Microsoft has indefinitely delayed Windows 10X, its lightweight operating system for low-spec systems and foldables, according to reports from Windows Central and Petri. Instead, the company will turn its focus to the existing desktop experience.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware that “Microsoft has nothing to share at this time.”
Windows 10X was introduced in 2019 at a Surface-based event as a version of the Windows 10 operating system designed for dual-screen devices, like the Surface Neo. But Windows 10X was delayed to spring 2021 after a shift to single screen devices to service people’s needs during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Surface Neo was delayed, and no date was ever given for a release. The device was also removed from Microsoft’s website.
In theory, not only would Windows 10X power foldables, but also rival Google’s Chrome OS with support for low-power computers. The Surface Neo, for instance, was going to run on Intel’s Lakefield platform.
The company is reportedly focusing on the existing Windows 10 experience now. Its Sun Valley update, which will include a visual overhaul will likely see the benefits of Windows 10X later this year.
Windows 10X was not Microsoft’s first attempt to rejuvenate Windows 10. Windows 10 S showed up with the Surface Laptop in 2017, but was seen as limited and later made into a locked down mode that users could easily switch out of. And let’s not forget Windows RT, which launched alongside the original Surface Tablet in 2012, only to be discontinued a year later, although technically that was in the days of Windows 8.
Recently, Microsoft announced that 1.3 billion active devices are running Windows 10. It appears that Microsoft is focusing on those experiences instead.
An issue with the AMD SCSIAdapter driver appears to be causing Windows 10 boot issues on certain hardware configurations, ComputerBase reports. The problem apparently being most commonly encountered on Gigabyte motherboards.
People have complained of these problems on the ComputerBase forums, Microsoft Answers, and the /r/AMD subreddit. The issues seemed to start after the Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. – SCSIAdapter – 9.3.0.221 driver was pushed via Windows Update.
So far it seems the boot issues are mostly affecting Gigabyte Aorus motherboards that use the X570 chipset. The only way to fix the issue, at least at the moment, is to roll back the driver update and prevent Windows Update from installing it again.
Complaints about the problem started to appear on Microsoft Answers on April 28. Now, over a week later, people are continuing to report that Windows Update pushed the problematic driver on them and in the process caused boot issues.
The problem has prompted fresh calls for people to install driver updates straight from the vendor rather than relying on Windows Update—and it’s hard not to agree shortly after the utility severely disrupted at least some people’s workflows.
The driver update was reportedly pushed to Windows Insider Program and normal Windows 10 users alike. Right now the best option seems to be avoiding Windows Update—or at least this particular driver—until the issue has been resolved.
Microsoft has been trying to build a lighter version of Windows for more than 10 years without success. The latest effort, Windows 10X, has reportedly now been shelved, in favor of improving Windows 10 instead.
Petri reports that Windows 10X will no longer ship this year, and the OS will likely never arrive in its current form. Microsoft had originally been planning to deliver Windows 10X, a more lightweight and simplified version of Windows, alongside new dual-screen devices like the Surface Neo. That was before the pandemic hit, and Microsoft decided to prioritize Windows 10X for single-screen laptops instead.
The Surface Neo was supposed to ship with Windows 10X.Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The switch was designed to position Windows 10X as more of a Chrome OS competitor. Windows 10X included a simplified interface, an updated Start menu without Live Tiles, multitasking improvements, and a special app container for performance and security. Microsoft’s overall goal with 10X was to create a stripped-back, streamlined, and modern cloud-powered version of Windows.
Microsoft has always seen Chromebooks as a big threat in businesses and schools, but over the past year there has been a big increase in demand for regular Windows laptops. Despite a global chip shortage, the PC market hasn’t slowed down during the pandemic. Microsoft has directly benefited with increased Windows revenue. Windows OEM revenue grew by 10 percent in the recent quarter, reflecting strong consumer PC demand. Windows non-pro OEM revenue also grew by 44 percent.
There are now 1.3 billion active Windows 10 devices, according to Microsoft. That’s a huge amount of existing devices, and it appears Microsoft is now focused on improving the core of Windows instead of delivering a new variant. Microsoft has been gradually working on improving the user interface of Windows 10, with new system icons, File Explorer improvements, and even the end of Windows 95-era icons.
The Windows 10X Start menu.
All of these visual changes are part of a broader effort codenamed Sun Valley. Microsoft has not yet officially detailed this work, but a job listing earlier this year teased a “sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows.” We’re expecting a lot of visual changes to arrive in the Windows 10 21H2 update that should appear in October.
