Latest News - Page 1034

Red Dead Redemption 2 didn't launch with support for AMD's new FSR 2.0 (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling technology when it hit the PC, but modders quickly added FSR 2.0 support... and now, the developer has added official FSR 2.0 support into the game.

The latest v1.31 update for Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PC adds support for AMD FSR 2.0, with developer Rockstar Games noting in the 1.31 patch notes: "AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 has been implemented". Ahhh, also... Rockstar, that would be "FidelityFX, not 'FidelityX' as you've noted here'.

You'll need to download the 433MB update, which will also add Reflex to reduce lag on the gamepad only (there's no help here for the mouse and keyboard input). Red Dead Redemption 2's new 1.31 update also sees Rockstar Games making improvements to Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA). So it's not just AMD FSR 2.0 in the new update, but that's the biggest deal here for sure. There's also plenty more in the patch notes, these three here are just the PC-only tweaks in the RDR2 patch.

NVIDIA will be hosting its upcoming GTC (GPU Technology Conference) where participants can win a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition graphics card, personally signed by CEO Jensen Huang.

In order to win the signed-by-Jensen GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition graphics card, you'll need to be registered for GTC that takes place later this month -- registration is free, by the way -- where you'll just need your email address. The pre-registration process began back on August 23 and runs through to September 22.

NVIDIA's upcoming GTC will take place between September 19 and 22, after which the Japanese and Korean media that have their giveaways will have their GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition graphics cards that were personally signed by Jensen Huang. Right before the launch of next-gen Ada Lovelace GPUs and the new GeForce RTX 4090, that's expected to kick the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti's ass.

The world of ATX 3.0 power supplies is about to open up, where we've seen MSI's new MEG Ai1300P being the world's first ATX 3.0 PSU, and now we've got the Seasonic "PS Vertex" series PSUs being teased.

Seasonic's new PS Vertex power supplies will come in 1000W to 1200W variants, with 80+ Gold through to 80+ Platinum series, with the new PSU family from Seasonic being ATX 3.0 ready. We've got a single 16-pin PCIe 5.0-ready power connector, which is capable of driving 600W of power into a next-gen graphics card.

Seasonic has used a fully modular design on its 80+ Platinum series, while there is just partial modular goodness to be had on the 80+ Gold series PS Vertex PSUs. When it comes to pricing, we're looking at between $243 for the Seasonic PS Vertex GX-1000 ATX 3.0 1000W 80+ Gold PSU, $271 for the Seasonic PS Vertex PX-1000 ATX 3.0 1000W 80+ Platinum PSU, and then $281 for the Seasonic PS Vertex GX-1200 ATX 3.0 1200W 80+ Gold PSU, and then at the very top Seasonic's new PS Vertex PX-1200 ATX 3.0 1200W 80+ Platinum PSU for $319.

Cooler Master has just introduced its new CryoFuze Violet thermal paste, which does something a little different: it's colored purple.

The new special purple-colored thermal paste from Cooler Master that better bonds to your PC hardware, with a nano-particle component that features improved thermal conductivity. The non-corrosive and oxidation-resistant formula was developed by Cooler Master for its new CryoFuze Violet thermal paste, and is capable of maintaining stability at -50C, and cook at up to as high as 240C (yeah, two hundred and forty degrees Celcius). Cooler Master says that the thermal transfer is rated at 12.6W/mK, making it a high-end thermal compound.

We have had regular-colored thermal paste for what feels like forever -- grey and silver for the most part -- but now Cooler Master is adding some color to an area that no one ever sees once they've used it. The new purple-colored themal paste in the form of the new CryoFuze Violet thermal compound hasn't got official pricing from Cooler Master, but we do have listings on Newegg already, with a cost for $30.99.

Halo Infinite's latest September update sets the stage for the future of the live service game, but many fans aren't happy with the plan.

343i is at a crossroads with Halo Infinite. In a new Halo Infinite update video, studio has laid out a new strategy that will establish a foundation for Infinite with an emphasis on five main priorities including: seasonality, rewards, inviting social gameplay, balanced competitive PVP, and stability. The devs had to sacrifice in order to move forward on these goals, though, and executing on this plan lead to the cancellation of Halo Infinite's promised split-screen co-op.

Fans weren't happy about this. 343i's Sean Baron also raised controversy with comments that Halo is a competitive shooter first and foremost. Many fans objected to this, saying that Halo was a fun party game before anything else, and this comment sparked multiple YouTube responses adequately attributing Halo's early success to split-screen co-op and in-house, local PVP with friends.

Ubisoft will show off four new Assassin's Creed games during its special Ubisoft Forward event on September 10, sources have told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier and TryHard's Tom Henderson.

