Editor profile

Zak Killian

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Ever since playing Joust on his family's Atari 800XL 8-bit computer as a youth, Zak has been hooked on PC and console games. His passion for gaming as a kid led to an interest in PCs as a teenager, which ended up with him founding his own PC repair shop in the year 2000. Decades later, he's still building, still gaming, and still arguing on the internet with any opinion anyone has. A former writer of news and reviews for The Tech Report, Zak is a modern-day Renaissance man who may not be an expert on anything, but knows just a little about nearly everything.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.

Recent posts

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...
If you're coming to us from a PC gaming perspective, you're almost assuredly aware of the standard DDR5 memory and the graphics-optimized GDDR6(X) memory. You might not be familiar with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). This technology uses an extremely wide 1024-bit connection to the host processor, and that's *per... Read more...
Cloud-hosted AI image generators like OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Meta's Imagine are really fun to play with, but they can come with onerous restrictions in terms of content, blocking even prompts that don't seem objectionable at all. They also are known to massage users' prompts—Gemini was recently noted to insert... Read more...
A lot of people seem to have a great many strong opinions about NVIDIA's software. They complain that the Control Panel is archaic and outdated, while whining that GeForce Experience is heavy, bloated, and cumbersome to use. We like NVIDIA's Control Panel around here, but we do have to admit it would be nice to have a... Read more...
Rumor has it that FromSoftware didn't originally intend to release an expansion for its fantasy epic Elden Ring. However, since the game's explosive launch nearly two whole years ago, fans have eagerly awaited more content. There were some notable additions in patches, including PvP arenas and a couple of extra... Read more...
AMD currently sells processors utilizing "standard" and "dense" (or "compact") cores, including some chips that have both. The "dense" cores are indicated with a "c" at the end, like "Zen 4c", and they have all the same capabilities as the standard cores, but typically run lower clocks because the tight spacing makes... Read more...
Despite considerable architectural advancements between the Steam Deck's "Van Gogh" APU and AMD's more modern mobile processors, the Steam Deck typically matches or beats the performance of other handhelds when running at very low power limits. These low power limits are critical for handhelds, as they allow longer... Read more...
A couple of video creators on China's Bilibili platform have gone hands-on with the MSI Claw Windows gaming handheld and come away with mixed impressions. We don't read Chinese around here, but machine translators come up with names of "Orange Buddha Series Review" and "Please, Komine" for the two channels we're... Read more...
Now that even entry-level GPUs are capable of producing hundreds of frames per second in popular games at the most common resolution (1920×1080), discrete GPU driver developers have turned their eye toward the latest metric everyone's making a fuss about. Indeed, input lag has once again become a hot topic for PC... Read more...
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