Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is one of most beloved games on one of the most beloved game consoles of all time. That puts it very high in the echelons of "all-time greatest games". If you remember the game wistfully and think you might like to play it again, you could load up an emulator—or, you could play...
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AMD's Ryzen 6000 mobile series, codenamed Rembrandt, offer solid performance and strong efficiency along with great integrated graphics. They do fall behind Intel's latest in both single- and multi-core performance, but that's why AMD isn't standing still. The company's already announced its next-generation mobile...
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For sure, the GeForce RTX 4090, RTX 4080, and RTX 4070 Ti are cool graphics cards, but the value proposition as well as the way the specifications are trending have left some folks wondering what lower-end Ada Lovelace-based GeForce GPUs will look like. Well, we may have our first peek at an upcoming desktop GeForce...
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Enthusiasts who've been around for a little bit will recall that before Arc existed as a brand, all of Intel's talk around its graphics hardware was about Xe, the core architecture for the Arc brand. Xe was actually split into no less than four separate architectures: Xe-LP, Xe-HP, Xe-HPG, and Xe-HPC, all targeted at...
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At CES 2023, AMD finally unveiled its "Phoenix" family of what would have once been called "Accelerated Processing Units." Sporting up to eight Zen 4 CPU cores, six RDNA 3 workgroup processors, and a special XDNA AI engine all in a monolithic 4nm die, these chips have high potential to be awesome for laptops and SFF...
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Have you ever wished that there was more Seinfeld, except visualized as a 1990s PC point-and-click game, and with completely nonsensical AI-generated everything? No? Well, that's too bad, because that's exactly what you get with "Nothing, Forever," an endless Twitch stream of exactly what we just described.
To be...
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Microsoft's DirectStorage is based on development done for the "Velocity Architecture" in the Xbox Series family of consoles. The intention is to drastically improve performance under a "sustained random" I/O workload such as that used by a game streaming assets. Forspoken is the first video game to support...
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Like a lot of enthusiasts, your author here upgraded his Socket AM4 Ryzen gaming system to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D when those chips came out. Because of that processor's explosive gaming performance, AMD's Zen 4 CPUs, while extremely quick in their own right, weren't as compelling to some gamers. That's likely about to...
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We take them for granted, but modern computers are absolutely amazing. Have you ever considered how much work must have gone into making sure that you can have a half-dozen displays connected to one system, with varying DPI and refresh rates, displaying all different applications running concurrently on a single...
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If you've got an NVIDIA RTX 40-series GPU and you feel like you need more frames in heavily ray-traced games Cyberpunk 2077 and Dying Light 2: Stay Human, you're in luck: both titles got updated today with support for the Ada Lovelace-exclusive DLSS 3 Frame Generation.
The third whole-number iteration of NVIDIA's...
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Corsair has a new series of power supplies, and they do something that some brands should have done a long time ago: move the modular connectors to the side of the unit. For folks who aren't experienced system builders, what this implies is that, for now-common cases with PSU shrouds, you don't have to go rooting...
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If you're not from Switzerland or one of its surrounding states, it's likely enough that you've never heard of Digitec Galaxus. Despite that, the shop bills itself as the largest vendor of PC parts in that mountainous nation, and that makes the numbers that it has decided to publish pretty interesting. In what Digitec...
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Artificial intelligence mostly isn't, at least not yet. Still, the artificial neural networks that humans have created are capable of some very impressive things, and you've probably seen plenty of examples of text and images created by computers that are extremely cool. What about music, though? There have been...
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Have you ever heard of CFD Gaming? Neither have we, but the company appears to be first to market with a Phison-based 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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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