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Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann started talking about the cloud version of the game along with mouse and keyboard support around eight and a half minutes in. Neumann said it’s a platform-level feature, so mouse and keyboard on the cloud will work with more than just Flight Simulator. Xbox Cloud Gaming already supports touch controls for some games because not everyone using a mobile device has a controller (Microsoft doesn’t limit controller support to Xbox controllers)....

Thus the key selling point to the Mi 6 is its hardware. At just over $400, you’re netting yourself a Snapdragon 835, not some lesser-tier mid-range chip. The 835 is the fastest SoC on the market (that’s available to Android OEMs), and provides around 30 percent better performance than the Snapdragon 821. It’s more efficient than before, and highly capable for today’s smartphone applications. The end result, when paired with a whopping 6GB of RAM and reasonable NAND performance, is a smartphone that’s extremely snappy to use....

The 17th annual Data Breach Report from the Identity Theft Resource Council (ITRC), a nationally recognized nonprofit organization established to support victims of identity crime, shows that there were 1,802 data compromises in the US last year, just 60 short of the record 1,862 seen in 2021. It seems that 2022 could have seen even more data breach incidents were it not for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which distracted Russian-based hackers, and volatility in the cryptocurrency market....

There are plenty of free alternatives out there but finding one with the perfect combination of features and ease of use can be an exercise in trial and error. Below we’ve rounded out what we believe are the best free image editors for Windows, throwing in a very solid cloud-based option as well for good measure. Whether it’s photo retouching, image editing, or creating new images from scratch that you’re after, there’s bound to be something here that’s right for your needs without spending a dime....

We’ve included five of what seem like the most approachable ways for resetting or recovering your Windows password along with abridged instructions on how to execute them and some alternatives toward the end. Before moving on, if you log into Windows with an online Microsoft account (offered as the default during setup since Windows 8), you can likely just reset it online at Microsoft’s site using another device with Internet....

The GTX 780 wasn’t much faster than the 1050 Ti in many of the games tested, yet it increased total system consumption by almost 140%. For those running a 780, you will require a 500 watt power supply to avoid running into any problems. In the 22 games we tested, the GTX 780 was on average 23% faster than the GTX 1050 Ti but 15% slower than the RX 470 and GTX 970....

One of the first such changes was my shift in focus from console games to PC gaming. A few months after getting my PC, I added a Diamond Monster II 3D graphics card powered by the 3Dfx Voodoo 2 chipset. It was an absolute screamer and took my gaming experience to a whole new level. We know how the story played out for 3Dfx, the graphics company that dominated the nascent 3D graphics industry for a few years in the late 90s....

We are already seeing smartphones, tablets and hybrids chip away at the once-thriving PC business. Meanwhile, smartwatches and augmented reality visors are signaling an emerging trend of wearable computing that could start gaining some ground in the coming year. With new forms of mobile devices that we haven’t even thought of yet likely on the horizon many have ventured to say that the days of the desktop PC are numbered....

Those protests have already ended, but they may have had a positive impact on Activision Blizzard’s hiring and employee compensation policies. Activision Blizzard has just converted a whopping 1,100 of its part-time employees to full-time workers, which was one of the major protest demands. This change will give impacted workers additional benefits, including access to bonuses and other perks of full-time labor. Activision Blizzard says it already made a similar move last year when it converted 500 “temp and contract roles” to full-time positions company-wide....

However, when increasing the DDR3 memory frequency to 1866MHz on the A8-3850 platform the memory throughput improved significantly. Read bandwidth increased by 23% while write bandwidth saw a massive 55% improvement. The AMD A8-3850 might have twice as much L2 cache as the Athlon II X4 640, but it’s no faster. In fact, it was the slowest processor tested when running the AIDA64 L2 Cache performance test – regardless of RAM speeds....

