Techreport

Happy TR BBQ Eve, gerbils. We've picked out a few of the choicest deals we could find this week to share with you. Here you go:That's it for this round of deals. If we missed a great bargain somewhere, share ...Read more...

Not content with the stock gameplay experience of The Witcher 3? Help from the modding community may soon be on the horizon. Developer CD Projekt Red has released what it's calling the Modkit, a set of tools that gives tinkerers access to the inner workings of the game.The Modkit has several major components. Modders can change the appearance of in-game objects with texture import and export, replace models with mesh substitution, and use scripts to toy with gameplay mechanics, ...Read more...

Dell would apparently like to shepherd some business computing into the cloud, and it's helping that dream to take flight with its Chromebook 13. The PC maker touts high performance, extra security features, and access to 24-hour support as reasons to buy into its business-class Chrome OS endeavor. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Back in May, Nvidia announced GameWorks VR, its VR-focused SDK aimed at both headset makers and game developers. At the time, the tools were open only to select partners, but they're now open to all, according to the GameWorks VR beta announcement. Nvidia says it received plenty of feedback from the partners that worked with the alpha, and much of their feedback has been used in the more widespread release.There are separate SDKs for headset makers and game developers. Game developers will get tools to add SLI support for VR apps, and to include Nvidia's Multi-Res Shading (MRS) in their programs. MRS is ...Read more...

Greeting, overseers in the lands of Android. You can now have your own Vault, thanks to Bethesda: the company has released Fallout Shelter for Android today. ...Read more...

First-person survival game Dying Light is getting a hefty expansion in the form of Dying Light: The Following. Developer Techland has released a trailer to announce the heretofore-untold tales of Kyle Crane. The best part starts around half-way through:...Read more...

TEN-HUT, pilots! Star Citizen commander Chris Roberts has given all you maggots the opportunity to fly in a ship this weekend with no payments or push-ups necessary. To get your flight suit, head over to the sign-up location and hand over the "Gamescom2015" coupon at the entrance. And no side trips through the mess hall—your ships can barely take off as it is! ...Read more...

The TR BBQ is this weekend in Holland, Michigan, and it's not too late for you to RSVP and join us.In addition to good food and great company, we'll be giving away some excellent PC hardware to the winners of the afternoon's cornhole tournament. Alongside the three white Define R5 cases ...Read more...

The TR BBQ is this weekend in Holland, Michigan, and it's not too late for you to RSVP and join us.In addition to good food and great company, we'll be giving away some excellent PC hardware to the winners of the afternoon's cornhole tournament. Alongside the three white Define R5 cases ...Read more...

Seems like just yesterday, we were talking about the Shield's library of native games being on the small side. Nvidia must have heard our pleas, because the company has announced two new games for the Shield, as well as Android TV and Shield-specific updates for several more. These games all look to be a cut above most other games on the Android TV platform, something Nvidia's little console desperately needs. ...Read more...

Nvidia has released a new set of GeForce drivers, version 355.60. This release features support for StarDock's Ashes of the Singularity DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 previews, as well as Nvidia's GameWorks VR SDK—headset-equipped users can now play games and use applications built with those tools. The company also claims that Oculus will update its own SDK soon to support GameWorks VR.The new drivers also bring updated SLI profiles for Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition and Next Car Game Wreckfest . Trine 3 also gets 3D ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Samsung went big this morning at an event in New York City. The company updated its flagship phablet with the Galaxy Note 5, and it also introduced a larger version of the Galaxy S6 Edge, appropriately called the Galaxy S6 Edge+. ...Read more...

Lenovo has announced its Q2 financial results, and while the company posted a profit, it's looking to cut costs. The world's largest PC maker reported net income of $105 million on $10.7 billion in revenues, which represents a 51% decline year-over-year. According to Reuters, revenues missed analyst targets by $600 million.The company reported that its biggest challenges came from the PC market, where Gartner and IDC both predicted fewer units would be sold this year, and in the tablet market, where Lenovo is a relatively small player ...Read more...

All-in-one liquid coolers have certainly made a big splash in the cooling market, but none have looked quite as tricked-out as a new pair of coolers from EK Waterblocks. The company says it raided its custom parts arsenal to build its Predator 240 and Predator 360 all-in-one units. The Predator 240 unsurprisingly uses a 240-mm radiator, while the Predator 360 exchanges heat with a 360-mm one.

