PC, Mobile And Console Gaming News And Reviews
Gamers come in all different shapes, sizes and platforms choices. No matter the medium, from Fortnite to COD, Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy or Assassin's Creed, gaming is big business these days with eSports heroes stepping up for national and global domination limelight. Here we cover triple-A titles pushing the pixels on anything you can mash a keyboard or shake a gamepad with, from laptops and desktops to consoles and mobile gaming goodness.
Gears 5 officially drops on Tuesday, September 10th, but if you've got Xbox Ultimate Game Pass or Xbox Game Pass for PC you may have already played quite a bit of it. The newest Xbox One and PC exclusive launched for Microsoft's subscription service on Friday. The Coalition's newest Gears title brings with it a whole host of new graphical effects and HDR lighting to both the console and PC alike, thanks to the latest iteration of Epic's Unreal Engine 4. We took the PC version for a spin and spent some time testing how the latest Gears title runs. Gears 5 features lots of details in the characters and architecture Microsoft entrusted its second-biggest exclusive franchise to The Coalition,...
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Finnish game studio Remedy Entertainment makes some of the finest-looking, quirkiest games around. Perhaps best known for the Max Payne series (but not Max Payne 3, which was developed solely by Rockstar), Remedy has been publishing its games exclusively on Xbox and PC for the last several years. The studio has delivered interesting, story-driven games more recently in the form of cult survival classic Alan Wake and the more recent sci-fi thriller Quantum Break. Both games featured cutting-edge graphics for their respective times. For that reason, maybe it's no surprise that the studio's latest creation, Control, uses the most cutting-edge graphics technology available today, including...
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AMD's Ryzen 3000 series processors have made a positive impact on the PC enthusiast market, the likes of which we haven't seen in years. From a performance-per-dollar standpoint, AMD's disruptive Zen 2 architecture offers a strong value proposition for new desktop PC builders from all walks of life and for many use cases including gaming, content creation and other workstation-class requirements. In fact, we were so impressed by Ryzen 3000 series processors in our launch review, that we decided we needed to have AMD's new architecture in our production flow here at HotHardware. This also presented us with an opportunity to call upon a few industry friends like Maingear Computers, Gigabyte, EVGA...
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It seems like a great time to buy a shiny new monitor for a gaming PC. FreeSync 2-certified monitors are plentiful on the open market and multiple companies are actively pushing them out the door to fight for your hard-earned dollars. Since NVIDIA started supporting FreeSync earlier this year, both GeForce and Radeon owners can take full advantage of variable refresh rate goodness without paying the price premiums associated with buying certain displays with G-Sync modules inside. If you haven't already, the time is right to start shopping for a high-refresh-rate FreeSync display -- the affect on smoothness and tearing is stark and make modern gaming monitors a worthwhile investment....
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You've just finished meticulously routing cables in your new battlestation and are basking in the subtle glow of RGB LEDs, but your setup is not ready yet. Your old generic mouse has served you well, but its bargain-bin sensor is holding you back. Your crosshairs are unsteady and trying to select individual units is frustrating. Worst of all, it disrupts the svelte aesthetics of your new rig. Fortunately, Corsair has recently released a family of gaming mice with something to fit anyone's needs and budget. These newest additions are the ambidextrous M55 RGB Pro, the shape-shifting Glaive RGB Pro, the weight-tunable Nightsword RGB, and the free-roaming Ironclaw Wireless RGB -- all of which...
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The final member of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX Super-series officially arrives today, the GeForce RTX 2080 Super. In case you missed it, a couple of weeks back, NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super, to preemptively zing AMD in the lead-up to the Radeon RX 5700 series launch. The GeForce RTX Super-series will supplant and eventually replace their original, “non-Super” counterparts once availability dries up. At the top and bottom of the stack, however, the GeForce RTX 2060 and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti will remain. It is in the meat of the 20-series where the Supers reside, with the new GeForce RTX 2080 Super we’ll be showing you here today leading the charge,...
