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One of the highlights of the 2022 PC Gaming Show was Half-Life Alyx: Levitation, the upcoming mod campaign for Valve’s 2020 VR FPS. The free add-on first teaser emerged last year and a short gameplay trailer appeared in April. On Sunday the developers showed a few minutes of action in their first uninterrupted gameplay reel. The new footage shows a lengthy shootout in an all-new level where the main game’s heroine, Alyx Vance, fights familiar Half-Life enemies like Combine soldiers and a Strider....

The listing for Colorful’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti BattleAx Deluxe shows it features the same 295 sq. mm AD104 GPU that was to power the RTX 4080 12GB. Other matching specs include the 12GB of DDR6X memory clocked at 21 Gbps, 192-bit memory bus, and 504 GB/s of bandwidth. Elsewhere, the card is listed with a base clock of 2,310 MHz. We know the GPU can boost to 2,610 MHz, but there’s no mention of a factory overclock on the page....

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is another CPU demanding title and at 720p the eighth-gen Core series pushed over 180fps at all times. This is another older DX11 title that just doesn’t play well with Ryzen. Here the overclocked R5 1600 was 21% slower than the 8400 and that’s obviously a huge margin. The massive deficit can also be seen even at 1080p as the overclocked R5 1600 was still 20% slower than the Core i5-8400 when comparing the minimum result....

The thought of taking my Steam games to the living room was mighty tempting, but ultimately I never bothered because of the impracticality of it all. Since then I’ve mostly played games such as F1 2015 using a Logitech G920 wheel and the occasional controller-friendly game. While I have longed to play first person shooters on the big screen, getting the keyboard and mouse setup in a way that makes them usable is no easy task....

The baiting attack is a more elaborate version of the traditional email phishing version in which millions of people receive messages with links to supposedly free software, often one of Microsoft’s suite of programs, but they are actually downloading malware onto their device. While mailing an engraved USB stick inside fake Office Professional Plus packaging to random people might cost a lot more than email phishing, recipients are more likely to be fooled into thinking it’s the real deal, convinced they were sent the $439 item by mistake....

As you’ve probably come to expect from our performance reviews, we’ll leave you to judge the gameplay and concentrate on how the game runs on a variety of hardware instead. Still relevant to our discussion however is the absence of DirectX 11 support at launch. As PC gamers ourselves, we can’t help feeling a bit disappointed by Crytek’s exclusive use of DirectX 9 rendering, especially considering that the original game did support DX10....

The Crysis photo modes are the work of Frans “Otis_Inf” Bouma, who also makes the Universal Unreal Unlocker mod that adds a photo mode to many Unreal Engine 4 games. The Crysis mods are very popular, but not with developer Crytek, whose PR manager Adam Grinsell issued Bouma a takedown request. The letter, tweeted by Bouma, states that Crysis does not allow mods under the terms of its End User License Agreement (EULA)....

Today’s game deal brings the cost of Cyberpunk 2077 down to just $4.99. It’s available on Xbox One, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 and at this price, you really can’t go wrong. Cyberpunk 2077 arrived in December 2020 with a multitude of technical issues in tow. Developer CD Projekt Red spent the next several months addressing the problems. With the latest patch, version 1.52, many of the early issues have now been ironed out....

In terms of specs, it’s a 49-inch monitor with a 5120 x 1440 resolution, giving it a 32:9 aspect ratio. Now you might be wondering, why would someone want a monitor that’s so wide? The answer is simple: this display is equivalent to two 27-inch 1440p displays side by side without a bezel in-between. So if you were planning to run with a dual-screen 1440p setup, something like the U4919DW might be a better choice....

Mercury Research reports (via Tom’s Hardware) that last quarter’s desktop CPU shipments saw their biggest year-on-year decline since the group started keeping records in 1994. One researcher suspects this is the largest decline since 1984. The report suggests reduced OEM inventory and falling demand are the primary driving factors. As the pandemic economy appears to be ending, that declining demand has manifested in bad reports in various areas. Intel lost half a billion dollars amid a 22 percent year-over-year revenue decline....

