Gaming

Tom from Moore's Law Is Dead reveals the hybrid core configurations for the upcoming Alder Lake S1, S2, P1, P2, M and N lineups and also shares a few more details about the 2022 Raptor Lake generation, plus other successive generations. No pricing info, though.

Opinion The Alienware m15 R4 we just reviewed offers gamers a strong performance, an RTX 3080, and a mechanical keyboard. But its battery life is downright abysmal. Is this an acceptable inconvenience for gaming laptops? Do gaming laptops even need good battery life? Yes!

Remedy Entertainment's surreal third-person shooter Control is now free on the Epic Games Store. All you need to grab your copy is an Epic Games account. It will remain free till June 17 on the platform.

Dell may be up to its CUDA core cannibalizing shenanigans again. A cursory glance at the Dell G15 listing tells us that its CUDA core count is set at 3,584 instead of 3,840. One could have dismissed it as an error had it not been for Dell's recent Alienware m15 R5 debacle. Update: The GeForce 3060 on the Dell G15 has the correct number of CUDA cores

Acer has announced that its latest round of consolidated revenue (for May 2021) was its best for 7 seven years. These earnings, which totaled about US$895 million, grew by nearly 23% year-on-year (YoY). The OEM's gaming arm grew by 15.3% YoY, whereas its Chromebooks brought in 30.1% more revenue compared to May 2020.

Razer has launched its latest Hammerhead True Wireless earbuds. The new Hammerhead TWS X earbuds are targeted at mobile gamers and feature the latest connectivity for quick pairing and low latency.

It has been a while coming, but Panic has finally set the pre-order date and launch price of the Playdate, its unique handheld games console. The Playdate will also support an ingenious dock and will come with 24 games.

Dell has confirmed that it intentionally disabled CUDA cores on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 in the Alienware m15 R5. The company has pledged to return all missing CUDA cores to the gaming laptop by the middle of this month, which should give it a noticeable performance boost compared to what it currently offers.
Update: Dell has enabled all the RTX 3070's CUDA cores with a vBIOS update.

Realme has officially announced that its flagship GT smartphone will finally get a global launch later in June 2021. However, the "price" section of this show may have been spoiled already thanks to an accidental leak of the OEM's EU product page for the device, showing that the phone will start at ~US$668 in the region.

New rumors about a potential Nintendo Switch Pro console have come to light, and they include mention of AMD involvement, 5 nm manufacturing process, a faster GPU, possible DLSS limitations, Xbox Game Pass, and even 120 fps at 720p theoretical capability. Apparently, Switch Pro devkits have already been sent out to Nintendo’s third-party game makers.

Lenovo will be offering new Legion 5 models with Ryzen 5 5600H and Radeon RX 6600M in Germany at prices starting from €1,299. However, this pricing is significantly higher than a Ryzen 7 5800H and RTX 3060 Laptop GPU configuration at €1,249 indicating that Legion 5 models with NVIDIA GPUs could offer a better price-to-performance ratio.

The RedMagic 6R offers the top-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor in a more mid range-looking chassis than is usual from this gaming-focused smartphone brand. The 6.67-inch display device will be released via its global website on June 24, 2021, starting at just under US$500.

AMD's Zen 4-based future processors are currently thought to have the code-name Raphael. It is also rumored to move on to a new LGA-based socket called AM5. Now, a new leak purports to show what one of them will look like from the other side, strange indented integrated heat spreader and all.

Popular YouTube tech commenter Dave2D has offered up some astounding estimates for the potential of the Apple M1X processor that could turn up inside the upcoming MacBook Pro 14 and MacBook Pro 16. It is suggested that an M1X Apple Silicon with a 32-core GPU could keep up with a GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU while consuming less than half the power.

Days Gone was launched to mixed reactions back in 2019, and its recently released PC port has mirrored that for the most part. Over a hundred thousand fans may have banded together to demand a sequel from Sony but even that looks to have been inadequate, with new information essentially confirming that Days Gone 2 is dead in the water.

