Maximum PC November 2020

IT’S HAPPENING! It’s finally happening—we’re back in the office. Sort of. Well, at least one Monday every other week, as a team, anyway. I mean, it’s not “normal” normal, but it’ll do for now, while the world is still in turmoil. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever physically sat in the Maximum PC editor’s chair, and boy, does it feel good. You can say what you like about working from home, but nothing quite beats the social aspects and camaraderie you have with a well-meshed team when you meet up in person, as opposed to over voice chat. But enough of my ramblings—mag updates abound, and I finally have some good news. So, this issue is known as issue 183 for internal purposes. Think of that number like an…

IT’S BEEN a while since I ntel had something properly new and shiny to boast about. Now it does: Tiger Lake has finally arrived. It’s a family of 11th-gen mobile processors using the Willow Cove microarchitecture coupled to the new Xe graphics engine. It replaces Ice Lake, which used Sunny Cove cores (the first proper new microarchitecture design from Intel since 2015’s Skylake). Before we get too excited, Intel has started at the bottom—the first wave of Tiger Lake processors is all the U series, aimed at low-power mobile devices of upto 28W. T iger Lake uses a 10nm SuperFin process, essentially a new name for the 10nm+ process. Let’s hope Intel continues to stop adding “+” to the end of things for good: 14nm++++ just looks ridiculous. The basic technical specifications…

NVIDIA HAS LAUNCHED AMPERE, its new 8nm GPU chip architecture, and the performance bump over Turing is a healthy one. Nvidia boasts of nearly doubling just about every metric. There are three initial cards. The RTX 3070 costs $499, has 5,888 CUDA cores and 8GB of memory. The mid-range RTX 3080 is $699 with 8,704 cores and 10GB. The monster is the RTX 3090 at $1,499. It has 10,496 cores, and 24GB of GDDR6, This is near Titan-level pricing for a GeForce-branded card. Turing was launched two years ago and brought a raft of new technologies, but was expensive and had issues, so the RTX didn’t sell in huge numbers. Ampere appears to have fixed this. The pricing is more realistic, and DLSS now works effectively and doesn’t hit the frame rates…

WHEN FACEBOOK BOUGHT OCULUS in 2014, one of Oculus’s founders, Palmer Luckey, said you won’t need to log onto Facebook to use your headset, and it became a semi-autonomous brand of Facebook. In 2018 it became a division of Facebook Technologies. Now Facebook is to integrate all user account functions. So, you will need to sign up to Facebook to use Oculus Rift. There will be no more new Oculus accounts. Existing users can merge their Oculus and Facebook accounts, which will become obligatory at the end of 2022. The move hasn’t been well received by users and developers, but where it will make a big difference is in overseas markets. Oculus has had to stop selling in Germany because the coupling of products and services violates European law on data…

IT’S HAPPENING! It’s finally happening—we’re back in the office. Sort of. Well, at least one Monday every other week, as a team, anyway. I mean, it’s not “normal” normal, but it’ll do for now, while the world is still in turmoil. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever physically sat in the Maximum PC editor’s chair, and boy, does it feel good. You can say what you like about working from home, but nothing quite beats the social aspects and camaraderie you have with a well-meshed team when you meet up in person, as opposed to over voice chat. But enough of my ramblings—mag updates abound, and I finally have some good news. So, this issue is known as issue 183 for internal purposes. Think of that number…

IT’S BEEN a while since I ntel had something properly new and shiny to boast about. Now it does: Tiger Lake has finally arrived. It’s a family of 11th-gen mobile processors using the Willow Cove microarchitecture coupled to the new Xe graphics engine. It replaces Ice Lake, which used Sunny Cove cores (the first proper new microarchitecture design from Intel since 2015’s Skylake). Before we get too excited, Intel has started at the bottom—the first wave of Tiger Lake processors is all the U series, aimed at low-power mobile devices of upto 28W. T iger Lake uses a 10nm SuperFin process, essentially a new name for the 10nm+ process. Let’s hope Intel continues to stop adding “+” to the end of things for good: 14nm++++ just looks ridiculous. The basic…