Apple TV+ dropped the first trailer for The Big Cigar Wednesday. And it looks like so much fun I almost don’t want to know how true the “incredible true story” actually is.
The upcoming drama series tells the tale of Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton enlisting a Hollywood producer to fake out the FBI, providing cover for Newton’s escape to Cuba in 1974. That came after he jumped bail on murder and assault charges he called false.
The six-part series debuts May 17 with two episodes, followed by a new one each Friday through June 14, Apple TV+ said.
The Big Cigar trailer plays up wild Black Panther-FBI fakeout with Hollywood’s help
The six-episode drama The Big Cigar “tells the incredible true story of Newton’s escape to Cuba,” Apple TV said. André Holland stars as Newton. And before we go any further, “The Big Cigar” is the title of the fake movie production that aided Newton’s escape.
I say I don’t want to know how true to history the movie is for good reason. I’ve gotten into the habit lately of reading source material for Apple TV+ movies and shows. And sometimes that comes back to bite me.
An example would be when I read the book behind the Manhunt series about the chase for Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. The way the show (understandably) tried to make the storytelling more visual by having august and asthmatic Secretary of War Edwin Stanton(Tobias Menzies) chase down perps and interrogate people all over the place drove me nuts. In reality, he ran the manhunt’s frantic operations from a telegraph room.
The Big Cigar‘s big story
Notably, The Big Cigar limited series is executive produced by NAACP Image Award winner Janine Sherman Barrois, Jim Hecht and Joshuah Bearman. And perhaps even more notably, multi-award winning actor/director/producer Don Cheadle directs and executive produces the first two episodes.
And whether or not it’s because of Cheadle’s influence, the series trailer feels like it’s for an Ocean’s Eleven-style caper movie. He played cockney-accented munitions expert Basher Tarr in that film.
Here’s the streamer’s description of the The Big Cigar:
Based on the magazine article of the same name by Joshuah Bearman (Argo), who also serves as executive producer, The Big Cigar tells the incredible true story of Hollywood revolution meeting social revolution. It’s a wild caper about Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton escaping from the FBI to Cuba with the assistance of famed producer Bert Schneider in an impossibly elaborate plan — involving a fake movie production — that goes wrong every way it possibly can.
Will the series pull off the caper, or will it turn out to be a silly mess? Hard to say just from the trailer for The Big Cigar.
The Bearman article appeared in Playboy in December 2012, but does not appear to be available online without subscription. Holland stars alongside Alessandro Nivola, Tiffany Boone, P. J. Byrne, Marc Menchaca, Moses Ingram, Rebecca Dalton, Olli Haaskivi, Jordane Christie and Glynn Turman.
Sherman Barrois (Claws, Self Made) serves as showrunner for The Big Cigar. Executive producer Hecht (Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty) wrote the first episode. The series comes from Warner Bros. Television. Other executive producers are Bearman, Joshua Davis and Arthur Spector (Little America) through Epic.
Watch The Big Cigar and other dramas on Apple TV+
The six-part series The Big Cigar debuts May 17 on Apple TV+ with two episodes, followed by a new one each Friday through June 14. With many dramas on offer, the service is available by subscription for $9.99 with a seven-day free trial. You can also get it via any tier of the Apple One subscription bundle. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac or iPod touch can enjoy three months of Apple TV+ for free.
After launching in November 2019, “Apple TV+ became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 471 wins and 2,090 award nominations and counting,” the service said.
In addition to award-winning movies and TV shows (including breakout soccer comedy Ted Lasso), Apple TV+ offers a variety of documentaries, dramas, comedies, kids shows and more.
Apple TV+ heralded the birth of a new season of popular family comedy Trying with a season 4 trailer Tuesday. It charmingly shows everyone getting older as the London family faces life’s little problems, including those adopted kids. After all, six years have passed in the story since season three’s action. They’re “older not wiser,” according to the show’s tagline.
The trailer is not exactly uncontrollably laughing-out-loud funny. But, like the show, its moments of wry humor will draw smiles and a chuckle or two. The fourth season debuts May 22 on Apple TV+.