Elsewhere, Microsoft is also focusing on improving Windows for those who rely on it daily. The software maker is finally fixing the rearranging apps issue on multiple monitors, adding the Xbox Auto HDR feature and even improving Bluetooth audio support.
It’s clear Microsoft is getting back to the basics, after more than a decade of trying to simplify Windows. Windows RT first debuted in 2012, and then Windows 10 S arrived in 2017. Both failed to simplify Windows, but Windows 10X had some interesting changes that will undoubtedly make their way to Windows 10.
It isn’t enough to have great new devices, apps, and games — you also have to know how to use them. Here at The Verge, we offer step-by-step how-tos for experienced and new users who are working with online, macOS, Windows, Chrome OS, iOS, and Android apps, services, phones, laptops, and other tools. From simple instructions on how to install and use new devices, to little-known strategies on how to take advantage of hidden features and the best methods for adding power or storage, we’ve got your technological back.
If you use your phone in portrait lock all the time, it can be frustrating trying to get YouTube videos into full screen with the tiny button in the UI. Thankfully, there’s a better way, using the app’s built-in gestures: you can simply swipe up on a video to fill up the screen and swipe down on it to go back to portrait orientation.
We’ve actually written about this feature before, but it seems like it’s easy to miss; most of the people I’ve shown it to had no idea it existed.
Easy.
Of course, this feature works on Android phones as well, which I personally like better than having to hit the auto-rotate button built into the OS.
There is one obvious limitation: it only rotates one way. If you want to hold your phone with the left side facing up, you’re out of luck unless you turn portrait lock off. Still, it’s way better than having to tap on the video once to get the UI controls to show up, then trying to hit the tiny full-screen button.
Now all we need is this feature to be added to every other app (or for our phones to get smart enough to realize that if I’m watching a video and turn my phone, I probably want to see the video in full-screen, despite portrait lock).
A Microsoft executive has admitted that the company doesn’t earn any profit on sales of Xbox consoles alone. The admission came as part of the Epic v. Apple trial yesterday, confirming what we’ve known for years: Microsoft sells Xbox consoles at a loss. Asked how much margin Microsoft makes on Xbox consoles, the company’s head of Xbox business development, Lori Wright, said, “We don’t; we sell the consoles at a loss.”
An Epic Games lawyer asked a follow-up question: “Does Microsoft ever earn a profit on the sale of an Xbox console?” Wright replied, “No.” That doesn’t mean Xbox doesn’t make money, though. Microsoft was keen to point this out in a statement to The Verge just hours after Wright’s testimony yesterday.
“The gaming business is a profitable and high-growth business for Microsoft,” says a Microsoft spokesperson. “The console gaming business is traditionally a hardware subsidy model. Game companies sell consoles at a loss to attract new customers. Profits are generated in game sales and online service subscriptions.“
The Xbox Series S.Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
I asked Microsoft whether it never truly makes any margins on hardware alone, but the company didn’t respond in time for publication. Typically, Microsoft and Sony subsidize hardware at the beginning of a console’s lifecycle, but those early component costs tend to decrease over time. Those lower costs also translate to lower retail prices for consoles over time, though.
A teardown analysis of the Xbox One S, for example, revealed an estimated bill of materials of $324, which is $75 less than the $399 launch price for the 2TB version of the console, back in 2016. Microsoft also launched a disc-less version of the Xbox One S two years ago, which was presumably also sold at a loss.
Sony and Microsoft have similar business models for PlayStation and Xbox consoles, but Nintendo is the exception. In court documents, Microsoft estimates that hardware is generating a loss for Sony, but a profit for Nintendo. That’s backed up by Nintendo’s impressive 84.59 million Switch sales this year, up to March 31st.
Why all these costs are being discussed right now is a big part of the ongoing Epic v. Apple trial. Epic isn’t happy about Apple’s 30 percent revenue cut on in-app purchases for Fortnite, but Apple is arguing that Epic should also take issue with Microsoft or Sony’s identical 30 percent cut. It has resulted in hours of testimony about whether the iPhone is more like a PC or an Xbox, and a debate around open platforms versus locked-down ones. Microsoft clearly sees a difference between Xbox and PC, and has only cut the amount it takes on the Windows side to 12 percent, while the Xbox remains at 30 percent.
Microsoft obviously wants to maintain its business model for Xbox, and has attempted to push the industry toward digital games for years. Microsoft has very much sided with Epic Games in the case against Apple, and Epic has admitted it has never even questioned Microsoft’s digital sales cut. But how long this harmony will exist between the pair will very much depend on the future of digital game sales and cloud gaming. Microsoft is increasingly focused on its Xbox Game Pass subscription, which spans across devices that aren’t even Xbox consoles.
