I've seen a lot of people on different forums and (sub)reddit that hail RTX as the next generation in graphics, and a lot of people saying that it's the reason why CGI looks so much better than video games. While that is partly true, its' not the whole story.

NVidia hasn't been very honest about what RTX really is. It's not a full ray tracing solution, so far it is only ready for minor stuff like reflections and shadows.

There are two main differentiation factors that prevent video games from being as graphically impressive as prerendered movies. The first is lighting. By that, I mean how every material is affected by everything else in the scene, the light bouncing and so on, basically, global illumination used to handle reflections and shadows. RTX is not doing the full global illumination that is used in movies, it still needs to become much faster for that to happen. However, it does use it for reflections and shadows, which is a great start. The other lighting advantages is that a typical path-tracing engine has perfect anti-aliasing, or equivalent to around 100x MSAA at the very least. This is not done by RTX, as AFAIK the main camera rays aren't ray-traced, only secondary rays are.

The second, and IMO greatest advantage is polygon count. Ray-tracing scales very differently to rasterization. Where rasterization is crippled by increased polygon counts, ray tracing is not as affected. This means that ray-tracing will pave the way to much much much higher polygon counts, and trust me that will improve realism so much, thanks to advanced acceleration structures. However, RTX does not ray-trace the camera rays, so it is not very useful. There is a drawback. Where rasterization is not as affected by increasing the resolution, path-tracing complexity increases linearly with the amount of pixels. Essentially, the ray-tracing part of RTX will scale much worse from 1080p to 4K than the rest of the rendering, and for true path-tracing it would be much worse. This means that I wouldn't expect RTX to have as little of an effect at 1080p and at 4k.

So RTX is definetly great, but it's certainly not as ground-breaking as Jensen made it out to be. It's going to be nice for eye-candy, but I don't think we will achieve real path-tracing until they find a way to make the cards 50x faster at path tracing.

Huawei officially launched its P30 range, and in some regions this includes a budget variant dubbed P30 Lite that will be offered alongside the more expensive P30 and P30 Pro.

As the name suggests, the P30 Lite discards several key features from the higher-end P30 phones but aims to retain the spirit of the P30 series by offering a high-end striking design alongside an adept camera setup.

Apart from the teardrop notch and the colorful back designs, the P30 Lite has little in common with its siblings. The specs are watered down from the P30 and P30 Pro to include more middling internals like Huawei’s mid-range Kirin 710 chipset and a modest triple camera setup. But competition, thanks mostly to Huawei, is stiff in the budget market.

The P30 series of handsets go on sale April 11 in the UAE, but they're already available in the UK – all except this smallest member of the bunch. The Huawei P30 Lite release date is set for May 10 in the UK, from a variety of carriers

Being the most affordable member of the series, the Huawei P30 Lite will be available for £329 / AED 1,099 (roughly $300, AU$415).

That gets you 4GB RAM and generous 128GB internal storage which is great value for money.

Intel has confirmed that they will be bringing their first multi-chip package design Xeon CPUs to the market in the form of Cascade Lake Advanced Performance or Cascade Lake-AP for short. We have been hearing reports about the new series for a while now, but Intel has now officially revealed the new Xeon lineup and also mentioned some early performance numbers.

The performance numbers were taken from a 2 socket server, featuring two 48 core chips which mean a total of 96 cores and 192 threads. The 12 channel memory will give a total of 24 DIMM slots and considering you can fill that up with some really dense ECC memory, we will be looking at up to 3 TB of memory support. In addition to ECC memory, the new Xeons will also support the Optane DC Persistent memory, featuring capacities of up to 512 GB. 24 of these in the 2S server would give a mind-boggling 12 Terabytes of system memory. This would deliver an unprecedented amount of memory bandwidth which is only possible through a CPU in the class of Cascade Lake-AP.

Now, coming to the official performance numbers, Intel claims that the 2S Cascade Lake-AP server is:

• 3.4x faster than AMD EPYC 7601 (2S) in Linpack
• 1.2x faster than Intel Xeon Scalable 8180 (2S) in Linpack
• 1.3x faster than AMD EPYC 7601 (2S) in Stream Triad
• 1.83x faster than Intel Xeon Scalable 8180 (2S) in Stream Triad
• 17.0x images per second versus Intel Xeon Scalable in AI/DL inference

To answer this question, we actually used a real case . The name of the parrent is Mavoa Hersel .

Last year my seven-year-old son discovered Minecraft. Before long, it became a bit of an obsession.

He was completely taken by the idea of being able to create his own world on the computer and, if I’d let him, he would have spent hours a day on it. When he wasn’t playing Minecraft, he was reading books about Minecraft or talking to me about Minecraft, to the point where my eyes would glaze over.

I have to admit I was slightly concerned. Was it okay for a kid to be so obsessed by a game on a screen? Would he find any of the content disturbing (zombies attacking, pet dogs getting killed, etc)? Would he somehow end up connecting with dodgy people online? And why was he – not to mention 120 million other people around the world – into a game that looked so… blocky?

Fortunately, there’s been some serious research done into Minecraft by a team of Aussie academics. Jane Mavoa from the University of Melbourne was involved in a study to see how kids play the game and how parents feel about it.

One of the things the study discovered is that a huge number of kids are playing Minecraft. A survey of 750 parents in Melbourne revealed that more than half of children aged 6-8 and more than two-thirds of kids aged 9-12 play the game.

That means a lot of parents have potentially had some of the same concerns as me. Even Mavoa hersel

“That’s how I ended up doing the PhD on it,” she tells Mamamia, “because I had exactly the same experience of watching my eldest becoming what I would describe as a little bit obsessed and thinking, ‘This has got to be doing something, and it’s on the computer, so it’s probably bad.’ But when I’ve actually looked into it, I’ve found that that’s probably not the case.” Mavoa says the study showed that the number-one concern of parents about Minecraft is the amount of time their kids spend playing the game. But she believes we need to stop thinking in terms of how much screentime we allow our children to have.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (MBAM) is one of a number of anti-virus software applications readily available to you, some of which are free downloads. While the majority of anti-virus software is legitimately helpful and effective, some rogue anti-virus software out there can be just as devastating as the viruses they claim to counteract.

Some fake or rogue anti-malware software will display a warning message pertaining to Malwarebytes. A few of these scam anti-virus software providers go so far as to advocate the removal of MBAM. It is easy to fall for these types of scare tactics, but you do not have anything to worry about when it comes to Malwarebytes.

If you do not know what Malwarebytes is, don't feel bad. Feel lucky that you've probably never needed it or anything similar to it due to a virus infecting your computer. To put it simply, Malwarebytes is an application that was created and developed by the by Malwarebytes Corporation in 2008 that hunts down and destroys viruses and other insidious malware.

There is a free version of Malwarebytes that looks for and eliminates malware, but it needs to be started manually. The MBAM version that you pay for performs scans automatically on a scheduled basis, gives you concurrent protection and has an optional flash-memory scan feature.