Gaming

With its last graphics card introduction until the end of Fall, Nvidia isn't trying to impress anyone with groundbreaking performance. Rather, the company is pulling better-than GeForce GTX 660 Ti-class frame rates to a $250 price point, creating value.

We just got our hands on two more Radeon HD 7990s, bringing the lab's total to three. That might sound like the makings of a 1000 W gaming fest. But we cut the experience short when we noticed some crazy-high temperatures and not-so-nice acoustics.

Intel's Haswell architecture is finally available in the flagship Core i7-4770K processor. Designed to drop into an LGA 1150 interface, does this new quad-core CPU warrant a complete platform replacement, or is your older Sandy Bridge-E system better?

At $1,000, GeForce GTX Titan only made sense for folks building small form factor PCs and multi-GPU powerhouses. Now there's another option with every bit of panache, a slightly de-tuned GPU, and a price tag $350 lower: meet Nvidia's GeForce GTX 780.

Following up our Dota 2 performance analysis, we benchmark the most-played PC game in the world, League Of Legends, and find out just how much graphics and CPU performance it requires for high-resolution, high-detail play, even across three screens.

Neverwinter is a new free-to-play MMO in the Dungeons And Dragons universe, sporting an action RPG flavor. We benchmark it with a number of graphics cards and CPUs, uncovering a processor-oriented bottleneck along the way. Does your platform measure up?

Reader requests affect much of the work we do, and we constantly receive email asking for this one: compare Intel's older Wolfdale- and Yorkfield-based designs against today's budget-friendly Ivy Bridge-based processors. Well, you asked, and we deliver.

MSI's GX60-series notebook is in our lab today. Armed with Radeon HD 7970M graphics, a 15.6" display, and triple-screen output, this is truly a desktop replacement. But can its AMD A10-4600M APU keep pace with gaming platforms armed with Intel CPUs?

Dota 2 is one of the most popular games around. And, it's free-to-play, so anyone can try it out. How much hardware do you need to enjoy this title at smooth frame rates? Not much, it turns out. We test a number of CPUs and GPUs at different settings.

Earlier this year, Asus joined the extreme high-end graphics club with its own dual-Tahiti-based card, liquid-cooled and overclocked. You can't buy it anymore, but we got our hands on one and are adding it to our database of performance data.

Now that Piledriver-based CPUs and APUs are widely available (and the FX-8350 is selling for less than $200), it's a great time to compare value-oriented chips in our favorite titles. We're also breaking out a test that conveys the latency between frames.

When it comes to gaming, the integrated Radeon on AMD's Trinity architecture crushes the HD Graphics 4000 engine native to Intel's fastest Ivy Bridge CPU. But we want to make a good thing better. How much does fast memory help boost an APU's performance?

Nvidia continues to encourage game developers to add Tegra-only details to their Android titles. Is Tegra 3 the killer SoC for Android gaming? How do Tegra-optimized games look compared to the same titles on iOS? Is it all just a bunch of marketing hype?

The third installment of the Far Cry series is more impressive as a game (to us, at least) than its predecessor. But do you need really powerful hardware to enjoy it? We benchmark 15 different graphics cards and eight different CPUs to find out.

The last time we looked at a notebook with AMD's Radeon HD 7970M in it, we stumbled across a problematic bug. Digital Storm's x17 employs the same graphics module. Do updated drivers cure what ailed the configuration previously? Let's find out!

The Call of Duty series is an old favorite of ours, so it's a foregone conclusion that we'd check out Black Ops II's performance on the PC. How well does your graphics card handle it? Does this title have what it takes to stand out in a crowded genre?

We already know that the look and feel of Windows 8 is very different from Windows 7. But once you fire up your favorite title, does Microsoft's latest affect your experience? We test 10 games and talk to one of the company's SDEs to answer that question.