New Gadgets

For the past few years, AMD has worked on a new generation of external GPU technology that would use Thunderbolt 3 and offer a better experience. This push got a major boost when Apple announced back in June that the MacBook Pro line would support this functionality. eGPU support is still being built into macOS High Sierra, but it’s now in a sufficient state for testing.

9to5 Mac took a Mantiz Venus MZ-02 chassis for a spin to find out what kind of performance upgrade Mac users might expect from adopting a high-end GPU. The results are early — hardware isn’t properly identified, and the author may have made a mistake in his hardware configurations, given that he tested Rocket League with vertical sync enabled. While that’s a reasonable option when it comes to how you personally prefer to handle V-sync, it permanently caps performance of any solution at the maximum refresh rate of the monitor. If your GPU can push 500fps and you lock your frame rate to 60Hz, 60fps is all you’re going to get.

But, with that caveat in place, we can at least say the RX Vega 64 retains enough of its raw performance to smash through what the MacBook Pro 13-inch is capable of delivering. Unigine Heaven isn’t a great test these days — it’s old and synthetic — but it does show a MacBook Pro 13-inch barely breaking 10fps on its own compared with a smooth 65fps for the Vega 64.



Again, early driver support and imperfect hardware detection makes it clear that it’s still early days to be running out to bet on eGPU performance in Apple systems, but the long-term trend is positive. The chassis in question is expensive, at $400, but includes a power supply, can charge the MacBook Pro while gaming, and has SSD mounting brackets, USB 3.0 and gigabit Ethernet support, and a 550W power supply.

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THE increasing adoption of digitalization in China could lead to a dramatic transformation of the Chinese economy, according to a latest report by McKinsey Global Institute.

Creative destruction would sweep across almost all economic sectors and enhance efficiency as well as boosting productivity, which would eventually boost the global competitiveness of Chinese companies, it said in the “Digital China” report released yesterday.

“The creative destruction brought by digital technologies is likely to be more rapid and on a relatively larger scale in China because of inefficiencies in traditional sectors and massive potential for commercialization. Digitization can make China’s economy more dynamic, and enable more Chinese businesses to compete globally and even export “Made In China” digital business models,” said McKinsey Global Institute senior fellow Jeongmin Seong.

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NEIGHBOURHOOD HELP
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Neighbourhood Help is a social app that brings communities closer together, and in the upfront happening and assist each subsidiary in the period of emergencies. A community can be an organization of families vigorous in a street, shop owners, little towns, retirement or gated communities, apartments, or anywhere an organization of people or families to your liking to promote each new.

By using this app, you will be practiced to easily and suddenly have enough money an opinion each adherent of the group, taking into account the easily reached shove of a button, that you have a Critical or Medical Emergency requiring the groups immediate protection.

The unique feature in the app is that you pre-photograph album an Emergency statement that your organization members will hear as soon as one of the emergency buttons is pressed. It personalizes the emergency, and your group members will know who has requested instruction and the location of the emergency.

Critical Emergency (Non-medical)

The first button is a Critical Emergency that you press later you require the quick reference from the community or energy due to a Critical Emergency. A Critical Emergency can add taking place a flare in the quarters, an intruder in or just about your dwelling, a domestic issue, etc.

Medical Emergency

The second button is a Medical Emergency that you press when you require the sudden recommend from the community or action due to a Medical Emergency. There are various reasons you may need to use this button where you may not take demonstration up opinion an approach to the right of right of entry emergency services directly from being incapacitated, unable to speak, etc.

This app will have enough money some innocent intimates of mind to people who may be busy alone, communities who what more control in their neighborhood, and may restrict or minimize the intensity of the emergency.

When AMD launched the RX 560 GPU, as an upgrade to the older RX 460, it upgraded the specs of the card slightly. Unlike the RX 580 and RX 570, which retained their GPU cores, texture units, and ROP configurations and simply targeted significantly higher clock speeds, the RX 560 actually changed the core configuration from 896:56:16 (RX 460) to 1024:64:16. Now, AMD has apparently changed its RX 560 configuration without giving any sign they actually did so. The RX 560 is now selling in an 896-core configuration; we’re assuming it’s the same 896:56:16 configuration as the RX 460.

To be perfectly clear: We don’t approve of or condone this practice. It’s not unusual for GPUs to be sold in different memory configurations, but some companies, like VisionTek, don’t even list the core count on their RX 560s on their own product pages. A sufficiently high base clock and turbo boost could compensate for the loss of the texture mapping units and GPU cores, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happened here.

It would be one thing if these GPUs were confined to the bottom of the market, or restricted to 2GB configurations, but they aren’t. Browsing Newegg shows plenty of Radeon RX 560s for sale in both 896 and 1,024-core configurations, including an Asus RX 560 with 896 cores for a whopping $140. (There’s an Asus RX 560 that shows on Newegg’s product page as costing $166, but when you click through it’s priced at $129).