Come join us for the live recording of the latest episode of The Tech Report Podcast on Twitch. We'll be discussing what to expect at the TR BBQ, our experiences with Windows 10, the availability of Broadwell and Skylake, the latest Steam hardware survey, and whatever questions our viewers throw at us. Come join in:...Read more...

We're recording the next episode of The TR Podcast live on Twitch tonight. Yes, that's a day earlier than usual. We're kicking off 30 minutes later than normal, as well: the stream will begin at 7:00 PM PT/10:00 PM ET. We'll likely talk about this week's news and perhaps an as-yet-unpublished review we have in the works for you. We'll also take reader questions, of course. Here's the video recording of the last time we did this thing:...Read more...

"Remember, Sire, never trust anything that's head-height with your groin." The Overlord series of games is back with a new title, called Overlord: Fellowship of Evil. Here's the anouncement trailer, brought to you by the Minionstry of Information:...Read more...

Divinity: Original Sin brought a classic PC RPG vibe to the modern day, and based on its Steam player reviews and high Metacritic score, that premise seems to have struck a chord with many people. Larian Studios has announced a return to the first game's universe with Divinity: Original Sin II. Crowdfunding for the sequel through Kickstarter will begin on August 26. For the uninitiated, the original game's launch trailer is below....Read more...

Steam's July 2015 hardware and software survey results are in, and they point to a a sharp divide between casual and more dedicated gamers, at least going by hardware specs alone.Out of the gate, it's easy to notice a trend: half of the PCs surveyed have modest CPUs. 51% have either one or two physical cores, while quad-cores make up 45% of the lot. ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of Toshiba's 48-layer BiCS flash, Samsung has introduced 48-layer 3D V-NAND flash of its own. These flash chips pack 256Gb (32GB) per die, using what Samsung calls "3-bit MLC"—or TLC to the rest of us. Samsung says the new chips will double the capacity of its SSD lineup, and it also expects the new chips to pave the way for multi-terabyte SSDs. ...Read more...

This has been a tough year for Qualcomm's chipmaking business, but the company hopes to turn its fortunes around with the newly-announced Snapdragon 820. The company isn't revealing anything about the CPU portion of the SoC today, but it is talking about the updated Adreno 530 GPU and Spectra image signal processor (ISP). ...Read more...

Samsung has added three new NVMe SSDs to its stable. The new drives use the company's 3D V-NAND flash, and they're meant to fill several roles in OEM and business deployments. ...Read more...

As if there wasn't enough reason already for you to join us at the TR BBQ this Saturday, the fine folks at Fractal Design have sweetened the deal. They've sent us three of their Define R5 cases in white to give away at the event, and they sure are beauties. Have a look: ...Read more...

There must be a glitch in the Matrix. I feel like I'm writing the same news again and again. A pair of researchers from IBM's X-Force Application Security Research Team has discovered a set of vulnerabilities in Android and some popular app SDKs. The worst of the bugs can let a seemingly innocuous app run arbitrary code on the device, and it's present in Android versions 4.3 and above—affecting 55% of handsets worldwide. Check out the proof-of-concept video, where the Facebook app is replaced with Fakebook:...Read more...

It's been a pretty big day for Nvidia's professional graphics group. To go with today's shiny, new Quadro graphics cards, Nvidia has unveiled its DesignWorks initiative, a suite of tools and development libraries for developers of professional design and rendering applications. Nvidia hopes that DesignWorks tools will help developers to incorporate accurate-looking physically-based rendering and materials into their applications. In turn, applications that use DesignWorks tools might help designers create more true-to-life simulations of their work.According to Nvidia, the DesignWorks initiative encompasses over two dozen tools, from PhysX and the Grid SDK to the Iray SDK and the company's Material ...Read more...

Nvidia has released two Maxwell-based Quadro graphics cards: the M5000 and M4000. These cards broaden the Maxwell-powered Quadro lineup beneath the titanic M6000, which was released last March. ...Read more...

NVM Express solid-state drives are the future, and Toshiba is bringing that future a little closer today with the release of three NVMe PCIe SSD families. These product lines are targeted at "high-performance notebooks and PCs, thin notebooks and tablets, and servers and storage appliances."The XG3 series of drives may be most interesting for the PC enthusiast: they're the ones meant for "high-performance notebooks and PCs." Toshiba says that XG3 drives will be available in an M.2 2280 (or gumstick) package, as well as a 2.5" SATA Express form factor. No matter which flavor you choose, ...Read more...

