Nvidia’s RTX 40-series graphics card generation seems to be one of U-turns. First we had the unlaunching of its RTX 4080 12GB card and now we’re seeing rumours of a 16GB version of its upcoming RTX 4060 Ti. Which is all kinds of odd.

The rumours have all sprung from a single set of tweets from Zed Wang (via Videocardz), a regular GPU leakerer, who has mentioned release dates of RTX 40-series cards in the past which have more or less lined up.

Their latest lists the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, and RTX 4060 8GB cards citing the first launching at the end of May, with the other two cards following in July. The 8GB versions of the RTX 4060/Ti themselves aren’t a surprise; we had been expecting that VRAM capacity from the get-go. But that 16GB level certainly is.

We are pretty certain about many of the RTX 4060 Ti cards’ specifications by now, with an ADA106 GPU sporting 4,352 CUDA cores, a bunch of extra cache, and a 128-bit memory bus. That last one is the key …

As promised in Nvidia’s CES ‘Special Address’ ray tracing is coming to Diablo 4 this month, and it’s just been announced that’s happening on March 26th. So, should you require any further incentive to dip back into the game, it ought to look a little prettier once that patch has launched. So long as your GPU has the ray tracing chops to cope with the extra load, that is.

You are only getting a pair of new ray traced lighting effects in the update: ray traced reflections and ray traced shadows. So it shouldn’t be as demanding as some full fledged ray tracing everywhere all at once mode, and with DLSS 3 being in the game already you should at least have some mitigation for the extra pretties now being dropped into Diablo 4. 

In terms of specifics, Nvidia has been rather scant with details, though it has said today that “armour, water, windows, and other suitably reflective surfaces will now feature accurate, realistic ray-traced reflections and ray-traced transparent …

As a humble, yeoman, single player FPSer, I can never tell whether gamepad or mouse and keyboard is supposed to be the good one that cheaters use. Overwatch and Apex players all seemed broken up about aim assist and the reviled controller users, while Amazon listings for abominations like the HORI Tactical Assault Commander stand in mute testimony of mankind’s misguided attempts to bring M&K to console shooters.

Rainbow Six Siege, with its slow movement and fast time to kill, seems to favor the precision offered by M&K, leading underhanded players to “input spoof” with latter-day Tactical Assault Commander-style setups. They lorded over their gamepad-bound victims with the godly aiming potential we’ve come to know and love on PC.

That ends soon though with Rainbow Six Siege’s upcoming “Mousetrap” anticheat. Ubisoft has revealed that it can fairly reliably catch “spoofers” in the act, and that they are also endemic to high-level R6 Siege play on console. Rather th…

The fact that we’re in iffy economic times and demand for all manner of capitalist consumables is down is not news. But the specific fact of lower silicon wafer prices of late is novel. And it immediately has us hoping for cheaper actual chips.

The news comes from Taiwanese media outlet UDN (via HardwareLUXX) and relates specifically to the blank or raw silicon wafers from which chips are etched using advanced lithography processes.

Reportedly, prices of six and eight-inch wafers are down for the first time in three years, while 12-wafers are holding steady but expected also to fall shortly. It’s the larger 12-inch wafers that are used for the most advanced processes at the most important foundry of all, TSMC, and also by Intel.

Higher wafer prices have been part or the reason why chip prices have gone up so dramatically in the last few years. According to industry observers, TSMC’s prices for a finished wafer fully etched with chips has increased from $10,000 per …

Axis Studios, the Scottish animation and VFX company who made the 2011 Dead Island rewinding teaser, is shutting down. Per GamesIndustry, the studio has ceased production on all its current projects, with 162 employees laid off as the company enters administration.

Back in 2011, Axis produced a cinematic E3 premiere teaser that singlehandedly catapulted Dead Island to the forefront of public consciousness. In a slow-motion, rewound sequence, the trailer revealed how a family’s White Lotus-ass vacation met an early, grisly end at the hands of an amassing zombie horde. Even without any gameplay footage, the response at the time was huge. (Zombies weren’t quite as played out in 2011.)

I didn’t end up enjoying Dead Island very much, but I sure as hell bought it and that teaser is to blame. Imitated and parodied countless times since, Axis’s Dead Island trailer left a profound fingerprint on the long-running trope of big budget game reveals pairing gruesome viol…

Less than a week ago, Helldivers 2 players managed to stamp out the Automaton resistance “for good”. This earned them a pat on the back and a whole single minute of free time—Super Earth isn’t a dystopia, though, honest.

You might have noticed that “for good” is in air quotes, there. That’s because the final holdout worlds of Maia, Durgen, and Tibit were merely a setback for the Automaton scourge. There was ample reason to believe that the bots would be permanently turned off until a total galactic victory reset the board, but… well, other shoe—meet your drop.

“The Automatons have revealed their true force,” announces a dire warning via the in-game dispatches system. “A massive invasion fleet sweeping through our territory. Defences are scrambling. Slow its advance as much as possible.”

The new Major Order is a desperate defence of at least five planets as the Automatons swoop in from space. Want to know what makes it worse? Cyberstan is among th…

We’ve seen a new memory form factor show up in a few places at Computex 2024—across modules to motherboards. Not least surprising is how often memory manufacturer Micron mentioned it to me at the show. And how enthused it was with the memory form factor, which it is first with to market.

“I think the future really lies here, which is LP[CAMM2] running on the PC using this form factor,” Dinesh Bahal, VP and GM of Micron’s Consumer & Components Group, says.

LPCAMM2 is effectively a pancaked memory kit. It offers some similarities to soldered memory while still being able to be replaced by the user. For that reason, it’s seen as the perfect fit for the next-generation of thinner laptops, and Crucial is the first out the door with its 32 GB and 64 GB kit.

“So people went from the SO-DIMM is taking too much space, let me just start soldering it down. The problem with soldering it down is that I’m deciding my configuration upfront.”

LPCAMM solves that pro…

Update (August 16): Linus Tech Tips has posted an apology video, suspended video production for a week, and says it’s investigating allegations from an ex-employee. Latest story here.

Original story: Linus Tech Tips founder Linus Sebastian has admitted to “sloppiness” in the hardware review channel’s handling of controversy that erupted over its recent review of a high-end watercooling system, but says what really bothers him about the situation is “how quickly the pitchforks were raised.”

The trouble began with a June 24 video in which Sebastian and an assistant put together a watercooled PC using Billet Labs’ Monoblock, a system designed to cool both the CPU and GPU simultaneously. The Monoblock is not actually in production at this point: It’s available for preorder at the Billet Labs website for $841. The device tested by LTT was apparently a unique prototype.

The build did not go smoothly. The installation of the cooling b…

Stick “microcapacitors” onto to your list of future technologies that might just change the world. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have announced a breakthrough in microcapacitor energy storage and power density (via SciTechDaily), smashing through earlier records.

In simple terms, there’s a benefit in storing energy locally on-chip, which can save on power transfer between components. It just hasn’t been practical before because the very smallest capacitors have previously stored so little energy.

But the Berkley team have published a paper in the journal Nature, nattily titled “Giant energy storage and power density negative capacitance superlattices” and detailing a novel capacitor design made from engineered thin films of hafnium oxide and zirconium oxide, or HfO2-ZrO2 to the initiated.

The films are grown by atomic layer deposition, using standard materials and techniques from industrial chip fabrication. “We…