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The EVO series is a member of Origin's thin-and-light family of gaming laptops. The words "thin-and-light" aren't often used when describing powerful gaming laptops, but considering Origin PC has managed to squeeze both an Intel 9th generation 6-core processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX series GPU into the EVO17-S, a machine that is less than an inch thick, the moniker fits. However, at about 6.6lbs the machine isn't exactly light either, though we digress... The Intel Core i7-9750H inside this gaming laptop is a high-end mobile processor that’s based on the Coffee Lake architecture (2019 refresh, CFL-HR). The processor clocks in between 2.6GHz and 4.5GHz and can execute up to twelve...
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HP is hoping to offer gamers the best of both world with its Omen X Emperium 65. Although HP is careful not to call the Omen X Emperium 65 a television, per se, there's no escaping that fact that this is a massive display that would be more at home in your living room, den, or bonus room than your average computer desk. The Omen X Emperium measures a massive 65 inches diagonally, which puts it squarely in big-screen 4K HDTV territory. However, it borrows technology from the gaming world that we don't see in typical consumer-grade televisions, like NVIDIA G-SYNC and support for 144Hz refresh rates, for example. This duality of purpose leads to some interesting design choices, some of which...
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Lenovo's line of Legion laptops and desktops are designed for gamers, but one complaint levied against last year's Legion Y730 model was the lack of more powerful graphics options. However, Lenovo was obviously listening to consumer feedback and the new Lenovo Legion Y740 we are looking at today, rights this previous wrong by giving potential buyers not one, but two powerful NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs to choose from. The base model comes with a GeForce RTX 2060, but if you're able to spend a few more greenbacks on your config, you can move up to a GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q wasn't the only high-end component selection Lenovo managed to squeeze under the hood of this...
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Sony has been rather forthcoming with details of its next generation PlayStation 5 game console and though the new system isn’t as close to reality as we would like, there’s certainly a lot of information on the AMD-powered game cosole out there that we’ve been mining and reporting recently on for passionate gamers. Let’s run down a list of what we know and see if we can paint a clearer picture of what to expect with the next generation Sony PS5. PlayStation 5 Specs And Backwards Compatibility Sony hasn't been shy about committing to what gamers can expect under the hood of the machine that some say has been running around in certain developer circles in dev kit form...
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One of the advantages to owning a custom PC from a boutique builder is the meticulous attention to detail. Tight cable management is not just a perk, it is an expectation when paying a premium for a boutique shop to assemble your rig with off-the-shelf components, and having to wait a bit longer compared to buying from a bulk OEM is an inherent trade off. Or is it? Maingear, a stalwart in the boutique space, would argue otherwise. Maingear Vybe At PAX East 2019 - AMD Ryzen Edition Earlier this month at PAX East, Maingear announced what it is calling the Vybe Enthusiast Platform. You might already be familiar with the Vybe name -- it is the least expensive line of desktop PCs in Maingear's stable,...
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As far as gaming laptops go, Dell's Alienware brand has historically been synonymous with some of the most powerful configurations on the market. And where the trend lately has been toward ever thinner and lighter versions of these otherwise traditional desktop replacement machines, even Dell's recently released Alienware m15 eschews trimming every bit of mass from its design in order to keep from cutting too deeply into its performance-optimized, muscular build. And then there's Alienware's all-new Area-51m that we're looking at here. Although you wouldn't know it at first glance, the Area-51m is nearly a complete departure from traditional gaming laptop platforms, and one that's...
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Purchasing a powerful, good-looking gaming PC used to require a visit to a boutique PC maker or a custom-built system from a local computer shop. There was a time when you couldn’t simply walk into a Future Shop or CompUSA and pick up something roughly equivalent to a DIY gaming system. Nowadays though, PC gaming has gone mainstream, and all of the OEM major players offer ready-built systems that cater to those that may not have the desire to build their own. What if you don’t have the time or skills to build your own system, but want reputable, name-brand components and a PC that could easily be upgraded or modified down the road? That's where desktops like the HP OMEN Obelisk can...
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To succeed in business, as the saying goes, you need to do it first, do it cheaper, or do it better. Google's Stadia platform certainly is not the first game streaming platform to hit the market, with incumbents like NVIDIA with its GeForce Now service deployed for a while now. Pricing models are not yet disclosed either, though we would not expect Google to undercut the market per se. If Google is going to keep its head above water in this competitive but quickly expanding market, the company will need to bring platform improvements its competition cannot match. Sony's Playstation Now, Nvidia's GeForce Now, and several other platforms have been growing in game streaming space and justifying...
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