Techreport

Tim Sweeney's blistering criticism of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) last week certainly got Microsoft's attention. Shortly after his op-ed was published, Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, took to Twitter to state that "UWP is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, and can be supported by any store." Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of Windows, echoed that message. Now Sweeney is back with a new op-ed, and he remains unconvinced. He also calls for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to pledge to the games industry that Windows will remain an open platform.Sweeney says a prime motivation for the UWP is to provide sandboxing and improve application security on the Windows platform. He says this is a good idea, and acknowledges it's ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Elite: Dangerous was one of the first games to support the Oculus Rift development headsets, but it's been stuck supporting version 0.5 of the Oculus SDK for a while now (or version 0.8 through SteamVR). That means it has trouble supporting the consumer version of the Rift, requiring users to do some fancy footwork to play the game correctly with that headset. ...Read more...

Today seems to be driver update day for the big two graphics card makers. According to many users on Nvidia's forums, Monday's 364.47 drivers were causing critical issues for some users who chose the "Express Install" option during setup. The update caused blue-screen crashes and TDR errors on some computers during the install process. Users would then need to start up in safe mode so they could roll back to the earlier version.Today's 364.51 driver update addresses those installation issues, allowing users to check out the features intended to roll out with 364.47. The big news for the driver was support for the Vulkan API, but it also included updates for Hitman, Tom Clancy's The Division ...Read more...

Zotac is bringing a ton of graphics power to the mini-PC space with its new Zbox Magnus EN980. As you might have guessed by the name, the EN980 will pack a GeForce GTX 980 graphics chip. That GTX 980 will be paired with some variety of Skylake Core i5 CPU. Given the tight confines of the mini-PC form factor and Zotac's previous use of MXM cards in the EN970, the GTX 980 may be the full mobile version that Nvidia released for high-end gaming notebooks. ...Read more...

AMD took the wraps off a new driver feature this morning that it's calling XConnect. As part of its Radeon Software 16.3 drivers, the company has added external graphics hot-plugging support. XConnect also includes management features in Radeon drivers that allow gamers to choose the display they want to use and gracefully close applications running on an external GPU before unplugging it. ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of Nvidia's driver release, AMD just put up its Radeon Software 16.3 hotfix drivers. Despite the "hotfix" moniker, this release comes with a basketful of new features and improvements.First off, this is AMD's first mainstream release with support for the Khronos Group's Vulkan API , which is the low-level variant of OpenGL (akin to DirectX 12). DirectFlip is now supported in the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark, letting the game behave closer ...Read more...

Oxide Games has set a March 31 release date for Ashes of the Singularity. The game is hotly anticipated thanks to its trailblazing support for DirectX 12, including features like asynchronous compute and explicit multi-adapter. Ashes has been widely used as a benchmark of DirectX 12 performance since last year. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

One worry that's arisen from game developers' move to DirectX 12 and the Universal Windows Platform is its potentially chilling effect on benchmarking and frame-time monitoring. Good old Fraps doesn't work with DirectX 12 apps like Ashes of the Singularity or UWP apps like Gears of War: Ultimate Edition yet. There's some hope, though. Friend of TR and Intel graphics guru Andrew Lauritzen released a tool called PresentMon today that gives us an independent look into the performance of DX12 apps.Put simply, PresentMon uses counters from a Windows facility called Event Tracing for Windows (in a manner that Lauritzen says is similar to Microsoft's own GPUView tool ) to give us frame times for DirectX ...Read more...

A wild Android release appears! Out of nowhere, Google unleashed the Android N Developer Preview on the world. The new iteration of Google's operating system is more evolution than revolution when compared to Android Marshmallow, but it still comes with a few interesting features. ...Read more...

Just a few days ago, Asus pulled back the curtain on its GeForce GTX 950-2G, a spin of the GTX 950 graphics card without an auxiliary PCIe power connector. That card already looked like a great choice for an HTPC, but Asus just went one step further. Meet the GeForce GTX 950 Mini. ...Read more...

Gigabyte has announced the GA-990X-Gaming SLI, an enthusiast ATX motherboard for AMD AM3 and AM3+ processors. The board combines the 990X chipset with some more modern accoutrements, like two rear USB 3.1 ports and an M.2 slot with four lanes of PCIe 2.0 connectivity. ...Read more...

We've all had times when something just didn't quite fit right during a PC build, but usually that means it's time to stop and consider why tab A isn't going into slot B. LinusTechTips forums poster Zanderlinde wasn't deterred when a screw hole on his GeForce GTX 980 Ti didn't quite line up with a Corsair HG10 liquid-cooling bracket, though. Even though Corsair's official installation video suggests that no screw or mounting nut needs to pass through this hole, Zanderlinde was convinced that one did, and he put the card on his trusty drill press to move the offending hole "just a tiny bit in." ...Read more...

