Techreport

Netflix gave us an in-depth look at its progress on a new per-title approach to compression and encoding on its tech blog earlier this week. This development is big news for any Netflix watcher who wants to maximize their viewership experience on a bandwidth-constrained connection, and it also offers perks to those looking for the ultimate experience on a high-bandwidth Internet pipe.In 2010, Netflix rolled out the H.264 compression scheme across its content library, using a set of bitrate-resolution pairs it refers to as a bitrate ladder. To build this ladder, Netflix engineers settled on ten such pairs, ranging from 235 kbps and ...Read more...

Riot Games, the studio behind the wildly popular League of Legends MOBA, has been purchased by Chinese Internet services company Tencent. Tencent had already held a majority stake in Riot Games after a 2011 investment. Riot says the buyout will allow it to offer cash-based incentives to its employees rather than equity shares. ...Read more...

Apple is making some big changes to its executive suite today. In an intriguing move, Apple appointed Johny Srouji as its senior vice president of hardware technologies. Srouji joined Apple in 2008 to lead development of the A4 SoC, and the company says he later worked to build teams responsible for "custom silicon and hardware technologies including batteries, application processors, storage controllers, sensors silicon, display silicon and other chipsets across Apple’s entire product line."Srouji's new role underscores the importance of custom chips and other hardware in setting apart many of Apple's products, and his ...Read more...

NEC is a name known in the monitor arena for quality displays, and its MultiSync family keeps growing. The company has released two new models aimed at color-critical work, the 30" EA305WMi and the 27" EA275WMi.

Instead of sailing through the stars, giant spaceships will soon be landmarks of a vast desert world in in Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. Previously known as Homeworld: Shipbreakers (and before that, Hardware: Shipbreakers), this prequel for the Homeworld series is being developed by Blackbird Interactive, and it'll be published by Gearbox Software. Gearbox released this trailer along with its announcement, and it's so beautiful:...Read more...

Many games are nothing if not a social experience, and Nvidia’s latest beta update for its Geforce Experience platform could make it easier to socialize with improvements to its streaming and screenshot capture tools. Gamers who like to brag about their exploits may want to take a look at these improvements before Nvidia rolls them into its general-release software. ...Read more...

Welcome to day four of TR's 12 days of Christmas giveaways. Before we show off today's prize, some congratulations are in order. The winner of ​yesterday's Monoprice bundle is Conor Hughes. Conor, check your email soon for a message from our business guy, Adam Eiberger, for more information on how to claim your prize. ...Read more...

The United States International Trade Commission has denied Nvidia's request for a decision review regarding the company's ongoing patent spat with Samsung. Nvidia was hoping to get the ITC's initial findings in Samsung's favor overturned. In the statement issued by the ITC, the agency says it again found no instances where Samsung was violating Nvidia's patents.This decision upholds judge Thomas Pender's earlier findings, published on October 9. While the judge concluded that Samsung and Qualcomm did indeed violate one of ...Read more...

Firefox version 43 is out, and it comes with an interesting new feature. There's now an official 64-bit build available for Windows. Users of 64-bit versions of Microsoft's operating system (in other words, everyone with a modern Windows machine) can now enjoy improved performance in Firefox.Those looking to install the new 64-bit build will need to grab the requisite installer directly from the Firefox download page , ...Read more...

Recent reports suggest that Intel's Skylake processors might bend under the weight of third-party coolers. Heatsink manufacturers like Silverstone and Noctua have since defended the safety of their products, but MSI has announced a potential solution for the concerned: the CPU Guard 1151. ...Read more...

Update 12/16/2015 at 1:23 PM: Turns out this deal was apparently too awesome for its own good. Adorama tells us it's had to cancel the coupon code below. We apologize for any inconvenience or frustration you may have experienced.We bring you a break from our regularly scheduled programming for an early deals post. Adorama is selling Samsung's 850 EVO 500GB SSD for $137.99 with promo code DECSALE015 ...Read more...