Google has chosen Vulkan, the low-overhead variant of OpenGL, as the next-generation graphics API for Android. The company details the new API's benefits in a post on its developer blog. Specifically, it believes that better CPU usage and parallellization will be the key benefits for Android developers, particularly in multithreaded scenarios. For a demonstration of Vulkan's capabilities on mobile-class hardware, check out Imagination Technologies' gnometastic demo.Vulkan is, of course, the OpenGL counterpart to Microsoft's DirectX 12 and Apple's Metal graphics APIs. Unlike the other two, though, Vulkan is an open standard published by the Khronos Group , comprised of academic and industry ...Read more...

Intel's just-announced mobile Xeons have already started trickling into mobile workstations—or at least into mobile workstation announcements. Lenovo has unveiled its ThinkPad P series of notebooks with Xeons onboard, starting with the 15" P50 and the 17" P70....Read more...

The Steamboy project unveiled at E3 last year looked interesting, but we noted at the time that the promised 2015 debut seemed ambitious. Now, the Steamboy is back with a new name, a new release date, and some more concrete hardware specs. Polygon has details of the Smach Zero, the handheld Steam OS device that promises to play "more than 1,000 games" from your Steam library.While the Smach Zero website is completely devoid of any detail, Smach did talk about hardware specs with Polygon at Gamescom. The Zero will have an AMD Steppe Eagle SoC with quad x86 Jaguar cores, GCN-based graphics, 4GB of memory, and 32GB of internal storage that's expandable with a microSD card. That hardware will drive a 5", 720p touchscreen display in a ...Read more...

Apple downplayed reports of its iPhone 6 bending under stress more easily than phones from rival companies, but the company may be looking to avoid the same bad press with its sequel. The same YouTuber who originally made Bendgate a thing by bending his iPhone 6 Plus with his bare hands claims to have gotten his mitts on the aluminum body of the next iPhone. Unbox Therapy compares the iPhone 6 and alleged iPhone 6S bodies in the following video:...Read more...

Imagination Technologies has made a demo showcasing Vulkan's performance on one of its GPUs, alongside a blog post with all of the details . The demo compares Vulkan's performance to OpenGL ES in the same gnome-filled scene, and it's quite impressive. See the video for yourself:...Read more...

Google is well-known for its sprawling range of ventures, from YouTube to Android to glucose-sensing contact lenses to self-driving cars to search. Even with that diverse group of ventures, it seems CEO Larry Page felt that it was time for a shake-up. As of today, Google is just one business owned by Alphabet, a new company headed by Page and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The goal of this new management structure is to make that family of companies "cleaner and more accountable," according to Page's statement introducing Alphabet.Alphabet is "mostly a family of companies," foremost of which is a "slimmed down" Google led by new CEO Sundar Pichai, who formerly served as the company's product chief. In that role, Pichai controlled virtually all of Google's household-name products, from Maps to Chrome to Android. Ventures that are only weakly related to Google's "main Internet products," ...Read more...

Researchers from FireEye Labs have unearthed multiple vulnerabilities in the fingerprint scanner implementations of several Android handsets. The group's research paper was presented at the Black Hat conference last week, and it describes several vulnerabilities, some of which had the potential to allow for remote background collection of fingerprints. We say "had," because it should be noted that all of the companies mentioned have patched the issues presented in the paper. Other, non-manufacturer-specific vulnerabilities could still be exploited.Android's fingerprint authentication framework originally provided only weak security. Fingerprint data was only as secure as the kernel iself—an attacker who manages to gain root access to the device can read fingerprints. Companies are starting to use ARM's TrustZone functionality , ...Read more...

The 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider was a pretty great game that enjoyed a solid PC port. The sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, was announced last year at E3 as a timed exclusive on Xbox One, but the game will also come to the PC sometime in early 2016. Microsoft showed off thirteen minutes of RotTR gameplay at Gamescom, and now you can watch it in HD on YouTube....Read more...

Heads up, fans of sneaking and stabbing games everywhere. There's a new video of Dishonored 2 Assassin's Creed Syndicate's gameplay out, showcasing the game's Victorian setting and some of its distinctive gameplay features. The clip shows us several ways of going about a mission in the shoes of master assassin Emily Kaldwin Evie Frye. Check it out:...Read more...

