Month: October 2020

For many people, WhatsApp has become the conversation platform of choice, with over 2 billion people using the Facebook-owned app to keep in touch with friends and family. In addition to offering encrypted messaging, WhatsApp boasts several features that appeal to a variety of users. And it’s about to expand its bag of tricks.

Specifically, WhatsApp is gaining two new capabilities that figure to broaden its appeal — the ability to mute conversations with others indefinitely, and a way to shop directly from within WhatsApp.

The ability to simply mute some conversations for the foreseeable future is probably WhatsApp’s most radical change. Up until now, WhatsApp has only ever offered muting for 8 hours, one week, or a full year. Now, you can make the decision to effectively ghost someone by never seeing their messages again with the option to mute a conversation forever.

You must have the most up-to-date version of WhatsApp to accomplish this— and even then, it seems like the muting feature is getting updated on a staggered basis — but it’s a useful capability that’s been a long time coming. On either iOS or Android, choose the conversation you want to mute, long press on its icon, and then you’ll see a few options pop up in relation to muting the account. 

To keep the conversation out of sight and out of mind forever, tap the check box next to “Always” and then ensure “show notifications” remains unchecked. You’ll remain in the chat, but you won’t receive pings night and day from the various members within. This should (mercifully) cut down on the amount of messages you get, especially from groups. 

But not-so-subtly butting out of conversations isn’t all that’s coming to WhatsApp. Users will also soon be able to go shopping from right within the app. According to the WhatsApp blog, prospective buyers will be able to purchase items directly from within chats. This means shopping can potentially take place in the same manner as a conversation would. 

A WhatsApp user could text a video game retailer looking to purchase a certain title, then receive product information and a link to seal the deal, adding items to a virtual shopping cart and checking out right from within WhatsApp.

WhatsApp calls the process “business messaging,” as lined out in a special video the company made to demonstrate the concept. It looks as though it could potentially be a vehicle for Facebook Pay, which the social media network utilizes as part of Facebook Shops, but this hasn’t been totally confirmed — it’s just a safe bet.

There’s also no confirmed rollout date for the new shopping-centric features. WhatsApp users in Brazil were able to test drive a pilot program to purchase items from local vendors, but the country’s Central Bank put the kibosh on the experiment, citing potential compliance with rules and regulations regarding cash. 

Little by little, WhatsApp continues to evolve. You may want to check your own download to see if you’re able to mute that noisy group chat without leaving forever right now. As far as shopping goes, that could certainly take a while. 

Preliminary benchmarks are starting to appear, and they paint a good picture for AMD’s upcoming RX 6000 series GPUs.

Multiple leaks purported to be for the unreleased AMD Radeon RX 6800XT graphics card have appeared online—although the results are far from definitive. Claiming to show performance for a high-end RDNA 2 graphics card, multiple sites and leakers are reporting the AMD RX 6800XT toppling the RTX 3080 in 3DMark test, Firestrike, while falling behind in ray-traced workloads.

These figures are all unverified at this time, and it’s unlikely we’ll receive any concrete information regarding the RX 6000 series graphics cards until AMD’s announcement stream on October 28, 2020. Beyond that, it’ll be down to whenever the review embargo is up.

Until then, we can at least paw over these preliminary results. 

Results from Igor’s Lab (collated over at Videocardz) claim to show Nvidia’s RTX 3080 falls some 18.2% slower than AMD’s RX 6800 XT (an unconfirmed SKU as of today, but likely) in 3DMark Firestrike Extreme running at 4K and not its default 1440p. WCCFTech confusingly reports the same percentage difference for FireStrike Ultra, which is a native 4K benchmark, reporting a score of 12,871 for the AMD card and 10,531 for the RTX 3080.

Either way, it sounds like both have received similar information for the most part, purported to be from an AIB partner testing an engineering sample (EVT stage), and likely one with the Navi 21 XT GPU within.

Both also suggest the RX 6800 XT leads the way in the DX12 benchmark, Time Spy Extreme, also at its default 4K setting.

