Latest articles by Nick Evanson
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus review
Score: 87% The dark horse of Arrow Lake: Ultra 7 class performance for an Ultra 3 class price tag.
Nvidia's very keen on you 'catching the future of real-time rendering' at this year's GTC, though I suggest not waiting with bated breath for anything groundbreaking
News It'll be 100% AI-powered stuff, of course, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
'We want that the real-time images look indistinguishable from reality. We want them to look like a film.' Nvidia has lofty goals for path-traced graphics, but its support for Microsoft's shader stutter cure is a lot more interesting to me
News Can't brute force your way to path tracing nirvana, so it'll be AI all the way into the future of graphics.
It's been 25 years since my jaw first dropped at 3DMark2001's Nature test but hoo boy, have 3D graphics changed since then
3D marked Dated and clunky, just like me.
Valve clarifies what's required for a game to be Steam Machine and Steam Frame verified, but it just makes me worry about the Gabecube even more
News Still, its advice for games being made with SteamOS in mind is all top-notch.
Memory prices could leap even higher as the supply of helium, crucial to making chips, is now impacted by the conflict in the Middle East
News There's no quick fix to getting hold of ultra-pure helium, either.
Microsoft announces that Office has two critical security vulnerabilities, and here's where you can find patches to fix them
News Both also require local access to exploit, so while they're bad, they're not super bad.
Nvidia will announce an x86 CPU in collaboration with Intel at its GTC event, according to one report, though Intel itself shoots down the whole idea
News It would be an extraordinarily quick turnaround, given that their joint venture only started last year.
Crimson Desert's updated system requirements look very promising for any PC gamer, and for what must be a first-ever move, the devs have namechecked the ROG Xbox Ally handheld
News You're looking at 60 fps at 4K, maxed out, on hardware that isn't unobtanium level for once.
As if PC hardware news couldn't get any gloomier, one research report suggests mainstream laptop prices could rise by as much as 40%
News And it's because CPUs are getting more expensive, too.
Resident Evil Requiem is one of the few games to use GPU data decompression but it's a bit hit and miss as to whether your GPU will ever actually use it
News It's a puzzle worthy of being in a Resident Evil game.
DRAM maker SK hynix has validated its next-gen LPDDR6 which would be great news for handheld PCs, except that the targeted market is AI devices
News Lots more performance and way better power efficiency, but destined to be rarer than pixie dust.
Intel has released the SDK for XeSS 3 so hopefully it won't be long before Arc GPU owners get in on native multi frame gen action
News Until then, you'll just have to use the override option.
Samsung's new 1440p gaming monitor sports a ridiculous 600 Hz refresh rate but that's nothing compared to the 1040 Hz it can do in 1080p mode
News And if you prefer pixels over performance, how about a 6K gaming monitor?
Modder helps Sony unwittingly beat Valve to the punch: 'I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine'
News Sounds easy to do, not actually easy to do at all.
A simple check with a magnet was the final clue that made Thermal Grizzly realise it had been hit by a 40,000 euro metal scam
News Copper's great for coolers but not so great when you need to buy several tons of the stuff.
This 3D printed, laptop-carrying 'suitcase' is not just a thing of beauty but it's also a neat solution to the dearth of eGPUs
News Just don't go waving it around like a real suitcase.
PS5 Pro owners will soon get an improved PSSR AI upscaler, while PC gamers with RDNA 2 and 3 GPUs are still praying for AMD to add official support for FSR 4
News All these GPUs share very similar parts and features, so if one can do AI upscaling, why can't they all?
Microsoft's update for Direct3D, with opacity micromaps and shader execution reordering now official features, will probably mean little to gamers but graphics devs are going to be happy
News And happy devs mean better games, right? Right??
The massive difference between how well Resident Evil Requiem runs on the Steam Deck and an Asus ROG Ally just adds more fuel to the rumour that AMD has abandoned driver support for its Ryzen Z1 chips
News And if that really is the case, how long before it does the same with Z2 processors?
Resident Evil Requiem's path tracing is tough on GPUs but it probably won't take as long as ray tracing did to become a mainstream option in games
The price of perfection Ray tracing? Pffft, easy peasy now.
Resident Evil Requiem PC performance analysis: Great visuals and decent frame rates all round, though path tracing's an obvious frame rate killer
Ray-traced evil Upscaling is a bit of a must-use, but that's a given these days.
You might be as surprised as I was to learn that Assassin's Creed Mirage is one of the few games to use AI neural texture compression—the only one, I think
News Now this is an AI use case I can get fully behind.