There's no shortage of choice today when it comes to ATX power supplies, but the same can't be said for the diminutive SFX form factor. Fans of smaller rigs should be pleased to hear that Corsair has released two new itty-bitty SFX PSUs for consideration: the 450-watt SF450 and the 600-watt SF600. Both units are fully modular and 80 Plus Gold certified. Most importantly, they each use relatively large 92mm fans that can stop spinning at low loads. ...Read more...

ASRock just won't do what Intel tells it to. The company may have issued BIOS updates that removed its SkyOC base-clock (or BCLK) overclocking features from many of its motherboards, but it's not abandoning the locked-CPU overclocking dream just yet. This time around, the company is taking the battle to the hardware. Its Fatal1ty H170 Performance/Hyper and Fata1ty B150 Gaming K4/Hyper boards both rely on an external clock generator for the BCLK signal. This generator appears to allow for base-clock overclocking of locked chips on these motherboards. ...Read more...

Seagate has an intriguing new toy to show off at this weekend's Open Compute Project Summit. It claims to have the world's fastest solid-state drive on its hands. To back up that bit of chest-pounding, the company claims the drive has "throughput performance" of 10 GB/s. Furthermore, Seagate says the drive is ready for production and should launch sometime this summer.Any "world's fastest" claim is a tough one to verify, especially when Seagate isn't specifying whether that 10GB/s figure describes reads or writes, nor whether it describes a random or sequential access pattern. Given that sequential figures are usually described in bytes per second, and that reads tend to be faster than writes with many drives, ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Unless you're living beneath a rock or in a pineapple under the sea, you're probably aware that Samsung has released new Galaxy flagship handsets. The Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge phones are in reviewers' hands now. We scoured the internet for the juiciest morsels of information about the new handsets, and here's what we found. ...Read more...

A couple months back, some reviewers noticed that pairing their Nvidia graphics cards with high-refresh-rate displays—those with maximum refresh rates greater than 60Hz—caused the idle clock speeds of those cards to surge at the Windows desktop. That clock speed surge resulted in excessive power consumption. Nvidia later issued a fix for that issue in version 361.43 of its drivers, and all was well—or so we thought. A TR reader emailed us recently and reported that he was experiencing the same issue with his triple-Asus-PG278Q setup. He noted that setting any one of those displays above a 60-Hz refresh rate at the desktop would cause this "power bug" to recur.Since we have an Asus PG279Q and several other monitors in our labs, we figured we'd try and see what was up. Our testbed system is running the most current drivers from Nvidia, version 364.47 . First, ...Read more...

A new generation of graphics cards is coming, and memory chipmaker SK Hynix wants to be part of the revolution. According to the German IT website Golem.de, SK Hynix plans to start production of second-generation High Bandwith Memory (HBM2) soon. 4GB SK Hynix chips are apparently slated for the third quarter of the year, and 8GB chips will arrive in the fourth quarter. With this move, SK Hynix provides some competition for Samsung, who already announced production plans for HBM2 memory. ...Read more...

We usually like to hold off on a deals-of-the-week post until Friday, but today, we're breaking with protocol to share some solid deals on SSDs at the 'Egg that expire soon. Without further ado:The Mushkin deals expire on March 9 at 11:59 PM PT, and the sale on the OCZ and Intel drives expires a ...Read more...

Valve's Robot Repair VR demo for the HTC Vive, set in the Portal universe, is already one of the more interesting peeks at what's possible on the platform. Now, the company is expanding the range of VR experiences in that setting. It's being widely reported that Valve will show off a new set of VR demos called The Lab next week at the Game Developers Conference. According to Polygon, The Lab will apparently take place inside Aperture Science's facilities, though we don't know much more about it yet....Read more...

Didn't we just have a Nvidia driver update? Yes, we did. Well, here's another one. Nvidia has released version 364.47 of its graphics drivers with a big new feature: mainstream support for the Khronos Group's Vulkan API. Vulkan can be roughly described as the low-overhead counterpart of OpenGL, akin to DirectX 12. Nvidia even has a page up on its website describing the new API and links to some neat demos users can download and try for themselves.Besides support for the new API, the 364.47 drivers pack new SLI profiles for Hitman and The Technomancer . Nvidia says Rise of the Tomb Raider is now "3D Vision Ready," though a number of titles like Far Cry: Primal and Need for Speed have been tagged "not recommended" when it comes to 3D support. ...Read more...

