When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Nvidia CEO on GPUs: 'The future is neural rendering. That's the way graphics ought to be' We asked what an AI gaming GPU would look like in the future. Love or hate it, upscaling technology like Nvidia's DLSS have expanded the definition around gaming performance. And while hardware enthusiasts still want to know what to expect for raster performance, free of any software tricks, we'll have to wait a while longer for a definitive answer.

Lenovo is really excited about the Chromebook Plus 14, as is its partner Google. In fact it was the only Chromebook Google showed me at its latest ChromeOS presentation in NYC, and Lenovo also sent a review unit to both PCWorld's laptop expert Ashley Biancuzzo and our video team leader Adam Patrick Murray. Now if you watch PCWorld's YouTube channel or our weekly podcast The Full Nerd, you know that Adam is a diehard Windows user. But like a lot of us, he's looking at some alternatives, and decided to use this opportunity to check out Chromebooks for the first time in years. The Chromebook Plus 14 is "premium," in the admittedly lower scale of Chromebooks versus Windows laptops, with a brand new Mediatek processor packing an NPU for AI-powered features.

Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter--your weekly dose of hardcore hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. In it, we dive into the hottest topics from our YouTube show, plus interesting news from across the web. Attending the Nintendo Switch 2 launch at our local Nintendo Store felled both Adam and Will, delaying our usual Tuesday episode. But don't worry: I still have plenty of juicy news bits to share with you below. Also our Micro Center tour videos are live!

Valve's Half-Life 2 is still a wonderful milestone of PC gaming more than 20 years after its original release, but it recently got its dated visuals pumped up with a mod that lets you flex the power of a cutting-edge graphics card. In a video sponsored by Nvidia, PCWorld's Adam goes through the new ray tracing and graphical enhancements and talks with the developers who implemented them. Half-Life 2 RTX is a free upgrade if you already own the original (and after a million Steam sales, who doesn't?), though you won't get all the enhanced goodies unless you're lucky enough to have an RTX 50-series card. We're talking ray tracing and path tracing for incredible lighting, plus new in-game assets with more polygons and better textures so you have something nice for those rays to bounce off. Naturally, this is going to make your gaming PC sweat a little more than the unmodified 20-year-old game.

This year at CES, Nvidia presented the next generation of its DLSS upscaling technology, which is trained with the help of artificial intelligence, alongside the new GeForce RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 (Ti) graphics cards. The company touted its major advantages -- and now that RTX 5090 reviews are live, we can confirm that DLSS 4 indeed feels like black magic, supercharging frame rates and making games feel just as snappy as the beloved Doom 2016. That's because DLSS 4 now supports Multi Frame Generation (MFG), an AI-based multiple intermediate frame calculation that can artificially generate up to three images and insert them between two "real" frames, thus quadrupling the frame rate. Of course, this feature only works on new Blackwell-based RTX 50-series GPUs. But are the AI frames generated in this way a step forward or is it all hogwash?

In this yearly penultimate episode of The Full Nerd, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, Adam Patrick Murray, and Will Smith came ready to brawl. Picking the best PC hardware of the year is no easy task, especially in a year that proved momentous for the future of computing. Heck, we couldn't even agree on a shared of definition of what "best" means – you know it when you see it -- but each participant brought his or her own picks for the best PC hardware and trends of 2023 before we all hashed out a single winner in each category. But considering how long it took to pick winners, it's probably best that we streamlined categories a bit this year. Note that this list is separate from PCWorld's wider best PC hardware and software of 2024 and best work from home tech of 2024; The Nerdies (as well call'em) are the opinion of our Full Nerd crew only.

PCWorld executive editor Gordon Mah Ung, a tireless journalist we once described as a founding father of hardcore tech journalism, passed away over the weekend after a hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer. Gordon was 58, and leaves behind a loving wife, two children, older sister, and mother. With more than 25 years' experience covering computer tech broadly and computer chips specifically, Gordon's dogged reporting, one-of-a-kind personality, and commitment to journalistic standards touched many, many lives. He will be profoundly missed by co-workers, industry sources, and the PC enthusiasts who read his words and followed him as a video creator. Gordon studied journalism at San Francisco State University and then worked as a police reporter for the Contra Costa Times in the late 1990s. In 1997, he joined Computerworld (a PCWorld sister publication) before I recruited him to join boot magazine (later re-launched as Maximum PC), where he would ultimately lead hardware coverage for 16 years. At Maximum PC, Gordon developed his trademark voice that blended a hardcore passion for PC tech with non-sequiturs, deadpan humor, and occasional bursts of outrage.

It was most evident in laptops: Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips kicked off Microsoft's Copilot PC era with long life and surprisingly competitive performance, only to be rivaled by Intel's Macbook-killing Lunar Lake chips months later. AMD, meanwhile, focused on bringing high-octane speed to Copilot PCs, zigging for oomph while the others zagged to endurance. With competition flourishing, PCWorld expects to review over 120 laptops by the end of the year, by far a new high water mark! This year, cutting-edge monitors became the norm, Thunderbolt docks and SSDs embraced newer, faster standards, Intel and AMD launched overhauled desktop CPUs, gaming handhelds got truly competitive, and the software that runs on all that hardware kept getting better and better, too. With such a gluttony of choice, it became harder than ever for PC hardware and software to impress us. Few products earned our rare Editors' Choice award.

Microsoft originally intended to delay its controversial Recall feature until October. But on Halloween, Microsoft has confirmed that Recall will be postponed again to avoid becoming the privacy nightmare before Christmas. Microsoft told The Verge that Recall has been delayed until December, when it will once again be released to the Windows Insider program. Brandon LeBlanc, one of the co-captains of sorts which heads up the Windows Insider program, told the publication that it needs more time to deliver a "secure and trusted experience." Microsoft representatives provided the statement in full to PCWorld.

If you work in an office, whether at home or on-site, there's a good chance you spend most of your day staring at a computer monitor. And you may spend even more time in front of a monitor at home playing PC games, browsing the web, or working on a personal project. That makes the quality of a monitor important. But how, exactly, should it be judged? PCWorld's experts have poured years of expertise into tackling this problem.