On Tuesday, Google announced that it’s complying with the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA) by letting Google Play Store developers charge their customers in Europe through third-party billing systems. Processing in-app payments through Google’s system gives the platform holder a 15 percent cut of revenue while circumventing Google’s processor only reduces the fee to 12 percent. Developers who wish to do so can start now by registering with Google’s declaration form....

This week, Bandcamp co-founder and CEO Ethan Diamond said Google has agreed to leave the music service’s Android app alone pending the court case between it and Epic Games, which recently acquired Bandcamp. Until then, Bandcamp will pay artists its regular rate, which is famously higher than Spotify’s. The dispute started when Google announced plans to force music apps on the Play Store to handle payments through its billing system and give it a 10 percent sales cut....

The Half-Life 2: VR Mod entered its beta phase a couple of weeks ago and is already getting good reviews, even though there is still much work to be done. Kotaku says it’s “almost too good to be true.” Even though it is technically a mod, I’m inclined to call it a new version of Half-Life 2. While it uses the Source engine and has not changed anything script-wise, it was built from the ground up for VR, which requires much more work than just making it run through a headset....

The new millennium would bring a closer relationship between people and computers. More portable, customizable devices became the conduit that enabled humans’ basic need to connect. It’s no surprise that the computer transitioned from productivity tool to indispensable companion as connectivity proliferated. As the late 1990s drew to a close, a hierarchy had been established in the PC world. OEMs who previously deposed IBM as market leader found that their influence was now curtailed by Intel....

The U Ultra comes with a 12-megapixel “Ultrapixel 2” rear sensor with 1.55μm pixels, attached to an f/1.8 lens. There’s also optical image stabilization, plus a combined PDAF and laser-assisted autofocus solution. On the front is a 16-megapixel with an f/2.0 lens. 4K video recording is included on this device. There are some really solid aspects to this camera. I was very impressed with the level of detail provided by its 12-megapixel images, especially when viewing 100% crops....

Those building an Intel machine these days have loads of options, with desktop CPU prices ranging from as little as $60 to well over $600. The Core i3 is intended as an entry-level option, the Core i5 is geared for mainstream usage, and the mighty Core i7 is meant for high-end systems and enthusiasts. Looking at the current Haswell lineup, we have Core i3 processors ranging from suggested retail prices of $122 to $149, Core i5 chips priced from $182 to $242, and Core i7 parts set between $303 and $339....

For example, the Core i3 delivered virtually the same performance as the Core i7 in applications such as Adobe Illustrator CC and InDesign CC. However, Photoshop CC and heavy workloads in 7-Zip and Excel 2013 favored the Core i7 over the Core i5 by a mile, while the Core i3 was crushed. The choice gets easier if you care about encoding as the Core i3’s Hyper-threading couldn’t make up for the fact that it’s a dual-core at heart....

Overall, power draw was comparable to that of the 7700K, which isn’t bad, and a maximum system draw of 143 watts in the Corona benchmark is certainly tame.

15.6" LED-backlit Full HD 1920x1080 display Intel Core i7-3620QM (2.6GHz - 3.8GHz, 8MB L3 cache) 8GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory Nvidia GeForce GT 650M 2GB DDR3 VRAM 750GB 7200RPM hard drive Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) 14.0" LED-backlit HD anti-glare 1366 x 768 display Intel Core i5-2520M (2.5GHz - 3.2GHz, 3MB L3 cache) 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3 memory 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6470M 320GB 7200RPM hard drive Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (64-bit)...

There isn’t much to discuss here. The Core i7-6700K is no faster than the 4790K when measuring gaming performance with the GTX 980 and this isn’t too surprising given what we’ve already seen from application testing.