Game Pass also includes xCloud, Microsoft’s cloud gaming technology. Fortnite isn’t part of xCloud, because Epic Games won’t allow it. That highlights the emerging battles that are starting to take place in the game industry over shares of revenue. It looks like Microsoft has been preparing for some of them, but Epic v. Apple feels like the beginning of a greater war over the digital future of game stores.
Reviews for Capcom’s Resident Evil Village have gone live, and we’re taking the opportunity to look at how the game runs on the best graphics cards. We’re running the PC version on Steam, and while patches and future driver updates could change things a bit, both AMD and Nvidia have provided Game Ready drivers for REV.
This installment in the Resident Evil series adds DirectX Raytracing (DXR) support for AMD’s RX 6000 RDNA2 architecture, or Nvidia’s RTX cards — both the Ampere architecture and Turing architecture. AMD’s promoting Resident Evil Village, and it’s on the latest gen consoles as well, so there’s no support of Nvidia’s DLSS technology. We’ll look at image quality in a moment, but first let’s hit the official system requirements.
Capcom notes that in either case, the game targets 1080p at 60 fps, using the “Prioritize Performance” and presumably “Recommended” presets. Capcom does state that the framerate “might drop in graphics-intensive scenes,” but most mid-range and higher GPUs should be okay. We didn’t check lower settings, but we can confirm that 60 fps at 1080p will certainly be within reach of a lot of graphics cards.
The main pain point for anyone running a lesser graphics card will be VRAM, particularly at higher resolutions. With AMD pushing 12GB and 16GB on its latest RX 6000-series cards, it’s not too surprising that the Max preset uses 12GB VRAM. It’s possible to run 1080p Max on a 6GB card, and 1440p Max on an 8GB card, but 4K Max definitely wants more than 8GB VRAM — we experienced inconsistent frametimes in our testing. We’ve omitted results on cards where performance wasn’t reliable in the charts.
Anyway, let’s hit the benchmarks. Due to time constraints, we’re not going to run every GPU under the sun in these benchmarks, but will instead focus on the latest gen GPUs, plus the top and bottom RTX 20-series GPUs and a few others as we see fit. We used the ‘Max’ preset, with and without ray tracing, and most of the cards we tested broke 60 fps. Turning on ray tracing disables Ambient Occlusion, because that’s handled by the ray-traced GI and Reflection options, but every other setting is on the highest quality option (which means variable-rate shading is off for our testing).
Our test system consists of a Core i9-9900K CPU, 32GB VRAM and a 2TB SSD — the same PC we’ve been using for our graphics card and gaming benchmarks for about two years now, because it continues to work well. With the current graphics card shortages, acquiring a new high-end GPU will be difficult — our GPU pricing index covers the details. Hopefully, you already have a capable GPU from pre-2021, back in the halcyon days when graphics cards were available at and often below MSRP. [Wistful sigh]
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Granted, these are mostly high-end cards, but even the RTX 2060 still posted an impressive 114 fps in our test sequence — and it also nearly managed 60 fps with ray tracing enabled (see below). Everything else runs more than fast enough as well, with the old GTX 1070 bringing up the caboose with a still more than acceptable 85 fps. Based off what we’ve seen with these GPUs and other games, it’s a safe bet that cards like the GTX 1660, RX 5600 XT, and anything faster than those will do just fine in Resident Evil Village.
AMD’s RDNA2 cards all run smack into an apparent CPU limit at around 195 fps for our test sequence, while Nvidia’s fastest GPUs (2080 Ti and above) end up with a lower 177 fps limit. At 1080p, VRAM doesn’t appear to matter too much, provided your GPU has at least 6GB.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Turning on ray tracing drops performance, but the drop isn’t too painful on many of the cards. Actually, that’s not quite true — the penalty for DXR depends greatly on your GPU. The RTX 3090 only lost about 13% of its performance, and the RTX 3080 performance dropped by 20%. AMD’s RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT both lost about 30-35% of their non-RT performance, while the RTX 2080 Ti, RX 6800, RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti, and RTX 3060 plummeted by 40–45%. Meanwhile, the RX 6700 XT ended up running at less than half its non-DXR rate, and the RTX 2060 also saw performance chopped in half.