Life’s little problems continue in Trying season 4 trailer
Apple TV+ said Tuesday the “beloved series” returns for season four’s eight episodes starting Wednesday, May 22, with the first two episodes. The show stars BAFTA Award nominee Esther Smith and SAG Award nominee Rafe Spall.
Here’s how the streamer describes the new season:
In this exciting new season, we fast-forward six years to discover that Nikki (Smith) and Jason (Spall) are experienced adopters having built a lovely little nuclear family, enriched by an extraordinary support network.
However, as their teenage daughter, Princess (Scarlett Rayner), starts to yearn for a connection with her birth mother, Nikki and Jason find themselves confronted with the ultimate test of their parenting skills.
And notably, the trailer and the show include new music:
The trailer features the brand new single from London-based pop star BEKA, titled “Forever.” BEKA helms this season’s soundtrack with original songs set to debut in each episode. She follows Maisie Peters and Bear’s Den who wrote and performed the soundtracks for Trying season two and season three, respectively.
Watch the Trying season 4 trailer
New and returning cast members
In addition to Smith and Spall, the cast includes Sian Brooke and BAFTA Award winner Darren Boyd. The new season welcomes Rayner and Cooper Turner as cast members.
Andy Wolton created and executive produces the show. BAFTA Award nominee Josh Cole, Sam Pinnell and Chris Sussman also executive produce. BBC Studios produces the show.
Watch Trying on Apple TV+
Like the Trying season 4 trailer? While you wait for the new season to air, you can watch the first three seasons of Trying on Apple TV+. The service is available by subscription for $9.99 with a seven-day free trial. You can also get it via any tier of the Apple One subscription bundle. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac or iPod touch can enjoy three months of Apple TV+ for free.
After launching in November 2019, “Apple TV+ became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 471 wins and 2,090 award nominations and counting,” the service said.
In addition to award-winning movies and TV shows (including breakout soccer comedy Ted Lasso), Apple TV+ offers a variety of documentaries, dramas, comedies, kids shows and more.
The Freestyle is one of Samsung’s coolest products. It’s a portable smart projector with an in-built speaker and a stand that lets you adjust the projecting angle by 180 degrees to allow you to project on walls and roofs. With such capabilities, Samsung thinks that The Freestyle makes for a great product for camping as it lets you watch content in a large size anywhere very easily, and the brand is now demonstrating that in South Korea.
Samsung has announced that it has set up a booth at the 17th Edition of the Go Out Camp in South Korea where it is showcasing The Freestyle and its capabilities. The brand is specifically demonstrating how The Freestyle is a great product for camping as it is portable, can project up to a 100-inch screen, has a wide range of projecting angle adjustments, and packs a 360-degree speaker, allowing you to watch content in a large size very easily in an outdoor setup.
The brand has also created a also a zone with a mini-bus featuring a camping setup where people can take cool photos showing that they are enjoying an outdoor camp. The booth will be live from 19-21 April 2024. We hope Samsung showcases The Freestyle at camping events in other countries too to introduce more people to it as very few of them are aware that a product exists that can let them watch content on a large screen anywhere easily.
Many of you reading this article might be using Google Messages as the default messaging app but most of you might not know that the messaging platform can show you who is providing you Rich Communications Service (RCS). To check that information, click on the profile icon/picture, go to ‘Messages settings,‘ and select ‘RCS chats,‘ and you will be able to see the RCS provider at the bottom of the page. Well, Google is rolling out an update to the app that changes the location where it shows the RCS provider information.
According to a new report from 9To5Google, Google Messages now shows you who is providing you RCS behind the ‘info’ icon beside your phone number on the ‘RCS chats’ settings page. So, now you have to click on the info button to see the RCS provider. Reportedly, for some users, the app neither shows the RCS provider at the bottom of the page nor the info icon beside the phone number after the update, which is kind of strange. Considering that very few people care about it, this change might not affect many people.
For your reference, RCS is either provided by your network carrier, in which case, Google Messages will show “RCS is provided by your mobile carrier” or it is provided by Google’s Jibe platform, in which case, the messaging app will show “Chat features from Google provided by Jibe Mobile.” Many network carriers globally, including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, have moved from their own implementations to Google’s Jibe platform lately to offer better interoperability and reduce issues with RCS messaging.
