Things get political this week on The TT Show when Jak and Kosta dig into the recent controversy surrounding Elon Musk, X, and the Australian government's attempt to censor specific content. Then, it gets even more political when the topic switches to the US government deeming Microsoft a security risk because all agencies depend on its software.

Plus, Intel partners with the Pentagon to develop microchips for what we can only assume is stuff you'd consider "not good." But hey, that's just the show's second half, as the first half is full of in-depth impressions for No Rest From the Wicked. Thel attest game from the studio behind the excellent Ori series blends Diablo with Dark Souls to deliver something special.

Jak and Kosta also talk about the upcoming rumors surrounding Ubisoft's Far Cry 7, which will feature Mr. Oppenheimer himself, Cillian Murphy, as the villain. Plus, Sony has announced a new PlayStation overlay with PSN Friends and Trophies for its PC games.

Capcom's Dragon's Dogma 2, a massive open-world RPG, has been one of the years talked about and played games. On PC, the gameplay has been generally well received; however, poor performance and optimization for Capcom's impressive RE Engine going 'open-world' for the first time is one of the main reasons it's currently sitting on a "Mixed" user rating on Steam.

That said, if you're looking for a mod that takes the game visuals to the next level, the Graphics Suite ALPHA mod from EXXXcellent (download it at Nexus Mods) unlocks a hidden developer menu for the game that includes a path-tracing renderer for the game that is not available in the retail version.

Path tracing (also called full ray tracing) covers indirect lighting, global illumination, shadows, and reflections - where anything related to light is ray-traced. Dragon's Dogma already includes RTGI or ray-traced global illumination, but as we can see in Digital Foundry's video on the path tracing mod, the difference is night and day.

NVIDIA is expected to generate $40 billion of revenue from AI GPU sales this year according to Bloomberg analysts, with competitors AMD and Intel in their dust.

AMD is estimated to generate around $3.5 billion in revenue from its new Instinct MI300X AI accelerator, while Intel will enjoy some loose change with its Gaudi AI accelerator, with analysts estimating just $500 million in sales. Both pale in comparison to $40 billion from NVIDIA, which is 80x more than Intel's estimated $500 million.

We all know that applying thermal paste to CPUs isn't the easiest thing to do, squirt a little on... move it around, make it kinda even... but now there's an idiot-proof method of applying the perfect layer thermal paste with X-Apply... check it out:

Igor's Lab worked with DigitalBlizzard, who "came up with the whole thing" explains Igor, and with a little help from an "industrial partner" and a few suggestions from Igor, X-Apply was born. The new X-Apply stencil allows the formation of the absolutely ideal pattern of thermal paste, with a perfectly even distribution across your CPU.

MSI seems to have fully pulled back from making AMD Radeon GPUs, with the company confirming with HardwareLuxx that it is solely concentrating on making custom NVIDIA GeForce RTX series GPUs.

Hardware Unboxed posted on X saying: "Did I miss this story? MSI has been completely removed from AMD's Radeon 7000 series, all existing products have been discontinued and they never released a 7700 XT / 7800 XT. This all seems to have happened very quietly". HBU isn't wrong, this has happened very quietly indeed.

Super Display Co (SDC) has just released its new SDC 27X1U monitor, featuring a 27-inch 4K Nano-IPS panel with a super-smooth 165Hz refresh rate and the latest DisplayPort 2.0 and HDMI 2.1 connectivity.

The new SDC 27X1U monitor costs just $415, but it features DP2.0 and HDMI 2.1, as well as a 4K 165Hz panel for that price, which isn't too damn bad at all. It's also another DisplayPort 2.0 monitor to add to the pile, which will only work on AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs and Intel Arc GPUs... NVIDIA GeForce RTX series GPU owners miss out on DP2.0 fun.

SDC uses a flat 27-inch 4K Nano-IPS panel from LG (model LM270WR8), which is used in some of LG's in-house gaming monitors, with the SDC 27X1U supporting 10-bit color, HDR600 with a measured brightness of around 680 nits in HDR mode. There's also support for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), it's compatible with VESA VRR, and AMD FreeSync, NVIDIA G-SYNC, and VRR functionality works on the PlayStation 5 (48 to 120Hz).

