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The market entered the new year in a state of serious shortage of video cards, which will not be eliminated by the middle of the year, even in the forecasts of AMD and NVIDIA management. Consultations with the participants in the production and logistics chain allowed us to find out what reasons caused the shortage of video cards this season, their number reached six.

Image source: Igor’s LAB

According to the Igor’s LAB resource, miners are buying up GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at factories at $ 700 apiece, exacerbating the shortage of video cards. For manufacturers, this form of selling products is more profitable, since they give a good price, and in such cases there is no need to worry about warranty obligations. Although this factor cannot be called new, it is gradually coming to the fore in terms of the degree of influence on the market.

The second reason, which has long been known, is the lack of proper next-generation GPUs. The current video chips TSMC releases for AMD using 7nm technology, NVIDIA receives 8nm gaming solutions from Samsung. Both contractors are struggling to cope with the demand, and it remains to be seen who chip developers are less dependent on in this situation.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Tuesday night rejected requests from US government agencies to suspend the rollout of Ligado Networks’ nationwide L-band mobile broadband network, which will be used primarily for 5G services and the Internet of Things.

In May of this year, the US Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration filed a request with the FCC on behalf of executive authorities, including the Department of Defense and Transportation, arguing that the FCC’s approval of the program would cause “irreparable harm to government users” of the GPS satellite navigation system.

The FCC said plans for the Ligado network have not yet been finalized and negotiations are ongoing with government agencies about the network’s potential impact on government GPS systems. The current decision of the commission came a day before President-elect Joe Biden takes office and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai leaves office.

Internet sources have unveiled the first image of MSI’s curious product – MPG Z590 Gaming Force motherboard, designed for gaming desktops on Intel hardware platform.

The novelty is built on the Intel Z590 chipset with the ability to install LGA1200 processors. There are four slots for DDR4 memory modules.

The board stands out from other products in the MPG Z590 series with a fresh hip-hop design with elements painted in original colors – shades of red and yellow, as well as blue and black.

There are two cooling heatsinks in the VRM area. Three more heatsinks are located in the area of ​​the M.2 NVMe SSD slots. By the way, one of these slots allows the installation of a PCIe 4.0 module.

Expansion slots are made according to the scheme: two PCI Express 4.0 x16, one PCI Express 3.0 x16 and two PCI Express 3.0 x1. The motherboard is supposedly equipped with a Wi-Fi 6E wireless adapter and a 2.5 GbE network controller with up to 2.5 Gbps bandwidth.

The MSI MPG Z590 Gaming Force is expected to be priced around 310 euros. The date of the start of sales has not yet been specified.

The Chinese company Xiaomi has offered a smartphone with a very unusual design of the camera unit. Information about the device is published on the websites of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

We are talking about a smartphone with a pull-out module hiding in the upper part of the case. Moreover, not components with lenses will be put forward, but a special reflective assembly.

This design will allow the image sensors to remain inside the device. The reflector unit will be able to rotate to one or another angle, which will allow for normal photography and create self-portraits. In addition, it will be possible to shoot from non-standard positions, as well as panoramic shooting.

The camera is designed to use multiple image sensors. A small electric motor will be responsible for the rotation of the reflective unit.

The proposed solution will equip the smartphone with a completely frameless display. In addition, there will be no need for a traditional rear camera with optical elements on the rear of the body.

However, so far the unusual device exists only in patent documentation. Nothing was reported about the possible time frame for the implementation of the proposed solution.

Acer today announced the XV270Pbmiiprfx (XV0) monitor on a high-quality IPS matrix, designed for use in gaming-grade desktop systems.

The novelty has a size of 27 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels, which corresponds to the Full HD format. Brightness is 250 cd / m2², contrast – 1000: 1, dynamic contrast – 100,000,000: 1. The horizontal and vertical viewing angles reach 178 degrees.

The panel boasts a 0.5ms response time. The refresh rate is 165 Hz. At the same time, AMD FreeSync Premium technology helps to eliminate tearing effects and improve the smoothness of the picture.

The monitor claims 98 percent sRGB color space coverage and HDR10 support. The equipment includes stereo speakers with a power of 2 W each, two HDMI 2.0 interfaces and a DisplayPort 1.2 connector.

BlueLightShield (eliminates harmful to eyesight in the blue part of the light spectrum) and Flicker-less (reduces screen flicker) help reduce eye fatigue. The stand makes it possible to adjust the angles of inclination and rotation of the display, change the height in relation to the surface of the table, and also transfer the panel from landscape to portrait.

It has been a long time since we last saw the demonstration of the Russian adventure shooter Atomic Heart, but NVIDIA decided to fix the situation. The company has introduced a fresh take on the game in a new trailer that showcases the power of GeForce RTX graphics cards.

