Ben Funk
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Recent posts
About two years ago, NVIDIA started talking about a shader rendering method that applied varying levels of quality to different objects in the game world. That method was called Variable Rate Shading, or VRS. When applied skillfully and artfully in different areas of a scene that are less prominent in the gamer's...
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Official support for Windows 7 might have ended in January of this year, but software support for Microsoft's older operating system hasn't completely dried up yet. Google still fields the world's most popular web browser, Chrome, on the platform. Originally, that was due to change in July of 2021, but the search...
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If you're playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch and sharing the system (and a single island) among family members, we're sure that this story will be a familiar one. There's a rivalry between siblings or across generations as parents and kids get out of bed early each morning and start shaking...
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Smart watches are a great gift idea, especially for those in our lives who love tracking their workouts and checking out notifications from their phones without picking up the ol' glass slab. Garmin makes a pretty wide array of smart watches, and right now those devices have some killer deals going on Amazon. Let's...
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There's something fun about looking at a physical video game collection. That's especially true with retro games for systems like the original Nintendo Entertainment System, when cartridges came in boxes and those boxes were wide enough that the spine can show off some fun concept art. For the collector, it's fun to...
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Intel's 10-nanometer Tiger Lake processors have one of the fastest CPU architectures available in Windows notebooks today. That's not to say they've got the fastest overall CPUs, though. There are competing mobile processors available with more cores and support for additional threads that are better suited for complex, multi-threaded tasks....
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The smartphone upgrade cycle never ends for any manufacturer, and Samsung is no exception to that rule. The world's biggest smartphone maker seems to be pushing up its release cadence in an effort to combat slumping sales and an onslaught of new phones from Apple. We've already heard that the Galaxy S21 series might...
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It seems like everybody on the planet is clamoring to build a new gaming PC, and that has left many components in very short supply. That cavalcade of hardware that nobody can get their hands on started in mid-September with the GeForce RTX 30 series, based on NVIDIA's Ampere GPU technology. One just has to look at...
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Everyone loves Animal Crossing's Isabelle. From her time as administrative assistant to the mayor (that's you!) in New Leaf on the 3DS, to the Resident Services coordinator in Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch, she's become a fan favorite with a devoted following. Maybe that's why she's arguably the...
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The Graphics Wars of 2020 continue to heat up. We already know most of the players on the field from both AMD and NVIDIA, but not all of the various models have been released into the wild yet. AMD talked a really big game when it announced the Big Navi family of Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards, which included the RX...
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Tablet PCs running Google's Android mobile OS have largely been relegated to the budget sector. For the most part, options are limited to Amazon's Fire HD series these days, with slower budget SoCs and a handful of small tablets with even slower processors. Those systems without exception are stuck on older versions of Android, and Amazon's...
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Thanks to COVID-19 and students doing their schoolwork from home, there might be some contention for the family PC, when all they really need is a Chromebook and internet access. The good news is that while it's not Black Friday yet, it's definitely November, which is means a huge season of deals is now under way...
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NVIDIA's so-called "BFGPU," the GeForce RTX 3090 has been in short supply since its release last month. The audience for the world's fastest graphics card might be a little limited thanks to its $1,500 MSRP, but that hasn't stopped them from fetching far more than that on eBay. One element that was missing at launch...
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On the desktop, AMD's Ryzen 5000 family is quite remarkable. These CPUs thump anything available from Intel in the single-threaded performance department. Not only that, they also bring the multi-threaded hurt on loads that can handle it. All around, they have amazing performance at attractive prices. The only thing...
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Happy N7 day, Mass Effect fans! November 7 has been something of an unofficial holiday for BioWare fans over the years, as news of a new game in the enormous hit sci-fi role playing series has traditionally dropped on this date. Today, BioWare announced that it has heard its fans' cries and has been working on a...
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Machine learning is everywhere. Voice and handwriting recognition, medical diagnoses, digital assistants (like the Google Assistant or Siri) and self driving cars are just a scratch in the surface of all the different means and methods by which machines infer, learn, grow and seemingly think on their own. NVIDIA is incredibly invested in machine...
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After a relatively quiet first year of existence, it seems like you can barely swing a cat without running into a new operating system distribution for the Raspberry Pi 4. Raspbian Buster has been around since the beginning, but last weekend Canonical announced a version of Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla desktop for the...
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Back in 2005, Microsoft teamed up with ATi, now part of AMD, for the graphics processor in the Xbox 360. In the 15 years since, the two companies have cozied up to form a console alliance for the ages. That's a relationship, Microsoft says, that affords it a closer alignment with AMD's RDNA 2 architecture than its...
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This week might have included the launch of the GeForce RTX 3070, but the talk of the internet has been AMD's big unveiling of its RDNA 2 graphics architecture and the Radeon RX 6000 series of graphics cards, aka Big Navi. The Red Team claims to have undercut NVIDIA's Ampere cards at a couple of price points and meet...
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There is no shortage of ways to make some quick bank in Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch. In fact, there are so many different ways, it starts to beg the question, "What do we do with all these bells?" The game has an incredible library of collectible items, but some of the most rare items only...
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The war of the Watch Dogs series has always been fought in two parts -- physically with weapons and by proxy in the online space. In the original, which took place in Chicago, hacker Aiden Pearce, aided by the DedSec crew, hacks just about any device in his vicinity on his quest to make up for the loss of his niece...
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Playing the Stalk Market in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is never a sure thing. Some weeks, you buy as high as 120 bells a piece from Daisy, only to sell them to the Nook Boys on Saturday afternoon for a measly 60 bells a pop. Other weeks, players can make serious bank not just by selling at high prices, but by...
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