Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
One of the greatest benefits of being a PC gamer is the unfettered backward compatibility. You can load up PC games from the 1980s and 1990s right now on the same machine you use to play Cyberpunk 2077, and they'll run just fine. Moreover, they'll use a lot less power because they don't need to fire up your...
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We've been hearing leaks and rumors about the next generation of Radeons since before the current generation even came out. Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between leaks and rumors, but as we get closer to the launch, information is becoming more and more concrete. So it goes, and as it happens, some of the...
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There are a great many factors that enthusiast gamers consider when selecting a graphics card for a gaming PC. Despite that, speaking from experience helping others with builds for decades, things like feature support, power efficiency, and acoustics often go by the wayside when there's a significant advantage in...
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Everyone's waiting anxiously for the release of new Intel Arc graphics cards to see how they stack up to the competition from AMD and NVIDIA, but don't forget that Intel has already released a couple of Arc products. Laptops packing the Alchemist-based A370M and A350M GPUs are slowly trickling into the market, and of...
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If you're not keeping up with AMD Ryzen codenames, the three upcoming chips to watch are Raphael, Dragon Range, and Phoenix. Raphael is the codename for desktop processors sporting Zen 4 cores, DDR5 memory support, and PCIe 5.0 connectivity, and these chips will be in the "65W+" category. Notably for AMD desktop CPUs...
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One of the biggest differentiators of the Radeon RX 6000 family, and by extension of the RDNA 2 graphics architecture, is its reliance on a large local cache—known officially as "Infinity Cache"—to provide rapid framebuffer access. This helps to make up for the relatively slower memory used on the cards in comparison to competitor...
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Nintendo sells consoles based on the strength of its game experiences rather than the power of their processors, but technology marches on regardless, and the venerable NVIDIA Tegra X1 is getting pretty long in the tooth. While its ARM Cortex-A57 CPUs are roughly comparable to the old AMD Jaguar CPUs in the...
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NVIDIA's relationship with the open-source community has historically been a tale of intense on-again-off-again interactions. In recent years, the company has embraced open source more closely as of late, but its past refusal to open-source its graphics drivers, citing trade secrets and proprietary technology, has...
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It's been a long road for Intel's Arctic Sound. We first heard the codename whispered back in 2018. At one time, it was rumored to be the codename for datacenter GPUs based on "Xe-HP". As it turns out, that didn't come to fruition, and the card expected to materialize in 2020 never appeared.
Arctic Sound is real...
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If you're a PC gamer, you're probably aware of Humble Bundle. For those unfamiliar, it's a site that got its start by selling the aforementioned bundles: packs of PC games, usually indie titles, where the purchaser can name their own price—thus the "humble" in the title. A portion of the proceeds goes to Humble Bundle...
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At its Intel Vision event in Dallas suburb Grapevine, Texas where it announced the 12th-gen Alder Lake-HX mobile CPUs, Intel also had an exhibition showing off its fancy new manufacturing technology. The company has been rapidly striding away from monolithic processor fabrication in the last couple of years, and while...
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As recently as yesterday, we've posted rumors regarding the eventual release of Intel's Arc graphics cards. Sure, they've already appeared in laptops—at least in low-end form—but the higher-end cards, as well as any desktop parts at all, are nowhere to be seen yet.
Almost as if in response to the rumors going...
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A bit of a recap for you: Souls is the short name of the FromSoftware series that predates Elden Ring. To say that the latest game borrows heavily from its predecessors is an understatement in the extreme; Elden Ring is Dark Souls 4 in all but name. The series started with Demon's Souls on the PlayStation 3, but...
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Rumors of the desktop PC market's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, while laptops still outsell desktops, the majority of laptops sold don't have discrete graphics. Meanwhile, AMD's setting sales records with its Ryzen processors that overwhelmingly don't include an integrated graphics processor, putting...
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Performance and fidelity are often two opposing sides of the same axis in computer graphics. You already know this; raise resolution, performance goes down. Rendering resolution is only one of the many sliders that game developers can tweak to optimize the performance-to-fidelity balance. Of course, what every...
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When you are investigating a crime, one of the most important things to establish is "motive." If you know a crime has been committed, having an understanding of why it happened is a critical step to figuring out who did it.
In the strictest sense, installing software on someone else's computer isn't a crime. It's...
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At GTC in March, NVIDIA announced its baddest GPU to date: Hopper H100. Named after US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, it was announced alongside an upcoming CPU product called Grace. Hopper isn't quite the biggest GPU NVIDIA has ever created—by a scant few square millimeters—but it's certainly the fastest.
Until...
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If you're not an overclocker, you may not be aware that graphics cards these days use multiple separate methods to monitor and limit their own performance. It's a constant dance between the boost algorithm perpetually pushing performance to higher levels and the various limiters putting the kibosh on its plans.
The...
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AMD gets a lot of love from the open-source community because it's willing to work with developers to ensure that its Radeon graphics cards are fast and stable on operating systems that aren't Windows. A prime example would be the recent updates to the Linux kernel to support GFX11, which refers to the company's...
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Hardware nerds of a certain vintage will recall the name Glaze3D with a mix of emotions. Some folks will feel wistful at what could have been, while others will smirk in vicious irony at the vaporware nature of the product. After all, the truth is that Glaze3D never came out, so we don't really know what could have...
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Nobody likes to use a slow computer. Having to wait for applications to launch and files to load can be incredibly tedious, especially when you're in a rush to get work done. That said, nobody likes to lug around a heavy "desktop replacement" laptop either, whether it's a mobile workstation or gaming system.
Well...
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Back when Intel first announced the Xe HPG Scavenger Hunt in October of last year, we did some analysis on the value of each award to estimate the retail pricing of the cards. Now that the contest is over, winners have received e-mails confirming their prizes as well as the actual retail value of the rewards in...
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