Zak Killian
Recent posts
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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AMD's stacked 3D V-cache memory technology has been a big hit for PC gamers that are looking for the best performance out of their processors. By stacking on an extra 64MB of L3 cache, AMD is able to drastically reduce how often the CPU...
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Micron just put out a press release crowing about its latest achievement: 8-high HBM3 Gen2 memory stacks with up to 24GB of capacity and a 50% improvement in per-pin transfer rate over extant HBM3. That raises the data rate to 9.2 Gbps...
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Remember the GeForce GTX 280? The "GT200" GPU was a gigantic beast that maxed out the limits of the "Tesla" design it was based on. It boasted 32 ROPs and something almost unseen in graphics cards before or since: a 512-bit GDDR memory...
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Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is one of a small handful of games that was originally developed exclusively for the PlayStation 5. Like Returnal, the game has found its way to the PC, and as you'd expect of a game targeting current-generation...
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