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The future for all games: Ray Tracing explained

The magic behind NVIDIA’s RTX series

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NVIDIA seemed to have struck gold with the announcement of their brand new graphics cards for gamers. These cards are set to bring the gaming world into unparalleled heights thanks to the technologies behind them. The company calls them the RTX series, and the biggest feature within these graphics cards is real-time, ray tracing technology.

But, what is ray tracing technology? What is it about this technology that had NVIDIA wanting to produce a new line of cards to house it? Will it really change the gaming experience as a whole?

Ray tracing in a nutshell

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that uses rays of light to project images or objects onto your screen. These rays of light determine the colors, reflections, refractions, and shadows that the objects possess. These also show more accurate, more realistic images as the rays trace back to any source of light in the surrounding. To put it simply, ray tracing is what happens when you could take a picture of anything around you with your eyes.

The technology isn’t that new; in fact, it has been used since the 1960s for movies and television. Ray tracing is the main proponent behind CGI, where most special effects are often rendered to recreate realistic backgrounds with accurate coloring. In 2008, Intel showed a demonstration of the game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that used ray tracing powered by a Xeon Tigerton processor. Currently, there are applications that allow you to edit videos using ray tracing such as Adobe’s After Effects.

Shifting from rasterization to ray tracing

For the longest time, NVIDIA has worked with multiple companies to produce game-grade graphics cards for consumers. The main technology behind these graphics cards is rasterization. In a nutshell, rasterization creates shapes to outline certain elements during gameplay. These shapes are given various colors to mimic reflections and shadows produced by such objects. The technology does not use up too much processing power to produce high-quality images for games. Rasterization enables gamers to play at smoother frame rates while getting the best and most realistic image quality.

However, NVIDIA wanted to take things up a notch when producing the next generation of graphics cards for the modern-day gamer. The company wanted to improve the gaming experience by any means, thus bringing in ray tracing in their graphics cards. With ray tracing, colors are more accurate allowing for a more immersive gaming experience — at least that’s how the company explains it. This is clearly seen with their exclusive gameplay of Shadow of the Tomb Raider:

This technology became the backbone for their new RTX graphics cards, putting much emphasis on real-time interactions within games. The RTX graphics cards possess greater memory capacity and processing speeds to keep up with the demands of the technology inside it. With NVIDIA’s Turing architecture, these new cards make the ray tracing processes much faster while using less computations.

Risks of going for ray tracing

Of course, with new technologies comes risks to consider before buying into them. First, ray tracing heavily relies on multiple calculations to generate accurate images on your screen. Back then, computers and graphics cards were not powerful enough to produce quality images immediately using ray tracing. Production of such images can take days to possibly weeks or months, as seen with most movies that heavily rely on CGI.

When applying ray tracing technology to modern games, graphics cards tend to suffer more. The computational requirement for ray tracing is much more than the graphics card’s virtual memory (VRAM) could handle. Of course, it depends on how much RAM is included in your graphics card — even then, it would consume more energy than it’s optimized for. These are the risks that NVIDIA is constantly trying to address with their new RTX cards.

There is still a lot of work needed to prove that ray tracing is the future for gaming. While the technology wants to bring to you the most immersive gaming experience ever, it also comes with a heavy cost — not just on your wallet. Let’s hope that the RTX series is worth the wait.

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Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and S24+ Charge Test

Does 45W Charging Really Work?

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It’s that time of the year again!

Since 2020, Samsung has equipped the Galaxy S20 Ultra with an ultra-fast 45W fast-charging speed compared to the Galaxy S10+‘s measly 15W charging standard. Four years after, 45W still remained on the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

For three consecutive years, Michael Josh has conducted a dedicated charge test to know whether its 45W “Super Fast Charging” works as promised on the latest line of Samsung’s Galaxy flagships. The Galaxy S24 Ultra isn’t an exemption to that.

Curious to know? Find out in our Galaxy S24 Ultra and Galaxy S24+ Charge Test.

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ChatGPT Explained: Should we be scared of AI?

Will the talking robot take over the world?

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Back in the earlier days of the internet, an emerging but short-lived trend involved chatbots who could generate conversation with whomever it talked to. Does this sound familiar? Today, a similar phenomenon is creating a lot of waves online, headed by the infamous ChatGPT. The exceedingly popular ChatGPT is turning heads out of fear that the technology will eventually upend society and eradicate a lot of jobs.

But what exactly is ChatGPT? How is it different from language programs in the past? Is the world right to worry about them?

On the rise of language learning

ChatGPT is hardly the first software to inexplicably generate comprehensible dialogue without human intervention. Decades ago, the internet hosted rudimentary versions of today’s chatbot technology. The concept is somewhat similar, though. The early versions relied on a database of responses from human users. If you asked about coffee, for example, the answer you get will likely come from the logs of another user who talked about coffee in the past.

