As we saw when testing with AS SSD Benchmark, the MX200 and BX100 drives are able to max out the SATA 6Gb/s connection when reading sequential data. The same is seen when writing sequential data as both the MX200 and BX100 are able to max out the interface. The 4K-64 thread data shows a noticeable drop off in performance when comparing the MX200 and BX100 to the MX100. Again we see that the MX200 and BX100 series is slower than the MX100 when measuring 4K-64 thread performance....

Several other cards impressed us when running the game on Very High. Affordable products such as the Radeon HD 5830, GeForce GTX 460 and Radeon HD 6850 mustered the strength to churn out playable frame rates at 1680x1050. Then at 1920x1200, relatively affordable graphics cards such as the Radeon HD 6870 and GeForce GTX 560 Ti scored solidly. AMD’s upper-echelon Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 were not quite as impressive when compared to Nvidia’s competing products....

Integrated graphics delivered undesirable results at 1680x1050, with the Core i7-3770K’s HD 4000 graphics engine rendering just 13fps and the A8-3850’s Radeon HD 6550D averaging 37fps – serviceable, but less than ideal. The Radeon HD 6670 at 45fps is about as slow as we’d want to go in Diablo III. Beyond that, the GTX 550 Ti, HD 7750, 7770, 6750, 6770 and 6790 all delivered a solid 54 to 61fps....

For example, even the year-old GTX 460 (1GB) averaged 46fps while the HD 5830 was slightly slower with 43fps. Even current generation low-end parts such as the HD 6790 and GTX 550 Ti hovered around 40fps, which again, was sufficient for smooth gameplay. Gamers stuck with the GTS 450 or HD 6750 will have to play with less demanding settings.

While many of today’s AAA titles are free-to-play, they come with insidious pay-to-win models where gamers are lured in by microtransactions and loot boxes. Indie titles offer a minor reprieve from these greedy cash-grabs, but free-to-play, in the strictest sense of the term, only exists in open-source games. You’ll find a wealth of resources online, and a good place to start would be the GitHub Stars Top 50. As the name implies, this is a list of the highest rated open-source games on GitHub....

The European Council (EC) officially approved its USB-C mandate on Monday. The President of the European Parliament and the President of the European Council only need to sign off on the rule. Earlier this month, the European Parliament passed the common charger directive in a landslide vote of 602-13. Electronic manufacturers will have to design devices sold in the European Union with USB-C charging by the fall of 2024. Laptop makers have until the spring of 2026 to comply with the EC’s directive....

On December 4, 2021, BitMart announced that it had identified a large-scale security breach resulting from someone using a stolen private key to access two of its internet-connected hot wallets. The company assured impacted users that it would use its own money to compensate them. But a new CNBC report reveals that some of those who lost a substantial amount of money five weeks ago have yet to see anything returned....

Ever since his first deployment, Halo’s armored protagonist has been the face of the Halo franchise and Xbox gaming as well as non-game related merchandise ranging from t-shirts to Mountain Dew. And now, thanks to Paramount Plus, our hero can add acting to his long list of achievements. But this achievement comes at a controversial cost, as fans will catch their first glimpse of a helmetless Master Chief. Whether or not to reveal Master Chief’s identity has been a hot topic as old as the game itself....

The $200-$250 range, where the GTX 960 belongs, was previously occupied by the GTX 760, the Radeon R9 280 and the R9 285. In that face-off, the R9 285 was cut for being too expensive while the GTX 760 was 10% pricier and 2% slower than the R9 280. Has the new GeForce GTX 960 changed this? Well, we expect it to be priced in line with the GTX 760 and we found it to be ~9% faster on average, with up to 34% more performance in Metro Redux and 17% in Watch Dogs, though it was 5% slower in Crysis 3 and 2% in BioShock Infinite....

For those of you who like to cross swords we have For Honor and here we find another ding dong battle between the R9 390 and GTX 970. Out of the box the 390 was a smidgen quicker while the 970 pulled a fraction ahead once overclocked. We find much the same story at 1440p between the 390 and 970. The R9 390 looks good overclocked though, matching the RX 480 8GB....

