We expect 2011 to be another great year for gamers, with most of 2010’s delayed titles finally hitting store shelves and many other highly anticipated ones making their debut. To help you keep track of this year’s upcoming releases we’ve put together a list with nearly 30 titles, spanning a variety of genres, alongside their respective trailers and relevant information. Games are listed by quarter and alphabetically within each period to make them easier to browse....

Motorola is hoping for a hat trick this year with the release of the third-generation Moto G. This new model isn’t a huge upgrade on last year’s Moto G, with Motorola sticking to incremental updates to some aspects of the hardware. However, considering the Moto G is still being sold at the same $180 price point as its predecessors, any hardware upgrades are much appreciated. One of the biggest updates to the Moto G in this year’s variant address a significant issue with last year’s model....

From the above battery results, the Moto Z2 Play isn’t particularly amazing. It performs well in mostly SoC-limited workloads like PCMark and Basemark Web, because the S626 is slower and consumers less power than the S835 in flagships like the OnePlus 5 and Xiaomi Mi 6. However when moving to web browsing tests, and any situation where the modem has to be utilized, the Moto Z2 Play falls back into the middle of the pack....

Razer fans may recognize that the Mamba is similar in style to their popular DeathAdder wired mouse. The unit is solid black with a smooth rubber surface on top and is accented by shiny hard plastic around the edges. The bottom corners of each side feature a rubber surface for improved grip, something that the Imperator could have benefited from. Buttons include the standard left and right click, a clickable scroll wheel, two thumb buttons on the left side and two additional buttons just beside the left mouse click button....

Disney didn’t reveal too many details about its ad-supported tier that’s set to arrive on its streaming service later this year. The company never announced any pricing, but it will presumably offer a cheaper alternative to its $7.99 per month / $79.99 per year up-front cost; much like the Disney-owned Hulu, whose $12.99 per month subscription is cut almost in half to $6.99 if you can stand the advertisements and don’t mind missing out on 4K....

Most associate such devices with convenience but that’s just one of many applications that home automation affords. As products like connected thermostats and lighting systems have successfully demonstrated, energy management can be just as, if not more, important. As you’ve no doubt seen when browsing the aisles of stores like Best Buy or Fry’s, connected appliances often carry a price premium, but as with many emerging technologies and trends it may not be immediately clear if it’ll be worth the extra investment....

Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus recently purchased a Gigabyte motherboard from Newegg and opted for expedited shipping as he needed it quickly for a content piece. By the time it arrived, however, he had already sourced a different board and no longer needed the unit from Newegg so it was returned. Something Burke didn’t notice when he placed the initial order was the fact it was an open box item, meaning it had been returned by someone else and deemed resellable by Newegg....

Nokia is much older than most people know, but it was during the last few decades that the company became known for iconic mobile devices with bold design and technology. These ranged from a simple brick-like concept to unorthodox, sophisticated, and downright ridiculous form factors. The Finnish giant took part in shaping the history of telecommunications and mobile phones, which allowed it to grow into a global household name, but eventually became calcified by its own DNA and was forced to make a series of choices that brought it to its knees....

Nokia has included a few of its own applications on the Lumia 800, including Nokia Drive for turn-by-turn navigation and Nokia Maps, which is destined to replace Bing maps in the future. Other applications that should be mentioned include the Office Mobile suite that ties in with Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Office 365 services. Nokia even includes a Contacts Transfer app to help users get their contacts from their old phone to their new phone using Bluetooth....

Enter the Lumia 925, Nokia’s answer to the complaints. It ditches the thick polycarbonate shell, hefty slab of glass and space-consuming LCD display for a mostly aluminum body with an AMOLED screen. In the process of changing a few components and materials, the Lumia flagship has shed some weight, dropping to 139 grams and 8.5mm thick (from 185g/10.7mm), giving it an all new breath of life. Aside from the size, a few other aspects of the phone have been optimized, including a some cool software tweaks by Nokia, and revamped camera firmware that should take better advantage of the 8....

Nothing further points out that some apps, including Netflix and YouTube, might not function properly with Nothing OS 1.5. “The OS can hinder the use of the phone in ways we can’t predict,” the company added. The beta program will run until June 30. After that, the phone is yours to keep and you can upgrade to the final version of the operating system. There is a 14-day return period but after that, you’re stuck with the device with no additional warranty coverage....

