Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
That's right: the game came out yesterday, and it's already getting major patches. Of course, while Counter-Strike 2 officially launched yesterday, replacing CS:GO on Steam, it has been in active development and semi-open beta for some months. The big patch yesterday for the release made an incredible number of...
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Counter-Strike in all of its forms has some of the most hardcore players of any game out there. These are people who want the game to be running at hundreds of FPS above their screen refresh for the infinitesimal input latency benefit that it gives. In that context, it's kind of crazy that the brand-new Counter-Strike...
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If you read that headline and balked at the idea of a gaming tablet, let us remind you that besides the Nintendo Switch, the recent spate of PC-based gaming handhelds are basically tablets. The device itself isn't really the interesting part of this story, though. Instead, the really interesting part is the SoC that...
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The answer to the question of whether Intel's first disaggregated CPUs would be coming to desktop systems has flip-flopped several times. If you pay attention to leaks and rumors, you're probably tired of hearing about it because it's gone back and forth so often. Well, we got a definitive answer from Intel just a few...
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A big part of AMD's business these days is in providing custom processors for its customers. That doesn't mean regular folks like you and me, but rather businesses who want a special CPU that no-one else has. The proper "semi-custom business" refers to the special chips that show up in the Steam Deck and commodity...
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CAMM is a new memory module format proposed by Dell and released to the public early this year. JEDEC acknowledged the proposal, but to date has not ratified it as an actual standard. CAMM stands for "Compression Attached Memory Module", and it refers to modules that are both thinner and faster than traditional...
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Scott Herkelman has been General Manager of AMD's Graphics Business unit for the last seven years, and he is also one of the company's Senior Vice Presidents. For now, anyway; in a tweet sent out at lunchtime today, he announced that he will be departing AMD at the end of the year.
You can read his tweet below, but...
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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 compnay 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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