Month: March 2020

I shouldn’t be surprised that people are finishing the fastest shooter on the block even faster than I imagined. Doom Eternal speedruns are already clocking in under two hours, with these runs from BloodThunder and CreeperHntr shaving an extra 30 minutes off. 

Granted, these are primarily exploratory runs rather for testing out early glitches and strategies. These runners are Doom experts, no doubt, jut don’t expect to see an endless reel of supreme Nightmare difficulty FPS skill on display here. Do expect to see Doomguy floating through and above nearly every environment. The thing only released last Friday, after all. This is the mining period, where speedrunners lay out some shaky tracks and do their best to break the intricate, layered work dozens of people spent years working on. 

Even so, there’s some rad movement on display. The ballista makes for a good Doomguy propellant, sending him gliding over vast expanses and skipping over the ground like a stone on the surface of a placid pond. And since you don’t die from falling into pits, playing around above and behind level geometry makes for some elaborate checkpoint skips. Give ’em a watch below. 

You probably know Gigabyte best from the its PC motherboards, but the company also produces tons of other hardware, including gaming laptops. The Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED is a great machine, and now one variant of it is down to $1,299.00 at Newegg.

The Aero 15’s main selling point is the 15.6-inch 4K AMOLED screen, which should give you deeper blacks than the screens on most other gaming laptops. Other specifications include a 6-core/12-thread Intel Core i7-9750H processor, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB NVMe SSD for storing all your data. There’s also per-key RGB lighting, HDMI 2.0 output, three USB 3.0 ports, one USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C connector, and Thunderbolt 3 support.

This is definitely a content-creation laptop first and a gaming laptop second, as indicated by the 4K screen (which maxes out at 60Hz) paired with a GTX 1660 Ti graphics card. You won’t be able to play most games at the native 4K resolution, but since 1080p scales up perfectly to 4K (and the 1660 Ti can definitely handle 1080p gaming), the AMOLED screen will still give you a great experience. And the 1660 Ti should be capable of playing less-demanding laptop games at 4K, too. The 8GB RAM is less than we like these days for intensive tasks⁠—you might want to upgrade it to 16GB down the road for improved performance.

Our friends at TechRadar reviewed the higher-end version with an RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics card, and found that the laptop’s “new 4K HDR screen is better than anything we’ve seen as a color-calibrated portable work display or high-resolution on-the-go gaming monitor.”

This is also the first driver to introduce initial support for DLSS 2.0 on GeForce RTX cards in a couple of games.

The newest ‘Game Ready’ graphics driver (v445.75) from Nvidia adds day-one support for Half-Life: Alyx, a VR exclusive built from the ground up for VR headsets. It’s also optimized for Resident Evil 3, due out in April, and Ghost Recon Breakpoint’s new Ghost Experience.

A driver labeled as Game Ready basically means Nvidia’s software engineers focused on specific games to eek out the most performance possible, while stomping out bugs along the way. The trade off, of course, is the unknown when it comes to installing graphics drivers right when they come out—some people prefer to wait a day or two (or longer) to see if any unforeseen issues rear their ugly heads.

Interestingly, I’m not seeing any fixed issues in the release notes (PDF) this time around, only a rundown of known issues (pages 8 and 9). Several of them are carryovers from the previous driver release and affect Doom Eternal in specific situations. For example, Nvidia highlights an issue in which the framerate drops in Doom Eternal when using Steam’s in-game fps counter.

As Alan reported on earlier today, Nvidia rolled out its second generation Deep Learning Super Sampling technology, otherwise known as DLSS 2.0. It is supposed to be a much improved iteration. As part of that, this driver releases also brings Game Ready optimizations to Control and MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries with DLSS 2.0 enabled.

You can download the latest driver through GeForce Experience or grab it manually from Nvidia’s website. And if you’re looking for installation tips, check out our guide on how to update drivers.

In addition to unveiling the Snapdragon 865, Qualcomm last December announced that it would update GPU drivers through the Play Store. At the Google for Games Developer Summit today, both companies provided an update on the effort, including how the Pixel 4 will be one of the first devices to see GPU updates.

Google today announced the Android GPU Inspector to make building and optimizing games on the platform easier. The tool provides detailed information about a game’s render stages and GPU counter that was previously not available. These insights can be used to improve frame rates and lower power usage for longer battery life:

While working with a game partner using the Android GPU Inspector and a Pixel 4 XL powered by Snapdragon, Google was able to discover an optimization opportunity that saved the game 40% in GPU utilization.

