Here Are All The Fish, Bugs And Critters In Animal Crossing New Horizons For August

It's a new month, and that means there are new creatures to catch in Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch. As summer heats up, a handful of new bugs and fish will appear, ripe for catching and giving them to Blathers as donations to the museum or as gifts for that one villager who really seems to like bugs (for me it's Cube). Also don't forget to hop in the ocean for a quick dip, because there's something new at the bottom of the sea, too.  The critters listed in our table below include active hours, location, and hemisphere, so you know the best times and places to grab...

OnePlus Buds Review: Great Sound, Battery Life And Price

by Myriam Joire - Fri, Jul 24, 2020

If there’s still any doubt that truly wireless earbuds are a thing, let us introduce you, dear reader, to the second wave -- exemplified by the OnePlus Buds. See, the first wave really took off when Apple introduced the original AirPods -- meh sound, OK battery life, high price. The focus was on convenience, reliability, and calls. Other major brands followed suit, like Samsung, Sony, Jabra, Amazon, Microsoft, and most recently Google -- some offering special features like long battery life, or active noise cancellation, or tight AI assistant integration. You either spent upwards to $200...

Death Stranding PC Review: Transcending Gameplay To Art

by Ben Funk - Tue, Jul 14, 2020

Backpacking across the country "Once...there was an explosion." So opens the oft-memed narrative of Kojima Productions' first post-Konami title, Death Stranding. If you've not been paying attention to the game, which launched in November as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, this title is about to make its jump to the PC. On July 14, non-PS4 gamers will get their first look at a post-apocalyptic world where, if one person dies, entire cities could be close behind. We got early access to the game, and today we can tell you about our experience, which is probably best summed up as "wild." Of Bridges And...

How To Score A Wet Suit And Sweet New Mermaid Gear In Animal Crossing New Horizons

by Ben Funk - Sat, Jul 04, 2020

Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch is the gift that keeps on giving. The latest free content release is the Summer Update that launched on Wednesday, and now you can swim with the fish. But before you dive into the ocean, you've got to be dressed for the occasion.  Unlike most of the clothing in Animal Crossing New Horizons that comes from the Able Sisters' tailor shop, you'll have to head on over to Nook's Cranny with 3,000 Bells in your pocket to pick up a horizontally-striped wet suit. If you don't mind waiting a day and would rather spend Nook Miles, you can...

How To Maximize Animal Crossing New Horizons Turnip Profits With A Few Key Stalk Market Tools

by Ben Funk - Sun, May 24, 2020

Animal Crossing: New Horizons  for Nintendo Switch came along at just the right time for our family. Just as seemingly the entire country began shelter in place plans, we could get away from it all on a remote deserted island and build a bustling village - a pandemic-free world of our own with new ways to profit. We've shopped, we've crafted, and we've planted dozens of fruit trees to get that sweet 500 bells a piece for fruit that wasn't native to our islands. In the real world, many states are opening back up slowly, but in my household, we're still paying off our multi-million Bell loans,...

Dell G5 15 SE Laptop Review: All-AMD Gaming With SmartShift

by Ben Funk - Thu, May 21, 2020

AMD is in an enviable position in the gaming laptop world. Not only does the red team arguably produce some of the fastest mainstream mobile CPUs around in its Ryzen 4000 series, there's also formidable graphics horsepower in the same camp. As a result, AMD can control the whole platform, hardware and driver stack in a PC with its CPU, GPU, and accompanying chipset, if a manufacturer chooses to use those components. The first of these gaming laptops to hit the lab with an all-AMD bent comes from Dell. The G5 15 SE launches today with a feature set, performance target, and price point that makes...

Google Pixel Buds 2 Review: A Triumphant Second Coming

by Myriam Joire - Tue, May 12, 2020

True wireless earbuds are all the rage these days, and with many phones lacking a headphone jack, it’s really no surprise. You can mostly blame Apple for the missing port, but you can also thank them for giving the entire industry a reason to copy the AirPods. And Google is finally in the game. See, the first Pixel Buds, which were neckbuds, were a bust back in 2017. So, we were pretty excited when Google announced these new, true wireless earbuds last October. And in terms of first impressions, the $180 Pixel Buds 2 deliver. Google Pixel Buds 2 Design Picture an egg. Now imagine you...

