Latest News - Page 1032

Uncharted visionary Amy Hennig is making a new Marvel game, and recent reports say it'll focus on Captain America and Black Panther.

Disney is set to host a video games showcase tomorrow, September 9 at 4PM EST. The big headliner is a fresh new game from Skydance New Media, a studio founded by ex-Naughty Dog and Visceral Games creative Amy Hennig (she was involved in Uncharted and the ambitious Project Ragtag Star Wars game that EA cancelled before shutting down Visceral Games).

Reports indicate that the new Marvel game will star Captain America and Black Panther as they battle Hydra in a World War II backdrop.

The PlayStation 5 now supports native 2560x1440 resolution output to compatible displays, Sony has announced.

It's finally here. Sony's latest PS5 firmware update allows gamers to hook up their consoles to a 1440p display and enjoy native WQHD resolution. There's just one trade-off: Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), which tightens up refresh rates between both the console itself and the display, isn't supported over 1440p. Adaptive sync solutions like G-Sync and FreeSync still aren't supported either.

"1440p video output on PS5 requires a TV or PC monitor that support 1440p/60Hz, or 1440p/60Hz and 120Hz. VRR on PS5 supports 1080p and 4K video output but not 1440p," Sony has said.

Returnal should be the next PlayStation 5 game to cross over to PC.

Sony is making a big splash onto PC gaming this year. Following the releases of Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, God of War, and more recently Spider-Man 2018, Sony is bringing its once-guarded PS4 exclusives over to PC in an effort to establish supplemental revenues. 2022 will deliver at least two new PlayStation exclusives with Spider-Man Miles Morales--a launch game on the PS5--and the Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection. Now there's even more reason to believe another PS5 game will cross over with Housemarque's punishing shooter Returnal.

Housemarque gave a GDC 2022 speech with on-screen debut footage that listed PC as the output platform (about the 13:32 mark). This indicates Returnal is probably coming to PC, reinforcing previous claims. Returnal was found on SteamDB under the name Tower of Sisyphus, which is a direct reference to a section of the game.

It's official: Square Enix no longer owns major franchises like Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Legacy of Kain, and Thief.

Today is a big day for The Embracer Group and its newly-acquired studios, Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics. The duo were previously owned by Square Enix, who notoriously shed its Western games division so it could double-down on more guaranteed hits and more tightly control budgets after major flops like The Avengers, which reportedly lost the publisher $200 million.

Now both studios have full creative control over major franchises--some of which have been on ice for many, many y ears. Crystal Dynamics has taken control over Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain, and has begun pre-production on a new Tomb Raider game built in Unreal Engine 5. Eidos Montreal is now free to make more Deus Ex games--a big deal considering Mankind Divided's ending--and even jump back into the Thief franchise.

In a twist of fate, Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto is helping craft Battlefield's next campaign storyline.

Following Battlefield 2042's disastrous launch (which EA management reportedly blamed on Halo Infinite's success...but that didn't last long), EA has put significant investment in trying to save the franchise. One of Battlefield 2042's big controversies was that it had no campaign--it was a purely online-only live service game. This backfired tremendously due to unstable gameplay, lack of content, and 120-player maps that were far too big.

Now EA is making some big course corrections. In 2021, EA announced that Marcus Lehto, who helped create the world, vision, and scope for the Halo franchise, would lead a new Seattle-based studio to work on Battlefield. EA has now confirmed the studio is named Ridgeline Games and that Lehto and his team will be "focused on developing a narrative campaign set in the Battlefield universe."

NVIDIA has officially announced its new "GeForce Beyond" event, which will take place as a "special broadcast" during GTC 2022 later this month on September 20.

You can tune into the GTC 2022 special broadcast of GeForce Beyond on September 20 at 8am PT, where NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will present his GTC 2022 keynote with the latest breakthroughs in gaming, creating, and graphics technology.

It was barely 12 hours ago that NVIDIA teased its "Project Beyond" on Twitter, and now we know why: the next-gen GeForce... which isn't hard to figure out. Project Beyond + GeForce Beyond = new GeForce GPU. NVIDIA has a new post on its official website titled "GeForce Beyond: A Special Broadcast At GTC 2022 with Jensen Huang" which teases that PC enthusiasts won't want to miss this special broadcast.