Because the system was imperfect in its infancy, part of the appeal was trying to get the software to fumble a conversation. However, if it did mess up, you can count on it asking you what it should have said. The next time someone asks the same question, the software might mirror what you said, creating a learning process between the software and the user.

Today, chatbots — meaning those usually used by businesses today — operate in the same way. If a customer comes with a query, the software will rely on a set of responses to most appropriately address the user’s problem. If the software can’t come up with a solution, the ball usually gets passed on to a human consultant.

Is ChatGPT just another chatbot?

Though the label certainly gets thrown around, ChatGPT isn’t strictly a chatbot. Instead, the software uses GPT-3.5, a specific language model created by OpenAI. Whereas early and more rudimentary versions of the same technology can already store an unbelievable amount of information in its memory, ChatGPT can analyze billions of words and the relationship between them.

Further, OpenAI extensively trains the software, ensuring that comprehension and grammar can live up to today’s standards. The learning is supervised. In fact, the company even has a makeshift reward system to ensure that the software puts out the most appropriate response. With users also contributing to the software’s learning process, ChatGPT is quickly emerging as a powerhouse for the technology.

The results speak for themselves. While users can generate simple conversations with the software, ChatGPT can just as easily answer more extensive queries with lengthier responses. If you ask it to create an essay about Christopher Columbus, for example, it can write a lengthy piece that can easily fool a casual reader. It can even handle more speculative queries. In a sample published by the developer, ChatGPT can answer what would happen if Columbus discovered America in 2015.

What’s it good for?

Based solely on what the software can do, ChatGPT can find its purpose in today’s world. The software can improve voice assistants and chatbots all over the internet. It can make big strides in the world of automation, enabling a more responsive interface between user and software.

On a more human aspect, the software can also handle more professional jobs with simpler prompts such as those involving simple marketing copy. It can help with more ephemeral research efforts, allowing users to get simple answers for otherwise complex questions.

And, on a more technical side, ChatGPT can reportedly analyze and detect what’s wrong with a piece of coding. With the software, developers can use ChatGPT to potentially repair code without having to pore over every single line. Allowing a powerful tool to inspect code speaks volumes for a lot of applications all over the world including smart vehicles and technical machinery.

However, as with every piece of technology, users will always find a way to use something beyond what it was originally designed for. ChatGPT is now changing the world of education as students are using the software to do their homework for them. Though a lot of the sample texts look like they can fool only lower levels of education, a Wharton business school professor (via Business Insider) recently stated that he would have been fooled by a ChatGPT essay, grading a sample with a passable grade of B or B-.

Should we be scared of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is undoubtedly rocking the world of education. While some schools have banned the technology outright, others are debating on the software’s impact on how schools are taught. Since ChatGPT deals out more factual information, could education reinvent itself to teach more personal, tailored learning, rather than just the ability to spit out memorized facts. (“Factual” might even be an exaggeration. CNET, which recently experimented with AI-written articles, discovered a plethora of errors from using the software.)

Now, education isn’t the only world in peril. The creative industry is facing an extreme challenge wherein ChatGPT can potentially cause workers their jobs. Though the danger certainly seems real, the limitations of technology are also real. ChatGPT can create comprehensible text that can fool a human, but it will likely stumble with conceptualization.

A piece of software is just software. Even if it can write an essay about existentialism, it cannot think of the concept metaphysically. In the same way, even if it can show you a photo of a parrot, it cannot think of that photo as anything but a pattern of pixels. To a language learning software, words don’t mean anything else besides their relationship with each other. It’s the same thought process as a dog learning to run to its human when its name is called. The dog doesn’t know that you just said its name (or even the mere concept of a name); it just knows to do a certain action after hearing a specific sound.

Can ChatGPT change the world? Overall, the jury is still out, but it’s unlikely that a piece of learning software can do much to replace human-centric work. Regardless, it’s important to think of how ChatGPT can improve (or detriment) humanity.

Like with other supposedly dangerous technology, the world of technology is a Pandora’s box. We can never put the genie back into the bottle. Once it’s out, it’s out. Instead of worrying about how technology can destroy the world, the more appropriate response is to figure out how it can better humanity without sacrificing anyone’s wellbeing in the process.

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RAM Explained: The Unsung Hero of Smartphones

There’s more than just the chipset

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When you’re looking to buy a new device, which specs should you pay attention to? Which upgrades should you consider?

In this video instead of reviewing the latest new smartphone, we’re going to talk about its unsung hero: RAM.

We partnered with @MicronTech to help you understand all the magical things that you get to do on your smartphone thanks to internal memory and storage.

To find out more about Micron’s mobile memory and storage solutions and how they’re bringing mobile innovation to life, visit https://www.micron.com/solutions/mobile or watch our explainer video.

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