For those not familiar with Games Done Quick, the organization hosts charity events in which some of the world’s top video game players compete - either against others, the clock, or with an unusual set of stipulations - to try and complete games as quickly as humanly possible. These events typically have a little something for everyone, no matter what your preferred genre of game is. I’m personally looking forward to watching runs of classics like Mega Man 2, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest, Bucky O’Hare and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist, among others....

With MSAAx8 enabled and PhysX set to normal, which offloads physics calculations to the CPU if you’re on an AMD card, while Nvidia’s can handle either GPU or CPU-powered PhysX so we ran the GeForce cards in both configurations. At 1680x1050, the GTX Titan using GPU-accelerated PhysX was the fastest graphics card tested at 96fps while the R9 290X trailed at 86fps, which was slightly faster than the GTX Titan using CPU-calculated PhysX....

From an aesthetics standpoint the case looks amazing, particularly the all black version, though we don’t mind the orange highlights on our review unit. Backing up the Dark Base Pro 900’s great looks is its excellent build quality – inside and out. No corners have been cut and there is no evidence of cost savings either. Starting at $200 for the Dark Base 900 or $250 for the Dark Base Pro 900, this is an expensive case....

Best Overall In any case what you get with the B360M Pro4 is a well laid out motherboard with all the features you could hope for at this price point, it also doesn’t hurt that the board looks great as well. The board packs a solid VRM with premium 45 amp chokes on a high density glass fabric PCB. Asrock advertises support for up to 95-watt processors so it shouldn’t have an issue getting the most out of the Core i7-8700 for example....

A tweet from Bethesda announcing the delays doesn’t go into any great detail as to why Starfield and Redfall have been postponed, beyond the usual excuse of requiring extra time to add polish to the games. “We’ve made the decision to delay the launches of Redfall and Starfield to the first half of 2023. The teams at Arkane Austin (Redfall) and Bethesda Game Studios (Starfield) have incredible ambitions for their games, and we want to ensure that you receive the best, most polished versions of them,” it reads....

For measuring frame rates we relied on Fraps where we recorded a minute of gameplay from the first level. The Intel Core i5 750 processor was overclocked to 3.8GHz in an attempt to remove any CPU bottlenecks that could influence high-end graphics cards scores. We will be looking for a minimum of 60fps for stutter-free gameplay.

Like CS:GO, Overwatch is another game that’s primarily CPU bound at 720p. However, unlike CS:GO, Overwatch does a good job of utilizing the Ryzen CPUs. As a result, the 2200G and 2400G look very solid and this time are comparable to not only the RX 550 and GT 1030 but also the HD 7950 and R7 370. Oddly, these AMD GPUs appear to be running into some kind of bottleneck not faced by the GeForce competition....

The Bulldozer concept is based on a 2-core design that shares latency-tolerant functionality, smoothes bursty/inefficient usage and provides dynamic resource allocation between threads. Each core has its own 16KB L1 cache with a 1MB L2 cache, while the L3 cache is shared. The other units are now effectively shared between two cores and include: Fetch, Decode, Floating-point pipelines, and the L2 cache. This design allows two Cores to use a larger, higher-performance function unit (ex: floating-point unit) as they need it with less total die area than having separate, smaller function units for each Core....

The GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 5770 also provided smooth gameplay for the most part. Moments of frame rate lag were noticeable using these high quality settings with the Radeon HD 5750 and the 5 graphics cards listed below it. Overall the result is positive for gamers on a budget as it means most will be able to enjoy Bulletstorm in all of its visual glory at 1680x1050.

The Bundle for Ukraine launched earlier this month, offering up nearly 600 video games as well as hundreds of analog tabletop RPGs and dozens of asset packs, comics, zines, books and soundtracks. The bundle started at just $10 although itch.io encouraged shoppers to pay a bit more if they could as proceeds from the sale would be split between two charities assisting those in Ukraine. Bundle standouts included Skatebird, A Short Hike, Celeste and Superhot....