We bring you a break from our regularly scheduled programming for an early deals post. Adorama is selling Samsung's 850 EVO 500GB SSD for $137.99 with promo code DECSALE015. That may be the lowest price we've ever seen for an 850 EVO 500GB. Samsung is still throwing in a code for Assassin's Creed Syndicate with this drive, too.

What has lighting that would make a Christmas tree jealous and can help even the most lightly stirring mouse register precise movement? It's day three of TR's 12 days of giveaways. Today's winner will receive a Monoprice Enthusiast Backlit Full Size Blue Switch Mechanical Keyboard and a Monoprice XL Precision Gaming Surface, courtesy of the fine folks at Monoprice. ...Read more...

Today's prize in our 12 days of giveaways is one of OCZ's 480GB Vector 180 SSDs, and we've drawn the lucky winner of this hunk of high-end solid-state storage. Colin Stuart, get a SATA port ready for your shiny new drive. Our business guy, Adam Eiberger, will send you a message shortly with more information about how to claim your prize. ...Read more...

Hey, folks. It felt weird to re-use Scott's "Etc." tagline in posts like this one. We'll probably find another, wittier name for these behind-the-scenes updates with time, but you'll have to cope with my unimaginativeness for now.You may have noticed a new writer in our news section over the past couple days. Eric Born is one of the candidates for our staff writer position, and he's working with us to get a ...Read more...

With Samsung's Gear VR on the market, and Oculus' Rift slated to arrive early in 2016, consumers want to know what games they'll actually be able to play on their shiny new toys. Today, Crytek announced The Climb, a game in which players scale rock faces modeled after beautiful real-world locations. Built for Oculus Rift hardware, The Climb aims to attract a broad audience to virtual reality gaming. Take a look at the trailer:...Read more...

A couple days back, we covered some rumors about the possibility that locked Intel Skylake CPUs could be overclockable after all. That day is officially here, at least if you're the owner of an ASRock Z170 motherboard. The company has officially announced "SkyOC," a new feature for its lineup of Z170 motherboards which allows users to overclock locked Skylake CPUs by increasing the processor's base clock.To take advantage of this feature, all that's necessary is a simple BIOS update to any ...Read more...

Welcome to day two of TR's 12 days of Christmas giveaways, gerbils. Today, we're giving away one of OCZ's Vector 180 480GB SSDs. Behold: ...Read more...

According to Chinese website PCPop, AMD has quietly launched a new CPU, the FX-6330 Black Edition. This purported new chip is based off the Piledriver architecture, and it's built on a 32-nm process. This 95W chip packs six Vishera cores clocked at 3.6 GHz base and 4.2 GHz turbo speeds, assisted by 6MB of L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache.The website claims the chip is already selling in the Chinese market for around $109, a price that places it roughly in Intel Pentium ...Read more...

A couple weeks ago at AMD's Radeon Technologies Group Tech Summit, Nick Thibieroz, senior manager of ISV engineering for the division, told us about what the company perceives as major problems for developers on the PC these days. He argued that limited access to the GPU and proprietary code wrapped up in black boxes (a thinly-veiled reference to Nvidia's GameWorks middleware) are causing headaches for developers who want to extract the most performance possible from the underlying hardware. He also feels that proprietary resources stifle information-sharing and collaboration among developers, a situation that ultimately harms graphics innovation in games. ...Read more...

The first of our 12 days of giveaways is over, and we've drawn a winner for the Monoprice prize package we've been showing off all day. Joseph Robison, you're today's lucky winner. Check your email soon for a message from our business guy, Adam Eiberger, for more information on how to claim your prize. ...Read more...

In our last poll, we asked gerbils what they thought of upgrading to systems with Intel's Skylake CPUs inside. Today, we have something a little different.We think it's a reasonable guess that a good chunk of our audience has several computers in the home, along with multiple smartphones and ...Read more...