Memory and memory bandwidth seem to be major factors with ray tracing enabled, and the 8GB and lower cards were hit particularly hard. Turning down a few settings should help a lot, but for these initial results we wanted to focus on maxed-out graphics quality. Let us know in the comments what other tests you’d like to see us run.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The performance trends we saw at 1080p become more pronounced at higher resolutions. At 1440p Max, more VRAM and memory bandwidth definitely helped. The RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, RTX 3090, and RTX 3080 only lost a few fps in performance compared to 1080p when running without DXR enabled, and the RX 6800 dipped by 10%. All of the other GPUs drop by around 20–30%, but the 6GB RTX 2060 plummeted by 55%. Only the RTX 2060 and GTX 1070 failed to average 60 fps or more.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
1440p and ray tracing with max settings really needs more than 8GB VRAM — which probably explains why the Ray Tracing preset (which we didn’t use) opts for modest settings everywhere else. Anyway, the RTX 2060, 3060 Ti, and 3070 all started having problems at 1440p with DXR, which you can see in the numbers. Some runs were much better than we show here, others much worse, and after repeating each test a bunch of times, we still aren’t confident those three cards will consistently deliver a good experience without further tweaking the graphics settings.
On the other hand, cards with 10GB or more VRAM don’t show nearly the drop that we saw without ray tracing when moving from 1080p to 1440p. The RTX 3060 only lost 18% of its 1080p performance, and chugs along happily at just shy of 60 fps. The higher-end AMD and Nvidia cards were all around the 15% drop mark as well.
But enough dawdling. Let’s just kill everything with some 4K testing…
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Well, ‘kill’ is probably too strong of a word. Without ray tracing, most of the GPUs we tested still broke 60 fps. But of those that came up short, they’re very short. RTX 3060 is still generally playable, but Resident Evil Village appears to expect 30 fps or more, as dropping below that tends to cause the game to slow down. The RX 5700 XT should suffice in a pinch, even though it lost 67% of its 1440p performance, but the 1070 and 2060 would need lower settings to even take a crack at 4K.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Even with DXR, the RTX 2080 Ti and RX 6800 and above continue to deliver 60 fps or more. The RTX 3060 also still manages a playable 41 fps — this isn’t a twitch action game, so sub-60 frame rates aren’t the end of the world. Of course, we’re not showing the cards that dropped into the teens or worse — which is basically all the RTX cards with 8GB or less VRAM.
The point isn’t how badly some of the cards did at 4K Max (with or without DXR), but rather how fast a lot of the cards still remained. The DXR switch often imposed a massive performance hit at 1080p, but at 4K the Nvidia cards with at least 10GB VRAM only lost about 15% of their non-DXR performance. AMD’s GPUs took a larger 25% hit, but it was very consistent across all four GPUs.
Resident Evil Village Graphics Settings
Image 1 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 3 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 4 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 5 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 6 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 7 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 8 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
You can see the various advanced settings available in the above gallery. Besides the usual resolution, refresh rate, vsync, and scaling options, there are 18 individual graphics settings, plus two more settings for ray tracing. Screen space reflections, volumetric lighting and shadow quality are likely to cause the biggest impact on performance, though the sum of the others can add up as well. For anyone with a reasonably high-end GPU, though, you should be able to play at close to max quality (minus ray tracing if you don’t have an appropriate GPU, naturally).
But how does the game look? Capturing screenshots with the various settings on and off is a pain, since there are only scattered save points (typewriters), and some settings appear to require a restart to take effect. Instead of worrying about all of the settings, let’s just look at how ray tracing improves things.
Resident Evil Village Image Quality: Ray Tracing On / Off
Image 1 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 3 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 4 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 5 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 6 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 7 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 8 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 9 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 10 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 11 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 12 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 13 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 14 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 15 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 16 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 17 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 18 of 18
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Or doesn’t, I guess. Seriously, the effect is subtle at the best of times, and in many scenes, I couldn’t even tell you whether RT was on or off. If there’s a strong light source, it can make a difference. Sometimes a window or glass surface will change with RT enabled, but even then (e.g., in the images of the truck and van) it’s not always clearly better.
The above gallery should be ordered with RT off and RT on for each pair of images. You can click (on a PC) to get the full images, which I’ve compressed to JPGs (and they look visually almost the same as the original PNG files). Indoor areas tend to show the subtle lighting effects more than outside, but unless a patch dramatically changes the way RT looks, Resident Evil Village will be another entry in the growing list of ray tracing games where you could skip it and not really miss anything.
Resident Evil Village will release to the public on May 7. So far, reviews are quite favorable, and if you enjoyed Resident Evil 7, it’s an easy recommendation. Just don’t go in expecting ray tracing to make a big difference in the way the game looks or feels.
