Nick Evanson

Nick Evanson

Hardware Writer

Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?

Latest articles by Nick Evanson

An image showing the retail boxes for an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, against a gradient green background, with a PC Gamer Recommended logo in the top right corner
Best CPU for gaming in 2026: These are the chips I recommend for gaming, productivity, and peace of mind

By Jacob Ridley Last updated

Happy Cores Fire up your rig with the best CPU for gaming. More cores, more clocks, more of everything that matters.

Happy Cores
A photo of an Intel Core Ultra 7 2750K Plus processor, resting against a colorful, Intel-branded box
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review

By Nick Evanson Published

Score: 89% Arrow Lake's redemption is here at last.

Score: 89%
A photograph of Intel's Core Ultra 5 250K Plus processor, placed on an Intel-branded display box
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus review

By Nick Evanson Published

Score: 87% The dark horse of Arrow Lake: Ultra 7 class performance for an Ultra 3 class price tag.

Score: 87%
Nvidia's Jensen Huang, his arms wide, at GTC 2024
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News It'll be 100% AI-powered stuff, of course, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

News
A screenshot of the PC version of Resident Evil Requiem
'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

By Nick Evanson Published

News Can't brute force your way to path tracing nirvana, so it'll be AI all the way into the future of graphics.

15 Comments
News
A screenshot from the fourth graphics test in 3DMark2001
It's been 25 years since my jaw first dropped at 3DMark2001's Nature test but hoo boy, have 3D graphics changed since then

By Nick Evanson Published

3D marked Dated and clunky, just like me.

3D marked
A promotional group image of the Valve Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News Still, its advice for games being made with SteamOS in mind is all top-notch.

News
Samsung Foundry's begins chip production with 3nm GAA architecture.
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News There's no quick fix to getting hold of ultra-pure helium, either.

News
A screenshot of Microsoft Word, skewed and shown against a gradient background
Microsoft announces that Office has two critical security vulnerabilities, and here's where you can find patches to fix them

By Nick Evanson Published

News Both also require local access to exploit, so while they're bad, they're not super bad.

News
A photograph of an Intel Core i7 14700K processor resting against an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition graphics card
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News It would be an extraordinarily quick turnaround, given that their joint venture only started last year.

News
Kliff soars on a dragon over the lands of Crimson Desert.
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News You're looking at 60 fps at 4K, maxed out, on hardware that isn't unobtanium level for once.

News
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 gaming laptop
As if PC hardware news couldn't get any gloomier, one research report suggests mainstream laptop prices could rise by as much as 40%

By Nick Evanson Published

News And it's because CPUs are getting more expensive, too.

News
Leon and Grace amid the flames
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News It's a puzzle worthy of being in a Resident Evil game.

News
A promotional image of an SK hynix LPDDR6 module, against a stylized electronic circuit background
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News Lots more performance and way better power efficiency, but destined to be rarer than pixie dust.

News
Intel Arc B580 graphics card
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News Until then, you'll just have to use the override option.

News
A collage of two Samsung gaming monitors, the Odyssey G6 G60H and Odyssey G8 G80HS
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News And if you prefer pixels over performance, how about a 6K gaming monitor?

10 Comments
News
A screenshot of a video posted by Andy Nguyen on X, showing a Sony PS5 Slim running Ubuntu OS and GTA 5 Enhanced
Modder helps Sony unwittingly beat Valve to the punch: 'I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine'

By Nick Evanson Published

News Sounds easy to do, not actually easy to do at all.

10 Comments
News
A screenshot of a Der8auer video, in which Thermal Grizzly's Roman Hartung describes how the company was scammed by copper and aluminium suppliers in China
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News Copper's great for coolers but not so great when you need to buy several tons of the stuff.

30 Comments
News
A photo of a 3D printed 'Laptop eGPU "Suitcase" SKADIS Frame', created by MakerWorld user MPKVR
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News Just don't go waving it around like a real suitcase.

News
A stylised image of AMD's RDNA 3 GPU design for its Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards
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

By Nick Evanson Last updated

News All these GPUs share very similar parts and features, so if one can do AI upscaling, why can't they all?

8 Comments
News
A screenshot from Alan Wake 2 showing the main character walking down a street.
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News And happy devs mean better games, right? Right??

News
Asus ROG Ally handheld gaming PC
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

By Nick Evanson Last updated

News And if that really is the case, how long before it does the same with Z2 processors?

21 Comments
News
Resident Evil Requiem survival horror
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

By Nick Evanson Published

The price of perfection Ray tracing? Pffft, easy peasy now.

7 Comments
The price of perfection
A screenshot of the PC version of Resident Evil Requiem
Resident Evil Requiem PC performance analysis: Great visuals and decent frame rates all round, though path tracing's an obvious frame rate killer

By Nick Evanson Last updated

Ray-traced evil Upscaling is a bit of a must-use, but that's a given these days.

9 Comments
Ray-traced evil
Assassin's Creed Mirage — Basim looks out across Baghdad at sunset while perched on a balcony.
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

By Nick Evanson Published

News Now this is an AI use case I can get fully behind.

News
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