It’s a tough time to be a Trekkie. The last new episode of Star Trek Enterprise aired over ten years ago. J. J. Abrams was poised to reinvigorate the franchise after the success of 2009’s Star Trek, but he's since jumped ship to direct Star Wars instead. Will Star Trek Beyond help the classic series' fortunes?We won’t know for sure, of course, until the movie premieres in July 2016. But the ...Read more...

Space pilots everywhere, rejoice. Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 is hitting flight decks everywhere, bringing with it a host of new features, technical updates, and a new slice of space to explore. RSI calls this release "the biggest update to Star Citizen yet." The new version introduces first-person combat on space stations, ship decks, or even while engaged in EVA. Spacemen focusing on piloting should welcome the new ships and flight modes, too. Check out the trailer below....Read more...

The Tech Report and our hardware partners have joined up to make this Christmas season special for some lucky TR gerbils. We've got a whopping 12 different prize packages to give away from the folks at Gigabyte, OCZ, Corsair, EVGA, and Monoprice. We'll be picking winners at the breakneck pace of one per day starting today, and we'll continue until our big bag o' gifts is empty on Christmas day.Here's the deal: you only have to enter once, and then you're eligible to win for the entire 12 days of giveaways. (Multiple ...Read more...

"Did you think I'd forgotten you, insect?" Those words sent a little chill down my spine. System Shock 3 has been officially revealed. Most of System Shock 2's development team is at the helm of this project, and they've banded together at OtherSide Entertainment. ...Read more...

When AMD debuted its Radeon R9 300-series cards, one of the major draws of the range-topping, Hawaii-powered R9 390 and R9 390X was the 8GB of GDDR5 memory on both of those products. Now, it appears that AMD's board partners are selling 4GB versions of the R9 390—in China, at least.

'Tis the season for giving, and in that spirit, The Tech Report and our hardware partners have joined up to make this Christmas season special for some lucky TR gerbils. We've got a whopping 12 different prize packages to give away from the folks at Gigabyte, OCZ, Corsair, EVGA, and Monoprice. We'll be picking winners at the breakneck pace of one per day starting this coming Monday, December 14, 2015, and we'll continue until our big bag o' gifts is empty on Christmas day.Peeking at presents ahead of time is a good way to end up on Santa's naughty list, but we've ...Read more...

Neural networks, once considered a computing-resource-intensive approach to machine learning, have become a mainstay in the field over the last decade or so. They do still require an enormous amount of computing power to run, though, and plain old CPUs aren't enough for the task, particularly in deep learning applications. That's where GPU compute comes in.Facebook is the latest player in this field to take advantage of Nvidia's Tesla compute cards—more specifically, the Tesla M40 . The social media company has recently announced "Big Sur," a system designed specifically for training neural networks. Big Sur is built on an Open Rack V2 platform , and each box can ...Read more...

It's Friday, gerbils. There are just two more weeks of shopping to buy your loved ones (or yourself) that new hot rod system for the holiday season. We've dug through all the deals we can stand today, and the best of the best are below.That's quite a pile of stuff. If we missed something good, be ...Read more...

Do you enjoy watching How It's Made? You're in for a treat, then. Valve has published a video of the automated production line that builds Steam Controllers, complete with Aperture Science robots and a few miles' worth of conveyor belts. Watch it here:...Read more...

Intel's unlocked Pentium G3258 CPU—or the Anniversary Edition—has been a constant presence in our System Guides for over a year now. For under a hundred bucks, that two-core, two-thread processor can reach stratospheric clock speeds with a little tweaking. Intel didn't announce a successor to the G3258 when Skylake rolled around, and the dual-core wonder has had problems with some games. Budget builders may need a new hero, and Anandtech says that hero will be motherboard manufacturers. Supermicro, ASRock, and Asus seem to have found ways to enable base-clock overclocking on locked Skylake CPUs.As Scott noted in our review of the Core i7-6700K, the base clock (BCLK) is no longer tethered to the chip's PCIe and DMI clocks. That means overclocking a CPU using the BCLK won't throw other parts of the ...Read more...

