Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Super Mario 64 is one of the most beloved video games of all time, and it's also one of the most thoroughly dissected video games of all time. There's a complete recompilation for PC including dozens of mods that allows players to add new areas, entities, and mechanics, play the game with ray-traced graphics, or even...
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When video game satirist videogamedunkey announced that he was opening a game publishing house, most people were understandably skeptical. Was this another bit? Was he really calling his nascent publisher "BIGMODE"? What kind of games would he publish? It turns out that yes, BIGMODE was in fact for real, and its first...
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Generative AI processing is highly complex, such that doing it in a performant fashion requires mountains of parallel processing power. This is the reason everyone's buying up expensive GeForce-adjacent GPUs for their datacenters, and why companies are focused on adding power-efficient NPUs to their SoCs. You can do...
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Windows insiders should already have received Preview Build 22635.3570, which includes a number of changes and new features. Among these are the ability to duplicate a tab in File Explorer, a pause for Copilot releases pending further refinements, and a fix for an issue where "Global.WindowsMigration" shows up in the...
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AMD's Ryzen 9 desktop processors include two "Core Complex Dice", or "CCDs", which is to say that the processors' 12 or 16 CPU cores are spread across two pieces of silicon. The company's top 3D V-Cache-equipped CPU, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, is known for only including 3D V-Cache on one of its two CCDs.
In theory, this...
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Intel has finally released an official statement about the ongoing stability issues affecting its Raptor Lake processors. In sort of a fascinating development, Intel's statement doesn't really address the cause of the issue, and unlike the private memo leaked before by Igor's Lab, it doesn't attempt to cast blame...
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Zen 5 hype is building as we edge ever closer to Computex, when AMD is expected to announce new processors based on its next-generation CPU architecture. From reliable leaks, we already know a fair bit about the chips that AMD will be creating based around Zen 5, but our only leak about the actual naming of the final...
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The ASUS ROG Ally and similar gaming handhelds are basically small PC tablets with game controls affixed to the sides. As a result, you can completely use them as a PC, but doing so can be kind of clumsy, particularly given the limited screen real estate inflicted by the use of default-on window scaling. One way to...
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ASUS' ROG Ally handheld doesn't have the absolute best specifications in any area compared to the exploding market of handheld PC game systems. However, it has arguably the best balance of features and price, and that's why we feel it is the most credible challenger to the Steam Deck so far. Versus the Steam Deck...
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When you plug in a USB or Thunderbolt cable to your computer, that connection is often being routed to a small chip that then translates that data into a PCI Express signal for the final connection to your CPU. In that case, why don't we just use PCI Express for external cabling, too, and route it directly from CPU to...
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AMD's RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPUs, even the ones as small as the integrated GPU on the Steam Deck, fully support DirectX Ray-Tracing, or DXR. Despite that, their relatively poor performance in ray-tracing workloads is well-documented. The reason is because the RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 architectures only accelerate a small (but...
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What is "an AI"? Put simply, the way we use the term "AI" these days is a little misleading. It primarily describes neural networks, functionally black boxes into which you stuff data and then out comes other data, munged in (hopefully) the way you want. Neural networks aren't programs, though; they're not executable...
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MSI's Claw gaming handheld is unique in one specific way that makes it really interesting to a particular class of gamer. That particular class is the hardware geek, and the specific interesting detail is that it is based on an Intel Core Ultra processor rather than one of the AMD Phoenix APUs upon which almost all...
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Intel's Raptor Lake processors, including the 14th-generation Core CPUs known as "Raptor Lake Refresh", have been facing criticism among PC gamers over the last few months, and especially the last few weeks, due to instability issues in certain games at completely default, stock settings. This isn't a matter of...
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Look at your poor old TV. The brightness is fading, worsening the contrast, and motion doesn't look quite as clear as it used to. Certainly not as clear as it would on one of these brand-new OLED TVs, with their sub-1ms pixel response time and brilliant HDR capabilities. If you're still rocking an old pre-quantum-dot...
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Intel's been under some fire recently for issues affecting its top-end Core i9 processors from both the 13th- and 14th-generation Core families. Some of these chips, even when set to "BIOS defaults", will crash or otherwise fail in certain tests, most commonly Cinebench 2024 and especially, games using Unreal Engine...
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Frame generation isn't a solution to a stuttery, unsmooth experience. However, the ASUS ROG Ally comes with a 120-Hz Freesync display, and there are plenty of games that it can get to 60 FPS reliably, yet where it will struggle to hit the triple digits. If your favorite game falls into this category, you may be in...
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In case you haven't been paying attention, AMD's Zen 5 processors are expected to debut before long. In fact, many people are expecting AMD to announce the first wave, likely the "Granite Ridge" desktop processors sporting Zen 5 CPU cores, at Computex 2024. That's about six weeks from now, in the first week of...
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The next generation of AMD Radeon graphics cards might be quite a departure from its past products, if the rumors to date are accurate. The cards, which are likely to be part of the Radeon RX 8000 family, are expected to be based on the fifth revision of AMD's RDNA architecture, known as "RDNA 4" (with the fourth...
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We're big fans of the ASUS ROG Ally around here. It's not only one of the best-performing gaming handhelds in existence currently, but it's also one of only a very select few (including the Ayaneo KUN but excluding the Legion Go and Steam Deck OLED) to have a variable-refresh-rate display. That means that the...
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There's no two ways about it—AMD's Ryzen 8040 mobile CPU family and its Ryzen 8000G desktop CPU family are the exact same silicon: Hawk Point, the evolution of Phoenix featuring 60% better NPU performance. AMD takes the same chip, attaches it to either an LGA or BGA interposer depending on whether it's destined for...
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HighPoint is a name that will need no introduction to the people that will probably be interested in these products. Distinct from the budget firearms manufacturer with a similar name, HighPoint is a company who has been selling storage controllers since the 20th century. The latest products from HighPoint are...
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