Fallout, Prime Video’s adaptation of the beloved game franchise, appears to be a hit: it’s currently sitting with 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and a whole bunch of rave reviews.
Inverse says it’s “as utterly addicting as it is innovative, and could very well become the new benchmark for the video game prestige series as we know it”, while Uproxx says “it manages to tread new ground within a genre that’s been covered almost too extensively thus far, mining comedy from its most mundane horror elements”.
With just eight episodes to binge in your bunker, however, it’s a pleasure that won’t last much longer than a cool bottle of Nuka-Cola. So here are three more sci-fi suggestions for you to stream on Prime Video.
Invincible
It’s hard enough being a teen without having a superhero for your dad, but that’s the cross Mark Grayson has to bear: he’s the kid of Omni-Man and has inherited powers of his own. This smart, violent and funny sci-fi animation has a whopping 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Jessie Gender says it’s “Game of Thrones for the superhero genre”, while Consequence says “this is so much more than just another superhero cartoon. No, this is humor, mystery, drama, romance and science fiction, all rolled up into one absolutely addictive treat.” According to Ars Technica, “not even Smallville could combine YA [young adult] drama and superhero DNA this well.”
The Peripheral
Gamer Flynne Fisher is stuck in a dead end job supporting her brother and her ill mother – but when her brother asks for her help with a game, she gets dragged into something strange and dangerous. The show comes from the same creators as Westworld, and stars Chloe Grace Moretz as Flynne in a story that’s often deeply odd. io9 says “It’s a lot to take in—but hardly any of it is extraneous, and nearly every nugget of information… becomes important.” The Peripheral is an adaptation of a William Gibson novel so it’s smarter than a lot of cyberpunk sci-fi, and according to The Wrap it’s “a joy to watch” for fans for cyberpunk crime drama anime. Isn’t that everyone?
Outer Range
Josh Brolin stars in this visually stunning sci-fi western that CNET says is “intense and unnerving” and that Inverse describes as “one of the boldest, weirdest, and most affecting sci-fi shows of the 21st century”. There are some pretty strong Stranger Things vibes here, and maybe some Lost and a bit of Westworld too, and while not everybody who watched it loved it – IndieWire isn’t a fan of the sci-fi elements – The Mary Sue says it’s well worth a watch: “What’s so great about Outer Range is that it’s something fresh while having the feel of a western in all the right ways.”
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Viewers along the eclipse’s path in North America will watch the Moon cross the Sun’s face and block the solar disk, offering the chance to see its outer atmosphere by eye.Credit: Alan Dyer/VW Pics/UIG via Getty
On 8 April, researchers will get an unprecedented view of the Sun’s outer wispy atmosphere: the corona. The solar eclipse visible in parts of North America will coincide with a solar maximum — a period of extreme activity that occurs every 11 years. One research team will chase the eclipse from a jet, adding 90 more seconds of observation time to the maximum of 4 minutes and 30 seconds seen by observers on the ground. One question they’re hoping to answer: why the corona is so much hotter than the solar surface. That, says solar physicist James Klimchuk, is like walking away from a campfire — but finding that instead of cooling down, you get warmer.
A diabetes drug called lixisenatide has shown promise in slowing the progression of Parkinson’s disease. Lixisenatide is in the family of GLP-1 receptor agonists, such as Ozempic, that have made headlines as weight-loss drugs. In the latest clinical trial, lixisenatide was given to people with mild to moderate Parkinson’s who were already receiving a standard treatment for the condition. After a year they saw no worsening of their symptoms, unlike a control group whose condition did worsen. Further work is needed to reduce the drug’s side effects, such as nausea and vomiting, and to determine whether its benefits last. “We’re all cautious. There’s a long history of trying different things in Parkinson’s that ultimately didn’t work,” says neurologist David Standaert.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s top biomedical research funders, will from next year require grant holders to make their research publicly available as preprints, which are not peer reviewed. It will also no longer pay article-processing charges (APCs) to publishers in order to secure open access, in which the peer-reviewed version of the paper is free to read. The change follows criticism that APCs create inequities because of the costs they push onto researchers and funders. “We’ve become convinced that this money could be better spent elsewhere,” said a Gates representative.
