Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Some people have claimed that AI is a fad, or a flash in the pan. It's easy to understand the perspective; the hype around the explosion of generative AI feels similar to the hype around previous fads, like 3D TVs or the metaverse. AI isn't a fad, though. It is already transforming every single part of the tech...
Read more...
Before we get into today's news, we should set the stage: Pocketpair is a small Japanese game developer with a few minor successes under its belt. Most people, particularly outside of Japan, have probably never heard of any of Pocketpair's previous games, like Unity-engine survival-craft title Craftopia or the rather...
Read more...
It's only really in the last decade that small form factor builds have come into their own. Time was that building a small PC meant using meager hardware and forgoing fancy expansion cards. Now that everything is integrated onto the motherboard or the CPU package itself, and thanks to the proliferation of compact...
Read more...
When DOOM came out in 1993, Id Software had all kinds of companies coming around asking to license the engine to use it in various types of software for which it was completely unsuited. John Carmack said that vendors of CAD programs and home designers wanted to make use of his amazingly-performant 3D engine, but...
Read more...
Things have been rough in the AAA gaming space over the last few years, and arguably the last decade. There's been a lot of turnover, as a good number of legendary studios have closed their doors and many others were shuttered before they even got a chance to shine. A high rate of turnover combined with a failure to...
Read more...
Maingear ZERO Legendary Boost Gaming PC: As Configured - $3,389 @ Maingear The culmination of over a decade of design, Maingear's ZERO moves critical connectors to the back of the motherboard, giving it the cleanest looks of any computer we've reviewed to date. Beautiful Build With Back-Side Connectors Unconventional...
Read more...
Intel has said very little yet about its Lunar Lake processors, but they are definitely real and on the way. We know this not only because Intel has demoed it on stage, but because we've seen several early leaks of the chips. A new note today from a known leaker offers a tantalizing glimpse at the multi-threaded...
Read more...
The top-end Ada Lovelace graphics processor, the AD102, sports a 384-bit memory interface. In combination with 21-Gbps GDDR6X memory, this nets the Geforce RTX 4090 a grand 1008 GB/second of memory bandwidth. The lower-end GPUs weren't so fortunate, though. AD103, the chip behind the RTX 4080, drops a full third of...
Read more...
Did you read our post last month about NVIDIA's Chat With RTX utility and shrug because you don't have a GeForce RTX graphics card? Well, don't sweat it, dear friend—AMD is here to offer you an open-source option that runs on just about anything. Known as LM Studio, it's a frontend that can download and run large...
Read more...
Back in the day, before the ubiquity of discrete graphics cards with powerful programmable engines, 3D games used what we now term "software rendering." This means that the graphics renderer ran purely on the system's CPU, rather than benefiting from dedicated hardware acceleration. This practice persisted longer than...
Read more...
TAITRA, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council, has just announced that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger will deliver a keynote speech at Computex Taipei. Gelsinger is scheduled to go on stage June 4th, and the release from TAITRA says that he will "detail how Intel's AI portfolio ... unlocks new possibilities in the...
Read more...
If you're not a PlayStation gamer, there's a good chance that you may not have heard of this game. Ghost of Tsushima is an open-world pseudo-historical action-adventure game set in 13th-century Japan during the Mongol invasion. It was developed by Sucker Punch, the studio previously known for the Sly Cooper and...
Read more...
Dell Precision 7875 Tower Workstation: As Configured - $31,065 at Dell.com Dell's Precision 7875 Tower Workstation is a regular-sized PC that packs in server-class power, giving it the capability to dunk on previous-genn systems in rendering, scientific computing, and of course, machine learning workloads. Incredible...
Read more...
AI-assisted image upscaling is pretty neat. It can take a low-rez image and turn it into a pretty convincing simulacrum of a high-rez version of the same image. NVIDIA's DLSS and Intel's XeSS are basically doing AI image upscaling at a rate of dozens of images per second, utilizing both prior frames and motion vectors to fill in additional
Read more...
AMD's current-generation client processors can be broadly divided into two groups: chiplet CPUs and monolithic APUs. Currently, both have Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA graphics, but the integrated GPUs on the chiplet processors (like the Ryzen 9 7950X3D) are downright puny, while the integrated GPU on the monolithic parts (such as the Ryzen 7 8700G)
Read more...
NVIDIA's been sitting pretty with its Ada Lovelace GPUs for consumers and professionals, while the HPC market is served by its upgraded H200, which is a fully-enabled Hopper GPU paired with super-fast HBM3e memory giving it some 5TB/second of memory bandwidth. Few parts of the technology industry sit still for long...
Read more...
AMD's third iteration of its FidelityFX Super Resolution performs upscaling not only spatially, but also temporally. In other words, not only does it make a lower-resolution image look like a higher-resolution image, but it also performs interpolation to generate additional frames, increasing the apparent frame rate...
Read more...
So-called "Super Resolution" features first came about during the tail end of the 6th generation of game consoles, when developers started experimenting with spatial upscalers on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The technology came into its own in PlayStation 4 games, which utilized features like checkerboarding to...
Read more...
As the latest salvo in its seemingly never-ending war against emulation, the producer of the third-best-selling video game console of all time, Nintendo, has filed a lawsuit against the creators of the Yuzu emulator for Nintendo Switch. The suit, filed in Rhode Island, alleges that Yuzu developers Tropic Haze are...
Read more...
Massive runaway indie success story Palworld is a game where you play a castaway washed up on an archipelago inhabited primarily by strange, cartoonish creatures known as Pals. Pals have otherworldly abilities, and this makes them valuable to the player, who can ultimately set up an entire industrial production system...
Read more...
Mobile World Congress started today, and at the show, Intel is offering a demo of its upcoming Xeon processors code-named Sierra Forest. Those parts are expected to launch later this year, but you won't find them in desktops or even in workstations. Sierra Forest is a fairly-specialized processor meant for...
Read more...
A lot of people will tell you that PyTorch is for NVIDIA GPUs, but that's not actually true. PyTorch is platform-agnostic; it's just that many packages built on PyTorch make heavy use of NVIDIA's CUDA API. You can run PyTorch on just about anything; however, performance may not be great without specific...
Read more...