TechSpot Features

By far the most common types of display panels used on PC monitors are TN, IPS and VA. We're sure you've heard these terms before if you've researched monitors to purchase, and to be clear, the type of panel is a key piece of information that reveals a lot about how the monitor will behave and perform.

The tech industry is known for its predictive pronouncements and verbal sparring as for its actual innovation. Many have felt compelled to follow Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law fame) in bringing their judgements and observations into the public eye... with varying degrees of success. Here's a taste of those now infamous quotes.

Time to revisit the state of ray tracing. It's been months since we last discussed ray tracing in detail, when we tested it on early titles such as Battlefield V, and the latest releases of Metro and Tomb Raider, so there's plenty of fresh stuff to go over, more benchmarks, more experience playing those games and quite a few opinions. This is bound to be a long one, so strap yourselves in.

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is brand fan, enthusiasts and cult/pop culture themed wallpapers. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, minimalism or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is minimalist and abstract wallpapers. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, illustrations or colorful designs, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is cars and sports wallpapers. Whether you are into abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is nature photography and amazing scenes. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great wallpaper can start your day off on a good mood. There's certainly no shortage of places to find something to revitalize your desktop, whether you are into beautiful landscapes, minimalism, abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns. With the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

I was bitten by the audiophile bug at a relatively young age, however I never got around to exploring the ins and outs of audio equipment as console gaming, computers and photography consumed much of my free time over the past two decades. Recently, however, an opportunity to further tinker with my sound system presented itself and I couldn't pass it up.

We've compiled a list of things that you can do in the Windows Command Prompt, including some commands everyone should know for general usage, more advanced ones for tweaking or troubleshooting your PC, as well as lesser known Command Prompt features.

Microsoft has been changing and improving the way it handles Windows licenses. We'll cover all you need to know in this article, from old school ways to retrieve keys, to the more modern approaches to make good use of your licenses and what restrictions may apply depending on your type of license.

Microsoft's Xbox controller has been the default gamepad for PC gamers for some time now, but you may prefer Sony's competing --- and also quite good --- DualShock 4 controller. The good news is, you can easily configure it to work on Windows or macOS.

The summer of 2019 saw the 50 year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when humans first walked on the surface of the Moon. But now there is a new race -- not of countries, but one fought by companies. Capitalism, growth, and business opportunities are the new fuels, and the goals are even bigger: not just back to the Moon, but on to Mars and beyond.

As a TechSpot reader you've surely opened software as an admin on Windows before -- maybe as recently as today -- so the function probably isn't foreign to you. However, we were curious to know more about what happens under the hood of Windows when you tell the operating system to run a program as an administrator, and why this process is necessary in the first place.

When the PlayStation 4 launched in 2013 its 500GB hard drive seemed like more than we could ever use, but the size of games has ballooned exponentially over the years. Upgrading your PS4 storage is not that difficult, so here's a quick guide to help users avoid headaches during the process. Grab your PS4, and let's get started.

Portable apps are lightweight versions of applications that don't use an installer. Executables are contained within a single folder, meaning you can run them from a USB drive or a cloud folder synced across PCs. We've assembled a collection of the best and most useful portable apps across a variety of categories.

Wi-Fi is set to get better and faster with this major update. While plenty of routers are already available with chips using draft specifications, 802.11ax Wi-Fi was not fully finalized until September 2019, ushering in a wave of updated devices touting new wireless capabilities that will contribute toward next-generation networks with more speed and less congestion.

So what counts as a strategy game? Here are the best games to play if you feel like taking charge of something, ruining an economy and/or driving an army across the fields of your enemies.

Come 2020 Intel will be back in the discrete graphics business and is expected to launch a new GPU for gamers. We can see this going one of two ways: Intel graphics become the butt of the next generation of PC jokes, or they achieve a miracle and enter a market that's been dominated by just two players since the start of the millennia.

In this second part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what happens to the 3D world after all of the vertex processing has finished. We'll need to dust off our math textbooks again, grapple with the geometry of frustums, and ponder the puzzle of perspectives. We'll also take a quick dive into the physics of ray tracing, lighting and materials -- excellent!

You've followed the rumors and ignored the hype; you waited for the reviews and finally slapped down your dollars and walked away with one of the latest graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia. Inside these, lies a large graphics processor, packed with billions of transistors, all running at clock speeds unthinkable a decade ago. Welcome to our architectural comparison of the newest GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

It used to be that buying a new laptop every few years was more or less necessary just to keep up with the large leaps in processing power. Now those generational performance jumps are smaller, however there are good reasons to look into new laptops to replace your two- to five-year-old unit that go beyond performance alone.

Alongside their new Radeon RX 5700 Navi GPUs, AMD rolled out two new features in the Radeon driver suite. Radeon Image Sharpening which directly targets Nvidia's DLSS, and Radeon Anti-Lag to reduce input lag while gaming. So, how well does the latter work?

We were among the first to review the Ryzen 5 3600 and at $200 we found the 6-core, 12-thread processor a crankin' good deal. In short, it murders the 9600K in core-heavy productivity benchmarks and was right there for the gaming tests. But without question the most popular question we received afterwards was: should you buy the Ryzen 5 3600 or the 3600X?

In this first part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing entirely on the vertex stage of the process. This means dragging out our math textbooks, brushing up on a spot of linear algebra, matrices, and trigonometry -- oh yeah!

Expanding upon all the testing we performed in our day-one 3rd-gen Ryzen coverage, today we'll be running a clock-for-clock comparison benchmark. IPC can be a good indicator of a processor's architecture efficiency, so we're pitting the new Ryzen 3900X and 3700X against Intel's Core i9-9900K.

Today we're taking a deeper look into one of the new features that shipped with AMD's latest Navi GPUs: Radeon Image Sharpening. In short, RIS is a post-processing sharpening feature for games that AMD says carries nearly no performance penalty. How does it compare to GeForce's DLSS?

In the world of computer chips, bigger numbers are often better. More cores, higher GHz, greater FLOPs, all desired by engineers and users alike. But there is one measure that's hot news right now and the smaller it is, the better. Let's take a journey into the world of process nodes, to find out more.

Despite continuous improvements, processors haven't had industry shifting advancements for a long time. Yes, transistors are smaller, chips have gotten faster, and performance has increased hundredfold, but we're starting to see diminishing returns. Learn what 3D integration, FPGAs, sea of accelerators and near memory computing are all about.

Computex 2019 is over and there was more hardware that our daily coverage could handle, and yet we could still rejoice with the very PC hardware-centric show that makes Taipei's yearly stop ever so special. Here are the 10 coolest products we saw at the show this year.