Ubisoft has ambitious plans for the Assassin's Creed series and is ready to start branching off into mobile while executing on Assassin's Creed Infinity, which will be the franchise's games-as-a-platform ecosystem. The first game will be Assassin's Creed Mirage, a smaller-scale game compared to Valhalla that is set during 8th century Baghdad and stars Basim, one of the titular characters of 2020's mainline game. Mirage is expected to launch in 2023.

The other three games are where Ubisoft starts differentiating its slate. There's two main games and then one mobile game. The first main game is codenamed Red, and will be set in Japan, possibly with samurai-style armors and playable male/female protagonists. Red is being developed by Ubisoft's Quebec team.

Tencent has made a strategic purchase that could pave the way to a buyout of Ubisoft in the future.

Ubisoft has fended off a potential hostile takeover from Tencent by selling shares of the Guillemot family's company instead of Ubisoft stock. Tencent has purchased a 49.9% stake in Guillemot Brothers Limited, a company run by Ubisoft's founding Guillemot family. The Guillemot brothers have the largest individual shares of Ubisoft stock out of all shareholders, so this technically gives the founders a way to sell their shares if they decide to.

"Post transaction, Guillemot Brothers Limited will hold 17,086,199 Ubisoft shares, including 9,086,199 shares held via derivative contracts," reads a press release.

CD Projekt RED today announced that it is officially dropping PS4 and Xbox One consoles in regards to new Cyberpunk 2077 content.

The new Patch 1.6 Edgerunners update will be the last major content drop for PS4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt RED will no longer provide new content updates or features to these older consoles. That also means Cyberpunk 2077's newly announced expansion Phantom Liberty will not release on PS4 or Xbox One.

"There's going to be some smaller updates primarily focusing on tech support to keep it all running smoothly, but yes all new future features and content are only coming to current-gen consoles as well as PC," Phantom Liberty game director Gabriel Amatangelo said in the recent Night City Wire stream.

Cyberpunk 2077's first major expansion is arriving in 2023 on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC, and it's called Phantom Liberty.

Cyberpunk 2077's new expansion Phantom Liberty is described as a sci-fi spy thriller where V enlists as an agent of the New United States of America. This kind of espionage action wasn't something I had expected from CP2077, but CD Projekt RED says they're having a lot of fun with the expansion, possibly drawing upon pop culture references to craft a story of intrigue, betrayal, and assassinations.

"We're having a lot of fun with it. It's a new kind of style of a plot that we're having fun with. A new cast of characters expanding on a district in Night City, where it primarily takes place," said game director Gabriel Amatangelo.

A study on the diamond formation titled 'Retrospective analysis of somatic mutations and clonal hematopoiesis in astronauts' has been published in the journal Communications Biology.

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have completed a first-of-its-kind study that assessed blood samples collected from astronauts that flew for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) between 1998 and 2001. The astronauts flew on space shuttle missions, and the blood samples from all 14 astronauts revealed DNA mutations that lend themselves to an increased risk of developing cancer and heart disease and are potentially linked to spaceflight

The mutations are known as somatic mutations and are found in the astronauts' hematopoietic stem cells, which comprise part of the blood-forming system and can become any kind of blood cell. Somatic mutations occur after a person is conceived and affect cells that are neither sperm nor eggs, so they cannot be passed on. The astronauts were found to have clonal hematopoiesis (CH), meaning the overrepresentation of blood cells made from a single clone.

T-Mobile CEO and President Mike Sievert and SpaceX Chief Engineer Elon Musk have joined forces in a recent live event at SpaceX's Starbase facility in Texas to announce Coverage Above and Beyond.

The Coverage Above and Beyond plan is a collaboration between the companies that intends to bring cell phone coverage to the entire United States. This will include remote locations that traditional cell signals have trouble reaching through leveraging SpaceX's Starlink constellation, which utilizes satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to enable access to the Internet.

Cellular connectivity is unavailable from any provider in over half a million square miles of the United States, leaving people disconnected or resorting to expensive satellite phones. To solve this issue, T-Mobile and SpaceX will create a new network broadcast from Starlink satellites using T-Mobile's mid-band spectrum, already in use nationwide, to provide a satellite-to-cellular service accessible from 'almost anywhere a customer can see the sky.'

TikTok is facing many questions regarding its data security after rumors began circulating about its source code becoming comprised.

Bloomberg reported that several cyber security analysts took to Twitter on Monday to inform the public about a potential security breach in TikTok's source code. This security breach was traced to TikTok's data storage that the analysts claim contained personal account information on users, which led them to deem the purported breach a "high-severity vulnerability". The security breach was found in TikTok's Android application and would have allowed attackers to "comprise users' accounts with a single click".