ASUS ROG Strix Hero III Review: A Svelte RTX Gaming Laptop

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Apr 21, 2020

Sometimes it feels like the 17.3-inch laptop form factor is dying out, but fortunately for those who (like myself) prefer a bigger notebook, they can still be found. Proof of this exists with the larger of the two ASUS ROG Strix Hero III options. Offered in both 15.6-inch (G531GW, G531GV, and G531GU) and 17.3-inch (G731GW, G731GV, and G731GU) builds, buyers can go big if they want to, and not at the expense of portability—surprisingly, the 17.3-inch models are not very cumbersome at all. We can confidently state as much after spending several weeks with the ASUS ROG Strix Hero III, model...

Experiencing Minecraft RTX: A Whole New Ray-Traced World

by Ben Funk - Thu, Apr 16, 2020

It was seven months ago that NVIDIA announced it was working to give Minecraft a makeover, thanks to the ray tracing hardware acceleration hardware built into its GeForce RTX line of graphics cards. Well, unless you've been living under a rock -- or haven't been spending as much time on our news page as you should -- you know that Minecraft publisher Microsoft will make a beta of this new techology available to the public at 1 PM Eastern time today. We've been playing Minecraft RTX with its new graphics features the last few days, and now we can show you what it's all about.  While...

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 Review: AMD Ryzen 4000 Mobile Unleashed

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Mar 30, 2020

We first got our hands on the AMD Ryzen 4000-powered ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 during CES early this year. If you are unfamiliar with the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14, it is a new breed of thin and light gaming notebook, that packs the performance of a much larger desktop-replacement type machine into a slimmer and sleeker 14”, sub-20mm class notebook. There will be multiple models of the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 available when it hits store shelves in the coming days, but at the heart of the particular system we’ll be showing you here today is the flagship AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS 8-core / 16-thread processor....

Evaluating NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 Quality And Performance In Mech 5 And Control

by Ben Funk - Fri, Mar 27, 2020

Back when the GeForce RTX family launched in late 2018, NVIDIA unveiled its Deep Learning Super Sampling anti-aliasing method, which upscales low-resolution images via machine learning on the GPU's Tensor cores. While the technology was promising, there were some drawbacks. First of all, image quality was typically lower than rendering at the target resolution, even when the game was in motion. Also, DLSS required per-game training on the graphics giant's neural network, and as a result adoption wasn't quite as high as NVIDIA would have liked. All that changed this week when the GeForce maker unleashed...

Doom Eternal: Demon Killing Gameplay And GPU Performance Review

by Ben Funk - Tue, Mar 24, 2020

Update 3/25/2020: We've added results for the Radeon RX 5600 XT 6 GB to our tests and value charts.   Doom is a game franchise that needs no introduction. In 1992, id Software laid down the groundwork for first-person shooters with Wolfenstein 3D. When Doom came along a year later, the studio cemented its status among elite American game developers, thanks in no small part to the game's outstanding graphics and addictive gameplay. The series saw several releases up through 2005's Doom 3: BFG Edition, and then Doom went dormant. In 2016 after being acquired by Bethesda, id released...

Here Are Our Favorite Games To Play During COVID-19 Quarantine

by Brittany Goetting - Sat, Mar 21, 2020

Many of us are spending more time indoors than usual this season and some are taking the opportunity to revisit a few favorite video games. While it is fun to be able to replay or delve deeper into the video games that you already own, sometimes you simply crave some new content. If you find that you are a little bored with your current line-up, this is the article for you. Here are some of the video games that HotHardware's staff recommends for killing time during the COVID-19 Quarantine. Games that offer an immersive adventure Doom 2016 (2016): Doom 2016 is a first-person shooter video game that...

Doom Eternal Tips And Tricks For Optimizing Your Hell-Raising Gaming Rig

by Ben Funk - Sat, Mar 21, 2020

Doom Eternal is here, and the early consensus around the HotHardware email thread is that the game is absolutely stunning. The 2016 Doom reboot ran great on relatively pedestrian hardware thanks to obsessive fine tuning by id Software and its id Tech 6 engine. The new Doom is harder, faster, and louder, but still unmistakably Doom, and it's a graphical tour de force. Since folks are diving into the game this weekend (no small part in thanks to multiple state orders to "shelter in place" because of COVID-19), we're here to share the quickest way to optimize performance. Tune-Up Those Drivers For...

Best NVIDIA And AMD GPUs For High Refresh Rate Gaming

by Ben Funk - Tue, Feb 25, 2020

It doesn't matter if you're playing Call of Duty, Counterstrike, Fortnite, or StarCraft, there's usually a benefit to having the highest frame rates possible when playing games competitively. That requires a couple of things, namely a very fast PC and a 120 - 144Hz or other high-refresh rate gaming monitor. Today, we'll look at the PC components end of that equation and identify graphics cards and GPUs that will help you get the highest possible frame rate out of your rig. However, it goes without saying you'll also need a pretty speedy CPU to drive that card as hard as possible as well. This article...