Sabrent has just kicked off a new build/upgrade bundle that gives you 20% off when you order a new Rocket 4 SSD, a Rocket DDR5 RAM module, and an SSD enclosure. You can save 20% with Sabrent's new Build/Upgrade bundle here.

The Sabrent bundle includes their Rocket 4 1TB and 2TB SSDs, Rocket DDR5 16GB SO-DIMM and U-DIMM memory modules (both at $39.99 each), and their USB 3.2 Type-C tool-free enclosure for M.2 PCIe NVMe and SATA SSDs. If you purchase at least one of each, you'll get 20% off at the end.

Sabrent's Rocket 4 2TB SSD, Rocket DDR5-4800 16GB U-DIMM, and a USB 3.2 Type-C SSD enclosure come to $279.97, but with 20% off, you're reducing that to $223.97. That's not bad at all, a savings of $50 on that bundle alone.

LG revealed its 32-inch OLED sporting a 480Hz refresh rate back at CES 2024 in January, and the gaming monitor is now imminent, with the manufacturer having announced that it's in mass production.

The monitor offers a 480Hz refresh rate - providing your GPU can cope with that - at 1080p (which that lower resolution will help your graphics card with, of course). However, this is a switchable monitor, allowing you to transform it to 4K resolution with a 240Hz refresh rate for when you want detail rather than superfast frame rates.

While LCD monitors have gone as high as 540Hz, LG notes that at 480Hz an OLED panel complements that refresh rate with a faster response time and smoother overall feel to the picture as a result. That response time is rated at 0.03ms (GtG).

While the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro might be the flagship Google phones that everyone turns to and the Pixel Fold is the one that captures a ton of attention, the Pixel 8a could be the most important of them all. It's a phone that will offer a budget option for people who want a solid Android experience without spending huge sums. And it's leaking in a big way of what is expected to be a release next month.

In a leak shared via Android Headlines that detailed a number of different aspects of the new and as-yet unconfirmed Pixel 8a, we learn that Google has plans to make sure that the phone lasts as long as possible. According to what appears to be marketing material for the phone, the Google Pixel 8a will come with seven years of security updates, ensuring that the phone remains as safe and secure as possible for a long, long time. That isn't something that people have always been able to say about Android devices at all.

That is of course excellent news, although there is one question left open. The leak doesn't appear to confirm how long Google will offer Android OS updates for this particular device which means that it could end much sooner than those seven years. For comparison, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro now come with seven years of Android updates, so it would stand to good reason that the Pixel 8a will as well. We'll await confirmation one way or another.

Following months of reports that suggested Apple has had a significant fall from grace in China, new smartphone sales figures suggest that there is no sign of a resurgence. Not yet, at least. In fact, things have gotten so bad that Apple now finds itself in fifth place in the Chinese smartphone market.

That will be particularly galling for Apple considering the company was once the number one smartphone company in China, and it's a problem that it will want to arrest as soon as possible.

The news comes via analytics company Canalys whose latest report covers the first quarter of 2024. The figures have Apple sitting in fifth spot behind other companies that are competing for sales in China, a vitally important part of the world for Apple.

When you buy a new iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air, and the entry-level MacBook Pro, all of those computers will have one thing in common. That thing isn't the Apple logo, and it isn't the fact that they're all powered by Apple silicon, either. The common trait is that they all have just 8GB of RAM as standard, although you can of course choose to pay extra and upgrade to 16GB or more, depending on the machine in question.

Now, it seems that the decision to stick to 8GB of RAM at the low-end is once again making headlines. Apple had previously justified the decision by saying that more simply isn't needed for what most people use these Macs for. It also noted that the M-series chips that are used in modern Macs mean that the computers are performant enough to be perfectly fine with just 8GB of RAM. But whether or not you go along with that assertion, it seems that we might be able to blame CEO Tim Cook for the lack of RAM as well.

A chart put together by Mastodon user David Schaub, reported by the Accidental Tech Podcast recently, and now shared by MacRumors, charts the base RAM in Apple's computers from 1984 onwards. The graphs show that Apple often increased the base RAM every two years or so but that all changed when Steve Jobs left and was replaced by current CEO Tim Cook. Since Cook took over from Jobs there has only been a single base RAM increase.