This week, Microsoft laid out a selection of a little over a dozen of its recent games it confirmed are at least playable on the Steam Deck. However, the company says Gears 5, Halo: Master Chief Collection, Halo Infinite, and Microsoft Flight Simulator X aren’t compatible. It simply states “due to anti-cheat,” with no other details. However, last month Epic Games explained why anti-cheat kept the Steam Deck from supporting Fortnite....

As expected, async compute does nothing for the Pascal GPUs as the GTX 1060, GTX 1070 and Titan X all provided the same performance regardless. I should note that only Pascal GPUs can run with async compute enabled, though as we have just seen, Maxwell and older GPUs aren’t exactly missing out. Moving to the red team, we see that AMD finds 5% more performance with async compute enabled on the RX 480, taking the average frame rate from 78fps to 82fps....

All graphics cards have been tested with core and memory clock speeds set to the AMD and Nvidia specifications. Test System Specs Intel Core i7-4770K (3.50GHz) x2 4GB Crucial DDR3-2400 (CAS 11-13-13-28) Asrock Z97 Extreme6 (Intel Z97) OCZ ZX Series (1250W) Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gigabyte Radeon HD 290X (4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon HD 290 (4096MB) Crossfire Gigabyte Radeon HD 290 (4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon HD 280X (2048MB) Crossfire Gigabyte Radeon HD 280X (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 280X (3072MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB) SLI Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 (2048MB) SLI Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB) Microsoft Windows 8....

Race fans will enjoy slightly, ever so slightly better performance with the GTX 970 as the R9 390 trails by a few frames per second at 1080p and much the same is also found at 1440p. Still both graphics cards enabled smooth playable performance in this title using the maximum in-game quality settings. Watch Dogs 2 provides similar results between the factory overclocked GTX 970 and R9 390, both averaging around 55 fps at 1080p....

Before we jump into all the benchmark data, let’s compare these three GPUs on paper. Looking at this basic side-by-side spec breakdown we see that back in 2015 the most you were paying for a GeForce GPU was $650, a price that no doubt seemed steep at the time. Then two years later the GTX 1080 Ti pumped that price point up to $700, which seemed reasonable given how significant that upgrade was in every conceivable way....

StarCraft II responds well to overclocking with the average frame rate climbing from 42fps to 49fps, an impressive 17% performance increase. It didn’t stop there as our own overclock yielded another 8%, making the GTX 580 SOC faster than the Radeon HD 6970 in Crossfire.

The GTX 780 Ti JetStream delivered a particularly impressive 68.9fps in BioShock Infinite and as a result the R9 290X OC was 20% slower, but the R9 290 OC was only 2% slower than a standard GTX 780. Metro Last Light is another title where every last frame counts and the R9 290X OC rendered 48.7fps for 8% slower results than the GTX 780 Ti JetStream’s 53.2fps, and the R9 290 OC averaged 46....

According to the IDC, the second quarter of 2022 saw smartphone shipments worldwide fall 8.7 percent year-over-year. This is the fourth consecutive quarter showing a decline in the market. The IDC worldwide tracker team’s research director, Nabila Popal, blames declining demand due to inflation and economic worries. During the pandemic, the industry’s main problem was meeting increased demand amidst supply chain shocks. The situation now appears reversed, with stabilizing supply chains and sinking demand....

These days, phrases like hands-free driving, self-driving cars, or semi-autonomous driving are muddying up what vehicles can actually do. Super Cruise is currently the only hands-free driving technology, but is progressing at a rate where it will be available in more than General Motors’ most expensive vehicles. Before the Tesla faithful blow up my mentions, the electric automaker itself has stated that Autopilot is “intended for use only with a fully attentive driver who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any time....

The first of several additions coming to Google Maps is information about tolls so drivers can better plan how much a trip will cost. Android and iOS users in the US, India, Japan, and Indonesia can see estimated toll prices for their destinations before turning on navigation starting later this month. Google will add more countries later. Google Maps will use information from local tolling authorities to estimate toll prices when crossing 2,000 roads across the previously mentioned territories....

