For most of Rise of the Tomb Raider, the second installment of a rebooted Tomb Raider series, Lara Croft doesn’t go around being scared. She still faces down overwhelming odds, grapples with doubt, and absorbs a ton of trauma. The newest iteration of the iconic video game heroine displays less fumbly panic than she did in 2013’s Tomb Raider. There are more moments of steely determination and fewer moments where she pauses to psych herself up....

Rockstar Games at long last has confirmed that the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series in well underway. Nobody has arguably done more with a single game than Rockstar has done with Grand Theft Auto V. The open-world action-adventure game debuted in late 2013 on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, before finding its way to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One more than a year later. A version for PC dropped in 2015....

A source familiar with the matter, who attended a focus group hosted by Roku earlier this month, told Business Insider that the company showed off a variety of models with varying feature sets, price points, screen sizes and names. To be clear, Roku already licenses its smart TV platform to existing set makers, and some of them use the Roku brand name to market their sets. The moderator of the focus group reportedly made it clear that “this is a manufacturing operation....

Google Chrome OS is to Chromium OS what the Google Chrome browser is to Chromium. It’s essentially Chrome OS’s open source brother, used primarily by developers, with code that is available for anyone to checkout, modify, and build. While you’d normally have to build Chromium OS from source to try it out on your computer, several developers have released installable builds that will save you the trouble. Over at chromeos....

Before we jump to the benchmarks, a few obligatory test notes: the 3900X has been tested on the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme using the latest BIOS revision and there are two test configurations. The first which we’re calling “stock” is the 3900X with the Wraith Spire RGB box cooler and nothing more than the XMP profile loaded in the BIOS using DDR4-3200 CL14 memory. Then we have an overclocked configuration using DDR4-3600 CL16 memory, the Corsair Hydro H115i all-in-one liquid cooler with PBO+AutoOC enabled....

The SSD 850 Pro took just 90 seconds to complete the Red Orchestra 2 installation, making it the fastest 2.5" SATA SSD we have tested and just 2 seconds slower than the PCIe Plextor M6e. Enabling RAPID mode didn’t help improve performance here but actually hurt the drive’s results a little when enabled. The SSD 850 Pro completed a virus scan of the system32 folder in only 36 seconds, which was almost a 20% improvement over the SSD 840 Pro yet still 3 seconds slower than the Plextor M6S....

Last year, the supply of DDR3 memory was already dwindling and profit margins remained slim, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that manufacturers are looking to phase them out in favor of newer variants like DDR4 and DDR5. Earlier this year, Samsung and SK Hynix were the first to announce they would cease DDR3 production in the coming months, while companies like Micron and specialty DRAM manufacturers like Nanya Technology, Elite Semiconductor Memory Technology, Etron Technology, and Winbond Electronics assured their customers they would continue making more for the foreseeable future....

Fast forward a few years and the Galaxy Note line is Samsung’s second biggest, after their flagship standard-sized Galaxy S series. The Notes have proven themselves to be popular with power users over the last four years, thanks to powerful hardware, top-end cameras, and plenty of screen real estate. They’ve been so popular that Apple, opposed to large screens for years due to usability concerns, released their first phablet-class device last year....

Samsung has a long history of making devices with strong cameras and the new Galaxy S II is just further evidence that the company knows what it’s doing. The main 8 megapixel camera takes fantastic photos nearly every time, though its LED flash tends to, oddly enough, under-expose photos in low light situations. Photos have good white balance and are very sharp, and the phone focuses both quickly and accurately....

The rear camera supports 4K capture at 30 frames per second (and 1080p at 60 FPS), while the front camera is limited to 1440p capture. The front camera hardware has been upgraded, though, to an 8-megapixel sensor with an f/1.7 lens and autofocus. One of the best aspects to the Galaxy S7 Edge camera remains in the S8+: it’s phenomenal focus speed thanks to dual pixel technology. What dual pixel does is turn every pixel in the sensor into both a light capture source and a phase detection autofocus element, so no matter where an object is in the frame, the sensor can focus accurately and very quickly....

