TechSpot Features

Every few years there's an amazing new technology with the promise of making games ever more realistic. We've had shaders, tessellation, shadow mapping, ray tracing -- and now there's path tracing.

For gamers and mainstream users, it's a great time to build a PC. The TechSpot PC Buying Guide includes four builds for different budgets and purposes.

What SSD should you buy? In normal times, we'd simply tell you to follow our Best Storage guide. But during flash sales, lesser known drives may be worth buying at a healthy discount. But which ones?

A look at the CPU market and pricing to see what would truly constitute a Black Friday sale and give our advice on the kind of deals you can expect during the holiday shopping season.

For this month's GPU pricing update, we have Nvidia's upcoming GeForce 40 Super rumors, current-gen GPU pricing, and what sort of deals you should be looking out for during Black Friday.

You're playing the latest games at beautiful 4K ultra res. Do you ever wonder how those graphics got there? Welcome to our 3D Game Rendering 101: A guide to how one basic frame of gaming goodness is made.

Do all the latest big budget games require over 100 GB of drive space? What's the average size of a AAA game today? We've investigated the figures in search of answers.

In today's world of permanent Internet connectivity, a firewall is an essential security component. Master the Windows 11 firewall with our guide on setting up custom blocks for network traffic.

A journey through memorable video game music, this second article is dedicated exclusively to PC video game soundtracks. We have our hands full given the wealth of excellent material available.

Your phone's ability to identify any song it listens to is pure technological magic. In this article, we'll show you how the ever popular Shazam app does it.

With growing concerns about online privacy and the security of your personal data, more people than ever are considering alternatives to Google products.

It's been four years since AMD launched RDNA, the successor to the venerable GCN graphics architecture. We take a look through the tech and numbers to see just how successful it's been.

Welcome to our monthly GPU pricing update. There's bits of news to go through, a few odd GPU launches, and some unfortunate price hikes. There's also some positive GPU price adjustments to discuss.

Downloading a video you've watched online can be more difficult than expected. Most sites prefer you to revisit them and view their ads every time, but this may not be ideal for several reasons.

We break down all the codes and ratings of microSD and SD cards and offer the best choices available. You might be surprised by the broad availability of high-speed, large capacity flash memory.

AMD's FSR 3 frame generation technology made a surprise debut earlier this month in two games, and we're ready to give you an early look, covering frame pacing, image quality and latency.

At the turn of the millennium, Yahoo! was the most visited site on the web. In Web 1.0 terms, Yahoo! was like Google and Facebook combined. So what happened?

With the new Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion, we're bringing you a fresh optimization guide that goes through every setting in the game to see how to best improve performance.

In the space of four years, GPUs have gone from having a few megabytes of cache to over tenfold that figure. Why did this happen and what benefits has it brought us?

Few things are as closely associated with PC gaming as Steam. Microsoft might provide the OS. Intel, AMD, and Nvidia power the most popular gaming hardware. But for most people, Steam is PC gaming.

The next iteration of Nvidia's DLSS technology has landed and today we're checking out what DLSS 3.5 is and taking a closer look at ray reconstruction, which has been integrated into Cyberpunk 2.0.

Welcome back to our monthly GPU pricing update. So, the GPU market still kind of sucks, but there's a silver lining with new launches and some price adjustments improving things a little this month.

We're going through every setting in Starfield and tell you which settings are worth turning to Ultra, and which should be turned down to improve performance. That's right, optimization guides are back!

In the realm of computer chips, bigger numbers are often better. More cores, higher GHz, greater FLOPs. But there's one metric where smaller is better. Enter the world of semiconductors and process nodes.

With an increasing number of people spending more of their hard-earned money on the latest tech and services, games expanded into new arenas. History showed once more, new tech paved the way for new opportunities.

Intel's long-running game performance analyzer has been updated with a fresh look and new features. Is it worth using? Let's dive in and see how we can use PresentMon to analyze our gaming PCs.

These days it's somewhat rare to see a new PC hardware company break ground, but 30 years ago they were popping up all over the place. Join us as we recount the remarkable story of S3 Graphics.

Bored with Midjourney's static images? Disappointed by ChatGPT's responses? Then try your hand at creating short videos, all through the power of AI. Here's a short guide to using Runway Gen-2.

It's time for our monthly GPU pricing update. Although there's been no major releases, new AMD Radeons are coming soon, meanwhile there's been some price movement across new and old-gen GPUs.

Looking to make your computing life better for you? Here's our guide on ergonomic peripherals and furniture, to ease the stress and strain on your body.