Microsoft is finally preparing to refresh its Windows 95-era icons. The software giant has been slowly improving the icons it uses in Windows 10, as part of a “sweeping visual rejuvenation” planned for later this year. We saw a number of new system icons back in March, with new File Explorer, folder, Recycle Bin, disk drive icons, and more. Microsoft is now planning to refresh the Windows 95-era icons you still sometimes come across in Windows 10.
Windows Latest has spotted new icons for the hibernation mode, networking, memory, floppy drives, and much more as part of the shell32.dll file in preview versions of Windows 10. This DLL is a key part of the Windows Shell, which surfaces icons in a variety of dialog boxes throughout the operating system. It’s also a big reason why Windows icons have been so inconsistent throughout the years. Microsoft has often modernized other parts of the OS only for an older app to throw you into a dialog box with Windows 95-era icons from shell32.dll.
New vs. old Windows 95-era icons.Image: Windows Latest
Hopefully this also means Windows will never ask you for a floppy disk drive when you dig into Device Manager to update a driver. That era of Windows, along with these old icons, has been well and truly over for more than a decade now.
All of this work to improve the consistency of Windows is part of Microsoft’s design overhaul to Windows 10, codenamed Sun Valley. The visual changes are expected to appear in the Windows 10 21H2 update that should arrive in October. Microsoft has not officially detailed its Sun Valley work, but a job listing earlier this year teased a “sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows.”
Microsoft has so far revealed new system icons for Windows 10, alongside File Explorer icon improvements, and more colorful Windows 10 icons that appeared last year. Rounded corners will also be a big part of Sun Valley, alongside changes to built-in apps and the Start menu.
We’re expecting to hear more about Sun Valley at Microsoft’s Build conference later this month, or as part a dedicated Windows news event.
Lenovo has officially teased its new high-end tablet device. As posted to the brand’s official Weibo handle, the Lenovo “Xiaoxin” Pad Pro 2021 is confirmed to have a 90Hz OLED screen with support for HDR10 and DolbyVision. This display will be capable of 600 nits of brightness, it will carry TÜV Rheinland certification for eye safety, and it will feature a resolution of 2560 x 1600 px.
Lenovo’s teasers of the Pad Pro 2021
The Lenovo Pad Pro 2021 will also be powered by the Snapdragon 870 chipset and run a modified version of Windows 10 for ARM processors.
The teaser images confirm that the Pad Pro 2021 has an appearance similar to that of a modern iPad Pro. It has slim bezels that hide a single front-facing camera, quad-speaker output, a microSD card slot, and it may offer a power button with embedded fingerprint scanner.
Adobe Flash is reaching the very end of its life. The final nail in its coffin comes from Microsoft. Even after Adobe officially ended support for Flash on the very last day of 2020, Flash remains a component of Windows 10, that is until Microsoft releases the 21H1 update for Windows 10. Rollout for this update begins this month and it will remove the Flash component from the operating system.
The Verge cited this change by an update posted to the Windows Blog. Titled the “Update on Adobe Flash Player End of support”, it outlines that a component called ‘Update for the removal of Adobe Flash Player’ will be included in Windows 10 cumulative update version 1507 starting in July. Machines on Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Embedded 8 Standard will also receive this component via its Monthly Rollup and Security Only Update.
Additionally, please note that when you update to Windows 10, version 21H1 or later, Flash will be removed. More information on Windows 10,
Adobe Flash was once used to run interactive multimedia applications like games or programs right from the web browser in the late 90s and early 2000s. Open web standards like HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly all became replacements for Flash player. This, in addition to increasing security vulnerabilities led to the obsoletion of the once popular web platform for multimedia.
Resident Evil Village is the latest addition to the long-running horror series, and just like last year’s Resident Evil 3 remake, it is built on Capcom’s RE Engine. We test over 25 GPUs at 1080p, 1440p and 4K to find out what sort of hardware you need to run this game at maximum settings, while also looking at the performance and visual quality of the game’s ray tracing options.
Watch via our Vimeo channel (below) or over on YouTube at 2160p HERE
In terms of visual settings, there are a number of options in the display menu. Texture and texture filtering settings are on offer, as well as variable rate shading, resolution, shadows, and so on. There’s also selection of quick presets, and for our benchmarking today we opted for the Max preset, but with V-Sync and CAS disabled.
One interesting thing about the Max preset is the default ambient occlusion setting – FidelityFX CACAO, which stands for Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion, a technology optimised for RDNA-based GPUs. To make sure this setting wouldn’t unfairly penalise Nvidia GPUs, we tested CACAO vs SSAO with both the RX 6800 and RTX 3070:
Both GPUs only lost 3% performance when using CACAO instead of SSAO, so we were happy to use the former setting for our benchmarking today.
