How to articles

How 3D Game Rendering Works: Lighting and Shadows

The vast majority of visual effects you see in games today depend on the clever use of lighting and shadows – without them, games would be dull and lifeless. In this fourth part of our deep look at 3D game rendering, we'll focus on what happens to a 3D world alongside processing vertices and applying textures. It once again involves a lot of math and a sound grasp of the fundamentals of optics.

Anatomy of a Motherboard: Dissecting the Tech Behind PC Components

How well do you know the components that make up your PC? Take the humble motherboard, it sits there, quietly keeping everything running, and rarely gets the same attention as the CPU or graphics card. Motherboards are remarkably important though, so let's go all Grey's Anatomy, and dissect the motherboard – breaking down its various parts and seeing what each bit does!

How 3D Game Rendering Works: Texturing

In this third part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what can happen to the 3D world after the vertex processing has done and the scene has been rasterized. The majority of the visual effects seen in games today are down to the clever use of textures – without them, games would dull and lifeless. So let's get dive in and see how this all works!

How 3D Game Rendering Works, A Deeper Dive: Rasterization and Ray Tracing

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!

How We Test: CPU Gaming Benchmarks

#ThrowBackThursday This a topic that's often raised when we do our CPU gaming benchmarks. We perform a ton of CPU and GPU benchmarks tests throughout the year, a big portion of which are dedicated to gaming. The goal is to work out which CPU will offer you the most bang for your buck at a given price point, now and hopefully in the future.

Ways to Free Up Storage Space on Windows

Gigabytes are cheaper than ever but they can also be the sort of thing where the more you have, the more you tend to consume, and it doesn't take long for the terabytes to fly by if you spend a lot of time on your computer. If you're wanting to clean up your drive, this guide will serve you regardless of your current storage solution.

Shortcut Extravaganza: Windows, Mac, Chrome, Firefox, Android, iPhone & More

#ThrowbackThursday What's more appealing than a shortcut? It's a quick way to take a task and make it less painful and easier to accomplish. If you save three minutes a day for a year, that's a little over 18 hours. You could binge-watch the entire show Freaks and Geeks with four hours to spare. So, shall we get started?

OS Keyboard Shortcuts

Windows macOS Chromebook

Browser Shortcuts

Chrome Firefox Safari Edge

Mobile Shortcuts

Android iPhone / iOS

 

Make Chrome great again: Performance and memory tweaks

#ThrowbackThursday For all its popularity Chrome is also notorious for its habit of consuming a lot of RAM and draining battery life on laptops. Google is continually improving in this area, but there are some things you can do to curb memory usage and keep Chrome from becoming slow and annoying. We'll also share some 'hidden' features to get the most out of your web browsing experience.

Litecoin Mining Using Enthusiast PC Hardware

If you're looking to treat virtual coin mining as a hobby, Litecoins are probably the best bet right now and we'll show you how to get started with choosing and configuring the hardware and software you'll need. Also note we are aiming this article to PC enthusiasts who likely have spare hardware around, separating our project from milk crate builds, this seems like the most logical approach for us to get started.