Zak Killian
Recent posts
If you're against the Microsoft purchase of Activision-Blizzard-King, what would be some potential reasons that you might present in a court to convince the judge that the deal shouldn't proceed? Would you talk about Call of Duty, or...
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In case you somehow hadn't already heard, over in Cologne, Germany, the biggest in-person gaming event in the world is going on. It's Gamescom time, and nearly every single vendor who has even the most tenuous connection to gaming is...
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If you're a PC hardware enthusiast of a certain age—and if you're reading this site, you probably are—you are likely to recall that back around 2010, GPU overclocking was a big deal. Folks were doing overclocks by 25% or more, something...
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If you want to know how ray tracing works, it's all in the name: the renderer simulates ("traces") the bouncing of light "rays" to determine how the scene should be lit and colored. This is great, but objects are huge and light particles...
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Red Dead Redemption, the sequel to Red Dead Revolver on the original Xbox, was a massive hit when it released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 back in 2010. As a later release for those consoles and the second Rockstar release to use the...
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Quake II is the latest classic first-person shooter to be remastered by Night Dive Studios, and the company did a bang-up job on the title, subtly improving the lighting, assets, and gameplay in ways that remain faithful to the original...
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If you clicked on that headline, we probably don't have to explain to you that "Mortal Kombat 1" is in fact the newest game in the Mortal Kombat series, and not the first one. This isn't quite as stupid as it sounds; the story goes that...
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Windows is insecure and dangerous, and Macs are safe and impenetrable, right? Haha, not so much. Microsoft's operating system certainly has its share of security flaws, but it's actually difficult to say which system software is more...
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Intel's efforts to improve its graphics drivers continue apace. We probably don't have to tell an audience of enthusiasts that Arc launched in a less than ideal state, and that lead to a sub-optimal first impression for the brand. Intel...
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Anyone who has ever owned an inkjet printer, or worked in IT for any amount of time, is almost certainly aware of this reality: when the ink runs out in your multi-function printer-scanner-copier thingamajig, you can't use it—even if you...
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Thirsty for information about Bethesda's Starfield ahead of its September 6th release date? Good news! Starfield developers Will Shen (lead quest designer) and Emil Pagliarulo (overall design lead) took time off from polishing up the title...
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All of the intelligent upsamplers that we have now—including NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS—are fundamentally algorithms at their core, and like any algorithm, they can be tuned and optimized. All three companies continue to do...
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Hyper-Threading is one of those concepts that's been around a long time, and which everyone takes for granted. Despite that, relatively few enthusiasts really understand how it works or what the point of it is. In short, simultaneous...
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You don't need to refresh; you read that correctly: ten minutes. A speedrunner known as Mae on YouTube has beaten Larian's epic new Dungeons & Dragons-based CRPG in almost exactly ten minutes, and it doesn't take mods, glitches, or...
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Japanese game developer FromSoftware might seem like it came out of nowhere in the last few years if you aren't a particular type of hard-core gamer. However, the company's first game was King's Field, a fantasy RPG released for the...
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Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake CPUs aren't that far from its 13th-gen Raptor Lake chips. There are lots of changes, of course, but from an end-user perspective, the biggest difference is the upgrade in L2 cache. Raptor Cove P-cores...
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The next couple months are absolutely jam-packed with big game releases. On September 26th, Cyberpunk 2077 will get its Phantom Liberty expansion, which is not only CD Projekt Red's biggest expansion ever, but also overhauls most of the...
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NVIDIA internal GPU codenames typically go something like this: first a G (for "graphics" or "GeForce"), then the first letter of the architecture name, and then three digits. The first digit indicates the architectural revision, the...
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Bethesda Softworks has released shockingly few games for the cultural clout that it has. As creators of the Elder Scrolls series and stewards of the Fallout franchise, Bethesda has released a grand total of four games in the former series...
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It should probably come as no surprise to fans of so-called "boomer shooters" that Night Dive Studios has just published another KEX-engine re-make of a legendary title. Since you read the headline, you know that the title in question is...
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While AMD's Radeon GPUs aren't as renowned for their ray-tracing prowess as competitor NVIDIA's, they're fully capable of handling the effects, particularly when games are programmed to match the hardware—just take a look at how Metro:...
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Ask some gamers what Capcom's most influential games are, and you'll get a wide variety of answers just because the company has been so innovative over the years. Street Fighter II basically invented the fighting game genre, Mega Man...
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