Intel's largest launch in a very long time will be later this year with its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" CPU family, which will reportedly be launching in November 2021 according to the latest rumors.

The introduction of Alder Lake-S will usher in Intel as the first with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory support, after AMD held PCIe 4.0 over Intel's head for a couple of years there, Intel will be the first with both PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support. PCIe 5.0 will be on all 600-series motherboards, but we will see some boards launching with DDR5 or DDR4 support -- some of that will be up to motherboard makers.

Wccftech says that Intel has told its partners that it is "planning to launch Alder Lake S in November of 2021. As with all timelines, this can move backward or forwards depending on a few variables but for now this has been communicated to partners and is mostly fixed".

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an incredible game, a system seller for the Nintendo Switch... but what about BotW in the glorious 8K resolution with some enhanced ray-traced graphics. Check it out:

YouTube channel "Digital Dreams" has done just that: got The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild up and running on the PC through the Wii U emulator CEMU, on top of that they ran Revolvere's "REVO ReShade REDUX" shader that adds Pascal Glicher's "Screen-Space Ray Traced Global Illumination" shader for some software-based screen-space ray-tracing effects.

If you already loved Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch, which I found to be an incredible experience in portable mode and not docked -- then running it on the PC through CEMU and cranking the resolution to 8K (!!!) and flicking on juiced-up graphics is music to my ears.

The world of hardware mods on graphics cards hasn't been anywhere near as good as it was a couple of decades ago, but it still happens -- with news of modder VIK-on breaking down a physically dead and no-longer-booting GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and seeing that it supports up to 22GB of GDDR6 memory (up from its stock 11GB GDDR6 memory).

VIK-on purchased a dead GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card that wasn't booting up anymore, with the modder noting that the graphics card was taken to 3 other workshops who didn't fix it but damaged it further. There were missing components from people who obviously didn't know what they were doing but VIK-on worked his magic.

The GPU was resoldered and each of the memory modules were replaced, and the PCB traces that were cut were fixed. VIK-on took his time adding in all of the missing pieces and components from the damaged GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card and then started to verify if a simple strap mod (tricks the GPU BIOS into supporting higher memory capacities) would work.

The hype engines for Battlefield are still humming away, but they were injected with a big one today with the official Battlefield Twitter account teasing a June reveal for something Battlefield related.

But that's the official Twitter account... and we all know how bad the marketing department for Battlefield has been over the years, with the Tom "one-man-marketing-team-for-Battlefield" Henderson saying we could be hit with a surprise trailer drop... TOMORROW.

Henderson tweeted out a new poll, saying that tomorrow is a "big day" for Battlefield and that either we get a surprise trailer drop or a confirmation on the June release date. Someone else asked how did he know that something Battlefield-related was guaranteed to happen tomorrow, with Henderson saying: "Because tomorrow is the EA Investors/Earnings call. So a confirmation of a release date, especially when they've tweeted it out should be expected".

Sony is currently working on its next-generation PSVR, and if UploadVR's sources are correct, the new headset could have some tech that no other headset does. Namely, it's said to have a motor inside for haptic feedback. If that's true, it would be the first VR headset that we know of that offers such a feature.

The next PSVR will also get a significant display overhaul. The new device reportedly features a dual-screen setup (the current PSVR has a single display shared by both lenses) with adjustable lens spacing. The new PSVR should also have significantly improved image quality thanks to a 2000x2040 per-eye resolution. Supposedly, the next PSVR will also include gaze-tracking cameras for foveated rendering, which would help with the performance requirements to drive those high-resolution panels.

It seems like Sony may be working to reduce the cable clutter with the next PSVR too. The original model required a breakout box with a pair of cables that ran back to the headset. The new device will reportedly run off a single USB-C cable, which would plug into the front port of the PS5 console.

Roblox Corp's first post-IPO earnings soar on strong daily active user and revenue surges.

Roblox Corp just posted up its Q1 2021 earnings, and the results are quite positive. The company earned $387 million in revenues, up 140% over Q1'20. Operating income is likewise up 140% YoY to $164.5 million, which takes the $51 million expensive of Roblox's direct listing into account.

Roblox DAUs hit 42.1 million), up 79% YoY, and DAUs outside of North America were up 87%. Average Robux spending per daily active user was around $15.48. In-game microtransaction purchases were also up tremendously over last year. Roblox made $652.3 million from Robux virtual currency purchases in Q1, up 161% from last year; $269 million of this was deferred revenue.

Naughty Dog celebrates Uncharted 4'ths fifth anniversary with an interesting retrospective on the game's development.

Uncharted 4 was a major breakthrough for Naughty Dog. The team optimized its internal games engine specifically for the PlayStation 4 and pushed the platform's capabilities to new highs (Naughty Dog did this once again with The Last of Us Part II in 2020). One of the biggest new frontiers Naughty Dog crossed was motion capture.

As confirmed in a recent 5-year retrospective post, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End was the first time Naughty Dog used facial capture for its in-game mocap. At the time of writing, Sony's Visual Arts and Services Group is advancing AI-driven motion capture for PS5 using Sony's internal machine learning tech.

"It was the first project that we used facial capture, so that was a transition for our team because we were used to hand-keying everything. Now, we had not only full-body data where we had to learn how to use a new rig and a new system, we had to figure out how to make it look really good," said Marianne Hayden, Story Animator at Naughty Dog and Cinematics Animator for Uncharted 4.

Sony's reported move to 6nm may not be enough to free up console stock in 2022 and supply is expected to be limited throughout next year.

The PS5 will be hard to buy from now through 2022, according to new reports from Bloomberg.

Sony Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki recently held a closed-doors meeting with industry analysts and made the following statement: "I don't think demand is calming down this year and even if we secure a lot more devices and produce many more units of the PlayStation 5 next year, our supply wouldn't be able to catch up with demand," sources attending the meeting told Bloomberg.

The official Battlefield Twitter account teases a June reveal for the next-gen Battlefield 6, likely during the E3-timed EA Play event.

EA's next-gen Battlefield 6 won't be revealed before the company announces its Q4 earnings report tomorrow (obviously that'd mean the game would be revealed today). Instead, EA and DICE will let the hype and anticipation continue brewing for a few more weeks with a June reveal for the game.

The new Battlefield game is expected to be EA's biggest next-gen splash to date. DICE has been updating its Frostbite engine for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X support for quite some time, complete with next-level physics systems, rendering capabilities, and environmental interactions that will rival any other Battlefield before it. EA's R&D spending is also up to new heights to help power this next-gen push.

Gears of War developer The Coalition is moving to next-gen game development using Unreal Engine 5, and aims to push the new Xbox Series X/S consoles to new heights.

The Coalition today announced it's embracing Unreal Engine 5 to power its new next-gen games. This is a pretty big deal for Xbox and gaming as a whole. The Coalition is known for completely redefining the capabilities of Xbox hardware--they were able to push Gears 5 past PC Ultra settings on Series X, complete with raytracing and 120FPS support--and other Xbox studios will benefit from The Coalition's work thanks to the iterative nature of games development.

The devs say it'll be quite a long time before their next projects are ready, though. "As we look to future games, we're excited to start shifting our resources to next-gen development using Unreal Engine 5. Shifting to a new engine is a big undertaking, so we want to be clear that we will not be announcing any new projects or titles for some time."