Month: July 2021

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  Resident Evil 8: Village's retail PC version, as accessed from Steam, suffers from sporadic midcombat stutters, as the top-left "performance graph" indicates. This week's cracked version has, at least in one independently verified testing scenario, solved this issue. [credit: Capcom ]

Over the weekend, the PC version of May 2021's Resident Evil 8: Village was apparently cracked and uploaded to various piracy depositories. In sadly unsurprising news, as with at least a few other cracked PC games in recent years, this scene release came with a bonus that's currently only available to freeloaders: improved performance.

The game's cracked version, credited to the release group Empress, includes an "NFO" text file that cites two distinct antipiracy prevention measures: "Denuvo V11" and "Capcom Anti-Tamper V3." While the NFO text includes its fair share of anti-Denuvo language, the Empress author's technical breakdown of the crack says both systems working in concert are to blame:

All in-game shutters [sic] like the one from when you kill a zombie are fixed because Capcom DRM's entry points are patched out so most of their functions are never executed anymore. This results in much smoother game experience. THIS IS PURE CANCER AND ANYONE WHO ACCEPTS THIS IS NOTHING BUT A PATHETIC GARBAGE HUMAN SLAVE!

The messaging continues with a key clarification: Capcom's DRM was "fully obfuscated" in a Denuvo virtual machine, thus making the game "run even slower."

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  As the name suggests, F1 2021 is this year's official Formula 1 racing sim. [credit: Electronic Arts ]

If you're old enough to have started playing video games by the turn of the century, the words "EA releases a new Formula 1 game" might strike fear into your heart. After all, the gaming behemoth published some pretty bad F1-branded racing games between 2000-2003. But even though this year's box art has the EA logo on it, F1 2021 still feels solidly like a Codemasters' game through and through (EA bought the British studio earlier this year).

That's good news, as Codemasters has been responsible for several extremely good F1 games over the past few years. As ever, the studio's challenge is to make this year's installment sufficiently different from last year's version to get people to open their wallets. For F1 2021, the changes are largely down to a new single-player story mode and a two-player career mode, which are both in addition to the various single-player, multiplayer, and esports modes you might remember from F1 2020.

These new feature-filled modes are interesting experiments from a development team better known for good physics, but in an era of an engaging new documentary series about F1, this is a clever move to capture some of the sport's new fans. And it's executed well, too.

Enlarge (credit: QuantWare)

Early in its history, computing was dominated by time-sharing systems. These systems were powerful machines (for their time, at least) that multiple users connected to in order to perform computing tasks. To an extent, quantum computing has repeated this history, with companies like Honeywell, IBM, and Rigetti making their machines available to users via a cloud service. Companies pay based on the amount of time they spend executing algorithms on the hardware.

For the most part, time-sharing works out well, saving companies the expenses involved in maintaining the machine and its associated hardware, which often includes a system that chills the processor down to nearly absolute zero. But there are several customers—companies developing support hardware, academic researchers, etc.—for whom access to the actual hardware could be essential.

The fact that companies aren't shipping out processors suggests that the market isn't big enough to make production worthwhile. But a startup from the Netherlands is betting that the size of the market is about to change. On Monday, a company called QuantWare announced that it will start selling quantum processors based on transmons, superconducting loops of wire that form the basis of similar machines used by Google, IBM, and Rigetti.

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  The new Drive app was a hefty 238MiB download and a pain-free but surprisingly long (several minutes) installation. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Google has released a new Google Drive desktop app that replaces old versions for both home and business. The new Drive app builds in features from Google Photos, Backup and Sync (the old, primarily consumer app), and Drive File Stream (the old, business-targeted version).

Features

Frankly, there doesn't appear to be much new in the upgraded app—the update looks like more of a clean-up and unification effort than anything else. Major features include:

• Uploading and syncing photos to Google cloud storage—including automatic compression and resizing, for those choosing "Storage saver" rather than original image quality
• Syncing external storage devices (thumb drives, USB hard drives, and SSDs) to Google Drive
• (Optional) two-way file and folder synchronization—automatically download files to local folders and vice versa
• Locally mounted Drive folders in either Stream or Mirror mode—automatically downloading files on-demand or automatically prefetching all files from the cloud
• In-app support for shared Google drives (new feature, was not present in Backup and Sync)
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook and Google Meet scheduling

Upgrading to the new Drive app

According to Google's introduction, users of the older Backup and Sync app will start getting in-app prompts to transition to Drive for desktop, which it recommends users complete by September of this year.