According to VideoCardz’s Chinese sources, the RTX 3050 comes with Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate algorithm, which drops its hash rate from 20 megahashes per second to 12.5 MH/s, consuming only 75 watts. Twitter user @wxnod posted similar results in a separate analysis, showing 13.66 MH/s at 57w. Those numbers are well below reported hash rates of similar cards like the GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 570. VideoCardz calculates that it could take 500 days for a 3050 to break even at its $250 MSRP....

The GeForce GTS 450 features 32 TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), again 43% less than the GeForce GTX 460 and half than the older GeForce GTX 260. The 16 ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines) on the GTS 450 are 33% less than the 768MB version of the GTX 460 and 50% less than the 1GB version. The GTS 450’s clock speed for fixed function units is 783MHz, while the CUDA cores operate at a more aggressive 1566MHz....

The GTX 650 Ti was impressive enough in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, providing a very playable 64fps at 1680x1050, making it 36% faster than the HD 7770, 10% slower than the HD 6870, 3% slower than the GTX 560 Ti and 26% slower than the GTX 660. The GeForce GTX 650 Ti averaged 44fps in Max Payne 3 at 1680x1050 making it 2% slower than the old Radeon HD 6870 and 4% slower than the GTX 560 Ti....

All graphics cards have been tested with core and memory clock speeds set to the AMD and Nvidia specifications. Test System Specs Intel Core i7-5960X (3.0GHz) x4 4GB Kingston Predator DDR4-2400 (CAS 12-13-13-24) Asrock X99 Extreme6 (Intel X99) Silverstone Strider Series (700w) Crucial MX200 1TB (SATA 6Gb/s) Nvidia GeForce Titan X (12288MB) Gainward GFeForce GTX 980 (4096MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB) Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB) Palit GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB) AMD Radeon R9 295X2 (2x 4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon R9 290X (4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon R9 290 (4096MB) Microsoft Windows 8....

The way AMD promoted and implemented Resizable BAR on Radeon 6000 GPUs, it required to be paired with a Ryzen 5000 series CPU and newer 500 series motherboard. AMD made it sound as if this was a new optimization they had developed and would be exclusive to their products, but that’s not the case. The claim was your AMD CPU/GPU combo could produce a performance uplift of 10% or greater in a number of games with SAM enabled, creating some buzz, but it was short lived after all....

Nvidia’s AI research arm has been working on inverse rendering and developed a Neural Radiance Field it calls Instant NeRF because it can render the 3D scene up to 1,000-times faster than other NeRF techniques. The AI model only needs a few seconds to train on a few dozen stills taken from multiple angles and then just tens of milliseconds more to render a 3D view of the scene. Since the process is the opposite of taking a Polaroid — that is to say, instantly turning a 3D scene into a 2D image — Nvidia recreated a photo of Andy Warhol using a Polaroid....

IDC estimates Meta sold between 5.3 million and 6.8 million VR devices in 2021. Firm figures won’t be known until fourth quarter data is finalized and even then, Meta doesn’t regularly disclose Oculus sales data so we may never know for certain. Even in that range, it’d still be better than the 3.5 million units it is believed the company sold in 2020. Both Jefferies and KeyBanc Capital reported downloads of the Oculus app were up over the holiday week, with Jefferies’ Brent Thill noting that daily active users on Christmas Day spiked 90 percent compared to the same period in 2020....

The program copy test is comprised of many small non-compressed files (6104 files totaling 2.75GB). As you can see, the Vertex 3 prefers uncompressed data, becoming 24% faster when compared to the 6GB ISO test. This made OCZ’s new drive 77% faster than the RealSSD C300 256GB and 50% faster than the new Intel SSD 320 Series 300GB. The game copy evaluation is a mixture of small and large, compressed and non-compressed files....

Oppo today unveiled its latest flagship Android phones, the Find X5 and the Find X5 Pro. After numerous leaks and official teasers, it was no longer a secret that this is essentially an incremental improvement on the Find X3 Pro concept, but that may actually be a good thing. The company wants a slice of the premium Android phone market, and iterating on a good recipe is what Samsung did right up to the Galaxy S22, which is selling like hotcakes....