Fortnite has set a new all-time concurrent player record, with tracker fortnite.gg reporting 6.1 million concurrent players as the game’s all-time peak yesterday, November 4 2023. That new total of 6,172,463 people online at once might be chalked up to the Fortnite Chapter 4 release, Fortnite OG, which brings back the original island and weapons, along with some early gadgets, from the heady days of Fortnite’s 2018 success. As of press time, Fortnite is holding at just over 5.5 million players.
Fortnite’s OG season does clearly hold a lot of positive memories, then. The main mode, Battle Royale, peaked at 3.1 million players yesterday. There were also nearly a million people playing Ranked Battle Royale and Zero Build Battle Royale modes, respectively. So lots of desire for that original, unranked Fortnite experience, but more than a little curiosity for what could have been—the game definitely didn’t have a ranked mode back in 2018.
“It’s a little funny to think t…
In the vast ocean of Intel Raptor Lake-powered gaming laptops, it’s a rare sight to see one sporting the latest Meteor Lake processors. This 2024 edition Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 boasts a Core Ultra 9 185H chip, with six P-cores, eight E-cores, and 22 threads in total. With a max power consumption of 115 W, it’s easier to keep cool than the Raptor Lake laptop processors, too.
It would be nicer to have more P-cores, but they use lots of power, and six is enough for most games. There’s even a little NPU (neural processing unit) inside the CPU, to help with basic AI tasks like Microsoft’s Copilot, but it’s not powerful enough to meet the Copilot+ PC requirements.
Besides, most of the performance will be controlled by the RTX 4070 graphics chip and even though it’s limited to a maximum of 105 W, that’s fine for 1080p gaming.
Yes, the display has a resolution of 2560 x 1600, so you’re more likely to be playing at 1440p+ resolutions but don’t worry—the latest games su…
We all like free games, right? Especially ones that normally have big price tags that have been squished right down to zero. Well, AMD has done precisely that by offering up to two complimentary games, when you buy a Radeon RX 7800 XT or Radeon RX 7700 XT from one of the quality retailers.
Okay, so spending several hundred dollars, pounds, or dollarydoos on a new graphics card is kind of stretching the realms of what ‘free’ actually means, but the choice of games on offer is well worth it. If you buy one of the aforementioned graphics cards from a qualifying retailer (check the list here), you can choose two from Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Starfield, Lies of P, and Company of Heroes 3.
That first one is a rather typical Ubisoft open-world affair but it’s a graphics tour de force and a perfect way to show off your new GPU’s capabilities. Starfield can look very pretty at times, too, but only if you like staring at the stark cold of space. Lies of P is pretty much Blood…
Improve your daily Wordle game in just a few minutes with our helpful selection of tips and tricks, or get yourself out of a tricky spot with our freshly written clue for the May 22 (702) game. If you need to save your win streak, you’re in the right place because today’s Wordle answer is ready and waiting just below.
I had a really close call today. Lots of cases of the right letters in the wrong places, with most of my follow-up guesses leaving me in pretty much the exact same situation. The good news was by the time I really started to panic, I’d ruled out enough letters and valid spaces for the yellows I had floating around the board for it to all make sense and unearthed today’s Wordle answer through a process of elimination.
Today’s Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Monday, May 22
Wordle needs you to enter the name of a small domed hut or shelter made entirely from cut blocks of snow if you want to win today. Three of today’s five letters a…
Your Sunday Wordle help is right here. Let our hint for the August 11 (1149) game guide your guesses, or go look at the answer to today’s puzzle if things aren’t going your way. Whether you’re enjoying the process or just want to take a look at the winning word, we have it covered.
Oh, I almost had that in two. Then I almost had it in three. Then I actually had it in four. I’m sure being one letter off the right word is worse than being nowhere near. I can’t help but feel like I was only a finger-slip away from a lightning-fast Wordle win there.
Wordle today: A hint
Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, August 11
This is a small, round, dense and unsweetened cake. It’s often split into two and eaten with jam and cream. Nobody can agree on the order of these items, or how to pronounce this word.
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Is there a double letter in Wordle today?
No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle.