In Jon Peddie’s 2022 GPU market summary, Q3 shows the lowest desktop graphics card sales total since at least 2005. Like many other products, GPUs received a sales bump during 2020 and 2021 from remote-working customers, but the hangover looks especially hard for this market. Intel, AMD, and Nvidia combined shipped just under 6.9 million discrete desktop graphics cards in Q3 2022, a 47 percent year-over-year drop. For comparison, the 2008 economic collapse caused a similar 46 percent decline from Q4 2007 (an all-time market high coinciding with the launch of Nvidia’s legendary 8800 GT) to Q4 2008....

As we have come to expect when testing real-world gaming performance on the exact same platform, there is little to no difference between the various motherboards, and here the DFI LANParty boards prove to be every bit as good as the MSI and Asus X58 competition.

For the final quarter of its 2022 fiscal year, Disney+ added 12 million new subscribers, pushing its total number of subs up to 164.2 million. The company will likely be pleased with the size of that increase, given it was only expected to add 9.5 million new subscribers. Disney+ still has a long way to go before reaching Netflix and its 223.09 million subs, but the company boasts a higher total number of subscriptions than its rival when counting all three Disney streaming services....

The only processors to really drop off in terms of performance were the AMD FX-4320, 6350, 8320E and Athlon X4 860K. The Pentium G3258 and G4400 both sustained over 90fps, while the Core i3 processors were good for 100fps+. For those with extreme GPU setups trying to achieve the highest frame rate possible, it will pay to overclock that Core i7 processor as high as possible as there will be more performance to be had....

In a way this works out to be a good guide for gamers who haven’t upgraded GPUs in several generations or as a second-hand GPU guide for Doom Eternal as we’ve tested a number of GeForce 600, 700, 900 and 10 series products, as well as Radeon HD 7000, 200, 300 and 400 series GPUs. For the sake of context we’ve also added some newer GeForce 1650 series GPUs and Radeon RX 5500 results....

Update (April 19): Following reports (including ours) that DuckDuckGo was removing certain pirate sites from its search results, CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg denied such claims this week, as seen in the tweet below. It should be noted, however, that the site was indeed not listing many of the mentioned sites properly, and this was not limited to the “site: operator,” even if the removal was not intentional. As noted by TorrentFreak, there was a confirmed removal of a group of sites, which were later identified to being delisted from Bing....

After reinstalling Windows we left the Liva running for a week without incident. Then out of interest I flicked the power off at the wall while the system was just sitting at the Windows desktop. It turned back on, booted and this time Windows setup ran for more than 30 minutes though it eventually loaded as expected (a few default desktop icons were restored). Roughly another 30 minutes later I pulled the plug one more time and rebooted the system (again, while the Liva was just sitting at the Windows desktop with no programs open)....

In an exclusive report, EVGA told Gamers Nexus that it won’t sell Nvidia graphics cards after the RTX 30 series. The company will keep supporting current customers’ warranties but expects to sell through its remaining inventory by the end of 2022. A primary reason for the falling out is that Nvidia’s Founders Edition 30 series GPUs have undercut EVGA’s variants of those cards, especially as Nvidia recently made significant price cuts to clear stock....

At 1366x768, Evolve is playable using a range of GPUs. The GTX 750 Ti averaged 54fps while the R7 260X was good for 52fps and it didn’t take much to break 60fps with the R9 270 averaging 61fps and the GTX 660 Ti offering 64fps.

So you rush to the internet to share your excitement of hitting the silicon jackpot, and within a few posts, somebody proclaims that you’ve got yourself “a binned chip”. Now, if you’re picturing an engineer rummaging about in a trash can and proudly pulling out a golden ticket, then you really need to read this explainer! Welcome to the magical world of processor fabrication and chip binning. TL;DR: What is chip binning?...