The new Intel HD Graphic 630 was meant to be a good bit faster than the previous generation 530 model. Well that certainly isn’t the case when playing the Tomb Raider reboot, we still get the same miserable performance. At 1080p using what is effectively just the medium quality settings, the Intel Core i7-7700K and i5-7600K were only able to average 43fps in Rocket League. Finally, we see a 9% performance improvement in Sleeping Dogs which is nice, but it’s not exactly worth getting excited over either....

Handbrake is a popular application for encoding video and we’ve used it to convert a 4K H.264 video to 1080p using H.265 and recorded the average frame rate. Here the 7960XE managed 22.3 fps while the 7960X was actually 8% faster. The reason for this is down to utilization, HandBrake really only utilized about 70% of the 18-core CPU and because the 7960XE has a lower operating frequency the 7960X actually came out on top....

When it comes to file compression performance the 9900K is roughly on par with the 7820X while the 9700K fell just short of the 8700K which meant it was also slower than the 2700X. Decompression performance is significantly stronger on the AMD CPUs and here even the Ryzen 7 1800X is able to edge ahead of the 9900K. The 9700K was able to slot back in ahead of the 8700K making it just a fraction faster than the 2600X....

This week, Intel announced that active software support is now only for 11th generation CPUs and newer. It is moving its 6th through 10th generation CPUs to legacy software support. So, aside from critical fixes and security patches, older processors will get updates less frequently than newer ones. Essentially, Intel is splitting its drivers into two groups in the same package. The legacy set is for every processor from Skylake to Ice Lake, including Elkhart, Lakefield, and Jasper Lake....

Programs like Excel 2013 that take advantage of multiple threads will always favor quad-core processors such as the Core i5, Core i7 and FX-8000 series instead of cheaper dual-core processors. The Pentium G3258 was one of the slowest processors tested, though it did manage to match the A10-7850K. Overclocking the G3258 improved performance by 18%, reducing the completion time to just 12.6 seconds, but the Core i3-4130 was still 10% faster....

The Intel 600p looks a bit livelier in the AS SSD Benchmark sequential read benchmark reaching 1629MB/s, much faster than the SATA SSDs. The write performance is once again a weakness of the Intel 600p as it is only able to match the SATA SSDs here. The 4K-64 thread read performance was well done on what you would expect for an M.2 NVMe SSD as the Intel 600p sustained just 506MB/s....

Apple already has a robust tracking system in place with the Find My service that pretty much renders an Apple device (iPhone/iPad/Mac/Watch) useless if it’s marked as lost. However, there is always the possibility that an owner who lost their device to a thief (or otherwise) didn’t have Find My activated. Such victims can report their device as stolen or missing, a record of which is kept in the GSMA Device Registry....

The leaked slide titled “DG2 Graphics Memory configuration” has found its way onto the Internet through HXL, a known leaker with a good track record. The slide has a table briefly detailing the specifications of five DG2 NB (notebook) SKUs, which may or may not be the same as the desktop SKUs. First, we have the DG2 SKU with 512EUs, which supports up to eight 2GB memory modules (16GB of VRAM) clocked at 16Gbps....

Wccftech has sourced a slide (below) that paints a rough picture of Alchemist’s pricing, power consumption, and memory capacity. It was allegedly part of a presentation created by Intel for its partners in Taiwan. It’s fairly official-looking and also contains reasonable information, but it doesn’t come from a reliable source, so treat it with the appropriate skepticism. Intel’s team joined Linus Tech Tips on stream last week to announce the third member of the Alchemist series, the A770 flagship....

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Hitman Absolution, Bioshock Infinity, Saints Row IV, Sleeping Dogs, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and a few others were very playable with their highest settings at 1920x1080, provided MSAA was disabled. From this, we can deduce that many gamers will be pleased with the base configuration. At less than $200, the 192-bit GTX 660 represents one of the sweetest spots in affordable, low-compromise gaming. I’ve yet to see marks on Lenovo’s Radeon HD 8950 option (available from OEMs only), but 28 compute-units and 240GB/s of memory bandwidth should put it more in line with a GTX 770....