Content and news by Rob Williams

As we first talked about earlier this year, the forthcoming Blender 3.0 is going to introduce a completely overhauled Cycles render engine – dubbed Cycles X. As Cycles is the de facto choice for most Blender users, any impact to performance is going to be noticed, and thankfully, what we’re seeing with…..

It’s a fact of life that if there is an online game, there are going to be bans. Sometimes, it’s obvious why someone was banned, while other times, it’s seemingly impossible to know what happened. Naturally, there are always those who try to plead ignorance about their ban even though they know…..

Game emulation isn’t just awesome, it could be considered important. With emulation capabilities, we can preserve gaming history, and not to mention dabble in nostalgia, or experience classics for the first time. On the PC, there exist roughly one billion emulators, and companies like Microsoft and Nintendo have used them to bring…..

We’ve talked a lot about the painful topic of inflated hardware pricing the past year, spawned largely by overall hardware shortages that plague multiple industries. While we were pretty pumped after AMD and NVIDIA released their latest crop of GPUs last fall, it didn’t take long before we began to feel more…..

AMD has so far released two Radeon Pro models built around its RDNA2 architecture – W6600 and W6800 – and compared to the previous-gen, there’s a lot of improvement. In addition to faster performance in general, we see additions like hardware RT, as well as support for resizable BAR and variable rate shading. Let’s see how both cards fare in our gauntlet of tests.

Not long after NVIDIA released its Ampere-based GeForces last September, GPU supply issues were becoming evident. By the time AMD released its RDNA2-based Radeons a couple of months later, hopeful buyers were already settled on the fact that they’d be “impossible” to buy – at least if you weren’t willing to be…..

Ahead of the latest iteration of its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit, Qualcomm has announced that it’s shaking up its Snapdragon branding to better push it forward. In a blog post by Qualcomm’s SVP and CMO Don McGuire, it’s highlighted that the Snapdragon brand has a legion of fans already, and it’s gaining…..

Earlier this year, alongside the launch of its second-gen Snapdragon 7c SoC, Qualcomm announced that it would soon be releasing a Windows-focused development kit – and today, it’s here. Application developers who want to port their x86 applications to ARM but lack the hardware can jump on this development kit for $219…..

With its newest GeForce GPU driver, 496.76, NVIDIA says it’s providing optimal performance for games like Battlefield 2042, Assetto Corsa Competizione, Hot Wheels Unleashed, Farming Simulator 22, Bright Memory: Infinite, and Myth of Empires – but that just scratches the surface on what NVIDIA wants to talk about today. At the forefront,…..

As we covered a couple of weeks ago, Blender 3.0 is going to bring about lots of change, not just at launch, but throughout the life of the product (leading up to 4.0). One of the more major changes we’ll see in 3.0 is the replacement of Cycles with the new “Cycles…..

In November 1971, Intel launched the world’s first commercially available microprocessor, simply named 4004. At that time, the chip would have been considered a technical marvel. Created by engineer Federico Faggin (who also later created the Intel 8080), Stan Mazor, and Ted Hoff, this now-modest chip sported 2,250 transistors, boasted high speeds,…..

Since the launch of its first EPYC processors, it’s been clear that AMD had huge ambitions for the enterprise. Not only was the company offering CPUs with more cores than its competitors, the Zen architecture has continued to improve and make each of those cores more potent, and more effective in a…..

Intel has just kicked-off its 12th-gen Core series with three desktop models, along with an IGP-less version of each. Due to shipping delays, we’ve yet to benchmark the architecture formerly known as Alder Lake, but based on what we’re seeing around the web, first impressions are good. Even some reviewers who tend…..

As we’ve covered before, the next major release of Blender is going to bring us to version 3.0 – some 20 years after the release of 2.0. If you’ve been paying attention even just recently, you’ll know that minor version bumps in Blender don’t necessarily mean minor improvements. There are stark –…..

It wasn’t all too long ago that Intel debuted its 11th-gen Core series, but here we are, with the 12th-gen launch upon us. Unlike most architecture launches we’ve seen from Intel recently, this one represents truly major changes, both to the architecture itself, and the accompanying platform.

When you take a look at the state of Linux gaming as it was just a decade ago, and then look at it again today, the differences are almost staggering. More developers have jumped on board with native builds, while many others have ensured (or maybe not) that their titles run fine…..

AMD has just launched its sixth RDNA2-based graphics card: Radeon RX 6600. At $329, this Radeon becomes the entry-point in AMD’s current-gen lineup, and does battle with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060, also priced at $329. In this review, we’re going to take a look at both cards (and more) at 1080p.

It’s no longer difficult to find a good assortment of ultraportable notebooks on the market, but finding great ones can still remain a challenge. In this article, we’re going to go head-to-head with Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 4 and Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro 360 – each with a different vendor platform under-the-hood – and see which comes out on top.

Right on schedule, Microsoft has today released the latest major version of Windows: 11. This release comes just over three months after the original announcement, which makes Windows 11 one of the quickest releases we’ve seen, from announcement to launch. Unlike most Windows OSes, 11 is a significantly changed both under and…..

The folks at UL have released a simpler, but interesting update to 3DMark this week – one worthy of note if you’re a user of the Steam version. While 3DMark is a benchmark, not a game, UL wanted to add a full fleet of achievements that you can work towards earning, as…..