Itching to buy one of Intel's Skylake CPUs, or the surprisingly-potent-for-gaming Broadwell Core i7-5775C? Well, you're not alone, according to Intel. The company tells us that its enthusiast Skylake parts are "on sale globally," but it is "aware of short term supply limitations in some areas of North America and Latin America." We're told to "expect improved supply soon." As for the Core i7-5775C, Intel says it's experiencing strong demand for that chip, as well, and that we should expect desktop Broadwell to become more widely available "as Q3 progresses."A quick check of listings at online retailers like Newegg suggests that motherboards based on the Z170 chipset are widely in stock, but the Core i7-6700K is listed as " coming soon ," while the $249 Core i5-6600K ...Read more...

The PC enthusiast community is often on edge about the latest software security holes and how people exploit them. We read about how developers close those vulnerabilities, and it seems like it's a never-ending cycle. What if the deepest, most private parts of your PC's hardware had years-old vulnerabilities that hadn't been detected, though? That nightmare is real. At Black Hat last week, researcher Christopher Domas demonstrated that security measures built into the hardware of some older Intel CPUs can be bypassed with a carefully-crafted attack.CPUs use different security levels, called rings, for code execution. Code running in a given ring can access data and processes in less-privileged modes, but those less-privileged areas cannot reach back into the more privileged rings. Ring 0 is where the operating ...Read more...

When one thinks of workstations, a large, powerful desktop usually comes to mind, but it seems that a growing segment of the population wants to work on the go. IDC says mobile workstation shipments grew in the second quarter this year. Perhaps that's why Intel has announced its first-ever mobile Xeon family of processors.Intel isn't ready to talk about the Xeon E3-1500M family in detail just yet, but it does say the new CPUs will be based on the Skylake architecture . They'll also sport workstation-friendly features like ECC memory support and its vPro remote management technology suite will be along for the ride, ...Read more...

On The TR Podcast live stream last night, we dove deep into Intel's new Skylake processors with the help of our friend David Kanter of Real World Tech and The Microprocessor Report. Here's the video version from YouTube for your viewing enjoyment....Read more...

Greetings, fellow gerbils. We just came back from hunting in the plains of Newegg, and here's the catch of the day:That's all we have today. If you spot a juicy deal we didn't cover, ...Read more...

Today's high-level Android vulnerability is called Certifi-gate. As you might have guessed, it gets its name from an underlying problem with the way the operating system handles digital certificates in the context of remote support tools (RSTs). The vulnerability can let an attacker gain full control over a victim's device.Here's roughly how it goes. A bog-standard RST app will usually ask for a normal set of user permissions, but it also needs to install a plugin with elevated permissions so it can perform its tasks. While the RST is digitally signed by its ...Read more...

Heads up, World of Warcraft junkies: your drug of choice now comes in a new flavor called Legion. The game's latest expansion lets players explore the shores of the Broken Isles to save Azeroth again. Take a peek at the cinematic teaser:...Read more...

"Next-gen hero-shooter" Battleborn is coming in February, Gearbox announced at Gamescom. Last time we looked in on the game, we learned about its team-focused campaign and multi-player modes. Now, Gearbox is talking about who Battleborn's heroes are. Check 'em out in the trailer:...Read more...

Eight is Enough

The TR Podcast live stream about Skylake with special guest David Kanter is now live on Twitch. You can tune in below and ask us questions via the embedded chat box:...Read more...

How do you keep enterprising hackers from unloading exploits into the wild? Microsoft has been paying bounties to researchers who find and disclose security issues for a while. Now, it's expanded the program. At Black Hat, the company announced that it will double the size of payments it makes in its Bounty for Defense program, and it'll also be expanding the Online Services Bug Bounty to new areas of eligibility.Let's say an exploit has been discovered in the wild, and Microsoft has mitigated (or patched) that exploit. If you can get around that mitigation, you have a submission for the company's Mitigation Bypass program, which could net you up to $100,000. Ideas for defending against further hacking efforts are eligible for the Bounty ...Read more...

Nvidia's quarterly financial results are in. The company posted a 5% year-on-year revenue increase, from $1.103 to $1.153 billion. Operating expenses rose from $456 million in Q2 2014 to $558 million, and net income fell to $26 million from $128 million a year ago. Gross margin fell slightly to 55%, versus 56.1% this time last year. Here are the full results, for your perusal:Earnings per share was $0.05 this quarter. Nvidia's inability to find a buyer for its Icera division resulted in a $0.19 charge per share, while ...Read more...