Many monitors advertise HDR support but lack essential hardware like sufficient brightness (1000 nits recommended) and proper local dimming to deliver true HDR experiences. PCWorld highlights that even high-end models like the Alienware AW3225QF may only achieve 250 nits in full-screen HDR despite 1000-nit peak claims. Consumers should prioritize raw specifications over marketing terms, as technologies like OLED or Mini-LED with strong contrast ratios are crucial for authentic HDR performance. Imagine you just bought a brand-new monitor that prominently advertises its HDR capabilities. You hop over to YouTube and stream the first "4K HDR" video you find but it looks washed out or barely any different from the non-HDR display you had before.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. I'll never buy another laptop without Windows Hello It's so important, I even go out of my way to add it to my desktop PCs! I review a lot of laptops here at PCWorld, and I'm always surprised when I unbox one without biometric hardware. Fingerprint readers and infrared (IR) cameras for facial recognition are both great--and some laptops even have both! But then you have those that skip the biometric hardware entirely, which is a huge loss these days.

Google is sunsetting Google Fit by year’s end. While Fitbit remains very much alive, the rebranded Google Health app is your one-stop shop for all things health and fitness.

PCWorld examines whether VR gaming is declining, highlighting challenges from Meta's failed Metaverse push and lack of compelling new content. Rising AI-driven hardware costs are making Valve's upcoming Steam Frame headset potentially unaffordable, while Apple's Vision Pro lacks gaming presence. Only Valve remains committed to VR gaming among major companies, making the technology's future uncertain despite continued development efforts. Meta is looking a lot less meta lately, reportedly pivoting from the virtual reality Quest brand and the ghost of Oculus to double down on pervert glasses. After a decade of work, Sony's VR ambitions over on the PlayStation seem to have made little progress. And I've barely heard a mention of Samsung's Galaxy XR headset--allegedly the flagship launch device for Android XR--since it arrived six months ago. While the idea that Apple is abandoning its Vision Pro headset might be overblown--the company is still actively hiring for the division--Michael Simon over at Macworld tells me the platform has basically zero gaming presence for the hardware. Hope for renewed interest in VR gaming with a big injection of Cupertino branding power has evaporated. Is virtual reality gaming, to borrow a term from, cooked?

Technology Robots Do humanoids dream of becoming human? Humanoids seem to be evolving into a distinct form. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Stories of human-like dolls yearning to become real people turn up everywhere. Pinocchio wants to be a real boy. The robot child in Spielberg's wants to be loved like a human son.

The new game from the creators of goes all-in on the PlayStation's haptics and 3D audio. Maybe it will catch on with other game developers. Spoiler for the very first thing you see in the upcoming game: It's a bunch of words. The letters type out one by one onto the screen, spelling out some world-building that gives context to kick off the game's story. I don't remember what any of it said, because I was so focused on the tactile vibrations coming from the controller in my hands.

The pasta-sauce company has partnered with the nonprofit StoryCorps on a device designed to record family conversations around the table and save them for all time. Prego, the pasta sauce company, is getting into hardware with a device that sits on your table and records dinner conversations. The Connection Keeper is a round puck that houses two microphones for recording around the table. The recorder was developed in partnership with StoryCorps, the 23-year-old nonprofit that has recorded conversations with more than 720,000 people about their lives. The Connection Keeper is more of a publicity stunt than a readily available product.

You don't have to upload your video to the cloud or pay a monthly fee to secure your home. In the age of state surveillance, with big tech trampling our data privacy rights and gouging us for every penny, there are plenty of reasons to keep your security camera footage local. Whether you want to save money or ensure your video doesn't end up in the hands of persons (or AI) unknown, subscription-free security cameras are the way to go. The good news is that locally recording security cameras are better than ever. I've been testing security cameras for a decade, and the gap between the best cloud-connected and local cameras is closing. You don't necessarily have to give up the best features to shirk that subscription anymore.

Nvidia's new AI upscaling gaming technology struck gamers as uncanny and off-putting. Developers don't seem to like it, either, but it could be "the default" in a few years. Nvidia announced a new version of its DLSS AI upscaling technology for its graphics cards earlier this week at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC), which it calls the Super Bowl of AI . But unlike previous versions of DLSS that used AI to improve frame rates in video games, DLSS 5 has a much more ambitious calling: using generative AI to make character faces in games look more realistic and detailed. The demonstration received sharp blowback on social media, with many finding the effect off-putting, reacting with outright disgust, and calling it yet another example of AI slop .

Despite advances in scalable models, the inference tools used for Gaussian processes (GPs) have yet to fully capitalize on developments in computing hardware. We present an efficient and general approach to GP inference based on Blackbox Matrix-Matrix multiplication (BBMM). BBMM inference uses a modified batched version of the conjugate gradients algorithm to derive all terms for training and inference in a single call. BBMM reduces the asymptotic complexity of exact GP inference from O(n^3) to O(n^2). Adapting this algorithm to scalable approximations and complex GP models simply requires a routine for efficient matrix-matrix multiplication with the kernel and its derivative. In addition, BBMM uses a specialized preconditioner to substantially speed up convergence. In experiments we show that BBMM effectively uses GPU hardware to dramatically accelerate both exact GP inference and scalable approximations. Additionally, we provide GPyTorch, a software platform for scalable GP inference via BBMM, built on PyTorch.