While performance is significantly improved by using Nvidia’s HEVC encoder, NVENC, it comes at a cost of quality. Simply put, you’re not going to get as good a quality at the same bitrates using Nvidia’s encoder compared to using Handbrake. You can check out a comparison on the pages that follow, but essentially the quality of Nvidia HEVC encodes is equivalent to a good H.264 encode, albeit with a much faster encode time....

The dialogue-free trailer recreates the grim atmosphere of the games, with Joel and Ellie, played by Game of Thrones alumni Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay, crossing the devasted landscape of the US while avoiding the infected humans that have been mutated by a parasitic fungus known as Cordyceps Brain Infection. Any TV adaption of a video game brings concerns over whether it will do the source material justice—the terrible Resident Evil series was canceled after just one season in the wake of some very negative reviews....

Patch 3.110 will also add support for adaptive supersampling tech including AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0 and Nvidia DLSS. Unsurprisingly, IO Interactive recommends enabling FSR or DLSS when using ray tracing for improved performance. Minimum hardware requirements for running the game at 1080p with supersampling enabled and ray tracing reflection quality set to medium include a GeForce RTX 2060 Super or Radeon RX 6600 XT, an Intel Core i5-10600K or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and at least 8GB of RAM....

That changed in 1999 with the arrival ‘Homeworld’, the first RTS that allowed players to move through three-dimensional space. Built on the custom Homeworld engine, Relic Entertainment’s 3D RTS was praised for its mind-blowing graphics, gameplay and other features, winning both IGN and PC Gamer’s game of the year award in 1999. Given Homeworld’s success (and the positive response to the non-canon Homeworld: Cataclysm made by Barking Dog Studios), it was no surprise when Relic and Sierra returned in 2003 with a proper sequel, nor was it a surprise when Homeworld 2 received largely positive reviews with features including a modified engine for even better graphics....

Also available is the Ryzen 7 2700U if you want slightly higher CPU clocks and a decent amount more GPU performance, while on the lower end you can get the Ryzen 3 2300U, although I’d recommend sticking with at least the Ryzen 5 to get a decent GPU. There’s also 8 GB of DDR4 as standard, and a 256GB SSD, although those parts are upgradeable if you’d like. Strangely, HP only offers a 16GB RAM upgrade with the Ryzen 5 SKU, not Ryzen 7....

Nevertheless 2015 is shaping up to be a positive year for HTC. One of the coolest products announced in the year so far, the Vive virtual reality headset was developed by HTC in partnership with Valve, and I’m seriously excited for its release towards the end of the year. As expected, the company has also launched a refined version of their well-regarded flagship Android smartphone. The One M9 could be the winner the company needs....

Most of the features that are found in Android 5.0 are seen in the HTC One M9 with its Sense skin. The card-based interface for notifications both in the drop-down pane and on the lockscreen is essentially untouched, which is great to see. The improved quick settings panel is also found in the One M9’s software, although it’s only a minor upgrade over what HTC used in past versions of Sense....

The main upgrade is a shift from f/2.2 lenses on both cameras to f/1.6, which delivers more light to the sensors and improves non-simulated depth of field. Like other Huawei smartphone cameras, both sensors use the same equivalent focal length, so there’s no zoom or wide-angle functionality. Instead, the company prioritizes simulated apertures, and includes a prominent feature that allows you to change the ‘aperture’ anywhere from f/0.95 to f/16....

So there are a few takeaways here from the P10’s battery performance. Firstly, the phone isn’t a top-tier performer, falling behind the best smartphones on the market like the Xiaomi Mi 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S8+. However in many areas, the P10 produces better battery life and faster charge times than the P9, which is a good result for Huawei. There is one area where the P10 doesn’t perform as well, and that’s in high performance usage, such as gaming (as measured by GFXBench) and intensive web browsing (measured by Basemark Web 3....

The first-generation Dual Camera system used two 12-megapixel sensors, one for monochrome data, and the other for RGB. With the second-gen system in the Mate 9, the monochrome sensor has been upgraded to a 20-megapixel unit with an f/2.2 lens. The 12-megapixel RGB camera remains the same; it’s a Sony IMX286 1/2.9" CMOS with 1.25µm pixels, paired with an f/2.2 27mm lens. This camera solution has some advantages over a standard single-sensor setup....

