Gaming

Based on the very few Polaris-based gaming laptops we've tested, they're just not worth the errors, crashes, and glitches when gaming especially when an equivalent Intel/Nvidia gaming laptop is available for the same price.

The future of Kaby Lake-G seems grim. Just as many have feared, the platform is looking more and more like a one-off design with no direct successor or long-lasting commitment from either Intel or AMD if the current product landscape is anything to go by.

The Game Awards 2018 has hosted a plethora of announcements, which included details about titles such as Dragon Age 4, Far Cry: New Dawn, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, Mortal Kombat 11, Psychonauts 2, Rage 2, The Outer Worlds, and many others. BioWare also teased the action RPG Anthem, which has apparently been in development since 2012.

Epic has officially launched its Games Store with just half a dozen “hand-curated” titles. In fact, just three third-party games are currently available: Hades, Ashen, and Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek. Unreal Tournament and Shadow Complex, both by Epic Games, are also listed. But it’s likely the store’s main attraction will be the PC and Mac versions of Fortnite.

Red Dead Redemption 2 managed to scoop up four prizes at The Game Awards 2018 while God of War took home the coveted Game of the Year title among its three wins. Fortnite and Celeste also had a successful evening, winning two awards each. Marvel’s Spider-Man was unable to win any of the seven categories it had been nominated in.

The ASUS ROG Phone has multiple USB type C ports, so that it can support accessories that need two of these ports. A Redditor has demonstrated that this feature can be hi-jacked in order to make it appear that the phone can charge itself. However, the effect may be less than authentic.

AdoredTV is back with yet another juicy leak, this time regarding AMD's upcoming 7 nm Navi gaming GPU lineup that is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2019. If the information is right, it looks like AMD is going for aggressive price points in the mid-range GPU market, making the upcoming Radeon RX 3080 / 3070 / 3060 models a very tempting alternative to Nvidia's RTX 2070 and GTX 1070 / 1060 cards.

Apparently, Nvidia had to iron out a few problems with the Turing chip production, so the mobility versions needed to be delayed for a few months. The RTX 2000 mobility lineup is now expected to debut at CES 2019, with general availability slated for early February. Inside sources claim there will be 2080, 2070, 2060, 250 Ti and 2050 models, plus Max-Q versions for the top two.

Worldwide sales are expected to more than double YoY. Top manufacturers like Asus continue to push the boundaries of gaming monitors by offering 4K UHD 144 Hz HDR options to attract more gamers. Curved gaming monitors will also make up more than half of all gaming monitor sales by the end of this year.

AdoredTV is well known for his previous leaks on AMD's upcoming Rome server CPU and Nvidia's current gen Turing GPUs. It's not entirely surprising that he has come across some information which he once again recommends we take with a grain of salt.

The OnePlus 6 and 6T grabbed the ninth and sixth place in the top 10 in terms of Antutu benchmarks for November. However, the Kirin 980 allowed Huawei to bag all top 3 rankings, and the Honor Magic 2 to come in fourth. The rest of this list was made up by Snapdragon 845-powered devices.

AMD CEO Lisa Su already expressed the intent to bring back high-end GPUs into the game in the Q3 financial report from last month, and now Su is reiterating these plans, saying that AMD is ready to dominate all GPU sectors once again. Navi would be AMD's answer to Nvidia's mid-range RTX 2070 cards, while Arcturus (expected in late 2019) would take on the RTX 2080 Ti and beyond.

Epic has announced plans to create its own game platform, which will be known as the Epic Games Store. Fueled by the incredible success of Fortnite, Epic is hoping to take on big names in the video-game digital distribution world such as Steam and Google Play. The company is offering 88% of store revenue to developers, with no tier system being incorporated.

The 4.9 mm bezels are 60 percent thinner than the last generation with a "retina-shattering" 13.3-inch 4K UHD display. Razer is promising 100 percent sRGB coverage, Whiskey Lake-U CPUs, and optional full-power GeForce MX150 graphics for a starting price of $1400 USD.

