Custom PC UK November 2018

Real-time ray tracing is often seen as the holy grail of gaming, removing the need for intricate conjuring tricks to give the impression of realistic lighting, and instead enabling you to truly trace the way light in a scene bounces off various surfaces. Ray tracing is what makes CGI movie effects look properly realistic. If you could really do full real-time ray tracing, it would be amazing. It’s also a long, long way off in the future, if it ever happens at all. I’ve been following the idea of real-time ray tracing for over a decade now. The first time I came across it was when Daniel Pohl demonstrated real-time ray tracing in the first Quake game in the mid-2000s – it was at very low resolutions and detail, but…

AMD’s Threadripper 2990WX (see p24) – a 32-core monster CPU – is undoubtedly an amazing engineering achievement for the firm.However,32 cores and 64 threads for a desktop PC is just too much. By AMD’s own admission, the 2990WX is designed for workstations – a niche market. The rest of us, however, will likely never have a use for it. To its credit, AMD has created awesome-value CPUs, and it knows it needs to snatch the performance podium from Intel. Being known as ‘the best’ in your business really does drive sales, even if it’s not the top product that sells in massive volumes. AMD knows that, and during Computex, its 32-core mic-drop reveal sent shockwaves through the room of journalists present, and the vibrations continued to ripple online for weeks.…

Blame video games, that’s the common denominator. Except video games don’t cause violence. Blame mental illness, but that’s stigmatising and people with mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Blame guns, except most gun owners are peaceful. Blame toxic masculinity, but most men don’t kill anyone. Blame helps us to cope. It’s what lets us put a tragedy in context. We can’t understand how a murderer thinks, so we cast about for one societal-wide cause we can understand. It’s useful to cast for something to blame, beyond the person who committed the crime, because we want to figure out how to stop it happening again. I don’t mean simplistic answers, such as ‘mental illness’ or ‘he was angry at losing’ During a Jacksonville eSports…

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2000-series Nvidia has finally lifted the lid on its first new gaming GPU architecture since the GeForce GTX 1080 blew us away back in mid-2016. Sadly, a siege-proof non-disclosure agreement and a lack of early press samples prevented us from giving you benchmarks in this issue, but we do know the specifications, pricing and launch dates for Nvidia’s new Turing-based range of graphics cards and that the first releases will include the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. However, there has been a sizeable online backlash against what appears to be a huge focus on ray tracing, but with little information about the speed of the new models compared with their predecessors in current games. Ray tracing Ray tracing has long been the ultimate…

32in G-Sync HDR 144Hz panels spotted At the latest display expo in Taiwan, LCD panel manufacturer AU Optronic (AUO) showed off its latest gaming tech, including a previously unannounced 32in version of the recently launched 27in 4K HDR 144Hz G-Sync panel. The core specs are the same between both sizes, with 4K resolution, 144Hz maximum refresh rate, Nvidia G-Sync HDR support and 1,000-nits peak brightness, plus a full array backlight with 384 zones. AUO makes OEM panels for a number of big-brand monitor makers, including Acer and Asus. 65in Nvidia BFGD monitor delayed until 2019 AUO also confirmed that its 65in 4K HDR 144Hz panels used in Nvidia’s BFGDs (pictured) are delayed until 2019. These monitors were originally shown at CES in January 2018, and slated for release in summer…

A use for old motherboards Back in 2008 I water-cooled my first real rig, based on CPC recommendations. When it failed six years later, most of the components were donated elsewhere, but the motherboard was dead. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out and it has been languishing in my parts box ever since. I’ve always thought motherboards look great, so I decided to spray the board matt grey and mount it in a box frame (with some modifications, naturally). Now I can have some geek art on my office wall. Thanks for inspiring us with such a great mag. SAM CLARKE Ben: Excellent, I love it – what a great idea! There’s an air of industrial dereliction about it, like a city plan from Judge Dredd. I love…