Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Intel's next generation of desktop processors is almost assuredly going to be a refresh of its extant Raptor Lake silicon. We say "almost" because Intel hasn't officially announced anything of the sort, but given all of the leaks up to this point, it is all but a forgone conclusion.
According to those same leaks...
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If you're reading this site, you probably are well familiar with the controversy over the 12VHPWR connector used on NVIDIA's recent graphics cards. This connector is a smaller-scale twelve-pin plug that can provide up to 600 watts of power over a single, smaller bundle of wires compared to the old-school 8- and 6-pin...
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What games do you think of when you hear the term "MMO", dear reader? Probably stuff like Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, or maybe Everquest if you're an old geezer like your author. You probably don't think of Niantic's mobile augmented reality game Pokémon GO. Despite that, it almost assuredly qualifies...
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When you hear "super-sampling", you have a certain expectation. Super-sampling is the oldest form of anti-aliasing, and it essentially amounts to just raising the render resolution. That's the type of anti-aliasing that early GeForce and Radeon cards used, as well as the last 3dfx Voodoo boards.
NVIDIA's DLSS...
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After what feels like ages and ages (but has really been less than two years), Microsoft is finally drawing near the finish line of its $68.7 billion dollar attempt to purchase Activision-Blizzard. The last roadblock, placed in the way of the acquisition by the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)...
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There are a LOT of PC-based gaming handhelds out there now. You probably know about the Steam Deck already; Valve's system that basically consists of a Steam Controller with a screen shoved in the middle and a custom AMD SoC inside. You probably also know about the ASUS ROG Ally, as well as the various devices...
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We're in the second day of Intel's Innovation '23 event, and our man Dave is on the scene. Intel held a Q&A session today where members of the tech press were allowed to fling questions at CEO Pat Gelsinger. There was some interesting discussion in the Q&A, but arguably the most interesting question to our audience...
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HotHardware's own Dave Altavilla is on location at Intel's Innovation '23 event, and that means he's getting to check out all the latest and upcoming hardware from the blue team first hand. Fortunately, that means you get to check it out, too, because we've captured some videos of the demos on the show floor. We've...
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In case you couldn't tell from our coverage, some of us around here—particularly your present author—are big fans of Cyberpunk 2077. That's not only because it's a legitimately great game these days, but also because it is a showcase for the absolute bleeding edge in graphics technology. That will continue to be the...
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If you read that headline and aren't suitably impressed, let us elaborate. Intel's next launch, looming on the horizon, will be the company's first chiplet-based (or tile-based) processors, codenamed Meteor Lake. Those chips are coming along with an extensive re-branding effort, at least for Intel's mobile...
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You probably already know that AMD's most recent Radeon GPUs are created using chiplets: a single GCD for graphics and compute, and then between three and six MCDs for memory access and caching. Intel hasn't released any consumer GPUs using chiplets yet, but its Datacenter GPU Max—that's the part formerly known as...
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was a big hit for Bethesda across all platforms, and one of the biggest was surely Sony's PlayStation 3. While that system had a rough launch compared to the cheaper Xbox 360, by 2011 it had overtaken Microsoft's system in sales, and the PlayStation 4 then dominated the Xbox One. We reckon...
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No matter what, it's clear at this point that the way forward for the semiconductor industry is chiplets, or "tiles" in Intel nomenclature. Piling multiple pieces of a processor onto one package brings a lot of challenges, though. One of those is the assembly of the chiplet package itself. Typically, manufacturers use...
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Once upon a time, AMD's Opteron processors allowed it to make significant inroads into the server market. The company lost ground in the Bulldozer years, though, and with EPYC, AMD had to prove that it could reliably deliver competitive processors on time. We're now into the fourth generation of EPYC processors, and...
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Work continues apace on Intel's Arc graphics drivers, but things have gotten to a pretty good state already. The heavily AMD-optimized Starfield notwithstanding, recent games like Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon and Baldur's Gate 3 both worked just fine on launch day, and most other applications we have tested on an...
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If you weren't playing video games in the mid-1990s, it's difficult to explain the popularity of the Tomb Raider games. The original title released first for the Sega Saturn, and then quickly showed up on MS-DOS PCs as well as the PlayStation, where it wowed gamers with its then-impressive 3D graphics and immersive...
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Let's get some names out of the way: "V" is the name of the customizable player character in Cyberpunk 2077, and naturally, that's the character you'll take into the game's expansion called Phantom Liberty. Idris Elba appears in the add-on as retired spy Solomon Reed, and Minji Chang plays top-tier netrunner Song So...
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If you pay any attention to technology news, particularly on this site, you may recall reading about ASUS' interesting power-delivery experiment one of the few times we've reported on it before. If you didn't read those stories, or don't recall, we'll recap: ASUS is about to start selling motherboards with...
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Shortly before the launch of Starfield, Bethesda and AMD announced a strategic partnership that caused concern among the GeForce-owning PC gaming community. That's because it coincided with an independent report that remarked on the trend of AMD-sponsored PC games skipping support for NVIDIA's DLSS technology. Come...
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You have a good sleep last night? Wake up feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? Well here's something to sap the energy from your step: Valve's digital game distribution platform Steam has just turned 20 years old. While it was originally just a client for managing and updating Valve's own games, Steam has gone on to...
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Boy, we love the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC). It's not that we do business in their territory, or anything like that. It's just that every filing made with the group is public, and the details are posted on its website. This frequently gives us a sneak peek into possible upcoming products, although we should...
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Starfield is out, and it's an incredibly demanding game despite the lack of any current-generation rendering features. We could probably write a whole post about Starfield's performance, but that'll have to wait for another time. Instead, this post is going to be about an easy trick that may or may not help your...
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