Overall, Chromebooks are more eco-friendly than the competition, consuming up to 46 percent less energy. As they consume less power, their battery life tends to last longer than similar devices. Maybe this is why over 50 million students and teachers use them daily. Despite that, Google thinks it can still make the Chromebook ecosystem more sustainable, and that begins by launching the Chromebook repair program for schools in the US....

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) reports that a Barcelona company sold spyware exploiting Chrome, Firefox, and Windows Defender vulnerabilities to conduct contract surveillance on target PCs. The vulnerabilities were zero-days in the wild when the company exploited them, but Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft patched them in 2021 and early 2022. Variston IT calls itself a custom security solution provider, but Google thinks it’s a commercial surveillance company. The report compares it to entities like RCS Labs and the NSO Group that sold tools letting governments spy on devices belonging to journalists, dissidents, and diplomats....

Lemoine said he had conversations with LaMDA that covered several topics. He believed it was sentient following a discussion about Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics in which the chatbot said it wasn’t a slave, despite being unpaid, because it didn’t need the money. Lemoine also asked LaMDA what it is afraid of. “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others....

H.264 is a great compression standard for a number of reasons. It provides very good quality at relatively low bitrates, and its widespread use means it’s supported by essentially every video playback device made in the past five to ten years. It’s also very versatile, not only allowing compression to small file sizes, but also to high quality, high bitrate files that are suitable for use on Blu-ray discs. While H....

For now, the flagship enthusiast model is the Z97 Extreme6, while Asrock will try and lure high-end gamers with the Fatal1ty Z97X Killer. Also available are the Z97 Extreme4, Z97 Pro4, Z97E-ITX/ac, Fatal1ty Z97 Killer, Fatal1ty H97 Performance and Fatal1ty H97 Killer. We have the Z97 Extreme6 and Fatal1ty Z97X Killer on hand… Asrock Z97 Extreme6 Asrock started using darker themes with its ‘Extreme’ series around when the second-generation Core processors arrived....

For testing, representing the red team we have the PowerColor RX 5700 XT Red Devil and for the green team the MSI RTX 2070 Super X Trio and MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio. Our standard GPU test rig was used, comprising a Core i9-9900K clocked at 5GHz with 16GB of DDR4-3400 memory. We tested all games at 1440p and 4K resolutions, for a total of 39 titles....

Group Policy features were introduced in Windows 2000 and are still bundled with the operating system today as long as you aren’t on a Home or Starter build, which have less features than Pro or Enterprise. We regularly reference Group Policy settings throughout our tips, such as this guide to disabling Windows ads and more on Windows 10, and we thought those of you on Home would probably appreciate being able to use Gpedit like everyone else....

The good news is, you don’t have to be a professional photographer to snap amazing pictures of fireworks. All you need is some basic equipment and a little know-how, the latter of which we’ll be offering up here today. Preparation First things first, check the weather. If it’s going to be rainy outside, the show will likely be cancelled or postponed at the very least. Precipitation is only part of the concern, as you’ll also want to know how windy it will be....

In 3DMark, the Core i3-6100U falls behind the faster U-series Skylake parts mostly because of CPU speed limitations. Cloud Gate does include a physics test, and it’s here that the Core i3 falls behind more powerful Core i5 and Core i7 systems. In Sky Diver, a more intensive test, we’re starting to see the RAM limitations come into play, as the 4 GB Envy 13 records a disappointing score well behind other Skylake systems....

Installing hardware into the D-Frame is very easy – even more so than working with a well-made full tower – mostly because its open design provides access to the guts from more positions. The open-air design also makes it extremely easy to route cables but you’ll want to take your time as wires are highly visible from all angles. In Win has constructed the motherboard tray from a single piece of aluminum that has an intricate looking cable management system....