Smartphone sales in Europe are yet to reach pre-pandemic levels of growth, however, 2021 showed noticeable signs of improvement as overall sales increased by 8 percent YoY. According to figures from Counterpoint Research, Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi were largely responsible for this growth as they traded places for the top spot multiple times throughout the year. Samsung, being the market leader, also had the smallest annual growth at 6 percent....

For large file transfers the new Samsung 960 SSDs lead the way. Although the 960 Pro was 30% faster than the cheaper Evo series, the 960 Evo 500GB drive was anything but slow, besting the rest here. The 960 Evo closely followed the 960 Pro in our program copy test, delivering an impressive throughput of 512MB/s. Again the 960 Pro series was almost 30% faster than the 960 Evo, this time for the game copy test, though the 960 Evo was still able to beat everything else with an impressive throughput of 856MB/s....

Scientists have finally finished mapping the human genome, a project that has collectively spanned more than two decades. If this sounds like déjà vu, there’s a good reason for it. Just after the turn of the century, it was widely reported that the human genome had been fully sequenced. In actuality, only about 92 percent of it had been successfully sequenced. The remaining eight percent of genetic material, which amounted to around 400 million letters, remained a mystery due to technological limitations at the time....

In a statement to Ars Technica, a Sega of Japan rep told the publication that the new miniaturized console was really a “Japan-only project.” Sega eventually decided to do a Genesis Mini 2 for Western audiences but said the system could only be produced in small numbers due to the global semiconductor shortage. Sega of Japan said the number of Genesis Mini 2 consoles manufactured will equal one-tenth the total production of the original Genesis Mini....

A modder has successfully built a brand-new, functioning Commodore 64 using mostly new components. The project’s documentation contains useful information for those interested in repairing or otherwise investigating the system’s hardware. Modder Celso Martinho assembled a replica C64 almost from scratch to test his mastery of the retro computer. Not stopping at rebuilding the system as it was in 1982, Martinho resolved to use as much new material as possible and make his “Frankenstein 64” easily repairable....

Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, spoke about the PS5 shortages during the company’s CES presentation. “Everyone who wants a PS5 should have a much easier time finding one at retailers globally, starting from this point forward,” he said. Ryan went on to thank fans for their patience over the last two years. Sony also revealed the PS5’s latest sales figures. Worldwide console sales have now reached 30 million, marking an increase of around 5 million since the last time the numbers were announced in November....

With a 6.4-inch display in your hands, you want to be seeing more information that what you would get with a 5-inch, or 4.3-inch phone. The extra screen real estate allows more text, more images and more data to be seen at a glance, in a similar way to a 10-inch tablet is better for productivity than a 7-inch tablet. As the Z Ultra falls in between high-end phones and small tablets in terms of screen real estate, ideally you’d be wanting information density somewhere in between those two types of devices....

After just a few days into the review period, it was clear that the Xperia Z1 Compact would deliver better battery life than the Xperia Z1. Stamina wasn’t quite up there with top performers like the LG G2 and Samsung Galaxy Note 3, but I tended to end a day of regular usage with around 30% of the juice still left in the tank. Using the camera more often or playing games would reduce this total, but at least there’s wiggle room if you want to use the smartphone more often....

Last February during its Stream On event, the company said Spotify HiFi would debut later in the year and deliver CD-quality tunes as an option for Premium subscribers. Pricing and market availability details were missing, but it turns out those details really didn’t matter as the service never rolled out. In response to community discussion on the matter, a Spotify moderator recently said they are excited to deliver a Spotify HiFi experience to Premium users in the future but don’t have timing details to share yet....

Monthly active users (which combine both premium and ad supported users) reached 489 million, a quarter over quarter increase of seven percent compared to last quarter’s 456 million monthly active users. Spotify noted continued strength in multi-user premium plans. Despite the gains, the financial losses continue to pile up. Spotify generated 3.17 billion euros ($3.44 billion) in revenue in the fourth quarter but posted a net loss of 270 million euros ($293 million)....