Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
AI-assisted image upscaling is pretty neat. It can take a low-rez image and turn it into a pretty convincing simulacrum of a high-rez version of the same image. NVIDIA's DLSS and Intel's XeSS are basically doing AI image upscaling at a rate of dozens of images per second, utilizing both prior frames and motion vectors to fill in additional
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AMD's current-generation client processors can be broadly divided into two groups: chiplet CPUs and monolithic APUs. Currently, both have Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA graphics, but the integrated GPUs on the chiplet processors (like the Ryzen 9 7950X3D) are downright puny, while the integrated GPU on the monolithic parts (such as the Ryzen 7 8700G)
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NVIDIA's been sitting pretty with its Ada Lovelace GPUs for consumers and professionals, while the HPC market is served by its upgraded H200, which is a fully-enabled Hopper GPU paired with super-fast HBM3e memory giving it some 5TB/second of memory bandwidth. Few parts of the technology industry sit still for long...
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AMD's third iteration of its FidelityFX Super Resolution performs upscaling not only spatially, but also temporally. In other words, not only does it make a lower-resolution image look like a higher-resolution image, but it also performs interpolation to generate additional frames, increasing the apparent frame rate...
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So-called "Super Resolution" features first came about during the tail end of the 6th generation of game consoles, when developers started experimenting with spatial upscalers on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The technology came into its own in PlayStation 4 games, which utilized features like checkerboarding to...
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As the latest salvo in its seemingly never-ending war against emulation, the producer of the third-best-selling video game console of all time, Nintendo, has filed a lawsuit against the creators of the Yuzu emulator for Nintendo Switch. The suit, filed in Rhode Island, alleges that Yuzu developers Tropic Haze are...
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Massive runaway indie success story Palworld is a game where you play a castaway washed up on an archipelago inhabited primarily by strange, cartoonish creatures known as Pals. Pals have otherworldly abilities, and this makes them valuable to the player, who can ultimately set up an entire industrial production system...
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Mobile World Congress started today, and at the show, Intel is offering a demo of its upcoming Xeon processors code-named Sierra Forest. Those parts are expected to launch later this year, but you won't find them in desktops or even in workstations. Sierra Forest is a fairly-specialized processor meant for...
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A lot of people will tell you that PyTorch is for NVIDIA GPUs, but that's not actually true. PyTorch is platform-agnostic; it's just that many packages built on PyTorch make heavy use of NVIDIA's CUDA API. You can run PyTorch on just about anything; however, performance may not be great without specific...
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If you're coming to us from a PC gaming perspective, you're almost assuredly aware of the standard DDR5 memory and the graphics-optimized GDDR6(X) memory. You might not be familiar with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). This technology uses an extremely wide 1024-bit connection to the host processor, and that's *per...
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Cloud-hosted AI image generators like OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Meta's Imagine are really fun to play with, but they can come with onerous restrictions in terms of content, blocking even prompts that don't seem objectionable at all. They also are known to massage users' prompts—Gemini was recently noted to insert...
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A lot of people seem to have a great many strong opinions about NVIDIA's software. They complain that the Control Panel is archaic and outdated, while whining that GeForce Experience is heavy, bloated, and cumbersome to use. We like NVIDIA's Control Panel around here, but we do have to admit it would be nice to have a...
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Rumor has it that FromSoftware didn't originally intend to release an expansion for its fantasy epic Elden Ring. However, since the game's explosive launch nearly two whole years ago, fans have eagerly awaited more content. There were some notable additions in patches, including PvP arenas and a couple of extra...
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AMD currently sells processors utilizing "standard" and "dense" (or "compact") cores, including some chips that have both. The "dense" cores are indicated with a "c" at the end, like "Zen 4c", and they have all the same capabilities as the standard cores, but typically run lower clocks because the tight spacing makes...
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Despite considerable architectural advancements between the Steam Deck's "Van Gogh" APU and AMD's more modern mobile processors, the Steam Deck typically matches or beats the performance of other handhelds when running at very low power limits. These low power limits are critical for handhelds, as they allow longer...
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A couple of video creators on China's Bilibili platform have gone hands-on with the MSI Claw Windows gaming handheld and come away with mixed impressions. We don't read Chinese around here, but machine translators come up with names of "Orange Buddha Series Review" and "Please, Komine" for the two channels we're...
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Now that even entry-level GPUs are capable of producing hundreds of frames per second in popular games at the most common resolution (1920×1080), discrete GPU driver developers have turned their eye toward the latest metric everyone's making a fuss about. Indeed, input lag has once again become a hot topic for PC...
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AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors are vulnerable to some serious security exploits, so you should be quick about slapping the latest system firmware into your board's BIOS. Head to your system vendor or motherboard maker's website to make sure you've got the latest firmware for your Ryzen rig or EPYC server.
AMD has...
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The science of generating content with AI has been progressing rapidly on all fronts as of late, but video presents a lot of unique challenges due to the amount of data involved. OpenAI is right at the forefront of solving these challenges, though, and the company just presented its new model called, "Sora", as proof...
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We have a secret to reveal to you, dear readers. It's something that Intel and AMD are rather coy about, although if we're being honest it's not exactly a "secret". The truth is this: supposed "mobile" processors that end in "HX" from both Intel and AMD are in fact not really mobile processors at all, but rather...
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If you're a regular reader around here, odds are very good that you've spent some time experimenting with AI, including large language models. Even if you're not a developer yourself, you've probably dallied with DALL-E, gabbed with Gemini (née Bard), or chatted with ChatGPT—perhaps in its more pervasive form as...
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AMD's current-generation Ryzen 7000 desktop processors came out in September of 2022. That's over 16 months ago. Intel's gearing up to launch its own Arrow Lake second-generation tiled processors on the desktop, and naturally, AMD is readying its competitor: the Zen 5 architecture and the CPUs bearing it, likely to be...
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