Given its modest consumption figures, we weren’t surprised to see that the HD 7970 remains relatively cool when gaming with temperatures in the same realm as the HD 6870 and GTX 570. It was also quieter than its upper-end peers when testing under heavy load – a major plus in our book.

To get a fuller picture, it’s increasingly apparent that you need to factor in a card’s frame latency, which looks at how quickly each frame is delivered. Regardless of how many frames a graphics card produces on average in 60 seconds, if it can’t deliver them all at roughly the same speed, you might see more brief jittery points with one GPU over another – something we’ve witnessed but didn’t fully understand....

As was the case with the Battlefield games, we see that the Nano is able to average 35fps at 4K when testing with Thief. Again this meant that the Nano was 5% slower than the Fury though it was able to beat the GTX 980 Ti by a slim margin, making it 21% faster than the R9 390X and GTX 980. When testing with Watch Dogs we saw another mid-30s frame rate at 4K from the R9 Nano which was 8% slower than the Fury, a surprising 3% slower than the GTX 980 and a whopping 21% slower than the GTX 980 Ti....

Ashes of the Singularity is a red team favorite thanks to its heavy use of Async Compute when running on the DX12 API. As you can see, DX11 isn’t particularly favorable, though the RX 480 still does quite well with an average of 49fps. However, using the same quality settings under DX12 boosts performance to 57fps, making the RX 480 just 2fps slower than the GTX 980. At 1440p the RX 480 matches the GTX 980 when using DirectX 12 while outpacing the GTX 970 by 28% and the GTX 960 by 79%....

At this point it’s pretty well established that the Ryzen 5 1600 (non-X) provides a value that is virtually unchallenged among enthusiasts processors. However, we’ve yet to determine the next best option for those who can’t afford to spend $220 on AMD’s six-core champion. For $170, the quad-core 1400 may very well be the next logical choice behind the 1600, though it’s not the next Ryzen chip in line by price....

Therefore, most opted for the $200 Ryzen 5 3600, which is what we widely recommended in the past year as the best value CPU, and that’s the part we’ll be comparing the 5600X to today. Though we’re sure AMD would have preferred we use the 3600X or 3600XT, we’ll stick to the more popular vanilla 3600. As a side note, the rumor mill has been churning out reports of a Ryzen 5 5600, a non-X version which might arrive at around $220, just 10% more than the beloved 3600....

Of course, we also have the Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X on hand, and you’ll see reviews on those parts over the next few days. We feel that these new AMD processors offer a significant leap forward that they each deserved their own dedicated review. AMD is justifying the price bump across the series with what they’re claiming to be dramatically improved performance, especially when it comes to gaming....

Before we get to the testing and benchmark results, here’s a quick refresher covering the design and specs… There are two models in the WX series, where the ‘W’ signifies that this is a workstation series. The workstation 2990WX and 2970WX models are configured very differently to the 2950X and 2920X processors. Whereas the 12 and 16-core processors pack two Zeppelin dies, the 24-core and 32-core models feature four. Typically such a configuration would have 4 dual-channel memory controllers for 8-channels, this however isn’t possible on the X399 platform, limiting these core heavy parts to quad-channel memory....

There will be a presentation called “Next-Generation Image Upscaling for Games” from AMD on March 23 as part of GDC 2022. The description of the hour-long talk only says AMD will present some results from its research in image upscaling, without mentioning any specific technologies. The company’s current image upscaling method - FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) - is already widely used in PC games. Though AMD’s calendar doesn’t mention it by name, it’s safe to expect the presentation to cover it....

Default Calibration Poor white balance shifts all colors towards the red area of the spectrum, leading to a weak saturation average of 4.16. Some colors do exceed the sRGB spectrum with their peak levels - greens and reds in particular - though blues aren’t quite as saturated. Still, sRGB coverage reaches 99.89%, albeit with a dE average of just 4.64 in our intensive ColorChecker test. Considering these results, it’s surprising AOC has opted to use the ‘warm’ color temperature mode by default, as opposed to the included sRGB mode....