the NCAA college basketball season early, but this year, Selection Sunday is tomorrow afternoon. And of course there's still plenty of time to upgrade the living room TV prior to the play-in game on March 19. We're here to help with some hot March Madness-themed deals on some...
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Whether you're streaming, video podcasting, or working from home to join meetings on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, visual fidelity is important. Video calls are hard to handle when we can't understand each other and body language is important. Streams on Twitch or YouTube video with poor quality are an easy pass, as well...
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After months of rumors and speculation, and then an accidental slip-up by AMD itself, the company finally announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT on Wednesday. The new GPU comes with a cut-down version of Big Navi, dubbed Navi 22 (not-so Big Navi?), which has 40 compute units with 12 GB of 192-bit GDDR6 VRAM. AMD targets...
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The never-ending parade of security vulnerabilities continues. Just as quickly as software vendors can tackle and resolve one set of exploitable issues -- i.e. the troubles at SolarWinds -- attackers find other vectors to break into networks and steal data. This time, it appears that tens of thousands of firms have...
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Using a graphics processor or GPU for tasks beyond just rendering 3D graphics is how NVIDIA has made billions in the datacenter space. Of course, NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA language and API have been exclusive to the company's GPUs since the beginning. There have been tools to port CUDA apps to widely-supported...
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Apple's latest M1 Macs -- and many Intel-based ones, for that matter -- all use the company's T2 security chip, which encrypts the system's built-in storage. The issue with highly-integrated motherboards with onboard storage is that if the onboard SSD wears out, the whole system becomes a brick of e-waste. And as...
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If you're currently using the microphone built into your webcam, it might be time to up your audio game. Whether you're streaming for fun or working from home, the mics including with USB cameras aren't the best around. While many laptops have noise-canceling arrays, desktop users with discrete cameras don't always...
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