Zak Killian
Recent posts
For years now as a software developer, if you're stuck on a hard problem and you want to ask a stranger for help, the place to go has been a website called Stack Overflow. There's so much helpful content on there, and so much of it is...
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Drop everything—there's a new hardware security vulnerability in Intel's processors! Or don't, really, because this vulnerability is only rated at a "medium" severity by Intel itself, and it's even arguably a good thing for the company...
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Dipping into the back catalog to re-release a beloved older game is a time-honored trick that fans fall for again and again. Sometimes, the new release is an updated version that has extra or improved features to justify its existence...
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NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang donned his signature leather jacket to take the stage at SIGGRAPH 2023 and deliver the opening keynote for today's sessions at the famed rendering conference. Most of his talk today was about generative AI and how...
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Rockstar has said basically nothing about the next Grand Theft Auto game beyond that it's being worked on. Despite that, we know a little bit about the game, partially thanks to the massive leak last year. It's going to be set in and around Vice City, it's going to have multiple playable...
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If you've never played a pen & paper role-playing game, you may not be aware that these games typically aren't distributed as boxed sets like board games. Instead, you typically purchase one or two "core" books with the main rules, and...
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The largest fighting game tournament in the world is known as "Evo", short for "Evolution Championship Series." At Evo, top players take on one another in games like Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, The King of Fighters...
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AMD's "Phoenix Point" processors are only now becoming widely-available in the marketplace, but enthusiasts are already looking ahead to Phoenix's Zen 5-based successor, Strix Point. Not that there's anything wrong with Phoenix; that's the...
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Rumors can be a lot of fun when you're not the subject, and extrapolating from incomplete data is always an entertaining exercise when we're talking about upcoming hardware. It's ultimately nice to have confirmation from the manufacturer...
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This one's a bit of a weird one, and it's going to require some analysis to understand, so pay close attention. The rumor this time around is that AMD's RDNA 4 graphics card line-up "will not have any high-end GPUs." The leaker compares...
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When Intel originally introduced the Arc graphics card family to us, it was described as including three tiers of cards, just like the company's Core i- family of CPUs originally did. The Arc 3 were to be entry-level GPUs, the Arc 5 were...
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Baldur's Gate III has just exited a lengthy early access period, and it already runs well on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. That may be why neither company bothered to release a graphics driver for the game's 1.0 release today. We didn't hear any...
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Jim Keller is a man who should need no introduction to an audience of tech nerds. He was part of the team that developed the legendary DEC Alpha microprocessors back in the 1990s, was the lead architect of AMD's groundbreaking K8...
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I am not a digital artist, but am a PC gamer, and like so many others I've tried my hand (with varying levels of success) at modifying my favorite games. One of the biggest pains when making game mods is dealing with format conversions...
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If you read that headline and thought, "didn't Baldur's Gate 3 come out like three years ago?", you're thinking of the Early Access version of the title. Like most games in Early Access, Baldur's Gate 3 was extremely incomplete on its...
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One criticism that some folks have had about AMD's RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards is one of relatively-high idle power usage, on the order of 100 watts. We didn't observe this in our testing, but some users have...
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AMD's current-generation desktop and laptop processors are fundamentally based on two designs: Raphael, also known as Dragon Range in laptops, and then Phoenix (or possibly Phoenix Point), created specifically for portable PCs. The former...
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As much as we love gushing about the latest hardware around here, the fact remains that most people don't care that much. As proof of this sad statement, check out the sales of the Nintendo Switch. That system's specifications were pretty...
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The Xbox and PlayStation consoles have been using broadly PC-compatible hardware for the last two generations. The previous-generation hardware was really too slow to be interesting with its meager Jaguar cores, but the current-generation...
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Hard drives are dead, right? The proliferation of cheap solid-state storage certainly has made the ol' spinning rust largely obsolete for desktop builds and typical consumers, but when you need to store a ton of data in as small a space as...
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No, there's not a typo in the headline—that's how Thermalright spelled it. Despite the sun iconography on the packaging and despite the obvious parallels with the sun and heat, Thermalright's new thermal interface pads for CPU cooling are...
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Twenty years ago, if you had asked your author here if he thought a Ratchet & Clank game would ever be the new high bar for graphics technology in PC gaming, he would have given you a very strong "no." Yet, here we are: Ratchet & Clank...
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