Driver Notes
AMD GPUs were benchmarked with a pre-release driver provided by AMD for Resident Evil Village.
Nvidia GPUs were benchmarked with the 466.27 driver.
Test System
We test using the a custom built system from PCSpecialist, based on Intel’s Comet Lake-S platform. You can read more about it over HERE, and configure your own system from PCSpecialist HERE.
CPU
Intel Core i9-10900K
Overclocked to 5.1GHz on all cores
Motherboard
ASUS ROG Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi
Memory
Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3600MHz (4 X 8GB)
CL 18-22-22-42
Graphics Card
Varies
System Drive
500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2
Games Drive
2TB Samsung 860 QVO 2.5″ SSD
Chassis
Fractal Meshify S2 Blackout Tempered Glass
CPU Cooler
Corsair H115i RGB Platinum Hydro Series
Power Supply
Corsair 1200W HX Series Modular 80 Plus Platinum
Operating System
Windows 10 2004
Our 1-minute benchmark pass came from quite early on in the game, as the player descends down into the village for the first time. Over the hour or so that I played, the results do seem representative of wider gameplay, with the exception of intense combat scenes which can be a bit more demanding. Those are much harder to benchmark accurately though, as there’s more variation from run to run, so I stuck with this outdoor scene.
1080p Benchmarks
1440p Benchmarks
2160p (4K) Benchmarks
Closing Thoughts
After previously looking at the Resident Evil 3 remake last year, a game which is also built on Capcom’s RE Engine, I wasn’t too surprised to see that overall performance is pretty similar between both games.
That’s certainly a good thing though, as the game plays very well across a wide range of hardware. At the lower end, weaker GPUs like the GTX 1650, or older cards like the GTX 1060 6GB, still deliver a very playable experience at 1080p max settings. Village also scales very well, so if you have a higher-end GPU, you will be rewarded with significantly higher frame rates.
AMD does see the benefit to its partnership with Capcom for this one, as RDNA-based GPUs do over-perform here compared to the average performance we’d expect from those cards. The RX 6700 XT is matching the RX 3070 for instance – when we’d typically expect it to be slower – while the RX 6900 XT is 7% faster than the RTX 3090 at 1440p.
In terms of visual fidelity, I don’t think the RE Engine delivers a cutting edge experience like you’d get from Cyberpunk 2077 or Red Dead Redemption 2 when using Ultra settings, but it still looks good and I am particularly impressed with the detailed character models.
The only negative point for me is that the ray tracing is pretty underwhelming. As we demonstrate in the video above, it doesn’t really deliver much extra from a visual perspective, at least in my opinion. Overall though, Resident Evil Village looks good and runs well on pretty much any GPU, so it definitely gets a thumbs up from me.
Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.
KitGuru says: Capcom’s newest game built on the RE Engine delivers impressive performance and looks good while doing so.
João Silva 15 hours ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
UL Benchmarks has recently announced the Wild Life Extreme benchmark, a more demanding version of the Wild Life benchmark. Unlike Wild Life, the Extreme version won’t be limited to smartphones and tablets, allowing users to run it on Apple computers with M1 CPUs and Windows 10 PCs, including those powered by Arm processors.
The new Wild Life Extreme benchmark is three times more demanding than the original Wild Life benchmark thanks to the addition of new effects, enhanced geometry, and more particles. Moreover, Wild Life Extreme can run at up to 4K resolution, making it even more demanding. On Windows and Android, the Wild Life Extreme benchmark uses the Vulkan API, but Windows 10 on Arm devices use DirectX 12. On Apple devices, the benchmark uses the Metal API.
With the Wild Life Extreme benchmark, users may compare the GPU performance across most of their devices. The higher the score, the better it performs. Users may choose the quick benchmark to measure peak performance or a longer one for testing sustained performance. Besides showing how your GPU performs against other machines and devices, the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme score can also predict the framerate your system will output in some games.
3DMark Advanced Edition includes the Wild Life Extreme as a free update. Customers with a valid annual license of 3DMark Professional Edition also have free access to the Wild Life Extreme benchmark.
Android users can now download Wild Life Extreme as a free update for the 3DMark Android benchmark app. To run it, your mobile device has to run Android 10 or later and support the Anisotropy feature level 16 and above.
As for Apple users, the Wild Life Extreme benchmark is available on the free 3DMark Wild Life iOS benchmark app. The iOS device compatibility list starts with the iPhone 7 Plus and beyond. Only Apple Mac computers powered by the M1 CPU are compatible with the benchmark.