Wordle h…
UL Solutions, the makers of the ever popular 3DMark benchmarking software, has announced 3DMark Steel Nomad. It’s set to replace the now aging Time Spy benchmark, and it’s sure to bring even the best rigs to their knees, as any new 3Dmark software should!
Steel Nomad is a heavy non-ray tracing cross-platform benchmark. It will support DirectX 12 via Windows, but also macOS and iOS using Metal, Android using Vulkan, and Linux using Vulkan. So far, only three screenshots have been teased and they certainly look good. For now we don’t have any information on the structure of the test(s), though a CPU test would seem likely.
Why doesn’t Steel Nomad support ray tracing? Well, there are the Speed Way and Port Royal benchmarks for that. Despite the industry and Nvidia in particular shouting about ray tracing from the rooftops, enabling it still incurs a hefty performance hit, and mid-tier graphics cards don’t yet have the horsepower to run ray traced games consistently, particu…
Save your win streak in a single click with the answer to today’s Wordle, give every game a boost with our guess-improving tips and advice, or find direction with a clue written specifically for the July 7 (748) Wordle. However you want to win, we’ve got all you need right here.
This turned out to be a quick and easy Wordle for me; a simple case of two letters, three letters, then a win. Finding the answer that fast is still a bit of a pleasant shock even after playing daily, for goodness knows how long, although it does leave me wondering how to spend my idle PC time until tomorrow.
Today’s Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Friday, July 7
The word you’re looking for today is the name of a delicious fried cake-like treat, often formed into a circular shape with a distinctive hole in the middle and then coated in various sprinkles and glazes. There are two different vowels to uncover.
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Is there a double letter in today’…
Roblox Corporation has announced the creation of a new category of experiences, which is what it calls the games people create on the platform, for people aged 17 and older. “17 to 24 year-olds are the fastest-growing group on Roblox, and in 2022, people over 17 made up 38% of our daily active users,” said Roblox in the announcement. “We’ve heard your feedback on wanting to be able to build experiences that feature more mature themes and storylines that appeal to older users”.
Users wishing to create or take part in anything in this category will need to provide a selfie and a photo ID to Roblox. This means Roblox now has four categories of experience, starting at “All ages” (“infrequent mild violence and/or light unrealistic blood” allowed), then Ages 9+ (“mild violence, heavy unrealistic blood, and/or mild crude humor”), Ages 13+ (“moderate violence, light realistic blood, moderate crude humor, and/or unplayable gambling content”) and now the Ages 17+ band…
After Microsoft admitted its Azure platform had been breached by Chinese hacking group Storm-0558, chairman and CEO of network security giant Tenable, Amit Yoran, took to Microsoft-owned social platform LinkedIn to air his grievances against Microsoft’s security practices.
Citing a letter sent by US Senator Ron Wyden to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Justice (DoJ), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently, Yoran calls for Microsoft to answer for the “lack of transparency” and a “repeated pattern of negligent cybersecurity practices, which has enabled Chinese espionage against the United States government” (via The Verge).
That’s quite the accusation, and the Google Project Zero numbers seem to add insult to injury, as Yoran notes “Microsoft products have accounted for an aggregate 42.5% of all zero days discovered since 2014”.
Yoran’s main argument centres around the Azure hack. He says members of Tenable’s res…
Apple has rolled out its latest iPad Pro and apart from the new M4 chip, which is pretty interesting in its own right, the highlight is undoubtedly its new dual-layer OLED display, known in Apple parlance as Tandem OLED. Capable of 1,000 nits sustained full-screen brightness and 1,600 nits peak HDR, it blows away any OLED PC monitor for sheer brightness. Even the best current OLED large-format desktop panels top out at about 250 nits full screen.
So, the immediate question is whether Apple’s dual-layer OLED tech could make the transition to desktop or even laptop PCs. But that seems unlikely. The main reasons are cost and complexity.
For starters, the Tandem OLED panel uses two OLED panels stacked atop one another. Current PC OLED monitors are expensive enough with just one. The cost of two panels in one monitor doesn’t bear thinking about. And that’s before you consider the complexity of manufacturing such a display. The two panels will need to be very closely aligned t…