DirectX Raytracing 1.2: Game-Changing Performance Boosts

• Opacity micromaps significantly optimize alpha-tested geometry, delivering up to 2.3x performance improvement in path-traced games. By efficiently managing opacity data, OMM reduces shader invocations and greatly enhances rendering efficiency without compromising visual quality.
• Shader execution reordering offers a major leap forward in rendering performance — up to 2x faster in some scenarios — by intelligently grouping shader execution to enhance GPU efficiency, reduce divergence, and boost frame rates, making raytraced titles smoother and more immersive than ever. This feature paves the way for more path-traced games in the future.

NVIDIA was already doing these in a few games, but nice to have them as part of the standard

Cooperative Vectors & Neural Rendering: Next-Generation Realism

• Neural Block Texture Compression is a new graphics technique that dramatically reduces memory usage, while maintaining exceptional visual fidelity. Overall, our partners at Intel shared that by leveraging cooperative vectors to power advanced neural compression models, they saw a 10x speed up in inference performance.
• Real-time path tracing can be enhanced by neural supersampling and denoising, combining two of the most cutting-edge graphics innovations to provide realistic visuals at practical performance levels.

NVIDIA announced this recently

My first smartphone was the Nokia 7610 that was gifted to me sometime in 2004.

It had a 176x208 screen with support for 65K colours. It had 8 MB RAM and 64 MB of storage.

It ran on Symbian Series 60 2nd Edition. I don't think there was an app store. I remember getting J2ME apps/games off of third party stores. Note the presence of RealPlayer:

In terms of applications, I had a J2ME version of Google Maps, which was very impressive in 2004; this was when paper maps were still commonly used. The J2ME version of Gmail also felt very futuristic.

It had a browser that could access the regular web (not just WAP). Vast majority of websites had no mobile friendly views, but websites were somewhat simpler then. Google Search did have a good mobile web version as did Google News (if I remember correctly). Keypad navigation actually worked much better than you think it would.

I did listen to MP3s on the Nokia 7610, but you could only put a few on the phone. You technically could also watch videos, but I never tried it.

I believe I kept using this phone all the way till 2007-2008 when I switched to another Symbian device. I only switched to Android with 4.x when I got the HTC One X in 2012.

Hi all!

I was running Kodi (and some *arr services) on an old laptop, but that one seemingly now decided it was time to die.
It was a bit underpowered for the task anyway and more meant as a test platform, to see if the setup works and if it's also comfortable enough to be used by my wife.

So I'm having this laptop connected with HDMI to the TV, with a HDMI-CEC adapter to let me use my TV remote and a reasonable large (12TB) external USB HDD for mass storage - which is a bit of a bitch, because it tends to go to sleep and not wake up properly or doesn't show with e.g. lsblk anymore (but that could also be a wonky usb socket in the beaten up laptop)

Any recommendations for something that could play some media well enough, handle multiple download connections and isn't eating much power, when not actually in use?

I looked at some Intel NUCs and some Chinese small form factor thingies.
But I'm not entirely sure, what would be sufficient and the best choice here.

Thanks for any input!

Edit: thanks for all the recommendations! I went with a BeeLink S13 (N150/16GB/512GB) and I think, it will exactly fit the the requirements.

If I'm having trouble or see any shortcomings, I'll inform the community here :⁠-⁠)