This week marks 30 years since the start of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which members of the Hutu ethnic group killed an estimated 800,000 people from Tutsi communities. The event is now one of the most researched of its kind. These studies are difficult, not least because because the genocide almost wiped out Rwanda’s academic community. But efforts, especially by local researchers, are helping to inform responses to other violent crises and longer-term approaches to healing. Sociologist Assumpta Mugiraneza is leading challenging work that gathers testimonies from the genocide — and of the rich lives people had before the atrocity. To think about genocide, she says, “we must dare to seek humanity where humanity has been denied”.
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes an account of women working in nature and a thoughtful history of how our unequal society deals with epidemics.
When Brazilian biologist Fernanda Staniscuaski returned from parental leave, her grant applications started to be rejected because she “was not producing as much as my peers”. “Maybe I was never meant to be in science,” she recalls thinking. As the founder of the Parent in Science movement, she is now lobbying for greater acceptance of career breaks. As a first step, the Brazilian Ministry of Education has created a working group to develop a national policy for mothers in academia. “That was huge,” Staniscuaski says.
When the remains of the Australopithecus afarensis nicknamed ‘Lucy’ were discovered in 1974, we never could have predicted how rare such finds would be, says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood. Nevertheless, the accumulated evidence of even older hominins has challenged Lucy’s status as ‘mother of us all’. (Science | 14 min read)
In our penguin-puzzle this week, Leif Penguinson is exploring a rock formation on the Barker Dam Trail in Joshua Tree National Park, California. Can you find the penguin?
The answer will be in Monday’s e-mail, all thanks to Briefing photo editor and penguin wrangler Tom Houghton.
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Our sister site Tom’s Hardware got the chance to try out a bunch of laptops that have the new ARM-based chip, while listening to claims from Qualcomm about how the Snapdragon X Elite will outgun both Intel’s Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) laptop CPUs and Apple’s M3 silicon (which is a rival ARM part).
According to Qualcomm’s testing – add a little seasoning as always with internal benchmarks, not that they’d be faked, of course, but they’re inevitably cherry-picked to present hardware in the best light – the Snapdragon X Elite easily beats Apple’s M3 SoC in Geekbench 6. In multi-threaded testing, the Snapdragon was close to 30% faster than the M3, in fact – although Qualcomm did not provide a single-threaded comparison.
Even more eye-opening was the race against Intel, which pretty much saw Team Blue eating Qualcomm’s dust. The Snapdragon X Elite proved 52% quicker in multi-threaded performance, and 54% faster than the Core Ultra 7 155H for single-threaded performance. That’s when both chips have the same power usage – alternatively, the Elite could match the 155H performance-wise while using 60% or 65% less power (for multi- and single-threaded respectively).
Turning to integrated graphics, the Snapdragon X Elite is apparently up to 36% faster than Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H, although note the ‘up to’ and that this is a vague assertion (we’re not told what the benchmarking involved). That’s what we mean about cherry-picking, and in the case of integrated graphics, Qualcomm didn’t draw any comparison with the Apple M3 (or faster Intel silicon such as the Core Ultra 9).
(Image credit: Future / Philip Berne)
Gaming goodness
On the gaming front, we also have the hands-on experience of Digital Trends to draw on. The site found that on one of Qualcomm’s reference laptops, the Snapdragon X Elite was able to run Control fairly smoothly at 35 frames per second (at 1080p, with low to medium graphics settings). With the same settings, Baldur’s Gate 3 ran at 30 fps on average.
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Those are pretty impressive results for contemporary games running under emulation (as it’s an ARM chip, remember, not x86).
One of the big hopes for Windows on ARM devices is that emulating software and games (that can’t be run natively as they’re x86) will reach a level where it’s more than palatable, and the Snapdragon X Elite seems to be a good step forward in that direction.
Apple favors podcasts in its “Browse” tab that participate in its subscriptions program, according to Semafor.
To be featured at the top of Apple Podcasts‘ Browse tab, creators simply have to submit a form to Apple, but the report noted that, last week, five of the first seven shows in the “Browse” carousel in the Apple Podcasts app were participants in Apple Podcasts Subscriptions.