It’s hardly an open and shut case, however. CapFrameX on Twitter suggests much closer scores at FireStrike Ultra, with Big Navi at 11,500 and the RTX 3080 at 10,600—a difference of nearly 9% in favour of an RDNA 2 GPU. It has been suggested that newer drivers are causing the significant uplift between these scores and the aforementioned results.

Further benchmarks have also been put forward by Twitter leaker KittyYYuko once again suggesting a Navi 21 XT GPU lead in Fire Strike Ultra, although this time reporting slower performance in Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme. 

What appears to be fairly consistent across results is that AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture will fall short of Ampere in ray-traced workloads, which isn’t all that surprising considering Nvidia’s focus on the burgeoning rendering tech. 

It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how Radeon’s ray tracing solution shapes up in the final shipping product, however. What’s perhaps more important will be the impact AMD’s adoption of the tech may have on ray tracing development and adoption.

It’s all a little confusing, to say the least. What is promising is that AMD next-gen card is trading blows with the RTX 3080 in rasterised gaming workloads—which makes up the bulk of your GPU’s day-to-day efforts—and that’s a great sign for a competitive GPU market to come. AMD has already confirmed strong performance in a handful of 4K games at high settings, over 60fps in the results offered, and that means we should be looking at much more attainable 4K gaming across the board with the latest graphics cards—even if these exact numbers don’t end up coming to pass.

WINDOWS 10 fans may find themselves in a nightmare scenario following the release of the latest update to the operating system, which seems to break a few essential parts of the software.

Windows 10 users might be having second thoughts about downloading the recently released Windows 10 October Update. That’s because the latest software updates from Microsoft seem to have caused some pretty serious issues with the hugely-popular operating system, including breaking the File Explorer, which is used for, well, just about everything. The updates, known as KB4579311 and KB4577671, were s’posed to fix security issues with Microsoft Office.

Windows 10 users who are still running the May 2020 and November 2019 updates can update to the new version, October Update. Unfortunately, users that have installed these patches have reported it breaks a key feature of the Microsoft OS – the File Explorer.

File Explorer is an absolutely pivotal part of Windows 10 which, as the name suggests, lets users access and arrange files on their hard drive. And as reported in a post by Windows Latest, the October update has caused the crucial programme to break and crash for plenty of users.

Highlighting the issue on the Feedback Hub, one Windows 10 user wrote: “Taskbar constantly appearing and disappearing, obviously explorer crashing. Happens for about 30 seconds, then finally the desktop comes up and Explorer starts working”.

While on Reddit another posted: “Explorer keeps restarting after login. After some 5 minutes it stops and system becomes responsive. Doing a restore, hopefully it will help.”

And these File Explorer problems are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to issues with the Windows 10 October update. Windows Latest has also reported that the most recent Windows 10 patch also causes major issues with Action Centre.

They wrote: “Earlier this week, we experienced a strange Windows 10 problem that prevented our Action Center from opening. Every time we clicked on the Action Center or used Win+A key, we were served with a completely blank Action Center. Unfortunately, fixing the problems with Action Center isn’t simple at all. I tried rebooting File Explorer and signout out and back in again, but nothing worked. After multiple systems reboot, I was able to access the Action Center again, but the same problem reappeared.”

While on the Feedback Hub one Windows 10 user affected by the Action Center bug added: “October 13, 2020—KB4579311 update is causing Explorer to be unresponsive after rebooting. It’s causing my start menu and notification screen to be irresponsive for at least 20 mins before they were operating normally”.

Windows 10 users have also reported that the cumulative update is causing printer issues, while others have reported screen flashes and black screen problems.

Other Windows 10 users have noticed issues with their internet connectivity since downloading the October Update.

If you’re experiencing issues with the Windows 10 October update then you can rollback to a previous version of the OS. But make sure you have important files backed up before you do this in case anything goes wrong.

If you do decide to remove the Windows 10 October update then you’ll be missing out on the security fixes it brings to the table as well as the other improvements to Microsoft’s flagship OS.