Razer’s first major laptop was the 14-inch Blade over five years ago in 2013. Ever since then, the Blade family has expanded to include 12.5-inch, 13.3-inch, 15.6-inch, and 17.3-inch models. The central 14-inch series, however, will be on hiatus for the time being.

The latest ray trace-supporting and Turing-powered card, the Titan RTX, was launched at today's (December 3, 2018) Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. With its 24GB in GDDR6 memory, 576 multi-precision Tensor Cores and 72 RT Cores, it is clearly aimed at deep-learning professionals.

Epic Games has silently enabled 60 FPS for the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max in its latest update for Fortnite on iOS, according to the Senior PR Manager at the company. The update (v. 6.31) is live now on the App Store.

Several influencers and YouTube personalities were seen teasing the NVIDIA RTX Titan GPUs. We're not sure what the new Titan card will be officially called as but from the pictures posted, we see a blue TITAN logo, two 8-pin power connectors, and an NVLink connector. The card seems to be sporting a golden shroud similar to the earlier Titan V card and is expected to feature a full Turing TU102 GPU with 4,608 CUDA Cores.

The ASUS ROG Phone is now available as a Flipkart exclusive in India. The company is currently selling the gaming phone for INR₹69,999.

3DMark's long awaited ray tracing benchmark Port Royal is finally coming out in January of next year. After Battlefield V, it will be the world's second ray tracing compatible application that focuses on gaming and the world's first dedicated ray tracing benchmark for gamers.

Anthem is now very close to its final release, as the developers just announced the Alpha test scheduled for December 8-9. Unfortunately, spots for the test are limited and those who do not get selected for this test could still participate in the beta test that is scheduled for early February, if they pre-order the game.

Microsoft has become more valuable than Apple in terms of market capitalization. At the time of writing, Microsoft’s value stood at US$846.76 billion compared to Apple’s US$844.39 billion. The Redmond-based company has passed Apple a number of times over the last few days, only for the Cupertino rival to temporarily bounce back.

It was discovered recently that AMD's Athlon 200GE processor, which is regarded as a great budget option, can actually be overclocked despite being officially a locked part. Overclocking enthusiasts discovered that MSI, perhaps by accident, allows the 200GE to be overclocked on its B350M Gaming Pro motherboard.

Even though the crypto market is at it its lowest this year, getting some cryptocurrency as passive income never hurt anyone. Asus and Quantumcloud joined forces in order to make it easier for Asus GPU owners to mine cryptocurrencies when the graphics cards are mostly idle. At current prices, the profits are pretty minimal, but no one knows when the next big swing would hit the crypto world and turn those modest profits into small fortunes.

The fourth major update for Microsoft's Sea of Thieves arrives under the "Shrouded Spoils" banner and includes new Merchant Alliance items, six new skeleton forts (in addition to the three existing ones), improved skeleton ships, new custom ship items, more frequent Kraken appearances, new Megalodon variants, and more.

Earlier this year, third-party developers started receiving PS5 development kits, but Sony claimed that the hardware specifications were not the final ones. A new leak coming from a Russian site depicts what looks like one of the development kit PS5 consoles running in bootloader mode. While the design seems credible, the bootloader screen is iffy at best.

Jon Peddie Research informs that the GPU market is doing relatively well, even though the AIB GPU sales saw a significant decline. The overall GPU sales (including iGPUs and mobility GPUs) were up 10.64% compared to Q2 2018, and Intel is still dominating the iGPU/embedded GPU maret with an increase of ~13%.

DigiTimes reports that Intel will be holding a conference for discrete GPUs in December, specifically about Arctic Sound. Raja Koduri will be presenting in the conference but went on the record to explicitly state that it is an "architecture day, not a DGPU day."

