Content and news by Rob Williams

Autodesk’s Maya is one of the industry’s most popular design suites, and likewise, its built-in Arnold is one of the most popular renderers. Both solutions are used for TV, movies, architecture, gaming, and even VFX. Join us as we explore both viewport and rendering performance with a wide range of CPUs and GPUs.

The idea seems so simple: to let gamers play against (or with) each other regardless of the platform they’re on. Wide cross-play support has been a long time coming, but it really didn’t start to take off in a big way until a couple of years ago. In 2017, we wrote about…..

We’ve already talked about Microsoft’s announcements revolving around updated Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models, but that’s far from where the company’s reveals have ended. At its New York press event, Surface creator Panos Panay said that he and the company didn’t know how to even talk about the Surface Neo and…..

Microsoft’s Surface series has received one heck of a shot in the arm today. The company has managed to not only launch a big collection of new products, but have every single one of them demand attention. Let’s tackle the new laptops, starting with the Surface Laptop 3: The latest Surface Laptop…..

With the major love AMD showed Borderlands 3 before and after its launch, we’ve been left surprised that the company hasn’t worked out a bundle deal with the game’s publisher. After all, there are new features to take advantage of on its newest Radeon Navi cards, such as image sharpening (which has…..

As we talked about yesterday in our post taking a look at strong Zen 2 performance in Adobe Lightroom, we mentioned that we’ve been augmenting our test suite for the next set of CPU launches. Lightroom is one (re)addition that’s being made, while Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is another. While we plan…..

In advance of the CPU launches from AMD and Intel set to happen over the next month or two, we’ve been updating and augmenting our respective test suite. Some preexisting tests like Premiere Pro and Corona Renderer have been bolstered, while some other new tests are being added – one of those…..

Zen 2 holdouts who’ve been patiently waiting for AMD to launch its 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X are going to have to exercise their patience for another two months, as the company has officially pushed the date back. If this news burns, will some ointment in the form of a third-gen Ryzen Threadripper announcement help?…..

Having taken a look at Linux performance with AMD’s Ryzen 5 6-core 3600X and 4-core 3400G last week, we’re now turning our attention to Windows. We’re tackling everything from encoding to rendering and math to gaming with the ultimate goal of finding out how these chips stack up, and see where the greatest strengths lay.

After seeing what the first-gen EPYC brought to the table, and having known what improvements AMD was going to be implementing, the wait for the second-gen release seemed to take ages. But, the launch finally took place last month, and it included much fanfare from AMD itself, and a number of its…..

Borderlands is back, and that means one thing: Borderlands benchmarking is also back! We’re taking a look at graphics card performance with the help of fifteen GPUs and four resolutions. Since the performance picture between AMD and NVIDIA varies quite a bit between DX12 and DX11, we’re including results for both.

After a long wait, Borderlands fans can finally jump into the latest game and indulge in whatever it is Pandora (and beyond) is ready to throw their way. As expected, both AMD and NVIDIA have new graphics drivers to greet the launch, with AMD offering an extra special bonus to owners of…..

The enthusiast community seems to be in wide agreement that peripheral software is rarely great, and if people had the choice, most would avoid it. Yet, we’re in an era where everything from fan speeds to RGB colors are controlled by software. Unfortunately, that software almost always needs to be active the…..

At the start of the year, Valve announced that it would be making some major changes to the Steam client going forward. Whether or not this renewed vigor for improvement was spurred by the insurgence of the Epic Game Store, we’re not sure, but we’d like to think most Steam fans would…..

Overclocking records are broken all of the time, so it’s rare when a new result manages to grab more than the usual amount of attention. If you’re an overclocker who’s managed to breach a long-targeted clock speed, such as 6GHz on memory, that’s an example of a result that will definitely stand…..

A couple of weeks ago, AMD posted Maya 2017 performance claims to its social media accounts, with us catching it on Twitter. Both AMD and NVIDIA regularly post similar things, but this one stuck out to us more than usual, because it didn’t actually make sense to us. Here’s the performance chart:…..

Following-up on our coverage of AMD’s 8 and 12-core launch Ryzen 3000-series chips, we’re now turning our attention to a couple of options that will not break the bank: the six-core Ryzen 5 3600X CPU and Ryzen 5 3400G APU. We’re also throwing in some comparative Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 19.04 performance to highlight the differences a distro release can make.

Right on schedule, AMD has released updated information concerning Ryzen boost clocks, and the forthcoming AGESA update which will bring fixes to consumers. As we covered yesterday, this new AGESA is versioned 1003ABBA, and you’re all lucky that I am not that familiar with the pop band, or else this post would…..

Sept 10 Update: Updates from AMD have been covered here. Last week, AMD let people know that it’d soon be releasing a new AGESA platform update to improve clock boost issues that have been plaguing some (or most) users. AMD said it’d be releasing more information on September 10, but it seems…..

We’ve all heard 5G praises sung from the rooftops, but as we inch closer towards the end of the year, it may feel like the market hasn’t progressed too much. 5G rollouts have occurred in various cities around the world, but it remains largely inaccessible to the masses. For those lucky enough…..