Acer Predator CG437K Monitor Review: 43” Of Big Beast Gaming

by Tuan Huynh - Thu, Feb 20, 2020

Gaming on a much larger screen has always had this almost unnatural appeal. Over the years, many enthusiasts likely have tried to hook up a PC to a much larger display for gaming bliss, whether it was a TV or projector via S-Video, component or DVI, or nowadays, the biggest possible LCD one can afford. When LCD TVs became the norm for home entertainment use, it made adopting the large screen experience much easier. PC Monitor manufacturers started catching on and now offer display sizes up to 65-inches in regular 16:9 or ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratios, with what we’d consider bare minimum PC...

NVIDIA GeForce NOW Goes Live With PC Game Streaming Anywhere At Prices That Undercut Stadia

by Brandon Hill - Tue, Feb 04, 2020

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW game streaming service is now available for all, meaning that it is no longer relegated to a select few that were accepted in waves as part of the early beta program. With this announcement, anyone can now join in with the service that allows you to bring the power of PC gaming to just about any modern computing platform including Macs, Smart TVs, the SHIELD TV, and Android phones. For those that may have not followed the development of GeForce NOW over the past four and a half years, it allows you to stream games at Full HD resolution at 60+ fps --...

HP Omen 17 Review: A Value-Priced Mobile Gaming Beast

by Paul Lilly - Thu, Jan 23, 2020

For the longest time, replicating a desktop-class gaming experience on a laptop meant spending a hefty premium on a comparable mobile configuration, and to some extent, that still holds true today. The situation is much improved, however, as the cost of entry into PC gaming territory in general has continuously fallen on the hardware side, for both desktops and laptops. Simply put, the bang-for-buck proposition on a gaming PC has never been higher than it is right now. HP's newest model Omen 17 gaming laptop highlights this. It also accentuates the shrinking divide between desktops and laptops,...

14 Movies And TV Shows Every Geek Should Watch And How To View Them

by Paul Lilly - Wed, Jan 01, 2020

Although being a geek was not always chic, geek culture has been celebrated in cinema and on television for decades in one form or another. In some ways, it is a genre unto itself. The appreciation of science, fantasy, and intellectual concepts have given birth to a wide range of both celebrated and cringe worthy flicks and TV episodes, from Weird Science and Revenge of the Nerds, to Star Trek and Star Wars. The list is long, and expands exponentially when you relax the criteria of what fits the mold of geek entertainment. Do Ghostbusters and Breaking Bad qualify? I would argue they do, in their...

Google Stadia Review: Setting Expectations For Cloud Gaming

by Chris Goetting - Wed, Dec 18, 2019

As most of your are probably aware, Google Stadia is an ambitious new game streaming service. It supplants the need for dedicated gaming hardware that renders high-end graphics by processing the workloads in the cloud and piping the final frames over the Internet to your device. In theory, all your device needs is a fast and stable Internet connection and software support for Stadia. It is a lofty goal. If successful, the monetary and complexity barriers to gaming are reduced even beyond traditional console setups, and cost is limited to just the price of game titles and maybe Stadia's Pro subscription....

AMD Unveils Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition With Radeon Boost, Streamlined Interface, New Features Galore

by Ben Funk - Tue, Dec 10, 2019

Over the last several years, AMD has released major new driver features and enhancements at the end of the calendar year, and as 2019 draws to a close, it is no different. The just-released Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition overhauls the driver suite's installation and interface to surface what's important, adds new features (and enhances several others), and promises performance improvements in a variety of games. This new driver suite supports any GCN-based Radeon going back to the December 2011 release of the Radeon HD 7970 all the way up to the latest Navi architecture and the Radeon RX...

GeForce RTX Ray Tracing On A $300 To $500 Budget: What To Expect

by Ben Funk - Wed, Nov 20, 2019

When NVIDIA's GeForce RTX graphics cards first launched, there weren't many games on the market that could take advantage of Turing's new bells and whistles. Over time that's changed, however, and some of this year's biggest hits—titles like Control and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—can take full advantage of stunning ray-traced visual effects. NVIDIA's high-end Turing cards include some of the fastest GPUs around with equally eye-watering pricing, but it doesn't have to be that way if you want to take a more modest approach. The $299 - $329 GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB and $499 GeForce...