Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / AMD’s artistic interpretation of how FSR works. It’s a bit more complicated than this four-box rendering implies—especially when we consider how much better FSR 2.0 is.

Out of all the battles between graphics card manufacturers, the fight over image upsampling and reconstruction is the most interesting to follow, mostly because more gamers can actually take advantage of the results. This week, that battle has become even hotter, thanks to AMD finally landing a considerable blow.

Despite only working on one game as of press time, AMD’s new FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) feature finally passes the sniff test that its “1.0” version flunked last year. This week’s updated “2.0” version works on a larger number of GPUs in the wild than Nvidia’s comparable option, and it lets players get closer to good-enough pixel counts when running on 1440p or 4K panels. But the caveats in play leave us viewing the results as good news for older or mid-range GPUs rather than the solution to the supply issues everyone is facing.

A brief explainer on Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR

Image upsampling, as delivered by the likes of Nvidia and AMD, can take a game with a smaller pixel resolution and intelligently blow it up to fill popular screen resolutions like 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. If these systems work as advertised, they’ll produce something comparable to raw pixels—or sometimes look sharper since they also include an anti-aliasing pass to remove “jaggies” and other visual defects.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Elon Musk today said his deal to purchase Twitter is “temporarily on hold” while he awaits details on the number of spam and fake accounts on the site, but he later added that he remains “committed” to the acquisition.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 percent of users,” Musk wrote in a tweet Monday morning. In a follow-up tweet two hours later, he wrote, “Still committed to acquisition.”

The first tweet saying that the deal is “on hold” included a link to a May 2 Reuters article noting that Twitter had “estimated in a filing… that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.”

Enlarge / North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un on June 30, 2019. (credit: Getty | BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI)

At least six people in North Korea have died and more than 350,000 have contracted an unusual fever since late April in an outbreak that “explosively spread nationwide,” North Korean state media said Friday.

On Thursday, 18,000 new cases were reported, 187,800 people were in quarantine, and 162,200 had reportedly recovered. The cases are being defined by “a fever whose cause couldn’t be identified,” according to The New York Times.

The numbers come just a day after the authoritarian country acknowledged for the first time during the pandemic that the coronavirus was spreading within its borders.

Enlarge / Lenovo’s Yoga 9i 14″ 7th Gen laptop. (credit: Scharon Harding)

For a laptop to make a statement, it needs to have more than just the latest components—it has to have style. Lenovo’s Yoga 9i is ready to compete in today’s market with its Intel 12th Gen P-series CPUs, but it shows it’s more than just another thin-and-light convertible with luxurious details.

You can immediately tell the Yoga 9i was designed to grab your attention with its shiny, polished finishes. But it’s the creature comforts, like a hi-res webcam with background blur, an optional tall and fast OLED touchscreen, and abnormally loud speakers—that tell the real story.