NASA has released the first set of images taken by the DART spacecraft of its target asteroid its set to collide spectacularly into.

NASA has taken to its blog on its website to provide an update on its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), with the space agency revealing the very first batch of images snapped by DART's onboard camera named DRACO, or more accurately, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation. The above image is a composite of 243 images snapped by DRACO on July 27, 2022, and at the time of their capture, the spacecraft was about 20 million away from its target asteroid.

The space agency explains that, as the image shows, the Didymos asteroid system is still very faint, but after combining all of the images and enhancing them, researchers were able to pinpoint the asteroid system's location. While the quality of these images could be achieved using ground-based telescopes on Earth, this first set of images is being used as a test to prove the imaging capabilities of DRACO are working as intended.

Twitter and Elon Musk are currently engaged in a lawsuit over Musk's decision to pull out of his $44 billion acquisition to purchase the world's second-largest social media company.

The lawsuit has arrived in front of Chancery Court Judge Kathleen St. J. McCormick in a Delaware court earlier in the week, as Elon Musk's legal team and Twitter's legal team attended to discuss several points of the case. During the hearing, McCormick fired some shots at Elon Musk's legal team over their work to produce information on who Musk spoke to about the deal to purchase Twitter, saying that Musk's lawyers' efforts "bothered [her] a lot".

Adding, "I ordered you to do the job, you had two custodians. Have you heard the saying: 'You had one job?". These comments from the judge came after Twitter's legal team argued that Musk's lawyers were intentionally withholding vital information on who Musk spoke to about the deal, which impedes Twitter's attempts at issuing subpoenas to individuals that are involved in the acquisition. Insider reports that more than 100 subpoenas have been issued, with more likely on the way.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured an exoplanet relatively close to Earth that's approximately twenty times the size of the largest planet in our solar system.

The space agency's newest and most advanced observatory has focused its incredible instruments on an exoplanet called VHS 1256 b, which orbits two small red dwarf stars approximately 72 light-years from Earth within the constellation Corvus. The exoplanet was originally discovered back in 2016 and became of particular interest to astronomers as it glowed red in observations. Webb has now confirmed previous theories about the reddish glow, which were that VHS 1256 b was being obscured by a thick blanket of dust.

Using the space telescopes instruments, astronomers were able to determine that VHS 1256 b is nearly twenty times the size of Jupiter and that its atmosphere contains water, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sodium, and potassium. Additionally, Webb's observations confirmed that VHS 1256 b is wrapped in smoke-like silicate grain clouds that have the some consistency as sand.

NASA has announced its selected the company to construct its next-generation spacesuits that will be used by the next Americans to walk on the Moon.

NASA has taken to its blog to announce it has tapped Axiom Space to develop a moonwalking system for its Artemis 3 mission, which will be the first time that Americans set foot on the Moon in over 50 years. NASA explains it has awarded Axiom Space under its Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services contract valued at $228.5 million, and the company will be responsible for the design, development, qualification, certification, and production of the new spacesuits.

The space agency explains that with its more than 50 years of space experience, it has designed the technical and safety requirements for the new spacesuits, which Axiom Space will be required to meet. The award comes under a new "task order" from NASA, which the space agency explains won't be the last as it plans on issuing future task orders under the contract for various scientific activities such as lunar landings, International Space Station missions, and special studies.

GPU-Z has some new abilities with the latest 2.48.0 update seeing the developers tweaking GPU-Z so that it doesn't send traffic when NVIDIA engineering samples are being tested... but get this: NVIDIA reportedly requested that TechPowerUp add this to GPU-Z.

NVIDIA driving this into GPU-Z means we won't see Ada Lovelace GPUs being leaked, with upcoming GeForce RTX 4090, GeForce RTX 4080, and GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards right around the corner. We won't see AIB partners submitting GPU-Z validations or BIOSes to TechPowerUp databases.

How does GPU-Z do that exactly? GPU-Z no longer resolves the "www.techpowerup.com" domain, but "www.gpu-z.com" which will make network blocking much easier than usual, but it's not really going to stop GPU leaks when it comes to NVIDIA's next-gen Ada Lovelace and GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards... leakers can take photos and upload them, they just won't be automatically submitted to the GPU-Z database.

