Gaming News - Page 1

Fallout 76 has amassed tons of new players on the heels of April's wildly successful Fallout TV show.

More than a month after the Fallout show's release, Fallout mania is still going strong. The games are racking up impressive player counts thanks to the marketing activations from the TV show push, and Fallout 76 in particular recently broke the 20 million lifetime players milestone.

That new figure is up substantially from 2022's previous number of 13.5 million lifetime players. Fallout 76 managed to tack-on 6.5 million more players from 2023 - May 2024, and a good portion of that was likely driven by the TV show an the fact that all Amazon Prime subscribers got a free copy of the game from Prime Gaming.

ZOTAC Technology is set to make a big splash at Computex 2024 with a range of new products and compact, all-in-one solutions for AI, gaming, and professionals. ZOTAC GAMING will be there with its latest lineup of discrete GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards. Demos will showcase full DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction ray tracing, AI-powered NPCs, generative tools, and even an AI chatbot.

However, for those who love PC gaming in all its forms, ZOTAC's most exciting announcement and reveal will be the new ZOTAC GAMING ZONE handheld, described as a "high-performance portable PC." The specs are a bit light, and all we have to go with is the teaser image you can see above - but we know one tasty little detail.

The ZOTAC GAMING ZONE PC gaming handheld will feature a 7-inch AMOLED multi-touch high-refresh-rate display. Actually, ZOTAC is teasing one other feature.

It took a minute, but AMD's FSR 3 Frame Generation is now available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles, with support added to EA and Ascendant Studios's first-person action game Immortals of Aveum. It's the first console game to support FSR 3 frame generation, a technology that inserts generated frames between natively rendered frames to boost performance.

The goal is to make a game feel like it's playing at 100+ FPS without impacting image quality or smoothness or adding tonnes of unwanted input lag. As part of their weekly podcast, the tech gurus at Digital Foundry have provided their initial impressions of FSR 3 on console - and they're mostly positive.

First up, performance. With an Xbox Series X playing a visually intensive sequence in the game with FSR 3 frame generation enabled and disabled, we see a performance increase from around 40-60 FPS to 80-100 FPS - a performance boost of 72% on average.

EA's annual racer, F1 24, is available today. The latest installment improves its realistic visuals and depiction of high-speed Formula 1 racing with multiple real-time ray-tracing effects. The F1 series has featured ray-traced reflections and ray-traced shadows for a few years now, but this year's addition of Ray-Traced Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination takes the game's lighting to a whole new level.

This more physically accurate and realistic version of global illumination produces a more lifelike image as light from natural and other sources reflects and bounces around from object to object. It's hardware intensive, doubly so when paired with RT reflections and shadows, so F1 24 supports DLSS 3 Super Resolution and Frame Generation to boost performance.

Partnering with NVIDIA, the official GeForce announcement for the game's release highlights the performance you can expect across a range of GeForce RTX 40 Series cards with DLSS 3 enabled and what you should expect with DLSS turned off. The results show that for F1 24 in 4K, with max settings and ray-tracing effects enabled, you'll need a GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER to hit an average frame rate of 61.1 FPS.

CD Projekt gives new updates on its new Witcher project.

Now that Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty is shipped out, CD Projekt is now full steam ahead on Polaris, their next big multi-game release. The Polish devs are working a new series of games set in the continuation of The Witcher universe, and the first game, Polaris, will kickstart an evolved saga for the landmark fantasy franchise.

While CD Projekt isn't yet ready to talk specifics, the company did confirm it most of its developers are attached to Polaris. The studio currently has 64% of its total workforce on Polaris, or 407 people, and CD Projekt is confident the game will enter principal development sometime in the latter half of 2024. This means the game will be in full production while CD Projekt also works on other games in parallel--titles like the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, Orion, and its new IP, Hadar.

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 will release day one on Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft today announced.

It's official: Black Ops 6 is launching day one into Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft revealed the news ahead of its big Xbox showcase on June 9 at 1pm EST and confirmed multiple reports from The Wall Street Journal and Reuters in the process.

"We're excited to confirm that Game Pass members will be able to jump into Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6 on day one with Game Pass," Microsoft wrote on the Xbox Wire.

Total GTA franchise revenues have broken $9 billion since late 2013.

According to Take-Two Interactive's latest earnings report, Rockstar Games has generated over $9 billion in total revenue from the Grand Theft Auto series since GTA V's launch. Arranged figures indicate the mega-hit franchise has made cumulative earnings of $9.118 billion from GTA 5's original release in Q4'13 all the way through the end of March 2024.

These revenues include full game sales of GTA V across all 3 console generations, sales of the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition re-release from 2020, in-game purchases in GTA Online, and all other sales of previous games made available.

The total installed base of 9th generation consoles is expected to break 111 million by the end of 2024, new reports from Take-Two Interactive indicate.

Take-Two Interactive's latest Q4 earnings call revealed an interesting snippet on console market expectations. During the call, TTWO CEO Strauss Zelnick gave out IDG's console expansion forecasts for the current 9th hardware generation. These numbers combine both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S console sales.

IDG expects the installed base for the 9th console generation to reach 111 million by the end of calendar 2024, up +37% from the previous figure given by Zelnick. The most eye-opening figure is for 2027 and beyond, where the 9th gen console installed base is expected to jump to 175 million.

Microsoft has officially launched its Auto SR (Automatic Super Resolution) technology, its new system-level super resolution tech, which is available on new Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite processor.

In order to use Microsoft's new Auto SR technology, you'll need a new Copilot+ PC powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite processor, which you can't even buy today. Microsoft has paper launched Auto SR, with Copilot+ PCs required to play it, unavailable to buy today.

You'll also need Windows 11 version 24H2, a 1080p display at a minimum, and automatic updated to be enabled. That is, once you've got your new Copilot+ PC powered by a Snapdragon X Elite processor. The 12 games that will work on the Copilot+ PCs with Auto SR supported out of the box include:

In the United States, the video game era in the late 1970s and early 1980s was defined by two consoles - the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. This rivalry predates the Nintendo versus Sega era by a decade and the current PlayStation versus Xbox versus Nintendo era. It even predates most gamers in 2024, who weren't even alive when the Atari 2600 was a thing that connected to a TV.

Atari and Intellivision aren't big players in the modern video game era, which makes today's announcement that Atari is acquiring Intellivision and its various trademarks and games more of a fun news story than the monumental news that something like PlayStation acquiring Xbox (or the other way around) would be.

What does Atari + Intellivision mean for gaming? The press release states, "Atari will seek to expand digital and physical distribution of legacy Intellivision games, potentially create new games, and explore brand and licensing opportunities."