Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be the first game to get Nvidia’s new RTX Hair features next month. Instead of using triangles to model hair, Nvidia will use spheres to improve Harrison Ford’s virtual hair in the Indiana Jones game.
RTX Hair is designed to improve lighting and shadows, all while maintaining performance in the game and not taking up too much extra memory. It also makes Ford’s hair look fuller and more realistic, and will be available as an update to the real-time path tracing mode in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
The RTX Hair improvements use new hardware capabilities in RTX 50-series GPUs, as Nvidia added hardware acceleration of ray tracing for hair and fur and support for the linear swept sphere (LSS) primitive. Nvidia says LSS is a “big step toward rendering high-quality digital humans in real time.”
MicroSD cards are tiny but slow; the M.2 storage sticks in your PC are blazing fast but bigger and fully enclosed. Now, a new type of SSD out of China could be the best of both worlds — and it’s already set to appear in two cutting-edge gaming portables.
Chinese storage manufacturer Biwin is calling it the “Mini SSD,” though another manufacturer refers to it as the “1517”; it measures just 15mm x 17mm x 1.4mm thick, smaller than a U.S. penny and just slightly larger than MicroSD. Despite that, it offers maximum sequential read speeds of 3,700 megabytes per second (or 3,400MB/s writes) over a PCIe 4×2 connection, and offers 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities.
To put that in context, the new MicroSD Express cards that work with the Nintendo Switch 2 top out at a theoretical 985MB/s, less than a third the speed. And while a full-size SD Express card could theoretically beat Mini SSD at 3,940MB/s, it would be nearly twice the size of Biwin’s creation.
The nano-SIMs used in recent smartphones are still smaller, though, and M.2 drives are still faster. I whipped up a quick chart so you can easily compare various storage cards and SIMs:
Type
Length
Width
Height
Theoretical max speed
Mini SSD
15mm
17mm
1.4mm
3,700MB/s
MicroSD
11mm
15mm
1mm
985MB/s
SD
24mm
32mm
~2mm (varies)
3,940MB/s
M.2 2230
22mm
30mm
~2mm (varies)
~8,000MB/s
M.2 2280
22mm
80mm
~2mm (varies)
~14,000MB/s
Nano-SIM
8.8mm
12.3mm
0.67mm
N/A
Micro-SIM
12mm
15mm
0.76mm
N/A
Mini-SIM
15mm
25mm
0.76mm
N/A
It’s not clear if Biwin’s Mini SSD is a true standard that other storage makers can easily adopt. But the company’s marketing it for laptops, tablets, phones, cameras and more, with its own dedicated slot that works exactly like smartphone SIM card slots: stick in a pin to remove the tray.
The company claims IP68 water and dust resistance, which could be handy for phones in particular, and three-meter drop resistance.
Two cutting-edge Chinese gaming portables already appear to be customers, both of which made announcements at ChinaJoy this past week. There’s the GPD Win 5, the monster battery backpack wielding Strix Halo handheld we told you about in July, which you can see with the new SSD in the video atop this story.
Sometimes kids need something they can do on their own — while you’re on a work call, cooking dinner, or just taking a breath. Here’s a list of solo activities you can try with your child, grouped by age. Some are linked to full activity guides on Offline.Kids, and others are simple ideas you can…
When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It's only legacy code if you have to maintain it! [...]
The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt. [...]
If you don't understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.
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