Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Even as buzz ramps about the next-generation Nintendo hardware, there are plenty of reasons to pick up a current-generation model. For one thing, if rumors are accurate, the next-gen system is going to ship with an LCD screen, not an OLED. For another thing, there's no guarantee that current-gen Switch games will be...
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If you read the headline and thought, "Phoenix 2? But Phoenix 1 has barely hit the market!", don't worry. This chip, despite the name, isn't really a direct successor to AMD's Ryzen 7040 series, codenamed Phoenix. Instead, Phoenix 2 appears to be more of a low-power chip for thin & light laptops and handheld systems...
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If you follow gaming news or even just this site at all, then we don't have to tell you that Starfield is the latest first-person open-world RPG from pioneers of the format, Bethesda Game Studios. It is a titanic title, and given that the company releases about two games per decade, it's a huge release...
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Unlike many computing trends, AI has practical purposes, so it has stuck around beyond the initial fad period. People are using AI for anything and everything, even when it isn't particularly-suited for the task. (Note that all of our articles are written by humans!) If you want to run large AI models like GPT-4, you...
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Between the rise of asset virtualization and the emergence of real-time ray-tracing, video game graphics technology is on the cusp of a revolution. Leading the charge forward is Epic Games with its Unreal Engine software, a package that just got its version 5.3 update.
Unreal Engine 5 has two major rendering...
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Exactly as promised, AMD has released a new Radeon driver that includes its HYPR-RX switch as well as an improved version of the Radeon Anti-Lag feature it's had for a while now. AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 23.9.1 is available for download, and besides those new tricks, it also comes with a bugfix for Dolby...
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Listen up, readers. I've been a die-hard Armored Core fan my whole life, and getting an Armored Core game on PC is a literal life-long dream of mine that we finally achieved this year. Despite that, I'm pretty sure my game of the year for 2023 is actually going to be The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. As...
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The topic of DRM in PC games has always been a contentious one, but no company has drawn more ire from gamers than developer Denuvo. Its anti-tamper technology serves not only to keep gamers from pirating their software, but also keeps them from modifying the games and making effective backups. Not only that, but...
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As you probably already know if you read this site—we've covered it a few times already—"Phantom Liberty" is the name of the first and likely only major expansion for Cyberpunk 2077. According to CD Projekt Red (the game's developer), it is the company's largest expansion to date—impressive, if you played The Witcher...
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Starfield technically isn't even out yet—the full release is tomorrow—and yet people are already unraveling all of its secrets. One of the criticisms of the game is that it is extremely reliant on fast travel. That is to say that, if you're one of the players who liked to walk everywhere in Skyrim or Oblivion, perhaps...
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When Bethesda Game Studios first announced Starfield, it was 2018 and the company was still its own separate entity underneath Zenimax Media. Its parent was purchased by Microsoft in March of 2021, and the predictable happened: Starfield, Bethesda's first new IP in 25 years, became a Microsoft-exclusive property. That means Xbox and Windows,
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As the saying goes, no matter how much CPU, RAM, or storage you have, developers will find a way to use it. That doesn't necessarily mean that the way will be good or useful, mind you. According to some folks, Windows 11's File Explorer is notoriously slow even on fast systems with quick NVMe storage. Directories with...
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If you're reading this text right now, there is a considerable chance that you're a PC gamer, and if that's true, then there's a nearly-equal chance that you've played Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls Part V: Skyrim. The game was a gigantic hit, and brought the company's already-popular fantasy game series out of a niche...
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How much RAM do you need, readers? If you're just a gamer or even a typical power user, you're almost assuredly satisfied with the 64 GB you can get from two large DIMMs right now. However, even 128GB of RAM might not be enough for some users. Those folks could be elated by Samsung's newest announcement: 32-gigabit...
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When AMD was first announcing the RDNA 3 architecture around the release of its Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX graphics cards, the watchword for the new design was "power efficiency". AMD endlessly emphasized that efficiency was the end goal for its new architecture, and promised huge efficiency gains out of RDNA...
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Some workloads are a single tangled-up thread with various data types and crunchy compute; for these, our modern CPU cores are perfectly-suited. Other workloads (like, say, graphics) are giant piles of a single data type that can be chomped through in big parallel bites; this kind of thing is exactly what our modern...
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Building PCs is pretty easy, but it's not without its challenges. Many enthusiasts will tell you that the most tedious part of putting a PC together is one of the last: hooking up the power supply cables. By necessity, power connectors are kind of large and unwieldy, and they can not only be a pain to route, but also...
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Long-time Chinese hardware vendor Colorful is introducing a new collection of products known as the "Colorfire Meow" series. As you could guess from the name, they're cat-themed. Colorful teased these parts earlier this year, but the first wave is finally making its way to market.
Actually, simply saying that...
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While it hasn't reached the heights of a mega-hit like FromSoftware's previous title Elden Ring or the kind of numbers that Starfield will surely do on its release next week, the long-awaited return of Armored Core has been a solid success for the developer. It's been ten years since the last game in the series, and...
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Intel's first Arc graphics cards were underwhelming on launch, and if you believed certain sources, the company was going to can the whole project as a result. Of course, that's not how things have played out—Intel has put considerable effort into improving those first Arc graphics cards, to the point that your author...
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PC gamers and power users sometimes sneer at Intel's E-cores because they aren't as fast on a single thread as the company's powerful P-cores. Demanding client tasks—like many operations in creative applications as well as, of course, games—tend to be single-threaded, or at least held up by a single slow thread. In...
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Put simply, NVIDIA's Frame Generation technology, introduced with its Ada Lovelace graphics cards and DLSS version 3, offers an increase in visual fluidity with very little downside to gamers. Yes, there's an increase in input lag compared to playing the same game with anti-lag features enabled, but it's not much...
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