Are you dutiful about keeping your drivers up-to-date? AMD does a pretty fantastic job about maintaining a monthly release schedule, after all. Today we look at how much performance you can expect from an old card in new games using four driver packages.

We update drivers for two reasons: stability and performance. When it comes to graphics, both...

Japan has been expecting and preparing for the “big one” for more than 30 years. But the magnitude-9.0 temblor that struck March 11 — the world’s fourth biggest quake since 1900 — wasn’t the catastrophe the island nation had in mind. The epicenter of the quake was about 80 miles east of the city of Sendai, in a strip of ocean crust previously thought unlikely to be capable of unleashing such energy.

“This area has a long history of earthquakes, but [the Sendai earthquake] doesn’t fit the pattern,” says Harold Tobin, a marine geophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The expecta...