This TV Backlighting System Fucked Me Up. This is opulence. Suddenly, there is extra light blasting from behind my TV screen, making a day- glow title sequence positively atomic. The Dream. Screen, a backlighting system that’s designed to make your TV viewing more immersive, is a luxury that I absolutely don’t need. In theory, the supplementary lights change color based on the pixels on the TV screen for an “immersive theater experience.” In practice, it’s an overstimulating, distracting, nauseating novelty, and I can’t get enough of this shit.
Latest environmental news, features and updates. Pictures, video and more. ![]() What is it? A group of LEDs on the back of a television that make viewing more immersive. Like. Those lights are very pretty. No Like. It can be really distracting and there are a lot of wires. I’m a fan of the Phillips Hue wireless LED lights, and find the ability to change the color of my room with my phone delightful. Dream. Screen, loosely based on the original Philips Hue- adjacent Ambilux television, works in the same vein, so I was keen on it. I do a lot of stupid things to entertain myself, like acquiring a 5. Samsung television with a gimmicky curved display. Dream. Screen seemed like an upgrade. I was naive. I didn’t realize how much I could loathe and love one product. Depending on what kind of TV you have, the kit costs between $1. HD or 4. K, and the size of your screen). The setup is a small feat in and of itself. There are chunky LED light strips to tape to the back of a TV, differently spaced depending on the size of your tv (there’s a guide). There’s a smartphone app that works with your wi- fi to download and set up. Then you need to plug your video source into the video input of the round HDMI splitter, and plug the output into your TV. There are also two optional “sidekick” lights for extra glow ($6. This thing takes up three fucking outlets. Get ready for a wire rat king. You do get the “bigger, brighter” TV the product’s website promises, but the lights don’t exactly extend the screen space; they sometimes echo, and sometimes compliment the colors of pixels around the very edges of your screen, sending rays of color from behind your television across your walls in time with whatever is on. In the case of a dramatic explosion, this is all very sensible, as a good part of your wall will look onfire. It really shines with material intended to be trippy—like whatever the hell that was in episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return (above), or that psychedelic 2. A Space Odyssey sequence. The more you give it—pink and blue neons, deep reds—the more you get. But it can be confounding in undramatic sequences, with bright blurry bits of clothes and other immovable objects echoing off screen, like dislocated fuzzy chunks. Daylight and black- and- white sequences result in a bright bluish- white screen halo. Letterboxing also presents an obvious, chasmic problem—gaps. I want to emphasize the visual loudness of this thing. Even at the lowest brightness, without the two sidekicks, the Dream. Screen is really bright. I like to watch movies in complete darkness and concentrate on the screen. With the Dream. Screen, the entire room is illuminated, including the dirty laundry in the far corner that I’m trying to ignore. Say you’re the type of person with serious respect for cinematography. The screen bleeding out of the frame in blurry puddles every which way might not be what the cinematographer intended. Despite and because of its flaws, this truly is an accessory of visual excess. There’s also the product’s weird “health benefits” claim that it “reduces digital eye strain.” The claim cites a single 2. TV not hurt your eyes so much. But the study also says that these results are “modest” and sometimes even the opposite. Speaking from personal experience, staring into a significantly brighter TV area is the opposite—my eyes ache after a while. So I wouldn’t take this study very seriously. Where Dream. Screen really shines is gaming. I sit closer to the TV while I game and my focus is more sharply drawn to specific sections of the screen. This position allows the peripheral edges of the game space to blend with the Dream. Screen light extensions and I’m significantly more immersed, just as Dream. Screen wanted. When I’m not watching the entire screen, the patchiness of Dream. Screen’s illumination isn’t a big deal. It’s also more dynamic because more is happening faster, so it’s swishing around me. That’s neat. For most everything else, it’s immersive, but kind of like watching TV wasted is immersive. You’re going to get pulled into the light. You’ll want to squint. Your eyes might skid. You might ask yourself, do I really need to do this? Am I enjoying it? Why am I doing this? Excess and novelty are perfectly good reasons to try something. Getting overwhelmed and bored is a great reason to stop. Until then, the trick is getting used to something completely unnecessary. Awhile back, I saw Wonder Woman in 4. DX, which is extra 3. D, with moving theater seats and “effects.” For two hours in the theater the seat jostled me back and forth and gently spit water into my hair. It was completely unnecessary. But now I wonder, how am I supposed to watch another movie again without steamy, bumpy smell- o- vision? I wasn’t even sure I liked 4. DX, but I’m going back, obviously. Maybe I want to be thrown around. Maybe I’ll always want a “bigger, brighter” TV. Maybe I want to be perpetually overstimulated by entertainment technology. Maybe I want bright lights strapped to the back of my TV, for extra explosions. Nothing in life is perfect. A lot of the things aren’t even good. I think this thing is bad, but also good. No one really needs it, but it’s awfully easy to get used to. When I don’t use the lights, I miss them. Sometimes I’ll even put them on the ambient setting when I’m doing something else. Like “rainbow.” Or “fireplace.” Twinkling in the background. Completely fucking with my head. READMEIt takes up to three outlets. It’s really bright and dramatic. Best for really bright and dramatic sequences in movies and games. Great for gaming and explosions, not so much for movies you respect.How much you’ll like it really depends on your definition of “immersive.”Easy to hate, hard to leave. What Color Is Pale Adobe Metallic . AMD's Vega Graphics Cards Could Kick Off a War. Every nerd loves a good tech war: Windows vs Mac, Apple vs Android, Intel vs AMD. They give us something to armchair argue about over beers with friends—or to rant over in the comments of illustrious tech blogs. After spending the weekend playing with AMD’s new Vega 6. Vega 5. 