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Choosing the best processor for PC gaming is a rather more complex proposition than it seems at first glance. After all, “best” is not a single metric. The simplest way for us to help you decide would be to link our Core i7-8700K (See on Amazon) review and leave a two-word caption: “This one.” But simply picking the most expensive and/or fastest processor a company offers for consumer desktop PCs, without any coherent rationale behind the choice, ultimately wouldn’t answer the question.

The truth is Intel and AMD offer a fairly wide range of CPUs at different price points, clock speeds, and capabilities. “Best,” for our purposes, is not defined solely as “fastest,” but contains some performance-per-dollar weighting as well. This is especially true in games, which often don’t scale well above four cores and almost never take advantage of Hyper-Threading. And as for AMD, the company’s Ryzen architecture, which debuted in March of this year, is worth serious consideration. Let’s break down our favorite choices for each company.

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One of the most important choices every PC builder makes is which graphics card to buy. That choice has been getting much more stressful lately as the price of GPUs skyrockets. You can thank the surge of interest in cryptocurrency for the increase in graphics card prices, but Nvidia is trying to do something about it. “Trying” is the operative word here.

As recently as the middle of last year, you could get a high-end GPU from Nvidia for around retail price. The cost of AMD’s cards has been on an upward trend for even longer, though. Late last year, increased interest in cryptocurrency sent speculative virtual money enthusiasts running for their nearest GPU retailer to pick up equipment for a mining operation. That’s left precious few cards for gamers who just want to frag some noobs.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are too mature now for a small-scale GPU mining operation to net much cash. Even newer coins like Monero might only make an operator the equivalent of a few dollars per day, but a jump in the value of the coins could make them instant millionaires. As a result, it’s a terrible time to buy a GPU for gaming. Cards like the GTX 1070 that cost under $500 last year are now selling for closer to $1,000. Even used cards will cost you $800 or more.

Nvidia has had enough of the price gouging, so it’s asking retailers to reserve some supply for gamers. Specifically, Nvidia’s proposal is a limit of two cards per customer, enough to set up a sweet SLI rig if that’s what you’re into. It can’t make anyone do that, but its own online store has implemented the pricing limit. Nvidia hasn’t increased the price of the “Founder’s Edition” cards, either. Even with the limit, Nvidia’s supply is all sold out.

If you need a graphics card, your best bet is to wait on Nvidia to restock at its more reasonable prices. I wouldn’t expect those units to last long, though. If people aren’t buying them for crypto mining, they might just flip them for a big profit to those who are.

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Legislators in Hawaii were among the first to express concern over the use of loot boxes in video games when Star Wars Battlefront II was in the news. This issue didn’t fade away, though. Lawmakers have introduced several bills designed to clamp down on the use of randomized loot crates in games, which are compared with gambling in the legislation.

Loot crates have been featured in games for years, but Electronic Arts’ particularly rapacious version in Star Wars Battlefront II kicked off a firestorm on the internet. As the release of Battlefront II approached, beta testers complained that too many items were locked up inside the random loot crates, and many of those items could change the gameplay. This left players with little choice but to drop cash in hopes of getting the items they needed. EA also stuck hero characters behind the loot crate paywall — the only alternative was to grind for up to 40 hours just to unlock a character.

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Sony has cut the price of its PlayStation VR systems, after a holiday sale apparently moved enough units that the company wants to goose them further. Through Saturday, March 3, Sony’s standalone headsets and bundles (See on Amazon) will be just $200, down from the $300 standard price.

Remember, the standalone headset doesn’t include the camera that you actually need to make virtual reality work. To enable that, you need a camera, which is why some of the associated game bundles are a pretty good deal. The Doom VFR Bundle includes the PSVR headset, PlayStation Camera, Sony’s VR Demo Disc 2.0, and Doom VFR itself. Price: $299, down from $399.

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It’s sometimes genuinely odd how little attention people pay to their own industry. In 2007, Sony dropped a rootkit onto users’ PCs when they attempted to play an audio CD. In 2008, EA took serious heat for integrating aggressive DRM into its products that directly hampered gameplay. Assassin’s Creed Origins was wrapped in so many layers of DRM, end users blamed the game’s initially poor performance on its DRM implementation (EA denied this, as it would). In aggregate, most gamers are willing to tolerate DRM so long as it doesn’t prevent them from using the software they purchase, harm the performance of their PC or console, and doesn’t install actual, literal malware on their systems.

Given how long topics of piracy and DRM have been hotspots in the PC community, you’d think any game developer would be familiar with them. And apparently, you’d be wrong.

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Apple loves to position itself as being on the cutting edge of OS research and development, but its long-term support for graphics APIs it didn’t develop in-house has been generally terrible. macOS is still limited to OpenGL 4.1, which was released in July, 2010. To put this in roughly approximate terms, imagine if Microsoft had quit evolving its graphics APIs with DirectX 11.0 and still expected everyone to rely on it for gaming and professional applications. Apple has launched its proprietary API for iOS and macOS, Metal, but it refused to support Vulkan, the open-source, low-overhead API intended to match DirectX 12 in the PC space. Fed up with this approach, the Khronos Group, which maintains Vulkan, has announced its own effort to bring Vulkan support to macOS and iOS whether Apple approves of it or not, via a thin translation layer.

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