GOODRAM has come out swinging at IFA 2022 this year unveiling its new IRDM Ultimate M.2 SSD, which offers up to 10GB/sec of read speeds in next-gen PCIe 5.0-capable motherboards.

The new GOODRAM IRDM Ultimate M.2 SSD is using Phison's new E26 SSD controller, powered with 3D TLC NAND flash, and capacities of 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. GOODRAM says that its new Gen5 SSD is still under development, but showed off its prototype IRDM Ultimate M.2 SSD at IFA 2022.

This isn't the first PCIe 5.0-capable SSD pushing 10GB/sec reads, and it won't be the last... we've seen Corsair show off its super-fast MP700 PCIe 5.0 SSD not so long ago pushing the same 10GB/sec reads. GIGABYTE has its new AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD that is offering a commanding 12.4GB/sec, and then there's the AORUS Gen5 AIC Adaptor which takes up to 16TB of next-gen SSDs with an incredible, absolutely out-of-this-world up to 60GB/sec (yes, sixty gigabytes per second) reads.

We are hearing that NVIDIA will be offering up gamers not one, but two GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card SKUs: one with 16GB of GDDR6X, and another that has 12GB of GDDR6X memory.

That is some of the very latest from the rumor mill on the GeForce RTX 4080, but the same leaker "MEGAsizeGPU" also said that the RTX 4080 with 12GB of GDDR6X memory will have a 10-layer PCB design, while the RTX 4080 with 16GB of GDDR6X memory uses a 12-layer PCB design.

Normally we'd see one of these SKUs released at launch but not both, with the leaker saying that NVIDIA will be unveiling both the GeForce RTX 4080 with 16GB of GDDR6X memory and GeForce RTX 4080 with 12GB of GDDR6X both at the same time. We have seen varying VRAM amounts on its GPUs for a while -- the latest with Ampere and its GeForce RTX 3080 with 10GB, 12GB, and hell, even 20GB in the wild recently -- but launching at the same time is going to be interesting.

MSI has revealed its pricing on its next-gen flagship MEG X670E GODLIKE motherboard, which will be priced at $1300. Yeah, we're not joking around... but it's not that crazy.

In an update to their US store, MSI has revealed pricing for their upcoming AMD X670-series motherboards: the PRO X670-P Wi-Fi, MPG X670E CARBON Wi-Fi, MEG X670E ACE, and MEG X670E GODLIKE motherboards. We're seeing prices from MSI starting at $290 for the cheapest X670 motherboard, while the cheapest X670E motherboard from MSI is the new MPG X670E CARBON Wi-Fi for $480.

But if you want to go absolutely all-out, MSI has its ultra-premium MEG X670E GODLIKE motherboard for $1300. You'll want to join that with AMD's soon-to-be-released flagship Ryzen 9 7950X "Zen 4" processor which AMD has an MSRP of $699 on. That's $1300 + $700 = $2000 total without a CPU cooler, DDR5 RAM, or anything else just yet.

NVIDIA seems to have kicked off the marketing campaign for its next-gen GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs and the upcoming Ada Lovelace GPU architecture with a very brief 9-second video on Twitter and the hashtag #ProjectBeyond.

What is Project Beyond? Well, if I had to guess... it's NVIDIA's next-gen Ada Lovelace GPU architecture and upcoming GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards. We're expecting to see NVIDIA release the GeForce RTX 4090, GeForce RTX 4080, and GeForce RTX 4070 which it seems NVIDIA is beginning to hype.

"Project Beyond" also leans into the project beyond what we have now, right? Ampere is here, and beyond that we have Ada Lovelace... makes sense, NVIDIA. I guess we'll see more and more as the days and weeks go on, leading into GTC 2022 and then a release in October. NVIDIA loves September GPU releases, so we should expect a late September announcement (and hopefully release) with more cards (custom AIB models) of the upcoming GeForce RTX 40 series GPU now known as "Project Beyond" in October onwards.