In short, devs are constantly coming up with new ways to detect and block those who don’t play by the rules; the cheaters respond with new tactics to gain the upper hand. Rinse and repeat. Call of Duty’s anti-cheat team – Ricochet – employs a variety of mitigations against cheaters. These are usually designed to keep cheaters in the game for longer so they can better analyze their tactics and strengths while simultaneously making their presence less impactful to legitimate players....

When Dell unveiled the Precision 7670 workstation laptop in April, some noticed that the company used it to introduce a new kind of RAM. RAM has used DIMM and SO-DIMM connectors for decades, and Dell might convince the industry to transition to CAMM. Because Dell patented CAMM, worries spread that it would remain proprietary and that laptops using CAMM could only use RAM upgrades purchased from Dell. However, the company soon told PCWorld it intends to license CAMM out with help from the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC)....

What’s interesting to note about this side-by-side game comparison is that in the more modern and well put together titles, Ryzen is extremely competitive. In fact, the only real head scratchers here are Hitman, Dawn of War III and Total War Warhammer. In many other games such as Dirt 4, Doom, Sniper Elite 4, Battlefield 1, Rise of the Tomb Raider, The Division, Prey, Overwatch and Resident Evil 7 we found Ryzen to be extremely competitive....

Although the design appears very simple, it’s far from boring. The matte paint job gives it a very stealthy look that will appeal to those after a more subtle design, while the case window that comes with all the models (white, black and green) could be outfitted with aftermarket lighting for a bolder look. The front bezel is both slick as well as intentionally crude, as the I/O panel has been left exposed at the top of the case and Corsair has used pop rivets as part of the design....

Follow up: CPU and GPU Stock Update June 2021, July 2021, August 2021, September 2021, October 2021, November 2021, December 2021, January 2022, February 2022, March 2022, April 2022, May 2022, June 2022 GPU Market Update The biggest question on everyone’s mind is, of course, the graphics card market so we’ll start there first. Unfortunately the news is not good: there has been no improvement to the availability nor pricing of graphics cards on a global scale, and in fact things have gotten worse....

The C300 was somewhat of a milestone for the consumer SSD market, being the only flash drive available with SATA 6Gb/s support for quite some time. Whereas most SSD makers opted for the SandForce SF-1200 controller with a peak read rate of 285MB/s, the C300 could hit speeds of 355MB/s courtesy of its Marvell “Van Gogh” 88SS9174 chip. On top of excelling at sequential throughput, the C300 provided strong random performance when working with files of all sizes, making it a well-rounded contender....

Tablet turnover rates are pretty low due to their very nature. People simply aren’t replacing tablets as often as they do smartphones, a fact that doesn’t bode well for hardware makers. It’s not all doom and gloom, however, as there are still plenty of potential buyers in the wild. In addition to those that have sat on the sidelines during the maturation process of the modern tablet, some early adopters will want to replace their tired tablets with something shiny and new....

Before we jump to the mixed GPU results let’s just focus on some single GPU numbers to get our bearings first. It’s interesting to note that the GTX 970 and GTX 980 delivered virtually the same performance and never were a great deal slower than the GTX 980 Ti, especially in the heavy and medium tests. This meant that although the GTX 970 wasn’t a great deal slower than the R9 390, the GTX 980 looked weak compared to the 390X....

Despite the loss, Netflix maintains a significant lead over the competition with around 222 million paying customers on the books. The company expects to shed a couple million more subs in the current quarter but will still be miles ahead of everyone else. At the end of the last quarter, for example, global HBO Max and HBO subscribers totaled 76.8 million. Disney+ now has 137.7 million subscribers globally, an increase of 33 percent year over year....

Analytics platform SteamDB reveals that 281,183 people have now placed Elden Ring on their wishlist, using the button on the game’s Steam page. It’s only recently that the Hidetaka Miyazaki-directed game moved up to number one—Dying Light 2 had been the most-wishlisted title for the entirety of last year. Elden Ring, which will feature world-building contributions from Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, has certainly attracted plenty of hype since its announcement....