6 graphics cards, I think I can safely say an old tech war is back on—even if AMD’s latest salvo feels paltry. Nvidia might be leading the discrete graphics card industry, but AMD’s two newest cards are cheap and fast enough to finally compete. And that can only mean good things for PC users. Price$4. 00 (Vega 5. Vega 6. 4)What is it? Discrete GPUs that are competing against graphics titan Nvidia. No Like. Don't expect any flash. AMD, which purchased Nvidia’s previous competitor, ATI Graphics, has been losing the GPU war for a while. Nvidia is currently producing the majority of discrete graphics cards found in computers today. According to Jon Peddie Research, by the end of 2. Nvidia had more than 7. AMD trailed far behind with just 2. So AMD decided to focus on building cheap cards to go in cheap machines—like the 5. I reviewed back in April. The AMD Vega 6. 4 and Vega 5. Nvidia 1. 08. 0 with cheaper options that start to approximate its performance. When the Vega microarchitecture the cards are based on was announced back at CES, people didn’t immediately leap out of their seats. AMD didn’t have a cool hook like when Nvidia announced it had spent “billions” to develop its latest card. All AMD had was a promise of speed when the cards arrived this summer. Eight months later, the Vega 6. The AMD Vega 6. 4 retails for $5. AMD Vega 5. 6 retails for $4. Both also have 8. GB of RAM built in. The big difference between the two is the number of compute units—think of those like the cores in a CPU (the more the better). The Vega 6. 4 has 6. Vega 5. 6 has 5. 6. When I compared the Vegas to the 1. I found was far less exciting that what I’d hoped for. While the AMD Vega 6. Instead it was sort of like going to the car lot and having to choose between a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla. They’re both very nice, cost the same, and do the same damn thing. What was really astounding was the performance of the $4. AMD Vega 5. 6. Despite being considerably cheaper than both the Vega 6. Nvidia 1. 08. 0, it played Overwatch and Civilization VI only marginally slower. The 1. 08. 0 managed 1. Overwatch on Ultra at 4. K, the the Vega 6. Vega 5. 6 pulled of 9. K with the graphics cranked to Ultra. That’s not just a little respectable, that’s really damn good. In Civilization VI the difference was even smaller, with the Vega 5. Vega 6. 4. In one case the Vega 5. Nvidia 1. 08. 0, and was on par with the more expensive Vega 6. When I rendered a frame in Blender, graphics software that allows you to create large 3. D images that heavily tax a discrete GPU, the Nvidia 1. The Vega 6. 4 rendered the same frame in 9 minutes and 2. The Vega 5. 6? Just 9 minutes and 2. With that kind of neck and neck performance there’s no reason to really buy either a Nvidia 1. Vega 6. 4 over the Vega 5. But speed isn’t the only factor to consider when buying a discrete graphics card. See, the cards that go in your desktop PC are very power hungry. If your power supply can’t provide enough juice, the GPU is worthless, and that is one place Nvidia performs far better than AMD every time. The Nvidia 1. 08. The Vega 5. 6 requires 2. Vega 6. 4 requires a whopping 2. All the extra juice means you have to use not one, but two 8- pin power connectors from your power supply. The Nvidia 1. 08. With the new Vega cards AMD is trying to get around the power constraints of it GPUs by offering some software solutions. The first, and most notable, is the Radeon Chill feature, and it’s actually sort of clever. It operates under the assumption that people don’t really need the fastest video card, they just need one fast enough for their monitor. Both AMD and Nvidia have a technology that allows cards to “sync” with monitors to deliver top- level graphics without straining the GPU (Nvidia calls its tech G- Sync, while AMD calls it Free. Sync). But you have to have a special monitor that works with the syncing technology and no monitor works with both the AMD and Nvidia sync tech. Radeon Chill works with any monitor. You simply tell it how many frames you actually want to see per second. Got a monitor that refreshes 6. Set the max to 6. Radeon Chill makes magic happen. In addition, the software doesn’t try and churn out 6. Instead it recognizes moments with static visuals and dramatically cuts down on how much power is being used—and you can tweak the number as well. Want it to never go below 3. Just set the slider in the AMD software. AMD added other software features that give users a better ability to throttle their cards without diminishing visuals. There’s a power saver mode which allows you to force the cards to sip as little as 1. Frame Rate Target Control mode that lets you cap the frames per second; and an Enhanced Sync mode that figures out the optimal frame to display on screen, even if it means skipping a few other frames. All these features make the AMD Vega cards feel incredibly practical versus the excess and overclocking shenanigans of Nvidia. It’s as if AMD is trying to say “if you want nose bleed speed go with Nvidia, but if you want control and a nice experience join us.” That’s a reasonable sale to an old woman such as myself. I play my games on 4. K TVs that have no syncing technology (though Microsoft suggests that could change next year) and can only show between 6. I don’t need dual video cards or crazy numbers, I need good enough. And the AMD Vega 6. AMD Vega 5. 6 are good enough. If you’re looking for a reasonably priced card the AMD Vega 5. But these cards aren’t enough to lure Nvidia loyalists or the power hungry away. As the latest salvo in the war between Nvidia and AMD goes, the new Vega cards are pretty weak. READMEThese cards are neck and neck with the $5. Nvidia 1. 08. 0 in the speed department. But they natively draw a lot more power. A bevy of software features try to resolve the power issue, but it means you’re effectively throttling your shiny new GPU. SPEC DUMPAMD Vega 6. GB of RAM • 6. 4 compute units • 1. MHz base GPU clock • 4. GB/s memory bandwidth • 2. TFLOPS • 3 x Display. Port • 1 x HDMIAMD Vega 5. GB of RAM • 5. 6 compute units • 1. MHz base GPU clock • 4. GB/s memory bandwidth • 2. TFLOPS • 3 x Display.
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