Intel's unlocked Pentium G3258 CPU—or the Anniversary Edition—has been a constant presence in our System Guides for over a year now. For under a hundred bucks, that two-core, two-thread processor can reach stratospheric clock speeds with a little tweaking. Intel didn't announce a successor to the G3258 when Skylake rolled around, and the dual-core wonder has had problems with some games. Budget builders may need a new hero, and Anandtech says that hero will be motherboard manufacturers. Supermicro, ASRock, and Asus seem to have found ways to enable base-clock overclocking on locked Skylake CPUs.As Scott noted in our review of the Core i7-6700K, the base clock (BCLK) is no longer tethered to the chip's PCIe and DMI clocks. That means overclocking a CPU using the BCLK won't throw other parts of the ...Read more...

Qualcomm's fortune with its Snapdragon 810 SoC wasn't the best. This powerful chip, used in several manufacturers' flagship phones, was prone to overheating and thermal throttling. The SoC's performance wasn't that stellar, either. Some reviewers pointed out that the company's Snapdragon 801 and 805 chips often delivered similar performance in many tasks.The firm isn't just sitting around, though. Qualcomm is putting the finishing touches on its new and ...Read more...

Multiplayer space-combat VR sim EVE: Valkyrie has made believers of many a show attendee this year. This guy couldn't even formulate a coherent sentence about the experience thanks to his excitement. Folks who are ready to embrace the VR future will get a chance to dogfight it out when the Oculus Rift ships next year (at least if they order a Rift ahead of time). CCP Games and Oculus have announced that EVE: Valkyrie will come bundled with each Rift preorder.We're thrilled to announce that @EVEValkyrie , by @CCPGames , will be ...Read more...

Zotac's Zboxen have always been good choices for some niche uses, like HTPCs and digital signage. The company is looking to take the small PC concept one step further, and it's billing its latest Zbox as a full-fledged desktop replacement. Meet the Zbox MI551. ...Read more...

Back in 2002, Mozilla launched its Phoenix web browser, which the company later renamed Firefox. A decade later, Mozilla announced its plan to get into the smartphone platform game with Firefox OS. A year after that, ZTE shipped the first Firefox OS phone, the Open. Now, Mozilla says it's halting the development and sale of Firefox OS smartphones. The company says in a blog post that, like the Phoenix of Greek mythology, Firefox OS will rise from the ashes for a new life among the Internet of Things.Mozilla's senior VP of connected devices, Ari Jaaski, writes that the company believes the coming IoT "revolution" will "be bigger than previous technology revolutions," including smartphones. Jaaski says Mozilla chose ...Read more...

Back in 2002, Mozilla launched its Phoenix web browser, which the company later renamed Firefox. A decade later, Mozilla announced its plan to get into the smartphone platform game with Firefox OS. A year after that, ZTE shipped the first Firefox OS phone, the Open. Now, Mozilla has ended development of its phone platform. It's not all over for Firefox OS, though. The company says in a blog post that, like the Phoenix of Greek mythology, Firefox OS will rise from the ashes and join the Internet of Things.Mozilla's senior VP of connected devices, Ari Jaaski, writes that the company believes the coming IoT "revolution" will "be bigger than previous technology revolutions," including smartphones. Jaaski says Mozilla chose ...Read more...

Back in 2002, Mozilla launched its Phoenix web browser, which the company later renamed Firefox. A decade later, Mozilla announced its plan to get into the smartphone platform game with Firefox OS. A year after that, ZTE shipped the first Firefox OS phone, the Open. Now, Mozilla has ended development of its phone platform. It's not all over for Firefox OS, though. The company says in a blog post that, like the Phoenix of Greek mythology, Firefox OS will rise from the ashes and join the Internet of Things.Mozilla's senior VP of connected devices, Ari Jaaski, writes that the company believes the coming IoT "revolution" will "be bigger than previous technology revolutions," including smartphones. Jaaski says Mozilla chose ...Read more...