Intel will launch its new 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPU family and new Z790 motherboards later this month, but we are getting a closer look at the new flagship Raptor Lake-ready motherboard from ASUS in the form of the ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme. Check it out:

The new ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme motherboard is being tested, benchmarked, and overclocked to its limits by overclocker Roberto Sampaio. Inside, the Z790-based motherboard is running Intel's new flagship Core i9-13900K "Raptor Lake" CPU, which the overclocker notes is boosting up to 6.5GHz on single-core under light loads.

The overclocker notes that he's testing out the new Z790 motherboard and Core i9-13900K, adding that the "12900K is a kid compared to the 13900K". Roberto said that under full load, Intel's new Core i9-13900K processor had its P-cores running at 5.7GHz and the E-cores running at 4.4GHz but adds that he only started testing yesterday.

We reported recently that Sony had some upgraded PlayStation 5 models going into the wild, but now they're hitting shelves in Australia and we are finding out just what makes them different... and you'd be surprised at the work Sony is putting into updating the PS5 design without bragging about it.

The new Sony PlayStation 5 model "CFI-1200" has been picked up and received the usual teardown treatment from YouTuber Austin Evans, where inside we find out about the new PS5 "CFI-1200" consoles and that they are not just much lighter -- which makes shipping millions of pounds less per year a big deal for Sony -- where we also find that the new PS5 models use less power, and they're also rocking a "totally different" motherboard.

The video details that the SSD enclosure has a "better" shield, while the motherboard has been tweaked, as too has the heat sink inside of the updated PlayStation 5 console that makes the reduction in weight very, very welcomed. Austin tested the PlayStation 5 models CFI-1000 vs CFI-1100 vs CFI-1200, where the launch version of the PS5 was using 218W of power, the 2021 version of the PS5 consumes around 229W of power, while the new CFI-1200 model is using only 201W of power in comparison.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card is back in the headlines, this time in Founders Edition form, where we are either looking at really good creative renders of NVIDIA's upcoming Ada Lovelace GPU-powered GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card... or this is a helluva leak and a sneak peek at Ada.

The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card looks like it features a slightly bigger fan on the front of the card, where I've got a picture that I took for my review of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition graphics card, where you can see the design is very, very similar -- virtually identical -- but the fan is slightly bigger.

The new renders of the purported GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card are coming from "QbitLeaks" with the second image (below) looking like it's being reflected by a mirror or very (clean) and reflective surface (maybe it's ray-traced reflections on Ada Lovelace).

EA is wanting to chew up more of your precious SSD space with its upcoming NBA 2K23 commanding a huge 152GB on the Xbox Series X/S pre-loads of the game.

2K Sports has unleashed pre-loading for NBA 2K23 on Microsoft's current-gen Xbox Series X/S consoles, with the pre-load taking up a huge 152GB of SSD space on the console. This is a rather alarming upgrade of 35GB from last year's NBA 2K22, so I do wonder where all that extra 35GB is being used as it's a massive chunk of storage for a single basketball game.

NBA 2K23 would be taking up one-sixth of the 1TB of SSD storage inside of Microsoft's current-gen Xbox Series X/S consoles, which is kinda ridiculous considering it's just a basketball game and not some next-gen Crysis-style AAA title on a next-gen Unreal Engine 5 visual masterpiece. But the 35GB increase in storage required over NBA 2K22 is absolutely ridiculous, 152GB in total for a basketball game is just bonkers.

Microsoft has taken a play from Stadia's strategy book by adding one of the most innovative features for instant gaming access.

Using the cloud, Microsoft is gearing up for its inter-connected empire of multi-platform online gaming. A big part of cloud gaming is reducing friction and providing easy access to content--that's actually the main selling point, being able to play games without having a console or a gaming PC. This new Xbox feature adds another way to streamline access and discovery.

Gamers can now instantly launch games directly from shared screenshots and video, not unlike Stadia's instant game-sharing feature. The idea is simple: Microsoft wants everyone to play as soon as possible as easily as possible. A friend can share a clip or snapshot on their Xbox LIVE feed, and you can click on it and launch the game directly from the message or activity feed UI. This only works on PC and mobile for now, and connects via cloud streaming similar to Stadia.