Zak Killian

Texas

Technical Editor at HotHardware

News writer for the Tech Report, general nerdery and weebness.

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Articles

The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5.6 Tech Demo Is A Stunning Ray-Traced Showcase

3 days ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

If you've ever played a video game based on Unreal Engine 5 and grumbled about the poor performance of it, we're right there with you. Unreal Engine 5 games are notoriously heavy, and to some degree this is down to what the engine is doing. But it turns out that, at least partially, this is also down to the engine's crap optimization.
Intel Slide Confirms Nova Lake S/U, Wildcat Lake And All P-Core Bartlett Lake Roadmap

4 days ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

For a long time, the play when you need critical real-time performance has been to set up a specialized embedded system for that task, meaning you need a whole other system for general-purpose computing. Intel wants its customers to know that its hardware and software support for "Time Coordinated Computing" means you can do it all on one chip. To that end, it released a slide deck on the topic, but as it happens, said deck turned out to include codenames for unreleased and unconfirmed products.
NVIDIA And MediaTek Are Teaming Up On A Powerful New Laptop Gaming Chip

5 days ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

This story is odd but potentially huge, so sit up and read this one carefully. You may have read previously about NVIDIA's Project DIGITS, which was formally renamed to DGX Spark back in March at GTC. It's a tiny mini-PC that sports a chip known as GB10, which integrates "a high-performance 20-core Arm CPU" and a Blackwell GPU of some description alongside 128GB of unified memory. The story is that NVIDIA and Mediatek may be bringing that chip, or something very similar to it, to laptops.
Google’s Veo 3 AI Video Generator Will Blow Your Mind With Realism

1 week ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

Google I/O was about a week ago, and if you haven't heard, one of Google's biggest announcements was the company's Veo 3 generative AI model for video. Gone are the days of creepy, low-quality clips that vaguely look like Will Smith eating spaghetti and don't traverse the uncanny valley very well. Veo 3 is more than capable of generating that with near perfect photorealism, and it can do a lot more than that, too.
Gigabyte Teases AMD Ryzen 9000G Gorgon Point APUs Ahead Of Launch

1 week ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

We recently posted an article that explored the idea of serious gaming on integrated graphics. In that post, we were using an older Ryzen 5 5600G chip to prove our point, but AMD's Ryzen 8000G processors are much, much faster.
PC BIOS Guide: How To Safely Flash Your Firmware & 3 Key Settings To Check

1 week ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

If you're reading this, chances are high that you got here via a Google search because someone told you to " update the BIOS" on your PC, and you're wondering what the heck that means. Don't worry; we're gonna get you sorted out, buddy. "BIOS" stands for Basic Input/Output System, and it used to be the lowest-level firmware in your PC. PCs don't really have "BIOS" anymore, but we still use the term out of convenience.
Is Intel Still Planning To Release An Arc B770 GPU? Here's The Latest

1 week ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

In what has become the most notorious will-they-or-won't-they saga of the graphics market this year, rumors have yet again revived the idea that Intel will launch the Arc B770 sometime in Q3 or Q4. We first heard whispers of the BMG-G31 GPU way back in July of last year, but then, usually-reliable Intel leaker Jaykihn said it was scrapped in Q3 of 2024. Now, our colleagues over at Dutch review site Tweakers are claiming that the card was quietly confirmed behind closed doors at Computex 2025.
Elden Ring Nightreign Launches Thursday For $40, And You Should Buy It

1 week ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

If you're a die-hard "Soulsborne" series veteran, you probably already know about this unusual spinoff title's rather quiet launch. Instead, we're going to try and pull in some of the folks who may have bounced off of Dark Souls or Elden Ring because of those games' dense RPG mechanics and long playtime. If you're just here for the reminder: Nightreign launches on PC at midnight CEST on May 30th, which means late afternoon May 29th in the US.
Massive 47GB Data Breach Exposes Millions Of Passwords For Google, Netflix And More

1 week ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

It might surprise you to learn this, but cybercriminals are usually fairly protective of t he data they steal, because things like credentials and login details have value, and can be sold to the right buyer. That's why it's so unusual that this latest discovery was apparently found completely unencrypted and visible to the open web; a massive database, containing over 184 million individual records spanning over 47GB of raw credential data, just plain for the world to see.
Legendary Commodore 64 Gets A True Full HD HDMI Upgrade For A Retro Reboot

1 week ago | hothardware.com | Zak Killian

If you've ever played with an original 8-bit computer—a Commodore, an Atari 400/800, or anything else of that vintage—you already know that getting clean video output can be a terrific struggle. These systems were primarily built to output a video signal using radio frequency (RF) output, not unlike a regular TV antenna, and require mods to even get clean RGB video output, much less anything digital.