From the very announcement of Atomic Heart, it was known that the game will support the then new ray tracing technology and DLSS from NVIDIA. The first shows focused heavily on RTX reflections, but the new trailer has shifted the focus, with Mundfish starting to focus more on ray-traced lighting and shadows.

The trailer from the NVIDIA GeForce YouTube channel contains obscene language, so here is an unofficial abridged version:

Recall that Atomic Heart takes place in an alternative universe, where the Soviet Union followed the path of rapid scientific and technological progress after World War II. The game will tell you about how robots began to attack people. The main character of P-3 will have to find out what caused all these events, and figure out what (or who) is behind the atrocities.

Atomic Heart is announced for PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and PlayStation 5. The game has no release date yet. Earlier, Mundfish said it did not want to release “Half-baked” product.

Last year, Elon Musk’s SpaceX bought two deep-sea oil platforms and is already converting them into floating launch pads for the Starship super-heavy rockets that the company is currently developing. The installations are located in the Port of Brownsville, near the Starship Research Center in Boca Chica, Texas.

Valaris 8500 Oil Platform (ENSCO)

The oil platforms were renamed Deimos and Phobos, after the Martian satellites. Starship is currently SpaceX’s top priority, and the company raised its latest prototype to an altitude of 12.5 km during a test flight in December. The vehicle completed several tasks, including a pre-landing maneuver, but was unable to land successfully.

As open records show, the 8500 and 8501 super deepwater semi-submersible oil rigs were sold for $ 3.5 million each. The former rig owner, Houston, Texas-headquartered Valaris, the world’s largest owner of offshore oil rigs, filed for bankruptcy in August in an effort to ease its heavy debt burden.

Fire tests of engines of the Starship SN8 prototype (SpaceX)

According to public records, a pair of platforms were acquired in July 2020 by Lone Star Mineral Development Corporation. The latter was registered in June 2020 in the name of SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen. Shortly before Lone Star Mineral Development was registered, Mr. Musk tweeted that SpaceX plans to build super-heavy-class floating spaceports for Mars, the Moon and hypersonic travel around Earth.

Samantha Lee / Business Insider

SpaceX has been publicly hiring people for positions related to maritime operations since last year, the company said it is creating a team of engineers and technicians to design and build an operational maritime missile system.

NVIDIA has commented on lower requirements for G-Sync Ultimate monitors. Earlier in the media, reports began to appear that the manufacturer did it without an official announcement.

Let us briefly recall that the story began with the fact that the list of monitors with declared support for G-Sync Ultimate on the NVIDIA website showed up Acer X34 S model with 400 and 550 cd / m2 nominal and peak brightness² respectively, as well as a couple of models of monitors from other manufacturers with a declared peak brightness of 600 cd / m2²… This fact came into conflict with the description of the G-Sync Ultimate standard put forward by NVIDIA, since earlier the manufacturer demanded brightness from 1000 cd / m2²which in turn complies with the VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification.

The initial requirements for monitors with support for three types of G-Sync looked like this (now they are no longer relevant):

Resource Overclock3D contacted NVIDIA for comment for details. The company responded to the request as follows:

“Late last year, we updated the G-Sync Ultimate specification to add support for new OLED and Edge LED display technologies. All G-Sync Ultimate monitors feature advanced NVIDIA G-Sync processors […] Although the original displays with G-Sync Ultimate had a brightness of 1000 cd / m2²and support for Full Array Local Dimming (FALD) technology, the latest displays, including OLEDs, offer nearly infinite contrast support at a claimed brightness of just 600-700 cd / m2²as well as advanced multi-zone lighting technologies, including Edge LED, which deliver these 600-700 cd / m2² brightness. At the same time, brightness and VESA DisplayHDR1000 certification have never been defining aspects of the G-Sync Ultimate standard. Conventional G-Sync-enabled displays are also equipped with NVIDIA G-Sync processors. As for the monitor model Acer X34 S, it was added to the list of displays with G-Sync Ultimate support on our website by mistake. It should be in the list of displays with normal G-Sync support. “, – the company noted.

There are several conclusions to be drawn from NVIDIA’s post. First, the manufacturer actually admitted that new displays (specifically OLEDs) with a peak brightness of less than 1000 cd / m2²but using alternative backlights can provide the right contrast level to meet the G-Sync Ultimate standard. Secondly, the company indicated that monitors with G-Sync Ultimate are determined by their G-Sync processor, not overall brightness.

Unfortunately, the company still does not provide a complete list of changes in the requirements for the G-Sync Ultimate standard (the site contains the old requirements), so the definition of the term “realistic HDR” mentioned on the English version of the NVIDIA site still raises some questions. On the Russian version of the site, the description of the technology is as follows: