Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Have you ever heard of CFD Gaming? Neither have we, but the company appears to be first to market with a PCIe 5.0 SSD. The M.2 NVMe drive has appeared in shops in Japan's famous Akihabara technology district with a 2TB capacity and a claimed maximum sequential read speed of 10 GB/sec.
This information comes to us...
Read more...
Understandably, AMD is really keen to sell through the remaining stock of its previous-generation RNDA 2-based graphics cards. To that end, the company has put up a blog post with a bunch of price-versus-performance data that carefully outlines why its Radeon RX 6000 series cards offer the best value. That's including...
Read more...
HPC and hyperscale guys are excited for Intel's Xeon Max processors with onboard HBM, but Sapphire Rapids comprises an entire line of processors spanning the whole range of Xeons. One of those chips has just shown up in the Geekbench database, spotted by the watchful eye of the Benchleaks bot.
The processor in...
Read more...
Square-Enix's Forspoken is out now, meaning that you can actually test DirectStorage in a real game. Forspoken even includes a built-in benchmark that not only shows framerates but also tracks load times. As you'd expect, faster SSDs mean faster load times, but they have another curious effect too: lower frame...
Read more...
MAINGEAR MG-1 Gaming Desktop: Starting At $1499 The Maingear MG-1 is the fastest pre-built gaming PC we've ever tested. It also makes for a solid workstation, and it's not hard to look at, either. Excellent Performance Massive Room For Expansion Attractive And Customizable Impressive Build Quality High-Quality...
Read more...
When Intel announced the lineup for its Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards, there were three tiers, just like its CPUs. We've seen Arc A300 GPUs, and we've seen Arc A700 GPUs, but so far, the A500 series is missing in action. Well now, a new benchmark leak may contain exactly that; with 16 Xe Cores, it lands directly...
Read more...
If you were looking forward to playing Square-Enix's new open-world fantasy title Forspoken this weekend, well, hopefully you have a brand-new graphics card. Not only are the game's system requirements surprisingly high, but there's also the consideration that AMD has only released a game-specific driver for its...
Read more...
It's hard to believe, but the PlayStation 5 will be three years old this November. The console has only recently overcome supply shortages but some are already clamoring for an upgraded model. According to Tom Henderson of InsiderGaming—historically known as a reliable leaker of game information—while the fifth...
Read more...
Being exactly such a person myself, I can tell you that people with niche interests run into performance bottlenecks you just don't see normally. A key example of such a use-case comes in the form of using graphics cards externally over Thunderbolt. We normally think of the bandwidth between a GPU and its host as a...
Read more...
Cyberpunk 2077 had one of the most disastrous game launches in history. A lesser game company might have abandoned the title and left it to rot, but CD Projekt Red has been continually crafting updates for the game and has it beaten into a pretty solid shape by this point. The upcoming expansion, Phantom Liberty, will...
Read more...
If you follow hardware news, you likely recall the discovery that Intel's 12th generation Core processors, even the ones without the "K" suffix, could be overclocked on fancy motherboards that featured an external clock generator. Well, as it happens, despite the company bragging about it initially, that was...
Read more...
One of the more peculiar statements to come out of a processor company last year was AMD's insistence that the Navi 31 GPU was "architected for 3GHz". As hardware enthusiasts will likely be aware, even the top-end Radeon RX 7900 XTX doesn't approach 3GHz most of the time. It can go well past that clock rate in some...
Read more...
Ayaneo was one of the very first vendors offering hand-held gaming PCs. The earlier models from this and other companies used lower-end and lower-cost APUs from AMD to get their foot in the door. As they've seen success, newer models have been equipped with more recent and fancier hardware, including the processors...
Read more...
Everyone that does creative work, whether it's in visual art, writing, music, film, or even chemical engineering, should be concerned about AI overtaking their jobs at some point. It's not happening right now (unless you work at CNET), but it will happen eventually. "Eventually" may not mean "soon," though, and...
Read more...
This whole Microsoft-buys-Activision deal is looking less and less likely by the week. Last week, NVIDIA and Google spoke up against the purchase, and the week before that, Microsoft had to revise its response to the FTC to remove remarks that recommended the outright destruction of the commission. Now, a new...
Read more...
DirectStorage is out! No, seriously—DirectStorage 1.1, which can drastically accelerate game asset loading time, is already released and available for developers to use. Unfortunately, there aren't actually any games that take advantage of DirectStorage yet, which is why PCGamesHardware.de had to use a synthetic demo...
Read more...
When we initially looked at the second generation of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution technology, we came away impressed. It was a tremendous upgrade over the spatial upscaling method used by the original "1.0" version of FSR, and we recommended using it when you're severely GPU-limited and don't have alternatives...
Read more...
Following the case of Microsoft attempting to acquire Activision-Blizzard-King is like watching a stage play put on by middle-schoolers: full of drama, unscripted twists, and surprise setbacks. The latest event in this grand saga is a big one: both Google and NVIDIA have thrown their hats into the ring, providing...
Read more...
Every once in a while, a product comes along that makes you think, "why weren't we doing it this way in the first place?" It's quite possible that Corsair's rumored RMx Shift series of power supplies could be one such product. In the leaked images from 188号 (@momomo_us on Twitter), the new power supplies look like the...
Read more...
Intel's current-generation Raptor Lake CPUs are rumored to have a refresh on the way, followed by Intel's first disaggregated client CPUs, Meteor Lake. After that, Arrow Lake is purported to bring a big increase in GPU performance. We've known that Intel's next move after ARL would be "Lunar Lake", but precious little...
Read more...
AMD has released another graphics driver, but if you are not rocking an RDNA 3-based Radeon, you can go on about your day. AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.1.1 is exclusively for Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards, which for now comprises just two models: the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX.
The list of...
Read more...
Disney Infinity developer Avalanche Software (in cooperation with Portkey Games) is hard at work putting the finishing touches on Hogwarts Legacy, an open-world action-roleplaying title set in the same universe as the Harry Potter books. The game doesn't bear the Boy Who Lived's name because it's set in the 1800s...
Read more...
