Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
We're in the second day of Intel's Innovation '23 event, and our man Dave is on the scene. Intel held a Q&A session today where members of the tech press were allowed to fling questions at CEO Pat Gelsinger. There was some interesting discussion in the Q&A, but arguably the most interesting question to our audience...
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HotHardware's own Dave Altavilla is on location at Intel's Innovation '23 event, and that means he's getting to check out all the latest and upcoming hardware from the blue team first hand. Fortunately, that means you get to check it out, too, because we've captured some videos of the demos on the show floor. We've...
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In case you couldn't tell from our coverage, some of us around here—particularly your present author—are big fans of Cyberpunk 2077. That's not only because it's a legitimately great game these days, but also because it is a showcase for the absolute bleeding edge in graphics technology. That will continue to be the...
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If you read that headline and aren't suitably impressed, let us elaborate. Intel's next launch, looming on the horizon, will be the company's first chiplet-based (or tile-based) processors, codenamed Meteor Lake. Those chips are coming along with an extensive re-branding effort, at least for Intel's mobile...
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You probably already know that AMD's most recent Radeon GPUs are created using chiplets: a single GCD for graphics and compute, and then between three and six MCDs for memory access and caching. Intel hasn't released any consumer GPUs using chiplets yet, but its Datacenter GPU Max—that's the part formerly known as...
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was a big hit for Bethesda across all platforms, and one of the biggest was surely Sony's PlayStation 3. While that system had a rough launch compared to the cheaper Xbox 360, by 2011 it had overtaken Microsoft's system in sales, and the PlayStation 4 then dominated the Xbox One. We reckon...
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No matter what, it's clear at this point that the way forward for the semiconductor industry is chiplets, or "tiles" in Intel nomenclature. Piling multiple pieces of a processor onto one package brings a lot of challenges, though. One of those is the assembly of the chiplet package itself. Typically, manufacturers use...
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Once upon a time, AMD's Opteron processors allowed it to make significant inroads into the server market. The compnay lost ground in the Bulldozer years, though, and with EPYC, AMD had to prove that it could reliably deliver competitive processors on time. We're now into the fourth generation of EPYC processors, and...
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Work continues apace on Intel's Arc graphics drivers, but things have gotten to a pretty good state already. The heavily AMD-optimized Starfield notwithstanding, recent games like Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon and Baldur's Gate 3 both worked just fine on launch day, and most other applications we have tested on an...
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If you weren't playing video games in the mid-1990s, it's difficult to explain the popularity of the Tomb Raider games. The original title released first for the Sega Saturn, and then quickly showed up on MS-DOS PCs as well as the PlayStation, where it wowed gamers with its then-impressive 3D graphics and immersive...
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Let's get some names out of the way: "V" is the name of the customizable player character in Cyberpunk 2077, and naturally, that's the character you'll take into the game's expansion called Phantom Liberty. Idris Elba appears in the add-on as retired spy Solomon Reed, and Minji Chang plays top-tier netrunner Song So...
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If you pay any attention to technology news, particularly on this site, you may recall reading about ASUS' interesting power-delivery experiment one of the few times we've reported on it before. If you didn't read those stories, or don't recall, we'll recap: ASUS is about to start selling motherboards with...
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Shortly before the launch of Starfield, Bethesda and AMD announced a strategic partnership that caused concern among the GeForce-owning PC gaming community. That's because it coincided with an independent report that remarked on the trend of AMD-sponsored PC games skipping support for NVIDIA's DLSS technology. Come...
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You have a good sleep last night? Wake up feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? Well here's something to sap the energy from your step: Valve's digital game distribution platform Steam has just turned 20 years old. While it was originally just a client for managing and updating Valve's own games, Steam has gone on to...
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Boy, we love the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC). It's not that we do business in their territory, or anything like that. It's just that every filing made with the group is public, and the details are posted on its website. This frequently gives us a sneak peek into possible upcoming products, although we should...
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Starfield is out, and it's an incredibly demanding game despite the lack of any current-generation rendering features. We could probably write a whole post about Starfield's performance, but that'll have to wait for another time. Instead, this post is going to be about an easy trick that may or may not help your...
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Alright, PC gamers—raise your hand if you whined about Intel supposedly holding everyone back at 4 cores for most of a decade, and then after you got more cores, you immediately proceeded to crying for years about games not properly utilizing the extra CPUs. Well, now's your chance to play a game that will actually...
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Even as buzz ramps about the next-generation Nintendo hardware, there are plenty of reasons to pick up a current-generation model. For one thing, if rumors are accurate, the next-gen system is going to ship with an LCD screen, not an OLED. For another thing, there's no guarantee that current-gen Switch games will be...
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If you read the headline and thought, "Phoenix 2? But Phoenix 1 has barely hit the market!", don't worry. This chip, despite the name, isn't really a direct successor to AMD's Ryzen 7040 series, codenamed Phoenix. Instead, Phoenix 2 appears to be more of a low-power chip for thin & light laptops and handheld systems...
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If you follow gaming news or even just this site at all, then we don't have to tell you that Starfield is the latest first-person open-world RPG from pioneers of the format, Bethesda Game Studios. It is a titanic title, and given that the company releases about two games per decade, it's a huge release...
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Unlike many computing trends, AI has practical purposes, so it has stuck around beyond the initial fad period. People are using AI for anything and everything, even when it isn't particularly-suited for the task. (Note that all of our articles are written by humans!) If you want to run large AI models like GPT-4, you...
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Between the rise of asset virtualization and the emergence of real-time ray-tracing, video game graphics technology is on the cusp of a revolution. Leading the charge forward is Epic Games with its Unreal Engine software, a package that just got its version 5.3 update.
Unreal Engine 5 has two major rendering...
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