When we talk about AMD and Intel hardware, there’s a general assumption that outside issues that touch on the CPU, performance, and compatibility should both be broadly equivalent. This is not to say identical — different chipset vendors will produce peripherals that maintain different levels of absolute performance, with AMD licensing critical chipset components from Asmedia, while Intel builds its own designs (not counting what third-party manufacturers may integrate into the boards themselves). It’s been a long time since we’ve had to warn people not to combine certain peripherals with other hardware. The gold standard example for this kind of problem is the legendary VIA 686b southbridge bug that caused irretrievable data loss in RAID arrays if you were foolish enough to use a PCI-based Soundblaster Live (one of the most common sound cards at that time) with a VIA VT82C686B southbridge, which VIA tapped for both its Intel and AMD motherboards back in 2001.
I don’t normally write about GPU sales — Grant covers that side of ExtremeTech. While updating our GPU buying guide, however, I came across a couple of price cuts on Team Red that were good enough to deserve to be called out separately. Newegg shows RX 570 GPUs with 4GB of RAM for $139, RX 570 cards with 8GB of RAM for $149, and RX 580 cards at $189. As an added bonus, the cards all come with your choice of two of the following three games: Tom Clancy’s The Division, Resident Evil 2 (remake), and Devil May Cry 5.
Fans of classic real-time strategy games (RTS) are in for a real treat, and it’s coming from an unusual source: Electronic Arts. After hinting at a new Command & Conquer project several weeks ago, the company has now revealed that a team of developers from the original 90s games have come together to create a remastered 4K version of the first two games in the series. In the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to get a single package with both Command & Conquer and the followup Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Best of all, . Yes, . Released in 1995, Command & Conquer was one of the first games we’d recognize as an RTS today.
Ever since Nvidia announced the RTX GPU family, we’ve been waiting to find out what performance would look like in shipping titles. The demos on-hand at the launch event were widely reported to show even the massive RTX 2080 Ti struggling to maintain 60fps in Battlefield V, which didn’t bode well for the performance of lower-end GPUs. Because Nvidia raised prices significantly with the RTX family of GPUs, there have been ongoing questions about what kind of performance these cards would achieve in RTX games, how fast they’d be, and whether cards like the RTX 2070 would be capable of maintaining playable frame rates in DXR-enabled games at all.
After a bumpy patch with former owner Square-Enix, a fully independent IO Interactive has returned with a follow-up to the 2016 soft reboot of Hitman. This sequel features six brand-new maps that are absolutely brimming with both bespoke events and enchanting systemic interactions. Ryan McCaffrey reviewed Hitman 2 at our sister site IGN, and he awarded it a . While he doesn’t think much of the high-level plot presentation, and the lack of mechanical innovation is mildly disappointing, the team at IO has delivered a slew of excellent new content for fans to immerse themselves in.
For most of human history, people wondered if there were other planets out there in the unfathomable reaches of space. It turns out there are some very close to Earth, though. A team of astronomers has revived interest in Barnard’s Star, which hangs in space just six light years away. After dismissing evidence for an exoplanet orbiting this star in the 1970s, the team now says there’s a very good chance Barnard’s Star . Barnard’s Star is a red dwarf and one of the closest stars to Earth. Only the Centauri system is closer, and we know there’s at least one exoplanet there.
Two weeks ago, we wrote a story about repeated reports of RTX 2080 Ti failures and how those failures were piling up and making waves on Reddit and Nvidia’s own forums. At the time, we told you that Nvidia’s official guidance was that there was no GPU problem. That guidance has changed, thanks to additional problem analysis. The company’s new information, however, is exceedingly brief. “Test escape” is a term of art that refers to a problem that slipped through quality control testing and wasn’t caught until it wound up in the hands of the end-customer. This certainly does appear to be the case.
In the ARM ecosystem, Apple has emerged as one of the only companies building its own high-performance custom CPUs. Other onetime rivals, like Qualcomm, have taken to licensing parts from ARM instead of building their own architectures. The field, however, isn’t empty — Samsung also has a custom CPU designed according to its own criteria. The reason you don’t hear as much about their chips is that previous efforts haven’t been all that great at competing with what Apple and ARM have brought to the table. The company is taking another crack at the topic, however, this time with a new CPU core, new cluster design, and a custom NPU (Neural Processing Unit) baked into the chip.
Nintendo went on the warpath over the summer in an effort to clamp down on ROM sites that make its classic games available for download. It went after two of the largest ROM sites, both owned by the same people, and now it’s secured a substantial settlement that could deter other sites. The owners of LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co have agreed to pay Nintendo a . , and both LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co (owned by Jacob and Cristian Mathias) suspiciously went down for “maintenance” around that time. The ROMs available on those sites let downloaders play games with the use of an emulator on a computer or phone.
