This week on PC, two major PlayStation 5 timed exclusives— Final Fantasy XVI and God of War: Ragnarok— are launching on PC. AMD released a preview driver today, while Nvidia hasbenchmarksfor the two games, showcasing what sort of performance we can expect from these AAA console ports. As usual, Nvidia’s benchmarks highlight performance onRTX 40-series GPUswith and without DLSS 3 Frame Generation enabled, while AMD’s patch notes include several game fixes and improvements to Radeon Boost and HYPR-RX, the latter dubbed HYPR-Tune....

CRITICAL SERVICE FAILED error indicates that a major system process has died, resulting in a blue screen error. Once the PC restarts, it usually boots into Automatic Repair mode and gets stuck stuck in an endless loop. Usually, installing a driver that is not officially signed causes CRITICAL SERVICE FAILED BSOD. If that’s the case, you need to disable the Driver Signature Enforcement to use drivers that are not signed officially....

In short,all SSDs are flash storage devices, but all flash storage devices are not SSDs. SSD is a flash storage device that was designed to overcome the low endurance and performance of traditional hard disks. It has the highest performance and the largest capacity of any other flash storage media. All flash storage mediause similar technologies, but you’ll find manydifferences between separate devices. In this article, I’ll be focusing on exactly how SSDs measure up to other flash storage devices....

JEDEC has published the specification for the GDDR7 memory standard — next-generation memory that will be used for graphics cards — and AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, and SK hynix have all weighed in on the matter. We anticipate GDDR7 will be the memory of choice for high-end RDNA 4 and Blackwell GPUs, which are rumored to launch next year and vie for a spot on our list of thebest graphics cards....

Why you can trust Tom’s HardwareOur expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you.Find out more about how we test. Brightness and Contrast To read about our monitor tests in-depth, please check outDisplay Testing Explained: How We Test PC Monitors.We cover brightness and contrast testing onpage two. Uncalibrated – Maximum Backlight Level OLED’s peak SDR brightness is usually determined by how much it varies with changes in content....

Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash model can reportedly remove watermarks from user-provided images and depict copyrighted characters/celebrities in generated images, claim users onReddit(viaComputerBase). This includes licensed stock imagery found online, stamped with watermarks to indicate their copyrighted nature. This risks potential litigation from media licensing corporations. Limited testing on our end revealed that watermark removal was unsuccessful on several provided images, while the generation of celebrity images was possible. Back in December, Google introduced native image output with Gemini 2....

Gaming is one area where AI has not made any significant advances yet (except for upscaling). But that could all change soon. A user named Indiegameplus on theaivideo subredditshared a video he reportedly made of GTA IV remastered with real-life graphics, with just AI text prompts. Skipping some scenes, the main gameplay highlights include the main character going up to a stopped vehicle and pulling a classic GTA-style car hijack, pulling the driver out of the driver’s seat, and hijacking the vehicle....

Most Dell laptops have a standard warranty of about one year from the purchase date or an extended warranty of three years. So, you may easily check when your laptop’s warranty will expire by adding your standard or extended warranty time to the purchase date. Your Dell laptop’s warranty should also be mentioned in your purchase receipt, and you can check from there as well. However, in case you have forgotten your purchase date or lost your purchase receipt, you can still check your laptop warranty online or use the Dell Support Assistant....

Sometimes, you might want to cut down a video’s file size to send it to someone or to ensure it doesn’t take up too much of your storage space. In such cases, you can compress the video to reduce its file size. There are a variety of methods you can use to compress a video in different operating systems. So, let’s start! What is Video Compression? Video compression is the process by which you can reduce the data necessary for a video to be processed properly....

Originally developed for Xbox X/S, Microsoft introduced DirectStorage for Windows PC gaming on July 02, 2025. Microsoft has since released two updated versions, DirectStorage 1.1 and DirectStorage 1.2 on November 7th, 2022 and April 18th, 2023 as well. It is an API (Application Programming Interface) that improves game performance by massively decreasing the load time of game assets. However, all systems and all games do not support this process. DirectStorage—An Overview Microsoft introduced DirectStorage todecrease the CPU usageand loading time of PC and Xbox console games....

Have you ever had a problem with the TV where the screen does not display any picture even when it’s turned on? In such cases, the problem might indicate damage to the backlight of the TV. As the name suggests, “backlights” are the light sources to our TV screen; no light source results in no viewable picture on the screen. Backlight damage is most likely caused due to problems in two essential components that make up the backlight:the Backlight Driver Board/Powerboardor theactual Backlight strips....

When Windows displays a BSOD error, we’re left bewildered and constantly attempt to find a solution. Well, the exact thing happens when DRIVER_CORRUPTED_EXPOOL pops up all of a sudden. As the name suggests, this error isprimarily caused by driver-related problemson Windows. Indeed, we might forget to update a certain driver, while sometimes, we mightencounter the BSOD on Windowsafter updating certain drivers that aren’t compatible with our system. Apart from just drivers, there can be other reasons you see the DRIVER_CORRUPTED_EXPOOL on a blue screen....

NVIDIA is the name that pops up straight away when you want the best graphical experience in your computer games and creative works. Over the years, it has improved both its hardware and the accompanying software. But it is not always free of errors. And the most common one that the users have experienced is the“NVIDIA Driver Not Compatible With This Version of Windows”error. But NVIDIA may not be the culprit here....