KitGuru says: Have you already tried the Wild Life Extreme benchmark? What score did you get on your device?
Become a Patron!
Check Also
Gamescom 2021 will once again be an all-digital event
2020 saw many of the industries biggest events either get cancelled outright, or translated into …
Matthew Wilson 15 hours ago Featured Tech News, General Tech, Operating Systems
Microsoft has revealed plans to start removing Adobe Flash from Windows 10 this year. Flash officially reached End of Life status on the 31st of December 2020, but remnants of it still remain in Windows to this day.
Starting in June, Microsoft will be issuing Windows 10 update KB4577586, which will begin the process of removing Adobe Flash Player from Windows 10 version 1809. Then in July, Flash Player will also be removed from Windows 10 versions 1607 and 1507.
In future versions of Windows 10, including the upcoming 21H1 update, Flash will no longer be present at all. Microsoft will also be updating older versions of Windows to remove Flash, including Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012.
While Adobe Flash is now technically dead, old Flash content has been archived and is still accessible today, so if you’re ever in the mood for a bit of nostalgia, you can use the Flashpoint emulator, or find old Flash games on the Internet Archive.
KitGuru Says: This is a necessary step for the sake of security on Windows PCs. What was your favourite Flash game or animated short?
Become a Patron!
Check Also
Gamescom 2021 will once again be an all-digital event
2020 saw many of the industries biggest events either get cancelled outright, or translated into …
Matthew Wilson 21 hours ago Featured Tech News, Security
It was revealed this week that Dell is in the process of updating hundreds of PC models to address a security bug affecting machines dating all the way back to 2009. The vulnerability allows an attacker to gain kernel-level permissions in Windows.
The vulnerability was found by security firm Sentinel Labs and while no evidence of this vulnerability being exploited has been found, a fix is still needed. The vulnerability exists in the ‘dbutil_2_3.sys’ driver and would have been installed on Dell PCs via a firmware update through one of Dell’s applications, such as Dell Command Update or Alienware Update.
The vulnerability exists on 380 Dell PC models, including recent XPS systems and older PCs dating as far back as 2009, although an attacker would need physical access to the PC in order to exploit it.
Updated firmware is now rolling out to address the issue. If you have a Dell PC, it would be worth opening up Dell Command Update, Dell Update, Alienware Update, or installing the latest version of Dell System Inventory Agent or Dell Platform Tags to ensure your system is secure. Alternatively, you can find the affected file and delete it manually.
KitGuru Says: This vulnerability has been flying under the radar for a long time now, but fortunately a fix has finally arrived. If you own a Dell system, be sure to update and stay secure.
Become a Patron!
Check Also
Gamescom 2021 will once again be an all-digital event
2020 saw many of the industries biggest events either get cancelled outright, or translated into …
Matthew Wilson 2 days ago General Tech, Professional
Synology has a new pair of professional-grade storage racks launching this week. The 12-bay RackStation RS2421+ and RS2421RP+, and 16-bay RS2821RP+ will be available starting this month, built to excel in large-scale infrastructure backups, business-level file serving and private cloud services.
Speaking on the new racks, Julien Chen, product manager at Synology, explained that both new RackStation products support “essential remote work applications” and well as offering a path for mass storage upgrades with redundant power to ensure file servers are protected in the event of a surge or outage.
In the table below, you can see the specs and features for both new RackStations:
RS2421+ RS2421RP+
RS2821RP+
CPU
Quad-core AMD V1500B
Memory
4 GB ECC DDR4 (max. 32 GB)
Form Factor
2U
3U
Drive Bays6
12 (max. 24)
16 (max. 28)
iSCSI 4K random read IOPS
106K
105K
iSCSI 4K random write IOPS
59K
59K
SMB Seq. 64K read
2200 MB/s
2200 MB/s
SMB Seq. 64K write
1154 MB/s
1164 MB/s
Network Interface
4 x Gigabit RJ-45
PCIe Slots
1 x Gen 3.0 8x slot
Redundant Power Supply
RP+ model only
Yes
Warranty7
5-year limited warranty
Both new RackStation units boast higher performance than their predecessors. The RS2421(RP)+ gets a 103% and 161% boost to random write and read IOPS speeds, while the RS2821(RP)+ delivers 115% and 162% higher random write/read IOPS.
Both devices can be fitted with a dual-port Synology 10GbE or 25GbE NIC for better throughput, or a Synology M.2 adapter card and NVMe SSDs to create a speedy cache. Each rackmount also comes with a three year warranty, which can be extended to five years.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: Are you considering a server upgrade for your business? Will you be considering an upgrade to a Synology RackStation for storage?