Apple launched podcast subscriptions in 2021, allowing creators to offer premium content to their audience, such as bonus episodes and exclusive segments, in exchange for a small subscription fee. Apple, in return, takes up to a 30 percent cut of the revenue generated from these subscriptions.
One executive at an independent podcast told Semafor that Apple explicitly said to them that podcast subscription enrolment would help their chances of being promoted in the carousel, while another remarked that Apple Podcasts Subscriptions was worth participating in simply for in-app placement advantages. An individual at Apple added that the Apple Podcasts app is now designed to offer more features to shows that participate in the subscription program, with several key slots reserved for this purpose.
Apple’s WWDC 2024 dates have been announced, giving us timing for the unveiling of the company’s next round of major operating system updates and likely some other announcements. This week also saw some disappointing news on the iPad front, with update timing for the iPad Pro and iPad Air pushed back from previous rumors. We did hear some new tidbits about what might be coming in iOS 18 and…
Apple will introduce new iPad Pro and iPad Air models in early May, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Gurman previously suggested the new iPads would come out in March, and then April, but the timeline has been pushed back once again. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos. Apple is working on updates to both the iPad Pro and iPad Air models. The iPad Pro models will…
Apple today added a handful of devices to its public-facing vintage and obsolete products list, including some older iPhone and iPad models. Apple now considers the iPhone 6 Plus to be “obsolete” worldwide, meaning that Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers no longer offer repairs or other hardware service for the device. Apple says it considers a product “obsolete” once seven…
Thieves in Montreal, Canada have been using Apple’s AirTags to facilitate vehicle theft, according to a report from Vermont news sites WCAX and NBC5 (via 9to5Mac). Police officers in Burlington, Vermont have issued a warning about AirTags for drivers who recently visited Canada. Two Burlington residents found Apple AirTags in their vehicles after returning from trips to Montreal, and these…
Apple has yet to release the first beta of iOS 17.5 for the iPhone, but two changes are already expected with the upcoming software update. iOS 17.5 will likely allow iPhone users in the EU to download apps directly from the websites of eligible developers, and the update might include some changes to how Apple ID recovery contacts work. More details about these potential changes follow. W…
In November, Apple announced that the iPhone would support the cross-platform messaging standard RCS (Rich Communication Services) in the Messages app starting “later” in 2024, and Google has now revealed a more narrow timeframe. In a since-deleted section of the revamped Google Messages web page, spotted by 9to5Google, Google said that Apple would be adopting RCS on the iPhone in the “fall…
Horizon Forbidden Westhas come to PC, and it’s given me another reason not to buy a PS5. I’ve bought every generation of PlayStation console since the OG model, but with Sony‘s shift to (belatedly) porting most of its exclusives to PC, it just doesn’t seem worth splashing out on a new console when I can just wait for the games I want to play to come to me.
So, I was very happy to hear that Horizon Forbidden West was going to be ported to PC. As a big fan of the original game, which I played on PS4, I’d been looking forward to playing it.
Of course, as a visually-impressive first-party game from Sony, I was also keen to see how it performed on our 8K rig. As you can see in the specs box on the right, our rig has remained largely unchanged for over a year. This is because it remains a formidable machine – and, crucially, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card that does the bulk of the work when gaming has yet to be beaten. It remains the best graphics card money can buy.
With rumors swirling that Sony is planning on releasing a more powerful PS5 Pro console in the near future that could target 8K resolutions through a mix of more powerful hardware and upscaling technology, Horizon Forbidden West at 8K on PC may give us an idea of the kind of visuals future PlayStation games may offer.
It also suggests what obstacles Sony will face if the PS5 Pro will indeed target 8K resolutions. Despite being almost two years old, the RTX 4090 GPU still costs more than its original launch price, hovering around $2,000/£2,000. While the PS5 Pro will likely be more expensive than the standard PS5, there’s no way it’ll be even half the price of Nvidia’s GPU – and that’s before you add in the cost of the other PC components required. Basically, you can’t currently buy an affordable 8K gaming machine that is priced for mainstream success. That’s the scale of the challenge Sony faces.