In a surprising move, Microsoft announced today that it's making its SQL Server database system available to customers running Linux. The sprawling relational database system was previously a Windows exclusive, but Microsoft says it wants "to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud" in the spirit of "meeting [customers] where they are."Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu developer Canonical are already working with Microsoft to bring SQL Server to their platforms. Redmond says it's opening a private preview of "core relational database capabilities" of ...Read more...

It looks like Fable Legends will never see the light of day as anything more than a DirectX 12 benchmark. In a post on its Xbox Wire blog, Microsoft says it's decided to cease development of the next Fable title. Sadder still, the company says it's "in discussions with employees about the proposed closure of Lionhead Studios in the UK." For the unaware, Lionhead is the developer of the Black and White and Fable franchises....Read more...

Look who's just joined 2016's mini-computer party. Origin PC has announced its Chronos mini-PC, which packs a respectable amount of firepower in a small ammo belt. Check out the presentation video....Read more...

February's Mobile World Congress came and went without a new HTC flagship smartphone. Details of a new flagship from the company seem to be emerging in leaks, however, and VentureBeat has reported some new information about the device alongside some attractive renders. The company will apparently forego its traditional flagship naming scheme by calling the handset the HTC 10 rather than the HTC One M10.. @OnLeaks Can I play ...Read more...

This is a something a bit out of left field, but it's really cool. Nobumichi Asai, a Japanese artist from the WOW collective, has used face mapping and digital video projection to create something rather unique: virtual animated makeup. A video is worth ten thousand words, so I'll let it speak for itself....Read more...

Eight is Enough

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 950 graphics card is already thrifty on power, but a new version of the card from Asus looks even more efficient. The company's GeForce GTX 950-2G has a near-reference spec sheet, with 768 stream processors, a 128-bit memory bus, and 2GB of RAM. The card is also clocked at 1026MHz base and 1190MHz boost speeds. Get this, though: Asus says the card has a board power of 75W and doesn't need a six-pin PCIe power connector. ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils. You know what day it is today. After much sweat and tears, we bring you a fine selection of online deals for your perusal. Take a gander at the best deals and discounts from this week.That's all for today. If you have any good ...Read more...

Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney is the latest to heap scorn on Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform. In an op-ed in the Guardian newspaper this morning, Sweeney expresses concern that the UWP and the Windows Store is a first step "towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce." He also says "if Microsoft does not commit to opening PC UWP up in the manner described here, then PC UWP can, should, must and will, die as a result of industry backlash."Sweeney points out that Microsoft has launched new Windows features exclusively under the UWP. He says most games and applications—most notably Steam—can't take advantage of those features because older software uses the Win32 ...Read more...

Yesterday, members of AMD's Radeon Technologies Group fielded questions from the public in a Reddit AMA. If you're hoping for details on the upcoming Polaris GPUs, prepare for disappointment. Aside from promising to come back later this year for another round of questions, Team Red kept a lid on those products. The company did provide a fair bit of detail with the questions it could answer, though.As PC Perspective points out , AMD says it'll soon add support for exclusive full-screen mode to its driver for DirectX 12 titles. That API feature, called DirectFlip or FlipEx, apparently wasn't present in the most current version of the company's Radeon drivers. PCPer ...Read more...

"That's up to Apple, and if they ever release a good computer, we will do it." That's the rather blunt way that Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, describes the current status of Rift support on the Mac. Luckey slammed Apple's platform during an interview with Shacknews, which you can watch below:...Read more...

HP's Envy Phoenix desktop is a pre-built PC that I might actually want to buy. Sure, that might sound crazy from someone who's always built his own systems. Unlike some Godzilla-villain-alike systems available from other companies right now, though, the Phoenix offers a subdued exterior with just enough blinginess to suggest powerful components under the hood. HP says it worked with HTC to make this system ready for the Vive VR headset when those goggles become available, too. ...Read more...

2016 is the year of the Linux desktop. Well, maybe the year of the Russian-constructed Linux desktop powered by a MIPS processor. T-Platforms, a Russian company specializing in high-performance computing systems, has introduced the Tavolga Terminal TB-T22BT, a desktop or thin-client machine that's intriguing for its choice of processor and operating system. ...Read more...

Augmented reality (AR) has yet to truly take off, but the avenues it opens for entertainment and work are manifold, as demonstrated by Microsoft's HoloLens. Intel is apparently thinking along the same lines, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. WSJ talked to several people "briefed on the company's plans" who say that the chip maker is working on its own version of an AR headset.The headset in question is reportedly built using Intel's RealSense 3D camera technology , which WSJ says was initially billed as an add-on peripheral. Interestingly, it appears that Intel won't be adding its own ...Read more...