That isn’t to say people were necessarily disappointed in the GTX 680. The 28nm part packs 3540 million transistors into a smallish 294mm2 die and delivers 18.74 Gigaflops per watt with a memory bandwidth of 192.2GB/s, while it tripled the GTX 580’s CUDA cores and doubled its TAUs – no small feat, to be sure. Nonetheless, we all knew the GK110 existed and we were eager to see how Nvidia brought it to the consumer market – assuming it even decided to....

Google announced last month that it would be bringing Android games to Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs via a Play Games desktop app. It has now launched a limited beta of this program for users in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. Google also shared the minimum PC requirements for eligible users who will join a waitlist before being given access to the beta. Notably, participants will need to have at least Windows 10 v2004 installed, a CPU with 8 logical cores, a gaming-class GPU, 8GB RAM, and an SSD with 20GB of free storage....

From Nvidia’s Ampere series, the page mentions the RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3070 Ti, and RTX 3060 Ti. Referring to AMD’s RDNA2 series, the seller lists the RX 6900 XT, RX 6800, RX 6700 XT, and RX 6600 XT. The listing also mentions that a surprise box could contain used cards, but any Ampere and RDNA2 cards are brand new. What’s concerning are the actual odds. Buyers have just a two percent chance to win an Ampere or RDNA2 card....

Last week’s Gran Turismo 7 patch and outage left players with a very bad taste in their mouths. So bad, in fact, that players review-bombed the game on Metacritic, earning it the lowest Metacritic user score for any Sony game ever. Game director Kazunori Yamauchi recently acknowledged the incident, issuing players both one million free credits and his assurance that additional changes are coming in April to balance the game’s reward system....

Since its original release on the first PlayStation console in 1997, the Gran Turismo franchise has remained exclusive to Sony consoles, including the PlayStation Portable. But the list of PlayStation-exclusive titles has been shrinking in recent years. Uncharted, God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Horizon Zero Dawn are just some titles to have expanded to PC, and more are expected to follow. In an interview with GTPlanet (via PC Gamer) during the Gran Turismo World Finals, Yamauchi was asked if Gran Turismo could make the leap to the PC platform....

According to Notebookcheck, which spoke with HDMI Licensing Administrator (LA) representatives at CES 2023, HDMI Alt Mode will not be updated to the latest audiovisual standards. The technology was never adopted by manufacturers of end users, and it was essentially dead on arrival because of new market trends and DisplayPort competition. As explained on the official page of the standard, HDMI Alt Mode would allow “HDMI-enabled source devices” to use a USB-C connection to deliver HDMI signal and features over a simpler cable with no need for additional protocols or adapters....

The GPU has been fabricated using the 40nm process, but features 454 million less transistors than the Radeon HD 5850’s Cypress XT core. This allowed AMD to shrink the die from 334mm2 to 255mm2, making the Radeon HD 6850 more fuel-efficient. By default, the core is clocked at 775MHz – 50MHz higher than the Radeon HD 5850 – while the GDDR5 memory operates at the same speed of 1000MHz (4....

Designing a chip is a complex process. First comes laying out the chip, making sure the design works, then preparing all the files required for the foundry, and when they come back from the fabs there is a lot of work involved in getting the chip debugged and working. It has gotten increasingly easy to do that first bit – designing a chip, but the rest of it is still a fairly laborious process, and the big chip companies think they can help others get through all of that....

Compared to AMD’s flagship at the time, the Radeon R9 Fury X, the GTX 1080 Ti was an incredible 60% faster at 4K and up to 30% faster than the original GTX 1080. This level of performance was made possible by a staggering 3584 CUDA cores, 17% more than the previous generation’s Titan part, that were also clocked almost 50% higher. For roughly 18 months the GTX 1080 Ti was the most powerful GeForce GPU on the market, but the fondness high-end gamers seemed to have for this GPU was only magnified when Nvidia showed it the door with the GeForce RTX 20 series....