PUBG Mobile managed to eclipse Fortnite’s earnings for two days in a row on iOS, according to market analyst SensorTower. This is the first time the Tencent game has managed to beat out the effort from Epic on Apple’s platform in terms of global player spending. Last week was a good week overall for PUBG Mobile, with revenue rising 166% from the previous week (total for iOS and Android).

Nubia has released the second generation of its Red Magic gaming phone, the 'Mars'. The device is as expected based on several leaks and rumors: it is powered by the Snapdragon 845 chipset, runs Android Pie and has a 10GB RAM variant. The Red Magic Mars also follows the RGB trend.

The new 860 QVO SSD drive uses a Samsung MJX controller and will be available next month in 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB versions. This 2.5-inch SATA drive provides sequential read/write speeds of up to 550/520 MB/s and random read/write performance of up to 97/89K IOPS. The prices will start at US$149.99.

Antlion Audio claims that its ModMic Wireless attachment adds mic capabilities to any kind of headphone. It has the aptX low-energy Bluetooth codec, 16-bit 48khz audio and a USB type A receiver. The ModMic Wireless also has a patented clasp to stay attached to its headphone cup.

In a blog post released earlier today, Sony revealed that it would be using the PAL version of nine titles on the PlayStation Classic. The PAL versions will be included in the North American PlayStation Classic as well. Considering that North America televisions operate on the NTSC standard, the format difference could cause these games playing at different speeds or glitch out, rendering them unplayable.

A group known for Nintendo Switch piracy has obtained and distributed a full file dump of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, set to release in two weeks on December 7th. While early game leaks are not uncommon, a leak this far in advance is quite unusual, especially a leak of a game as hotly anticipated as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

If you somehow missed all the Black Friday deals, not all is lost. Cyber Monday is here with similar bargains and Newegg has some of the best laptop deals around. This time we are taking a look at what Asus, Dell and Lenovo have to offer. Most of the models come with Intel CPUs but there is one AMD Ryzen model that might catch your eye.

Initially meant to get a US$500 MSRP, AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64 GPU had to go through serious supply problems that jacked the retail prices to almost US$800. Fast forward one year later, the card supply is almost too high now, and thanks to AMD's price slashes plus the Cyber Monday deals from Newegg, the RX Vega 64 can be ordered for US$400 along with three free games.

Get the Spectre x360 13t for just $850 USD while it lasts. The convertible has apparently become HP's "#1 selling Spectre" while the "top seller" is the last generation budget AMD-powered HP 15z for only $320 USD.

This franchise that has been around since 2011 — when the first Kingdom Rush title was introduced as a free flash browser game — is back to Android and iOS as Kingdom Rush Vengeance. This new fantasy tower defense title involves fights against trolls, orcs, wizards, in various environments such as forests, wastelands, and mountains.

Dell has denied that there are any BIOS related GPU issues with XPS 15 9570 laptops, the company has informed us. Despite providing the company with data and numerous online posts demonstrating otherwise, it has not been able to determine what is causing some NVIDIA GPUs to throttle until reaching 48 °C/118 °F.

According to a Taiwanese forum thread that claims to have information from an inside partner meeting, Intel may be developing a 10-core consumer-grade CPU in the Comet Lake-S family. The CPU would be built on the 14 nm process and may use a dual-ring bus design, implying that the CPU will split cores between two dies.

ASRock has released its Phantom Gaming 6 motherboard. It supports X399 Threadripper CPUs, up to 128GB of 3400MHz OC DDR4 RAM, Phantom Gaming 2.5G and Intel Gigabit LAN. It also has 7.1 channel audio, 3 PCI-e 3.0 x16 slots, 3 M.2 slots and, of course, RGB.

Some innovative gamers have gotten Pokémon: Let's Go to boot and run on the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu. Despite the game only being a week old, it is somewhat playable, although there are numerous glitches and oddities. The framerate is highly inconsistent and the audio is a mess, but the fact that a week old game is playable via emulation is impressive.