Believe it or not, a Christmas tree won't stay upright on its own. Instead, you need a stable Christmas tree stand that can accommodate the type and size of tree you have. We researched dozens of the best Christmas tree stands to help you find the right one for your needs, whether you have a real tree, an artificial tree, a small tree, or a behemoth. The stands in our guide have a track record of durability, performance, and easy setup. We also outline the size and type of tree each stand is meant for. Check out our guide to the best Christmas tree skirts once you've chosen the right stand for your tree. The best Christmas tree stands in 2022 Best Christmas tree stand overall: Krinner Tree Genie Christmas Tree Stand, available at Amazon, $82.79 The German-engineered Krinner Tree Genie Christmas Tree Stand is easy to set up in a couple of minutes and keeps trees up to 12 f...
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Don’t Miss NVIDIA’s Free ‘Portal’ Graphics Upgrade
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When Valve released Portal in 2007, it was a revelation. Critics and gamers alike praised the first-person shooter/puzzler for its inventive gameplay, the deadpan wit of GLaDOS (the artificial intelligence that antagonizes you throughout your mission), and its unique approach to storytelling. But 2007 was a long time ago, and while the gameplay certainly holds up after 15 years, the visuals...not so much. That’s why it’s such good news that the game is getting a graphical overhaul—and if you bought Portal in the past, you can update the game for free.
Portal with RTX is a 2022 reimagining of Portal’s original graphics. It uses the NVIDIA RTX Remix tool, building upon similar upgrades to Quake II and Minecraft. NVIDIA RTX Remix revamps Portal with ray tracing, a computationally-intensive graphics technique in which the game sends light rays out into the 3D environment, and measures how those rays bounce off of objects towards light sources. Ray tracing produces detailed, dynamically-lit environments and performs excellently, at least on modern hardware.
Unlike the original graphics, light will bounce off of and interact with every surface in the game in the RTX version. All of the original flat surfaces have been replaced by more floors, walls, and ceilings with more realistic textures, including grooves and bumps, which help direct the light to give the graphics added depth and realism. You’ll even see light naturally travel through the titular portals, and bouncing back into your environment. Thanks to volumetric ray tracing, light interacts with fog more naturally as well.
Image: NVIDIA Corporation
But it’s not just ray tracing that makes Portal with RTX such an upgrade. NVIDIA also rebuilt textures and models from scratch. Everything from the portals, to the companion cube, to your portal gun look completely modern. You can see how stark the difference is by perusing the diagrams on the official announcement page. The difference is truly night and day, making the 15-year-old gamefeel like it could’ve dropped this year alongside titles like God of War Ragnarök and Elden Ring.
One of the modern appeals of classic Portal is that it will run on just about anything. You don’t need an expensive gaming PC to try out this inventive, game-changing puzzle-platformer. However, Portal with RTX isn’t nearly so forgiving. In fact, it’s quite demanding: To play the game at 1080p 30 FPS, NVIAIA’s minimum recommendations, the company suggests your system have an RTX 3060 with DLSS 2. To bump up to 60 FPS, NVIDIA recommends an RTX 3080 with DLSS 2. To play at 4K 60 FPS, NVIDIA lists an RTX 4080 with DLSS 3, plus 16GB of VRAM and 32GB of RAM. Oof.
Image: NVIDIA Corporation
Still, these are their recommendations. The update is still free to anyone who has purchased Portal on PC, so you might as well try it out on your particular setup. NVIDIA is officially launching the update via Steam on Thursday, Dec. 8, so you don’t need to wait long.All these years later, Portal is very much Still Alive.
I recently watched “ the greatest film of all time ,” and the most boring one. In retrospect, the title alone should have been a sufficient warning: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles . Alas, I’m old enough to be a bit nostalgic about massive telephone address books. And massive it is. Clocking over 200 minutes, Chantal Akerman's 1975 dreary drama follows three days in the monotonous routine of Jeanne, a widow, a mother, and a prostitute. I watched Jeanne’s autopilot existence, until, staring at her back as she washes dishes, I decided to fast-forward a couple of minutes, only to discover she was still at it. And Jeanne is equally thorough when she’s busy baking, cleaning, folding laundry, or shining her son’s shoes. She speaks so scarcely and mechanically, that it’s impossible to detect any emotion or volition beyond her carefully controlled chores . Watching Jeanne Dielman is what the word “painstaking” was invented for. Chantal...
Stored procedures: like functions for your SQL. A stored procedure is a batch of SQL statements created and stored on a database. You can reuse a stored procedure over and over again. A stored procedure can accept parameters, run a query, and return results. Many users can call a stored procedure and different applications can call it with different parameter values. What Are the Benefits of Using Stored Procedures? Apart from allowing multiple users and applications to reuse it, a stored procedure has other benefits. It is easy to modify. You can change a stored procedure when necessary and these updates will be reflected for all users. Furthermore, you don’t need to redeploy your application when you modify the stored procedure. It reduces network traffic because the server only passes the procedure’s name over the network and not the entire query. It improves database security since users don’t have direct access to tables. To make...
Believe it or not, a Christmas tree won't stay upright on its own. Instead, you need a stable Christmas tree stand that can accommodate the type and size of tree you have. We researched dozens of the best Christmas tree stands to help you find the right one for your needs, whether you have a real tree, an artificial tree, a small tree, or a behemoth. The stands in our guide have a track record of durability, performance, and easy setup. We also outline the size and type of tree each stand is meant for. Check out our guide to the best Christmas tree skirts once you've chosen the right stand for your tree. The best Christmas tree stands in 2022 Best Christmas tree stand overall: Krinner Tree Genie Christmas Tree Stand, available at Amazon, $82.79 The German-engineered Krinner Tree Genie Christmas Tree Stand is easy to set up in a couple of minutes and keeps trees up to 12 f...
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