Weekend Mood

We've been geeking out over beastly CPUs absolutely destroying any and all benchmarks, because what else is there to do? When the average price of a GPU has doubled since 2020, we're all stuck playing fantasy hardware, here. The current state of the market frankly got us like: where the heck do GPU prices go from here? A harrowing question. Although, the first RTX 4060 laptop prices aren't horrendous.

 

Meanwhile, AMD is over here refusing to make users pay for "features they will never use" when it comes to AI accelerated graphics cards, while giving devs and modders open access to FSR 2.2.

 

On the science side of things, there's tech popping up with the ability to let people with severe paralysis text and browse the web using only the power of their minds. I think I'm okay with waiting for the price of GPUs to go down if I get to witness the birth of brain computer interfacing, honestly. Though when we've got one of the biggest Sci-Fi mags halting submissions due to an influx of AI generated stories, there's much to be said about the duality of man.

Graphics cards are straightforward, right? You buy the bigger number, you spend more, you get higher gaming performance. That's how it works on the desktop, but it's not necessarily the way things work in gaming laptop land. It's confusing, frustrating, and kinda disingenuous.

This Sapphire card is a slightly overclocked version of the non-XT RX 6700, and that puts this card in the performance bracket between the RX 6650 XT and the RTX 3060 Ti from Nvidia. That will make it an excellent 1080p card, and a capable 1440p GPU for that matter.

This Gen4 SK Hynix drive is just as quick as the 2TB version, and is a great buy even without a discount. You get the highest performance write SSD at 1TB, and although the WD SN850X will generally be cheaper, this one nails raw SSD performance.

Here's a monitor we really rate from our Gigabyte M28U review. We actually loved this package for its blend of speed and resolution even at its $650 price tag, but at this tantalisingly cheap $530 it's that much better.

PC gamers with slow internet connections or bandwidth caps rejoice: Valve has just launched a feature in the latest Steam beta allowing users to transfer game installations from a PC to the Steam Deck or another PC on the same local network.

Game developers now have unfettered access to AMD's latest and greatest upscaling technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.2. AMD has made both the API and source code available for all to integrate.

A million here, times a million there. Pretty soon you're talking about big numbers. So Nvidia claims for its AI accelerating hardware in terms of the performance boost it has delivered over the last decade and will deliver again over the next 10 years.