A cryptocurrency miner has confirmed that Nvidia's hash rate limiter works as intended on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Hash rates for Altcoins such as Ethereum Classic, Ergo, and RavenCoin appear to be significantly lower, too.

Screen captures from Godfall - one of the first games to support FSR - suggest that image quality with AMD's new upscaling technique might not be substantially better than conventional resolution scaling, while offering worse performance, bringing back memories of DLSS 1.0

The slower RAM gimps the gaming performance by up to 20% on the Asus model, while the missing MUX switch is further limiting the potential that should match models equipped with RTX 3080 mobile dGPUs. Similar RAM problems can also be encountered on the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. However, the Lenovo Legion 7 AMD features faster RAM, so this is not really just another conspiracy against AMD.

New concept renders of a Nintendo Switch Pro console have been shared online that have convinced some fans they could be looking at the real deal. However, while gamers wait for the Big N to officially announce the Switch Pro or Super Nintendo Switch, the truth behind the alleged “first leaked images” has surfaced.

The Eyesafe display specialists have confirmed that Gigabyte monitors have achieved its TÜV Rheinland certification for user health and comfort. Four of these Aorus-brand models are on the market, whereas one still awaits a launch. Therefore, the OEM can say the displays are as low on blue-light emissions as they are high on gaming performance.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti has made its debut on benchmarking websites. The RTX 3070 Ti competes with the RTX 2080 Ti and Radeon RX 6800 XT, which are more expensive than NVIDIA's latest effort. The RTX 3070 Ti appears to be worse value for money than the RTX 3070, though.

Several Alienware m15 R5 laptops are apparently reporting just 4,608 CUDA cores for the RTX 3070 Laptop GPU instead of 5,120. Apart from the CUDA cores, even the clocks, TMUs, and pixel fillrates are being reported to be lower than normal leading to performance loss. Currently, a possible workaround is to flash the VBIOS from an m15 R4 that seems to restore the correct values and performance.

Though this price range is typical for a GeForce RTX 3060 laptop, the CPU and display offered here are definitely faster and better than pretty much any other 15.6-inch gaming laptop retailing for around $1000 USD.

A price tag and potential pre-order information have been leaked in regard to the new Nintendo Switch hardware. The console, which is still tentatively known as the Nintendo Switch Pro, has a true next-gen console price tag to go along with its rumored high-end specs. According to one leak, fans may need to start emptying bank accounts within days.

Looks like Nvidia is playing the prudent game and is not touching any smartphone chips before completing the ARM acquisition. Its current solution for Android and iOS devices is the GeForce Now cloud gaming service, allowing AMD and Samsung to be first to market with the upcoming Exynos SoC that integrates an RDNA2 GPU later this year.

A new model number for the Sony PlayStation 5 console has been spotted in documents filed with a Peruvian government communications agency. However, it seems more likely the number will be used for a hardware revision rather than a completely new console such as a PS5 Pro or PS5 Slim model.

This move might not surprise too many, but it does show that Nvidia can still be caught off guard by AMD, even when Team Red announced the arrival of the mobile RDNA 2 dGPUs half a year ago. On top of this, AMD might not even come up with a decent supply of RX 6000M dGPUs due to the ongoing chip shortages.

The powerful hardware of the Schenker XMG Core 17 brings all the current computer games smoothly to the responsive display (WQHD, IPS, 165 Hz, 17.3 inch). The preinstalled Control Center allows you to adjust the performance development of the CPU and GPU.

Labeled 2.7 "Red Skies" and released earlier today, the latest update to War Thunder introduces rank VII jets, alongside two new locations, 11 new ground vehicles (including modern Chinese SPAA), 5 helicopters, 6 new ships, as well as a comprehensive list of minor tweaks and fixes.

Intel's graphics chief Raja Koduri showed off the Xe-HPG DG2 512 EU GPU on Twitter indicating that now it's software engineering's turn to optimize performance in benchmarks and games. Raja also clarified to a query that Intel is indeed looking into considering AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technique in the interest of ISVs.

