Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Ever since Ubisoft unveiled its upcoming open-world, action-adventure game Watch Dogs, the game press has been looking towards the title as a no-holds barred example of next-generation innovative gameplay. Unlike most games, which place an emphasis on run-and-gun shooting, Watch Dogs revolves around the idea of...
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Buzz has been building for the last week that Microsoft would soon unveil the next version of DirectX at the upcoming Games Developer Conference (GDC). Microsoft has now confirmed that its discussion forums at the show won't just be to discuss updates to DX11, but that it's putting a full court press behind the...
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Valve CEO Gabe Newell did a Reddit AMA yesterday, tossing open a window into the production plans and viewpoints of one of the industry's most beloved companies. One of the topics he opened up on was the future of the Source 2 engine. We discussed leaked screenshots that purportedly showed a Left 4 Dead 2 level...
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For the past few months, Microsoft has been loudly and insistently banging a drum. All support and service for Windows XP and Office 2003 shuts down on April 8 -- no more security updates, no more fixes. In early February, faced with a slight uptick in users on the decrepit operating system the month before, Microsoft...
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The United States Government has filed a lawsuit against Sprint Communications requesting triple damages to the tune of $63M. Sprint's crime? Overcharging the NSA, FBI, and various other government agencies for the cost of spying on millions of Americans and turning their data over to the government. This is another...
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Over the past 20 years, special effects houses (typically known as VFX studios) have risen from an occasional tool used in science fiction or fantasy movies to a mainstay of the entire industry. The term "VFX" refers to more than the use of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) -- it also references live-action shots or...
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Intel is announcing its new tablet and smartphone designs this week at Mobile World Congress, alongside a major push to drive adoption of its 28nm XMM 7160 and XMM 7260 modem technology. It's been two years since Intel launched its first serious Atom-based smartphone platform, codenamed Medfield, and it's safe to say that those two years haven't...
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It's been a year since Nvidia took the wraps off Tegra 4i, its first smartphone design with an integrated software modem, quad-core Cortex-A9 processor, and a slightly smaller version of the Tegra 4 mobile GPU used in devices like Nvidia's Shield. At the time, Nvidia promised that we'd see devices out by the end of...
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Over the past 12 months, Netflix performance has been dropping steadily across most of the major ISPs. Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable have all recorded significant performance drop-offs. The issue has been particularly acute on Verizon, where measured bandwidth rates have fallen a high of 2.3Mbps in October 2013 to 0.97Mbps in January,...
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The latest results from Jon Peddie Research are in, and they aren't overly encouraging for AMD. According to the firm, Sunnyvale's share of the graphics market tumbled in Q4 2013, despite significant price cuts and the launch of both the R9 290 and R9 290X. AMD's total GPU shipments fell by 10.4% quarter-on-quarter, while Intel's share increased...
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Ken Levine, head of Irrational Games and lead designer on last year's smash hit, BioShock Infinite, has announced that Irrational Games is essentially shutting down with all but 15 personnel laid off as the company transitions towards building different kinds of games. Levine didn't offer much in the way of hints...
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For months, there have been rumors circulating of a new Intel 15-core CPU, with a particular focus on Big Data analytics, multi-socket systems, and the enterprise market. Well, this past January, we took a trip to Intel's SAP research lab to see the new processors and the rather substantial update coming down the pipe. Unlike Intel's...
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Netflix has long chased after methods of improving its movie recommendation algorithms, once even awarding a $1M prize to any team of people who could substantially improve on the then-current design. As part of that process, the company has been researching neural networks. Conventional neural networks are created...
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In about six weeks, Blizzard will launch Reaper of Souls, the first expansion pack for Diablo 3. I've spent the last few weeks playing in the beta for RoS, and while I normally hold an article this extensive for a launch, there's enough locked-in differences to be worth discussing at this stage. This new expansion comes with the usual...
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Today, AMD is officially announcing its Radeon R7 250X, a new $100 GPU that the company is positioning against NVIDIA's GTX 650 in the entry-level, discrete graphics market. Like all of AMD's other recent product launches, save for the R9 290 family, the new Radeon R7 250X is a rebranded HD 7000 part -- but it...
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The Olympic games officially begin tonight in Sochi, but if you're one of several million US citizens who don't pay for cable access, you're not going to be watching much of that content online. While NBC is officially streaming the entire games, those streams are reserved for paying cable customers. In 2011, NBC cut a deal with the International...
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Two events in the telecommunications and cable world this week have highlighted why, exactly, we need net neutrality and stronger protections for consumer rights. First, on the cable side of the business, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Eagle Communications, and Comcast have collectively introduced a bill into the Kansas...
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War. War never changes. Once, humans waged war for domination of a single planet. In EVE Online, players and guilds battle for control of entire star systems. They scheme over resource-rich worlds, they vie for areas of strategic importance. And sometimes -- despite all the advances of modern technology -- somebody...
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AMD's Andrew Feldman announced today that the company is preparing to sample its new eight-core ARM SoC (codename: Seattle). Feldman gave a keynote presentation at the fifth annual Open Compute Summit. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is Facebook's effort to decentralize and unpack the datacenter, breaking the...
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For years, gamers have wondered when Valve might debut a new version of its Source engine and next-generation games built to run on it. Now, we may have answer to that, thanks to leaked screenshots of what appears to be a rebuilt version of the classic Plantation level. If true, it represents an enormous step forward...
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Blizzard has released a powerful new suite of tools for Starcraft 2 modders and developers that fundamentally change the nature of what's possible in the popular RTS game. Now, players can use the same architectural and graphics design toolsets that Blizzard has used internally to build new units, tilesets, and...
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News from gaming insider Pete Doss is that Microsoft is mulling significant changes to the restrictions it places on developers regarding the Xbox One's GPU. Reportedly, some 10% of total GPU horsepower is reserved for the Kinect -- 8% for video and 2% for voice processing. Microsoft is apparently planning changes...
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