(Image credit: Future)
Spoilt for choice
One of the best things about Sony’s initiative to bring its games to PC, apart from giving me an excuse not to spend money I don’t have on a PS5, is that they usually come with an excellent choice of PC-centric options, including support for upscaling technology from Nvidia and support for ultrawide monitors.
Horizon Forbidden West continues this streak, and the PC port has been handled by Nixxes Software, which has handled many previous PlayStation to PC ports.
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This latest release is particularly noteworthy as not only does it support DLSS 3 for Nvidia RTX graphics, but it also supports competing upscaling tech in the form of AMD FSR 2.2 and Intel XeSS.
All three of these features allow the game to run at a lower resolution, with the images upscaled so that the game appears at a higher resolution, but without the additional strain on your PC’s graphics card.
This mainly allows less powerful GPUs to hit resolutions with graphical effects enabled that they usually wouldn’t be able to handle. It also allows the mighty RTX 4090 to reach the demanding 8K resolution (7680 × 4320) in certain games while maintaining a playable framerate.
By supporting the three major upscaling tools, Horizon Forbidden West gives users much more choice (both FSR and XeSS work for a range of GPUs, while DLSS is exclusive to recent Nvidia GPUs) – and it also gives me a chance to see which upscaling tech performs the best.
(Image credit: Sony)
First up: DLSS
First, I played Horizon Forbidden West at the 8K resolution of 7680 × 4320 and the graphics preset at ‘Very High’ – which is the highest quality on offer. With DLSS turned off (so the game is running at native 8K), my 8K test rig managed to run Horizon Forbidden West at an average of 32 frames per second (fps).
Considering that this is a graphically-intensive game and running at the highest graphics and at a resolution that’s pushing around 33 million pixels, this is very impressive, and is a testament to the raw power of the RTX 4090, the rest of the components inside the rig built by Stormforce Gaming, and the talents of Guerrilla Games (developers of the game) and Nixxes Software.
I feel that 30fps is the minimum frame rate for a playable game, so if you wanted to play Horizon Forbidden West at a native 8K resolution, that’s certainly possible. If you drop the graphics preset, then the frame rate will go up – though at the cost of graphical fidelity.
Of course, you don’t spend around $2,000 on a GPU to get 32fps in a game, so I turned on DLSS and set it to ‘Quality’, which minimizes the amount of upscaling performed to preserve image quality as much as possible. This led the average framerate to jump to 45fps, with a maximum frames per second of 60.7fps.
One thing to note with my results, which you can view in the chart above, is that because Horizon Forbidden West doesn’t have a built-in benchmark tool, I had to play the same section over and over again, using MSI Afterburner to record my framerate. I chose a section of the game with large open spaces, water effects and a combat encounter, and I tried to make each playthrough, lasting around eight minutes, as similar as possible. However, my playthroughs weren’t identical, as some things, such as enemy attacks, would change, and this explains why there are some discrepancies between results. Still, it should give you a good idea of the difference each setting makes.
Next, I turned ‘Frame Generation’ on. This is a new feature exclusive to DLSS 3 and Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series of cards. It uses AI to generate and insert frames between normal frames rendered by the GPU. The goal is to make games feel even smoother with higher, more consistent framerates while maintaining image quality.
As the chart shows, this gave the game another bump in frames per second. I then tested the other DLSS settings with Frame Generation left on.
With DLSS set to Ultra Performance, I hit 59.3fps at 8K – basically the 60fps goal I aim for in these tests, which offers a balance of image quality and performance. With Ultra Performance, the RTX 4090 is rendering the game at a much lower resolution, then using DLSS to upscale to 8K, and this reliance on upscaling can lead to an image quality that can suffer from a lack of sharpness and detail, and graphical artifacts. The good news is that DLSS 3 is a big improvement over previous versions, and the hit to graphic quality is far less noticeable these days.
So, thanks to DLSS, you can indeed play Horizon Forbidden West at 8K. But how does AMD and Intel’s rival technologies cope?
(Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)
AMD FSR 2.2 tested
AMD’s FSR 2.2 technology isn’t as mature as Nvidia’s DLSS 3, but it has a noteworthy feature that DLSS lacks: it’s open source and doesn’t just work with AMD graphics cards – Nvidia and Intel GPUs can make use of it as well.
This makes it far more accessible than DLSS, which is exclusive to new and expensive Nvidia GPUs, and for many people this flexibility makes up for any shortfall in performance.
As you can see from my results above, FSR 2.2 provides a decent jump in frame rates compared to running Horizon Forbidden West natively at 8K, though at each quality setting, it doesn’t quite keep up with DLSS 3’s results.
The best results I managed was with FSR set to ‘Ultra Performance’, where it hit 55.2fps on average. Below DLSS 3’s best results, but certainly not bad, and close to doubling the performance of the game compared with playing it natively.
As well as being unable to hit the same highs as DLSS 3, AMD FSR 2.2’s image quality at Ultra Performance isn’t quite as good as DLSS 3 at similar settings, with a few instances of shimmering and ghosting becoming noticeable during my playthrough.
(Image credit: Sony)
Intel XeSS results
Finally, I tested out Intel’s XeSS technology. While there is a version of XeSS designed to run with Intel Arc graphics cards, as with FSR you can use XeSS with various GPU brands, so there is yet another upscaling tool that gamers can try out. As with most things, the more choice there is for consumers, the better.
XeSS hasn’t been around for as long as DLSS or FSR, and as you can see from the results above, it wasn’t able to match either of Nvidia or AMD’s solutions. There’s no ‘Ultra Performance’ mode either, so XeSS hits its highest framerates with XeSS set to ‘Performance’, with an average of 50.6fps. This leads to a perfectly playable experience at 8K, but it’s noticeably more sluggish than when playing with DLSS at Ultra Performance.
However, it still gives you a decent fps bump over native 8K, and with Intel being one of the biggest proponents of artificial intelligence, I’m pretty confident that XeSS performance will improve as the technology matures. The fact that you can use it with GPUs from Intel’s rivals is also a big plus.
(Image credit: Sony)
Conclusion: DLSS for the win (again)
Once again, DLSS 3 has proved to be the best way of getting a game to run at 8K and 60fps with minimal compromises.
Not only did it allow the RTX 4090 to hit 59.3fps on average while playing Horizon Forbidden West, but it also looked the best with minimal impact to image quality.
This may not come as too much of a surprise – DLSS has been around for quite a while now, and Nvidia has been putting a lot of work into improving the technology with each release.
Also, while Nvidia’s preference for proprietary tech means you need the latest RTX 4000 series of GPUs to get the most out of it, this does at least mean Team Green can make use of exclusive features of its GPUs such as Tensor Cores. With AMD and Intel’s more open implementations, they are unable to target specific hardware as easily – though FSR and XeSS are available to a much wider range of PC gamers.
And, while FSR doesn’t quite match DLSS performance with Horizon Forbidden West, it comes close, and if you don’t have an Nvidia GPU, this is a fine alternative. As for XeSS, it shows plenty of promise.
So, upscaling tech has made gaming at 8K on PC achievable, and it’s great to see increased choices for users. So, if Sony is indeed working on a PS5 Pro that aims to run games like Horizon Forbidden West at 8K, it’s going to have to come up with its own upscaling tech (or adapt FSR or XeSS) if it wants to compete.
At MWC 2024, Google announced a new feature for Google Maps for Wear OS. This feature shows you public transit options to reach a location. The company reiterated the feature in the March 2024 Pixel Feature Drop. Now, it has finally started rolling out the feature.
According to a new report from 9To5Google, Google is making public transit directions available in version 11.119.0702.W of Google Maps for Wear OS as a server-side change. If you have this version of the app on your Galaxy Watch 4, Watch 5, or Watch 6 series smartwatch, you should be able to see the public transit option soon. If not, make sure to update the app from the Google Play Store on your watch.
With this feature, when you search for a location, Google Maps will show you the new Transit option along with the Driving, Walking, and Cycling options. Once you click on the Transit option, the app will show you how you can reach the location using public transport, including showing you how to reach the nearby station, which train or bus to catch, and the arrival/departure timings for those buses and trains.