The Huawei MateView and MateView GT are now official in Germany. The former is a creator-specific 4K monitor, while the latter is a curved, 165Hz WQHD SKU earmarked for gamers. Prices start at EUR 549 for the MateView GT and EUR 699 for the MateView.

NVIDIA is bringing its DLSS image upscaling technology to Linux users via Proton. This will enable supported games on Linux to leverage the Tensor cores on RTX GPUs for AI-based supersampling. NVIDIA said that DLSS will be enabled for Vulkan games this month followed by DirectX titles in the fall.

AMD surprised everyone during its Computex 2021 keynote today by demonstrating the first 3D stacked vertical cache called 3D V-cache. AMD showed a 192 MB 3D V-cache (64 MB per CCD) implemented successfully on the Ryzen 9 5900X. The 3D V-cache brings several improvements over conventional 2D and microbump 3D packaging and was demonstrated to yield up to 15% performance gains in today's games with the current 7 nm Zen 3 architecture.

This new NUC goes into beast mode with an 8-liter enclosure that can fit full-size GPUs plus a PSU. It also supports 45 W Intel Tiger Lake-H CPUs including the HK overclockable models, but apparently only supports air coolers, so it might get some TGP restrictions. Nevertheless, it also comes with a NUC 11 Extreme Compute Unit that includes features such as PCIe 4.0, Optane Memory, 2x Thunderbolt 4.0 connectors and even a 10 Gb NIC.

The latest video cards to join ZOTAC's GAMING line-up are based on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti GPUs and feature RGB lighting, advanced cooling, active fan control, as well as RGB LED backplates and metal front plates. Those interested will be able to buy the new cards starting later this week.

"Ultrathin gaming" probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think "Alienware". Dell is looking to change all that this year by launching the thinnest gaming laptop the company has ever made.

The ultrathin 17.3-inch Alienware x17 integrates vapor chamber cooling, Dell's in-house liquid metal formula, and four individual fans for a starting price of $2099 USD when it launches on June 15. The system ushers in a new era of Alienware where thin and light may soon take priority over the traditionally thick and bulky Alienware designs.

NVIDIA kicked off its Computex 2021 keynote with a slew of gaming announcements and has officially launched the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti GPUs for US$599 and US$1,199 MSRP, respectively. The company also showed off a Doom Eternal demo running on the RTX 3080 Ti at 4K with RTX on and confirmed that RTX features are coming to several current and upcoming games in the coming weeks.

AMD offered some details on its much anticipated FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technique, which is pegged as a competitor to NVIDIA's popular DLSS technology. AMD FSR will be a part of GPUOpen and will offer four quality presets that work with almost all modern GPUs on the market. AMD demoed the technology with Godfall running on the Radeon RX 6800 XT and also on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060.

AMD has unveiled the RDNA 2-based RX 6000M mobile GPUs for gaming laptops to take on the competition from NVIDIA Ampere Laptop GPUs. The RX 6000M lineup includes the RX 6800M, RX 6700M, and the RX 6600M designed to target 100 fps+ gaming at 1080p and 1440p. AMD is also introducing the AMD Advantage Design Framework, which is a collaborative effort with OEMs to introduce performance standardization in AMD gaming laptops.

AMD just announced its newest and most powerful mobile GPUs ever — too bad only two laptops are actually going to use them when they launch later this month. We can only hope that manufacturer support for mobile Radeon graphics will grow quickly over time to better compete against the ocean of GeForce-powered gaming laptops.

Asus has modified its high-end ROG Strix G17 gaming laptop with an AMD graphics card. The Asus ROG Strix G17 Advantage Edition features a Ryzen 9 5900HX processor, a Radeon RX 6800M GPU, 32GB of DDR4-3,200 RAM and a high-refresh-rate screen.

ASUS has revealed the ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition, a 15.6-inch laptop that combines two of AMD's most powerful laptop components. The G15 Advantage Edition will be available with up to a Ryzen 9 5900HX and a Radeon RX 6800M, with the latter capable of operating at up to 2,300 MHz.