Become a Patron!
Check Also
Microsoft will begin removing Adobe Flash from Windows next month
Microsoft has revealed plans to start removing Adobe Flash from Windows 10 this year. Flash …
That question was asked — implicitly and explicitly — over and over on the third day of Epic v. Apple testimony. The antitrust trial started on Monday with some heady pronunciations about Fortnite, the game and/or metaverse at the heart of the case. Yesterday, both sides argued about whether iPhones and iPads were truly locked down. And today, Apple and Epic delved into one of the biggest questions of the trial: whether saying iOS violates antitrust law would make every major game console an unlawful monopoly too.
Apple’s attorneys issued a dire warning to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft during its opening statement, saying that their business models were all fundamentally similar. “If Epic prevails, other ecosystems will fall too,” they warned. But today, Epic called up Microsoft’s Xbox business development head Lori Wright as a sympathetic witness. In response to a line of questioning, Wright divided computing devices into “special-purpose” and “general-purpose” devices — in a way that clearly defined iPhones as the latter.
The Xbox, as Wright describes it, is a special-purpose device. “You are basically building a piece of hardware to do a specific thing,” she told a judge. “The Xbox is designed to give you a gaming experience. People buy an Xbox because they want to play games.” As a result, Microsoft keeps tight control of what content users can access — it’s a “curated, custom-built hardware/software experience.” The market is also much smaller: tens or hundreds of millions sold, compared to “billions” of Windows devices. Later in the day, Epic engineering fellow Andrew Grant gave his own, similar definition of gaming consoles in general, calling a console “a single-purpose device for entertainment.”
Windows computers, according to Wright, are “general-purpose” devices. “You’re buying it to do a wide variety of things, and that changes every day as new ideas are getting created,” she said. “It can do a bunch of things already, and it has the aperture to do a bunch more things.” These platforms can support unexpected, emergent applications across more aspects of people’s lives, particularly when it’s easy to get an app onto them in the first place.
Wright made a point of discussing all the different ways that users could get apps on Windows. That includes Microsoft’s own app store, but also Steam, the Epic Games Store, and direct downloads from a website. Microsoft recently dropped its commission on Windows apps to 12 percent to compete with Epic, while the Xbox still takes a 30 percent commission. Wright says there’s no plan to change that discrepancy. That’s despite the fact that under the hood, there’s not a massive hardware difference between an Xbox and a desktop PC.
It’s hard to call the iPhone anything but a general-purpose device under Wright’s definition. (She described a “special-purpose” Apple product as something like an iPod.) Intentionally or not, Wright also linked the distinction to one of Epic’s major talking points: profit.
Epic describes profit as one of the biggest differences between iPhones and consoles. It argues console makers have to treat app makers better because they lose money on hardware, unlike Apple, so they need to plan around attracting developers to the platform. And from Microsoft’s point of view, Wright emphasized in testimony that no Xbox console has been sold at a profit, even late in a generation’s lifespan after manufacturing costs fall. So part of that curated hardware/software experience includes planning around a specific genre of app and attracting the developers who will build it, rather than simply turning it loose and seeing what happens.
Microsoft later hedged in a statement saying that “profits are generated in game sales and online service subscriptions,” but it didn’t really contradict the claim — it just made clear, as Wright did, that the overall operation is profitable.
Will these distinctions convince the court? It’s hard to say, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has asked questions that appear lightly skeptical of Epic’s hard lines between consoles and iPhones and Wright’s strict delineation of “general” and “specific” devices.
Apple’s attorney didn’t spend as much time arguing over precise definitions. Apple’s strategy relied more on questioning Wright’s credibility by noting that she’d failed to produce documents that Apple requested. Later, an attorney similarly lambasted Grant for working on the hotfix that secretly introduced a new payment system into Fortnite, insisting that “you knew you were being dishonest, didn’t you?”
But Apple did push Wright to lay out in detail just how much more locked-down Xbox is than Windows, asking whether it did things like support rival game stores or streaming services. (This questioning was muddled by the fact that Microsoft refers to both its consoles and general gaming division as “Xbox,” so you can have an “Xbox store” on PC — a fact that led to some confusion during cross-examination.)
Why is this useful to Apple? Well, Epic began the trial by saying that iOS should work more like macOS. Both operating systems have a reputation for relative security and seamlessness, but only the latter allows installing software from outside the App Store. Epic’s opening statement questioned why Apple needed to lock down the iPhone when it had already created a perfectly workable but more open system. But with Wright and Microsoft, Apple has a perfect comparison point: a major computing company that offers two very different versions of a big black box.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
