RTX 4070 benchies, AI NPCs, and Crypto bros doing "science"

Good news for Steam Deck owners this week—not only is Valve going to halve the size of those SSD-hogging shader caches, we hardware journalists may have helped rally some support for an abandoned hackathon project promising a Steam Deck-friendly Windows handheld gaming mode, too.

On the graphics side of things, the red and green teams have been at it this week, with AMD throwing shade(rs?) at Nvidia for the company's apparent aversion to VRAM. And alongside testing the new RTX 4070, our Dave inadvertantly discovered that the print screen button can actually be useful, so has brought this lifechanging knowledge to light for our benefit.

You could claim some stagnation given that this is Ada's fourth tier graphics card and it's offering ostensibly the same performance as the fourth tier of the Ampere generation. But the RTX 4070 is cooler, quieter, more efficient, cheaper, and has some extra Frame Generation performance in its back pocket to give it the edge over the excellent old RTX 3080.

This is a rare great deal for an RTX 4080 gaming PC. There's no compromise here, no last-gen CPU to cut the build price, no half-measure storage option. This is a whole lot of PC for the money. That RTX 4080 is the big one--on its own not our favorite GPU because of its price, but as part of a prebuilt machine there's no arguing with its gaming power.

WD is ruling the mainstream SSD market right now. The SN770 is a great buy if you're after speedy PCIe 4.0 performance without breaking the bank on a more cutting-edge storage device. It may not be the fastest Gen4 drive, but it easily outpaces any SATA drive or older PCIe 3.0 SSDs--a great price for 1TB of speedy storage.

This is the gaming monitor deal of the moment. A 1440p IPS panel with a high refresh rate all within a well-built package is awfully impressive at this price.

We may soon be entering a world where NPCs don't just run through lines of code, but form complex relationships with other NPCs even when we're away, or seem to, at least.

Discord announced in a tweet it's increasing its file size limit for all users from 8MB to 25MB. This is great if you plan on sharing fun high-resolution photos, pet videos, or in some cases, classified military documents.

Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms recently shared a video claiming that its crypto mining operation "has zero carbon emissions," and if you think that's ridiculous, wait until you see how it reached that conclusion.