This week, Humble is selling a bundle of 123 items, including games, books, and software. The minimum price to get all the items in this pay-what-you-want bundle is $40, all of which will go towards four charities focused on helping Ukraine. The charity package consists of Some major games, including Metro Exodus, Quantum Break, Fable Anniversary, This War of Mine, Back 4 Blood, and the Amnesia series. Supporters will also receive core rulebooks for Pathfinder Second Edition, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition, and Starfinder....

This week, IT security group Checkpoint Research (CRP) published a report on its discovery of a crypto mining malware campaign hiding behind legitimate-looking apps, including Google Translate. The programs download malware while performing their advertised functions to gain users’ trust. Researchers found the malware from Turkish developer Nitrokod on popular software download sites like Softpedia and Uptodown, which marked it as safe. The fraudulent programs include desktop versions of Google Translate, Yandex Translate, Microsoft Translator, YouTube Music, an mp3 downloader, and an auto-shutdown app....

And while that should give you a neat jumpstart, we haven’t entirely touched on how time-consuming it can be to actually download and then install every new app. Not everyone has a speedy broadband Internet connection or a well-equipped PC, and tracking down a dozen or more pieces of software along with manually installing each one could easily burn an entire afternoon – not counting the time it takes to get your new operating system up and running....

Although it launched in 2013, we didn’t get our hands on the desktop Bay Trail-D variants until August of 2014, once Asrock started peddling its Bay Trail Motherboards. At the time we checked out the Asrock D1800M (Celeron J1800), Q1900M (Celeron J1900) and Q2900 (Pentium J2900). To recap, the Celeron J1800 was a dual-core part clocked at 2.58GHz with a tiny 1MB L2 cache, while the J1900 had four cores working at 2....

So again the Core i3-8100 looks quite impressive. Out of the box, the 8350K isn’t nearly as impressive and again it was much slower than the slightly more expensive 8400, 25% slower this time. Moving on to Blender using the Ryzen Graphic 27 workload we see that the Core i3-8100 easily beats the R3 1300X, completing the task 11% faster. Meanwhile the 8350K was 5% slower than the Ryzen 5 1500X and that margin will likely remain once both CPUs are overclocked and we’ll look at that a little later on....

Overclocking Previously, when testing the Core i7-8700K I was able to get it to an incredible 5.2GHz using just 1.4 volts on the MSI Godlike. Using the same motherboard for the overclocking the 8350K was only good for 4.9GHz and that required 4.2 volts to stabilize the overclock. Despite trying various voltage settings I couldn’t get the system to even boot into Windows at 5GHz without crashing. It has been suggested that Intel cherry picked the review sample chips and that’s why most reviewers managed 5GHz or better with reasonably tame voltages....

The Core i5 661 will cost about the same as the existing Core i5 750, but as you know the new processor carries an on-die GPU. The i5 661 will also hum along to the tune of 3.33GHz, while the i5 750 operates at a more modest 2.66GHz. Despite the clock speed advantage, the 661 only feature two physical cores, whereas the Core i5 750 features four. This applies to all four processors in the Core i5 600 series, which also feature half as much L3 cache as the Core i5 750....

x264 HD Benchmark’s were similar to HandBrake’s with the 3820 nestled between the 3960X and 2600K. Using TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress, we recorded the time it takes to convert a 700MB avi file to mpg. The Core i7-3820 finished in 5 minutes 48 seconds, a hair slower than the 3960X and much faster than the 2600K.

When looking at the data from SolidWorks, the i7-3820 was a fraction slower than the 3960X, though the results were practically equal. At the same time, the new part outpaced the i7-2600K by 36%. The i7-3820 delivered similar OpenGL performance to the 2600K and 3960X in CINEBENCH R11.5, though CPU scores varied quite a lot as the Core i7-3820 was 10% faster than the 2600K but 29% slower than the 3960X....

The Core i7-4960X completed our Excel 2013 workload in an impressive 3.29 seconds, making it 7% faster than the i7-3960X. A reasonable improvement, though it is less than the 9% increase in clock speed. When comparing single-thread performance the Core i7-4960X was 6% faster than the i7-3960X and 29% faster than the i7-4770K thanks to all that extra L3 cache. When comparing multithreading performance the i7-4960X was just 4% faster than the i7-3960X but 38% faster than the i7-4770K....