The OCZ Vertex 3 240GB was $500 ($2.08/GB) when it arrived last spring, while the Crucial m4 256GB appeared around the same time for $1.95 per gigabyte and Samsung’s 830 Series debuted later in the year for around $1.66 per gigabyte. By mid 2012, SSD prices fell through the floor, costing approximately half as much as last year. Granted, that’s still nowhere near as economical as standard hard drives, so companies have continued to offer affordable solutions in addition to their high-end series to drive sale volumes....

Atto Disk Benchmark’s read test pushed the Agility 4 to 421MB/s, which is in line with OCZ’s claimed rate of 420MB/s. The v4 reached 277MB/s, exceeding the 230MB/s cited by Crucial. The Agility 4 reached 410MB/s when working with 32K data and maintained it through the 128K test, and this is the exact figure OCZ says the drive is capable of when writing. The v4 reached 212MB/s, a tad higher than its supposed 190MB/s limit and much slower than the Agility 4....

As much as we admire developers’ efforts to make newly released games accessible to a majority of PC gamers, Crytek’s ambition to push the graphics envelope was confirmed last year when they claimed Crysis 2 would have “the best graphics you’ve ever seen”. Soon after we got word that Crysis 2 would be made graphically superior on the PC versus its console counterparts, which was great news as we worried that Crytek may not remain loyal to their PC fans....

Jeff Ross, the director of Days Gone who left Bend Studio in 2020 after two decades at the company, tweeted that the game has outsold Ghost of Tsushima. His post came after developer Sucker Punch announced that the Samurai adventure had sold over 8 million copies since launching in July 2020. In the time since Days Gone arrived on Steam in May 2021, it’s sold over a million more copies....

Dell CFO Tom Sweet said there’s always going to be some issues affecting the consumer PC chain but added that from their perspective, it’s now operating more like the historical norm. Indeed, it would seem the well-oiled machine is back on track. Heightened demand from the pandemic is easing up, putting less stress on manufacturers to turn out more products than usual. As inventory improves, component costs also decrease. IDC earlier this month forecast a dip in traditional PC and tablet shipments that likely will not recover until at least 2024....

Gotham Knights executive producer Fleur Marty recently confirmed via Discord that the game would be locked at 30fps@4K on the Xbox Series X/S and PS5. The title lacks the familiar performance mode that sacrifices some graphical fidelity/resolution for a higher framerate. The company says the reason for this decision is the “type of features” found in Gotham Knights, such as the fully untethered co-op option in the highly detailed world, which means it’s not as straightforward as lowering the resolution to increase the fps, apparently....

Besides the very substantial drop in DDR3 memory prices, a variety of supporting motherboards priced at or below the $200 mark have arrived to market. Processor pricing has not changed, nevertheless the Core i7 920 was always reasonably priced at $280, especially for the kind of performance throughput you get in exchange. Those looking to build a Core i7 system on a budget will no doubt choose the Core i7 920 as the next step up costs $570, and at more than twice the price the Core i7 950 only offers a slight performance advantage....

Epic filed a 91-page appeal to the US Ninth Circuit court of appeals this month, against last year’s decision that Apple was within its right to kick Fortnite off the iOS App Store, and that Apple’s behavior on the App Store isn’t monopolistic. Attorneys general of 34 US states and the District of Columbia issued a statement this week in support of Epic. States including Utah, Texas, Colorado, and Indiana assert that Apple monopolizes the distribution of software on iPhones and iPads, harming consumers....

While there was a lot of hype around Dying Light 2, it still had to contend with the fact that it would be launching three weeks before Elden Ring, meaning plenty of people opted to save their money for one of the most anticipated games of all time. Dying Light 2 arrived to mostly positive reviews from critics and buyers, but it certainly wasn’t universally loved, especially with its slew of bugs....