Qualcomm worked with Google on the Inspector given the Adreno GPU family’s wide adoption. In using the tool to make optimizations, developers can suggest driver enhancements directly to the chipmaker. An Adreno Graphics Development Driver will be made available to select devs to allow for fast testing of optimizations.

These improvements to the Adreno GPU driver will be compiled and released to consumers as an update through the Play Store. Similar to on PCs, this will bring new features and performance enhancements. The end-user experience will be akin to updating an app, just like with Project Mainline and its modularization of security and other key Android components.

Today’s update reveals how Qualcomm and Google are “currently collaborating” on upgradable GPU drivers for the Snapdragon 855-powered Pixel 4, Samsung Galaxy S10, and Note 10. More devices are “coming later.”

CHUWI brand is definitely one of the big dogs in chinese tablet/laptop industry and they always focus on the price/performance ratio. Recently they have sent to the market a new CHUWI Hi10 X convertible 2-in-1 tablet and it more or less embodies the company’s philosphy. It packs quite a punch with rock solid specs, but on the other hand is not exceeding the acceptable pricing. And the design of full metal unibody chassis with sleek 8.8mm thickness and 600g of weight certainly helps too. How about rest of the specs ?

For starters the 2-in-1 convertible tablet is getting a solid processor with the Gemini Lake Intel Celeron N4100 paired with 6 GB LPDDR4 RAM and 128 GB of internal storage. The 10.1-inch fully laminated G+FF IPS display with FHD resolution is kept and with the added support of the 1024-pressure level stylus pen HiPen 3 it got even better. The tablet is also boasting full metal unibody build with a docking keyboard as an extra and new set of ports. Those will even have two USB Type-C ports (one slower 2.0 for charging and one 3.0 for data). Battery life is also not bad with estimations ranging from 6 to 8 hours. Everything of course runs on the pre-installed Windows 10 system as usual.

And now we are getting to the best part of the whole thing. Because CHUWI Hi10 X is really kept pretty affordable with the base prices on Aliexpress, Amazon and Banggood official channels reaching roughly about $210. But ideally you want to throw in the mix the keyboard dock and the stylus pen for couple dollars more to have all the perks. Still the pricing is really good all things considered. You can find more information about the model including the buying links on the official website.

A leaked slide suggests that Intel’s Rocket Lake is going to be the desktop equivalent of Tiger Lake, just a bit more portly.

Intel Rocket Lake is rumoured to be the next next-gen desktop processor from the chip giant, and a freshly leaked slide looks to be serving up our first concrete info on the new Intel CPUs. Of course we need to get the Intel Comet Lake processor update out of the way first, but the Rocket Lake silicon should be our first taste of a new Core architecture on the desktop since Skylake when it finally arrives. When that might be… well, all hardware launches are subject to change right now.

The slide, leaked by Videocardz and reportedly its sources at Intel, promises “Increased performance with new processor core architecture.” The 10nm Tiger Lake mobile chips launching in laptops (near you) later this year look to be the forerunners of the Rocket Lake desktop parts, and those sport the new Willow Cove Core architecture. 

Willow Cove wraps in the extra single threaded performance boost of the Sunny Cove architecture, but includes a cache redesign, new transistor optimisations, and some much-needed security features. And that should give Rocket Lake some of the edge it needs to compete with AMD’s Ryzen chips. Which will be in maybe their fifth generation by the time it launches some time in 2021. Tough times.

Alongside the new architecture will be the Xe graphics silicon, but as Rocket Lake S is a desktop part, don’t expect Intel to ship too much GPU grunt inside it. After all, you’re going to be slamming a next-gen AMD RDNA 2 or Nvidia Hopper graphics card into your hypothetical Rocket Lake rig.

The slide also promises PCIe 4.0 support for the touted Intel 500-series motherboard platform, something which Comet Lake’s 400-series boards won’t be offering. Again, a long while after AMD dropped the inaugural PCIe 4.0 platform. The PCIe 4.0 support is coming directly from the CPU itself, offering a x16 interface for the GPU and another x4 lanes for an NVMe SSD. That there’s bandwidth, people.

So, will this be the first 10nm desktop processor from Intel, a node akin to AMD’s 7nm chips? There’s no confirmation in the latest slide, but the expectation all along has been that Rocket Lake will be another roll of the 14nm dice, with a huge number of +++++ characters behind it, back-porting the advanced core architecture into an older process node.

Given the performance Intel has squeezed out of the 14nm node up to now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The best CPUs for gaming are still Intel… for now. But we’ve got to wade through the Comet Lake CPU sludge first, and who knows when that’s going to happen.