While everybody is looking forward to AMD processors based on the upcoming Zen architecture, those chips are still a ways off. During the Raymond James Technology Investors Conference, AMD CFO Devinder Kumar said that Zen-based CPUs wouldn't ship for revenue until 2017, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. In the meantime, it seems the company may bring back the Excavator core found in Carrizo APUs for one more round of processors, if some internal slides BenchLife got its hands on are the real deal.Since Carrizo didn't make its way to the desktop, the company has only introduced refreshed Kaveri APUs this year. 2016 may be a little more exciting, since the rumored ...Read more...

The European Commission has sent Qualcomm two Statements of Objections regarding alleged anticompetitive practices. The EC has been investigating the firm since last July, and it's now published its preliminary conclusions.The first Statement of Objections is related to "significant amounts" that Qualcomm has allegedly been paying to a "major smartphone and tablet manufacturer" since 2011. The payments were made under the condition that the ...Read more...

Valve and HTC's joint effort to bring virtual reality gaming into the mainstream has hit another snag. The HTC Vive's intially-promised first-quarter availability timeframe is right around the corner, but the company has announced that the headset won't make it into consumer hands until April of 2016. ...Read more...

Yahoo, once a household name around the Internet, may soon split in two—but not in the way it once planned. The firm is now working to spin off its core businesses into a new company in order to separate itself from its high-value stake in Alibaba.Yahoo previously planned to spin off its portion of the Chinese e-tailer earlier this year. The company believed this spin-off would be tax-free, but the conditions for that deal have changed unfavorably since then. ...Read more...

Apple has unleashed a truckload of updates for its various platforms. OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 patches a couple of bugs. watchOS 2.1 adds support for a number of new languages. tvOS 9.1 lets owners of the fourth-generation Apple TV control their set-top boxes with the iOS remote app. The biggest update Apple released is iOS 9.2, though. This latest iPhone and iPad update includes several new features and purports to fix a whole mess of bugs. ...Read more...

Flash may be gathering nails in its coffin, but the plugin's zombified carcass remains animated for now, and it's still chasing users. Adobe has just released another update for the thrice-darned web player software, and it's a doozy—the company squashed 79 security vulnerabilities this time around.The update covers Flash Player version 19.0.0.245 and earlier for Windows and OS X, and version 11.2.202.548 and earlier for Linux. Perhaps more interestingly, the Chrome and Edge versions of the Flash player ...Read more...

Graphics cards with closed-loop liquid coolers on board are becoming quite the phenomenon lately. Those cards have generally occupied the top rung of the price and performance ladders, though. EVGA has brought the cost of entry down a rung with the GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming. The company walks through its liquid cooler in this YouTube video....Read more...

Stop me if you've heard this before: a vulnerability in an OEM software utility leaves systems wide open to attack. This time around, three manufacturers can tell this tale of woe. Lenovo, Dell, and Toshiba all have unpatched vulnerabilities in their various support utilities. These vulnerabilities were discovered by a security researcher who goes by Slipstream, who has posted details online (warning: obnoxious auto-play music) along with proof-of-concept code called OEMDrop.Three OEMs. Three applications preinstalled. Three ...Read more...

Corsair's cases have always been liked here at TR due to their well-thought-out layouts and stylish designs. The company has added two more full towers to its family of cases: the Carbide Series 600Q and its windowed cousin, the 600C. We've got one of these cases in our labs for review soon, but Corsair officially took the wraps off its latest today. Take a good look at these sleek puppies now. ...Read more...

Marvell has released preliminary financial results for its fiscal third quarter, as well as its finalized results from the second quarter. In its report, Marvell disclosed that it's under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Justice Department because it hasn't been compliant with SEC reporting obligations recently.In September, Marvell reported a preliminary $393 million loss in its fiscal second quarter, thanks in part to a $394 million charge related to losing a 2012 patent suit by Carnegie Mellon University. The ...Read more...