Ben Funk
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Recent posts
Ultraportable laptops with 13 or 14-inch displays and low-power processors are great for a certain kind of user. Those folks are usually found running from gate to gate in an airport or catching an Uber to a sales meeting. These machines have great single-threaded performance and good-enough graphics capabilities, but the thermal limits and...
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There's been a lot of discussion about image quality and super-sampled graphics in 3D games over the last few months. Ray tracing is quite expensive from a computational standpoint, so frame rates typically suffer when it's enabled. Upscaling technologies seek to claw some of that performance back, by rendering at a...
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If there's been one drawback to Alienware's previous gen Aurora desktop series, it's that the systems we've gotten in for review have made a bit of a racket at times. These systems have always been well-equipped with the latest hardware and turn in some great performance, but their noise floor has sometimes been a...
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The Android version of Genshin Impact running on Windows via side-load
The Windows Subsystem for Android required for installing Android apps from Amazon's App Store has arrived for everyone running the Release Preview or Beta channels of Windows 11. There's already been a hack released to get the Google Play Store running on Windows 11,
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NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is not a new product, but today the company's game streaming service is expanding in a couple of key ways to bring more performance and better visuals to gamers everywhere. Announced last week, NVIDIA is bringing a whole new tier of graphics horsepower to its service, dubbed GeForce NOW RTX...
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Right about a year ago, Apple announced the first Macs with its own home-grown processor technology, dubbed the M1. The first 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini shipped with the company's new wonder-chip, and even the base model $700 Mac mini knocked our socks off at the time. However, CPUs don't stand...
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The Left 4 Dead games were great cooperative fun. For the uninitiated, four players blasted their way through frantic zombie hordes in the L4D games, working together as a team just trying to survive. Developer Turtle Rock Studios, which was acquired by Valve prior to the release of the first game, re-established itself as an independent studio...
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Month after month since its launch in March of 2020, Nintendo has released new content for Animal Crossing: New Horizons like clockwork. The smash hit feels like a living, breathing organism all to itself because it seems like every time we look, there's a content update just around the corner. ACNH features special...
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The raid on this fort is reminiscent of infiltration missions in Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag A whole new crop of blockbuster games are lining up for a big holiday shopping season. Ubisoft didn't really intend for that to be the case for Far Cry 6, but early this year the COVID-19 pandemic had other plans. The game...
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Another Apple iPhone launch event has come and gone, with the company's latest flagship and mid-range phones already shipping to customers, arriving on front porches just a few short days ago. In a second consecutive year of component shortages, Apple's deep resources and influence seemed to mitigate any potential issues securing chip...
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Did you pick up a shiny new iPhone 13 Pro expecting silky-smooth 120-Hz animations and seamless integration with an Apple Watch? I know I sure did, but things haven't gone as expected on Apple's new smartphone platform right out of the gate. One would think that Apple tested its APIs with the Pro Motion Display and...
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Like many big tech companies including Microsoft and Google, Apple has a bug bounty program that pays big bucks for newly-discovered security vulnerabilities. The fees for confirmed reports of issues range from $25,000 for "limited" unauthorized control of an iCloud account, to a cool million bucks for a zero-click...
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Samsung has been refining its innovative foldable phone line-up for a couple of years now. While the first iteration of the company's Galaxy Z Fold may not have been terribly robust out in the wild, last year's follow up was by most accounts a solid device. This year, the newest Galaxy Z Fold3 5G seems to have it all: a malleable 7.6" screen,...
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Just because Epic Games got a big win against Apple in court yesterday doesn't mean that the fight over the developer's cash cow Fortnite on the world's second-biggest mobile platform is over. The ruling wasn't a clean sweep for Epic, but Apple has 90 days to comply with allowing third-party payment methods on its app...
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Apple's 4th generation iPad Air has a lot going for it. The A14 Bionic SoC at the heart of the device offers great performance in a wide variety of apps and games, and the 10.9" Liquid Retina display looks great under many different conditions. In fact, for some use cases, the iPad Air could rival a full-fledged...
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The original Nintendo Game Boy and its follow-up Game Boy Color weren't the first portable video games. However, they were incredibly successful and spawned many successful franchises, like Pokemon and Super Mario Land. For millions of Gen X and Millennial gamers, it was their first exposure to the wonders of video...
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The Surface Go 2 took all the good looks of Microsoft's more expensive tablet + keyboard combinations and brought the price point down to a very affordable level. That machine has been hanging around since its release in the middle of last year, so it's getting a little long in the tooth. If rumors pan out to be true...
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Intel's high-performance Arc family of graphics architectures resemble an adventuring party from tabletop role-playing lore or a classic turn-based computer RPG. The Intel Arc Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid delegation set off across a barren wasteland where GPUs are scarce to take on the mighty Dragon...
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Since its release, NVIDIA's Broadcast effects suite has been enhancing camera video and microphone audio for streams and teleconferencing tools using the company's machine learning hardware baked into the GeForce RTX series of graphics cards. Back when it was just RTX Voice, we found the AI-assisted cleanup tools did...
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More powerful, more capable and feature-rich -- the current crop of gaming laptops with the most recent CPU and GPU platforms can offer a major upgrade to the enthusiast laptop experience. That's especially true these days with discrete graphics cards being hard to come by and marked up by factors of two to three...
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Windows 11 is coming just about six weeks from now, on October 5th -- at least, on new PCs. One of the biggest pieces of application-related news was the ability to run Android apps directly in Windows. Thanks to Intel, Android apps compiled for Arm64 would still be able to run on x86 PCs directly from Amazon's App...
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Sony's PlayStation 5 launched in November of 2020 somewhat incomplete. While the hardware had an M.2 slot to expand the internal storage needed by PS5 games, the software didn't know what to do with it out of the box. Earlier this year though, Sony opened up a beta program with early access to firmware that can use that slot, and we managed...
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