The documents, seen by Insider, show that Musk, 51, and Shivon Zilis, 36, filed a petition in April to change the twins’ names in order to “have their father’s last name and contain their mother’s last name as part of their middle name.” Zilis reportedly gave birth in Austin, Texas, in November 2021, weeks before Musk and singer Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, had their second child via a surrogate....

Parts of Russia are already available in Euro Truck Simulator 2, but the Heart of Russia DLC announced last March would have opened up more of the country, including the capital Moscow, to its many players. However, the situation changed drastically three months ago. “On the 24th of February 2022, our Heart of Russia team was some 6-8 weeks away from completing work on the highly anticipated new DLC,” SCS wrote in a post on its website....

When equipped with the HD 7970 GHz Edition, raising the Core i7-3770K’s clock rate 80% from 2.5GHz to 4.5GHz only produced a 10fps (15%) performance increase, suggesting that Core i7 and likely Core i5 owners needn’t worry about overclocking to get the most out of their graphics card in Far Cry 3, as the rewards are minimal. When testing with the AMD FX-8350, we saw nearly a 60% performance increase when jumping from 2....

The FBI’s Internet Crime Center (IC3) Public Service Announcement warns that the average amount victims lost to fake job listings since 2019 is around $3,000. Scammers often spoof official companies’ job listings, using the same logos, language, images, etc., altering only the contact information. They’ve also been known to use names of actual company employees to make the ads appear more authentic. It’s noted that the lack of strong security verification standards on one unnamed recruitment website allowed anyone to post a job on the site, including on the official pages of the company they were imitating....

It was back in May last year when Sony Interactive Entertainment’s president and CEO Jim Ryan announced a partnership with Discord that would see it integrated into the PlayStation ecosystem early in 2022. As promised, PlayStation users are now receiving basic support for the app. It started “gradually rolling out” to those in the US a few hours ago and will be making its way overseas soon—the feature has already arrived in the UK....

Looking at Cloud Gate first up, this is a test that already runs fairly well on ultraportables and can be CPU-limited at times. The i7-8550U manages to outperform the i7-7500U here by 23 percent, which suggests some of the additional CPU resources are getting utilized. As we move to more intensive tests such as Sky Diver and Time Spy, the benefits of the faster CPU slip away, and we’re left with the pure gains to GPU performance....

Valve has been in the software business for a long time, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it. In 2014, the PC gaming giant will be launching their first official piece of hardware: The decidedly odd, innovative Steam Controller. What will happen when a company steeped in software releases their first piece of hardware? No one—including the people making the controller—is quite sure. On Tuesday, I flew in to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to attend a brief Valve event dedicated to their new Steam Machines initiative....

Performance picks up a little bit in S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky. Although still 15% slower than the GeForce 9800 GT at 1680x1050 and around 17% compared to the Radeon HD 4770, Gainward’s GeForce GT 240 offered somewhat playable frame rates at this resolution and was 19% faster than the 9600 GT.

When testing Crysis 2 at 2560x1600, the GTX 670 was 13% slower than the HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 680, but it mustered an 8% lead over the HD 7950 and a 22% boost over the last-gen GTX 580. Nvidia’s new arrival rendered 37fps when running Dragon Age II at 2560x1600, 3% faster than the HD 7970 and a whopping 37% margin over the HD 7950. It was still about 8% slower than the GTX 680....

So not everyone can afford to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in PC gaming when there are other bills to be paid. You might also be a young kid getting into PC gaming and computing. That can be tough for some, most parents are going to be more interested in the idea of buying a console than a computer, which I feel is a mistake, but let’s not get into that here....

According to analytics firm Sensor Tower, Genshin Impact dwarfed its competition by raking in $567 million in Q1 2022 alone, with an active user count that grew by 44 percent year over year. It made its first billion within six months from launch. For comparison, it took Pokémon Go nine months to make $1 billion. While the revenue stream has slowed somewhat since launch, continued popularity has analysts forecasting Genshin Impact to average $2 billion per year for the foreseeable future....