Augmented reality (AR) has yet to truly take off, but the avenues it opens for entertainment and work are manifold, as demonstrated by Microsoft's HoloLens. Intel is apparently thinking along the same lines, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. WSJ talked to several people "briefed on the company's plans" who say that the chip maker is working on its own version of an AR headset.The headset in question is reportedly built using Intel's RealSense 3D camera technology , which WSJ says was initially billed as an add-on peripheral. Interestingly, it appears that Intel won't be adding its own ...Read more...

EK Water Blocks has released a new line of CPU liquid-cooling kits. The Professional Series slots in between the company's existing two kit lines: the more value-oriented Liquid series, and the bleeding-edge Extreme series. With this new line, the company is aiming for an attractive price-to-performance ratio. ...Read more...

Got burning questions about AMD's Radeon Technologies Group? The division is holding a Reddit Q&A today from 10 AM to 5 PM US Central Time on the r/AMD subreddit. Here's the official description of the event:The Q&A is open to all topics dealing with anything under the Radeon Technologies Group (the Radeon division of AMD). Some big secrets could be unveiled this Thursday, so ...Read more...

We often think of 1TB or 2TB SSDs as massive in PC enthusiast circles these days, but those drives pale in comparison to Samsung's latest. The company says it's now shipping the PM1633a SSD, a 15.36TB monster that talks to host systems over a 12Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. That eye-popping capacity comes courtesy of 32 512GB flash packages built with Samsung's 48-layer 3D V-NAND. ...Read more...

DJI has released the $1399 Phantom 4, the latest model in its Phantom line of quadcopters. With this iteration, the company has added some autonomous features that should benefit experienced operators and drone newbies alike. The biggest upgrade on this drone may be its obstacle-detection features. When a pilot is controlling the Phantom 4 manually, the drone is designed to stop short of an oncoming obstacle and hover in place. ...Read more...

Well, that's certainly unexpected. Microsoft's long-running racing franchise, Forza Motorsport, is finally making the leap to the PC with Forza Motorsport 6: Apex. The game will be available free-to-play in the Windows 10 Store as a "curated experience" aimed at players who are new to the series. Grab a bib and feast on the trailer below....Read more...

Eight is Enough

It's driver update day in graphics card land. Both AMD and Nvidia have new driver releases out in preparation for some upcoming game releases. The red team has released Radeon Software Crimson Edition hotfix version 16.2.1, which brings an updated CrossFire profile for Ubisoft's Far Cry Primal. This minor update comes hot on the heels of the 16.2 release, which added optimizations for Ashes of the Singularity, CrossFire improvements for The Division and XCOM 2, and bug fixes for Fallout 4 and Rise of the Tomb Raider.On the green side of the fence, Nvidia released version 362.00 of its graphics card drivers, which have a WHQL certification badge. Nvidia says they're "Game Ready" for a handful of new releases. Far Cry Primal gets performance optimizations and an ...Read more...

27" 4K monitors are all the rage these days, but it's rare to see a less-dense 30" or 32" 4K display. Acer's 32" Predator XB321HK could be just the thing for people who don't want to deal with the itty-bitty pixels of 27" 4K panels. Not only is the XB321HK a big 4K display, its IPS panel is driven by Nvidia's G-Sync variable-refresh-rate technology. ...Read more...

The VESA standards body has finalized the specification for the DisplayPort 1.4 standard. The association calls this the first major update to DisplayPort since the publication of DisplayPort 1.3, which became a specification back in September 2014.The most important new feature in this version of the spec is Display Stream Compression 1.2. VESA says DSC 1.2 ...Read more...

Apple has scored a point in one of its legal battles over iPhone security. It isn't in the San Bernardino case that has caught national attention in recent weeks, though. Rather, the company has been assisting the government in an investigation of the iPhone of Jun Feng, a man who has plead guilty to drug dealing. The investigators in Feng's case had argued that the All Writs Act (AWA) of 1789 allows them to compel Apple to bypass the passcode security on the defendant's iPhone. On Monday, magistrate judge James Orenstein ruled on Monday in the US District Court of the Eastern District of New York that the AWA does not give the government the power that it seeks.Orenstein looks to a federal law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act , or CALEA, for guidance in this case. The judge notes the All Writs Act is understood to have a "gap-filling" function, and Apple ...Read more...

An international group of researchers has discovered that web traffic encrypted with Transport Layer Security (TLS) can be decrypted if a server also supports the antiquated SSLv2 cryptographic protocol. The researchers estimate that a staggering 33% of HTTPS-enabled sites are vulnerable to this attack, which they call DROWN, for Decrypting RSA using Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption.While the SSLv2 protocol has long been known to be weak , the attack is significant because traffic encrypted with the stronger TLS protocol is potentially vulnerable. Communication from a client—like a web browser or mail transfer agent—that insists on TLS encryption may still be subject ...Read more...