According to a study by William M. Volckmann II from the University of North Carolina, we have received an insight into the financial consequences of digital rights management (DRM) breaches in the PC gaming industry. The research, titled "The Revenue Effects of Denuvo Digital Rights Management on PC Video Games," offers valuable insights into the relationship between piracy and game sales. The study's most striking finding reveals that when Denuvo, a popular anti-piracy technology, is quickly compromised, game publishers face an average revenue decline of 20%. Interestingly, the research suggests that long-term DRM implementation may be unnecessary. Volckmann's analysis indicates that games cracked after the first three months of release or those from which publishers voluntarily removed DRM protection after this period experienced negligible revenue loss.

The study also explored potential predictors for quick DRM breaches but found no conclusive indicators based on game characteristics. This unpredictability poses a challenge for publishers in assessing the risk of piracy for individual titles. Volckmann acknowledges gamers' concerns about DRM's technical drawbacks, recommending that publishers consider removing such protections after the critical initial three-month window. This approach could balance piracy prevention with user experience optimization. The findings present a compelling case for publishers to reconsider their DRM strategies. While protecting games during the launch period remains crucial, extended DRM usage may offer diminishing returns.

Gabriel Ferraz, maintainer of the TechPowerUp SSD database and content creator, recently published an article that shows the relationship between SLC (Single-Level Cell) cache technology and its performance impact on SSDs. Using a Pichau Aldrin Pro 2 TB SSD featuring an Innogrit IG5236 controller and YMTC 128-layer TLC NAND, Gabriel has uncovered both the advantages and potential drawbacks of this feature. The article reveals that with SLC cache enabled, which acts as a high-speed buffer, the SSD achieved remarkable write speeds of up to 6.5 GB/s, but only until 691 GB had been written. Beyond that, speeds dropped to 2.2 GB/s and then to 860 MB/s as the drive filled up.

Disabling the SLC cache delivers more consistent performance results that are 2.1 GB/s across the whole capacity of the SSD, but with lower peak performance. Testing also examined the impact on power consumption and efficiency. With the SLC cache active, the SSD consumed approximately 5 W of power while achieving over 3000 MB/s bandwidth. Disabling the cache reduced power consumption but at the cost of halving the bandwidth to around 1900 MB/s, resulting in lower overall efficiency. Maximum power consumption with cache enabled peaked at 7.3 W, compared to a lower figure when operating in constant TLC mode. Below, you can see some performance benchmarks published on The Overclock Page.

Nations have long invested in domestic infrastructure to advance their economies, control their own data and take advantage of technology opportunities in areas such as transportation, communications, commerce, entertainment and healthcare. AI, the most important technology of our time, is turbocharging innovation across every facet of society. It's expected to generate trillions of dollars in economic dividends and productivity gains. Countries are investing in sovereign AI to develop and harness such benefits on their own. Sovereign AI refers to a nation's capabilities to produce artificial intelligence using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business networks.

Why Sovereign AI Is Important
The global imperative for nations to invest in sovereign AI capabilities has grown since the rise of generative AI, which is reshaping markets, challenging governance models, inspiring new industries and transforming others—from gaming to biopharma. It's also rewriting the nature of work, as people in many fields start using AI-powered "copilots." Sovereign AI encompasses both physical and data infrastructures. The latter includes sovereign foundation models, such as large language models, developed by local teams and trained on local datasets to promote inclusiveness with specific dialects, cultures and practices. For example, speech AI models can help preserve, promote and revitalize indigenous languages. And LLMs aren't just for teaching AIs human languages, but for writing software code, protecting consumers from financial fraud, teaching robots physical skills and much more.

A new global study by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that nearly half of CEOs surveyed identify productivity as their highest business priority—up from sixth place in 2022. They recognize technology modernization is key to achieving their productivity goals, ranking it as second highest priority. Yet, CEOs can face key barriers as they race to modernize and adopt new technologies like generative AI.

The annual CEO study, CEO decision-making in the age of AI, Act with intention, found three-quarters of CEO respondents believe that competitive advantage will depend on who has the most advanced generative AI. However, executives are also weighing potential risks or barriers of the technology such as bias, ethics and security. More than half (57%) of CEOs surveyed are concerned about data security and 48% worry about bias or data accuracy.

ASUS today announced BR1402 series, the world's first 2-in-1 ruggedized 14-inch laptops aimed at K-12 education—and designed for the need of modern students and hybrid learning. Available in both traditional clamshell form (BR1402C) and a convertible design that flips 360° to become a versatile multitouch tablet (BR1402F), the all-new BR1402-series laptops are built to military-grade standards and packed with clever protective features to help students through their learning journey.

BR1402 series are also loaded with essentials for the demands of hybrid study, enabling education to flow seamlessly from the classroom into the home and beyond. To empower a full day's study, these laptops include up to 10-hour battery life, full-function USB-C, up to WiFi 6 for speedy connectivity and a modular design to ensure easy maintenance and upgrades.

Worldwide PC shipments totaled 64.8 million units in the second quarter of 2020, a 2.8% increase from the second quarter of 2019, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. After a significant decline in the first quarter of the year due to COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions, the PC market returned to growth as vendors restocked their channels and mobile PC demand increased.

"The second quarter of 2020 represented a short-term recovery for the worldwide PC market, led by exceptionally strong growth in EMEA," said Mikako Kitagawa, research director at Gartner. "After the PC supply chain was severely disrupted in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the growth this quarter was due to distributors and retail channels restocking their supplies back to near-normal levels.

An independent study conducted by the European Hardware Association (EHA) has revealed that AMD now ranks higher than Intel in the CPU space. While we have seen this as recently as last week, where we reported on top sellers across some Amazon webstores in Europe, with AMD scoring most of the top sellers in both Germany and the UK, this is the first time a comprehensive study has put some verifiable, science-generated numbers for us to see.

According to the EHA, 60% of the European PC enthusiasts (in a sample of 10,000 respondents) showed a strong sentiment towards AMD as their favored manufacturer of CPUs, and would choose any sort of system with an AMD CPU over an Intel one (including APU, AMD + Radeon graphics cards and AMD + NVIDIA graphics cards). This is a far cry from the same time around last year, where AMD only held 40% of a similar sample's preferred buying intention, and up from the 50% shown in the same study, carried out in 2H2019. The same survey also shows a slightly increased preference for AMD's graphics cards, with the 1H2019 showing 19% preference compared to 23% in this latest study.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Riverside have developed a new, ultrafast method for electrically controlling magnetism in certain metals, a breakthrough that could lead to greatly increased performance and more energy-efficient computer memory and processing technologies. The findings of the group, led by Berkeley electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) professor Jeffrey Bokor, are published in a pair of articles in the journals Science Advances (Vol. 3, No. 49, Nov. 3, 2017) and Applied Physics Letters (Vol. III, No. 4, July 24, 2017).

Computers use different kinds of memory technologies to store data. Long-term memory, typically a hard disk or flash drive, needs to be dense in order to store as much data as possible. But the central processing unit (CPU) - the hardware that enables computers to compute - requires its own memory for short-term storage of information while operations are executed. Random Access Memory (RAM) is one example of such short-term memory.

In the latest edition of "RTB's Obvious News," I present you with an alarming statistic:

Digital purchases make up most video game sales in the United states at around 74% of purchases, according to a study by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA).

I know, I can hear it now: "Obvious news is obvious, R-T-B. Why'd you post this? Your news sucks!" etc etc. Believe it or not, I have a reason for bringing this seemingly lame study to your attention, and that's because despite the headline being lame, the study actually contains some interesting tidbits about the gaming market in general.