Month: December 2021

Final Fantasy VII Remake on PC: A gorgeous start, but where are the toggles?

Square Enix backtracks on recent record of enabling its PC games’ customizations.

Cloud Strife is finally on PC again, and this image is taken directly from real-time rendering in the new PC port.

Enlarge / Cloud Strife is finally on PC again, and this image is taken directly from real-time rendering in the new PC port. (credit: Square Enix)

Final Fantasy VII Remake's exclusivity on consoles ends today. Nineteen months after its launch on PS4 and seven months after its PS5 update, Square Enix's ambitious return to Midgar breaks out of Sony's console family to land on PCs.

If you're the type of Final Fantasy fan who wants little more than a way to play this game on your computer, you can expect a beautiful and mostly solid port that delivers the perks of the PS5 version to many more people. I went into my testing of FFVIIR on PC with higher hopes, however. For gamers like me, the news isn't nearly as good.

A graphics menu brick wall

You might think that this is the first of multiple graphics settings menus in <em>FFVIIR</em>'s PC version. Nope. This is it.

You might think that this is the first of multiple graphics settings menus in FFVIIR's PC version. Nope. This is it.

My first stop before starting any FFVIIR PC gameplay was the options screen, where I slammed into the brick wall that is the above "graphics" menu.

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Buskill: Magnetisches Kabel dient als Killswitch für Notebooks

Sobald sich Buskill vom USB-Port trennt, sperrt sich das verbundene Notebook. Mit dem Produkt sind aber auch weitaus drastischere Killswitches realisierbar. (DIY – Do it yourself, Eingabegerät)

Sobald sich Buskill vom USB-Port trennt, sperrt sich das verbundene Notebook. Mit dem Produkt sind aber auch weitaus drastischere Killswitches realisierbar. (DIY - Do it yourself, Eingabegerät)

Rigetti announces 80 qubit processor, experiments with “qutrits”

An 80-qubit processor made by linking two 40-qubit ones.

Image of a golden colored square with lots of attachment points for cables.

Enlarge / The Aspen-M 40-qubit chip and its housing. (credit: Rigetti)

On Wednesday, quantum computing startup Rigetti announced a number of interesting hardware developments. To begin with, its users would now have access to its next-generation chip, called Apsen-M, with 40 qubits and improved performance. While that's well below the qubit count achieved by IBM, the company also hints at a way it can stay competitive: private testers will now have access to an 80 qubit version achieved by linking two of these chips together.

Separately, the company says that it is now experimenting with allowing testers to access a third energy state in its superconducting hardware, converting its qubits into "qutrits." If these qutrits show consistent behavior, then they would allow the manipulation of significantly more data in existing hardware.

New and improved

For traditional processors, advances are typically measured in clock speed, core count, and energy use. For quantum computers, one of the most critical measures is error rate, since the qubits lose track of their state in a way that digital hardware doesn't. With Aspen-M, Rigetti is claiming that a specific type of error—the readout of the state of the qubit—has been cut in half.

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