On September 3 posts surfaced on the Breach Forums message board where a hacker wrote that the server contains 2.05 billion records in a humongous 790GB database. Followed by these rumors was a tweet from hacking group BlueHornet, who has seemingly had their account suspended by Twitter after this story gained traction. The tweet read, "Who would have thought that TikTok would decide to store all their internal backend source code on one Alibaba Cloud instance using a trashy password?".

Researchers have detected a large sunspot on the far side of the Sun that's changing the way our star vibrates.

A sunspot is a phenomenon that appears on the surface of the Sun as black blotches, these regions of the Sun's surface are darker because they are colder than the surrounding area. Sunspots present themselves in areas with strong magnetic fields as these fields prevent convection from occurring, or more simply, the heat from inside of the star reaching the surface.

As the sunspot continues to grow, it can cause events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME), both of which are closely associated and, when directed at Earth, can have negative effects on the planet. When Earth is slapped with a solar flare or a CME, a geomagnetic storm is caused that disrupts communication services such as radio and GPS.

NASA recently had to call off the launch of the world's most powerful rocket after malfunctions presented themselves that couldn't be remedied in time.

The Space Launch System (SLS) carrying NASA's Orion spacecraft rocket was scheduled to launch on September 3, but the space agency had to scrub the launch after it detected a liquid hydrogen leak that was traced back to a fuel line. Reports indicate that engineers tried on three separate occasions to reseal the fuel feed line but weren't able to achieve success.

After NASA officially called off the launch of the Artemis 1 mission, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that the rocket's next launch window will take place in early October, with the space agency putting all its effort into getting Artemis 1 off the ground, Nelson said it would be aiming for a date somewhere in the middle of the month. Artemis 1 is the first step NASA will take on getting humans back on the surface of the Moon as the SLS rocket will transport the Orion capsule on a reconnaissance journey around the Moon and back to Earth.

The skeletal remains of a "female vampire" have been uncovered in the village of Pien, Poland.

Researchers from the nearby Nicholas Copernicus University were conducting archaeological work at a seventeenth-century cemetery in the village when they uncovered the human remains, buried with a sickle and padlock. The researchers also found the skull adorning a silk cap, indicating the woman once held high social status. The sickle was laid over the throat, while one of the big toes was padlocked to supposedly 'prevent her returning from the dead.'

Professor Polinski said that the padlocked toe was likely symbolic of 'the closing of a stage and the impossibility of returning.' While he noted that the burial was unusual, similar burial sites have been found throughout the region, with bodies either having sickles placed similarly or skulls impaled with stakes or metal rods, under the belief that this would stop anyone returning from the dead.

A study on the diamond formation titled 'Diamond formation kinetics in shock-compressed C─H─O samples recorded by small-angle x-ray scattering and x-ray diffraction' has been published in the journal Science Advances.

An international team of researchers led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) laboratory, the University of Rostock, and the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France, have completed an experiment in which they were able to create tiny diamonds from PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) plastic. Their investigation was conducted to elucidate what happens inside icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus, where it is believed it "rains diamonds."

Using a high-powered X-ray laser, the team heated a thin film of PET plastic to 6,000 degrees Celsius (10,832 degrees Fahrenheit) while simultaneously generating a shock wave that compressed the material with pressures exceeding a million times atmospheric pressure over a few nanoseconds. These conditions simulate those found in the interior of planets like Neptune and Uranus, as does the presence of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in PET plastic, simulating the distribution of such elements found inside the planets.

A coronal mass ejection, or CME, has hit the joint European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA Solar Orbiter, originating from the Sun, containing highly energetic particles like protons and electrons at extremely high speed.

The spacecraft was due to fly past Venus on Sunday, September 4th, using the planet for a gravity-assist maneuver to alter its orbit and help it come closer to the Sun. Days earlier, on August 30th, the Sun shot out a CME in the satellite's direction. The ESA has reported no negative effects on the spacecraft from the CME, as it has been designed to withstand them.

However, the same cannot be said for Venus, whose atmosphere is usually eroded somewhat as the CME passes through it, stripping away the gases within. The Solar Orbiter's orbital path around the Sun was chosen to bring it close to Venus every few times it orbits around the Sun, allowing it to take advantage of its gravity to tilt or otherwise adjust its orbit.

Elon Musk has given his thoughts on the recently released The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV show.

Amazon has finally released The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and more than 25 million people have viewed the first two episodes, according to Amazon's recently released numbers. The first two episodes have been released, and the response from the audience has been mixed, with some viewers being impressed and excited about the series and others criticizing Amazon's choices. It seems that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk falls into the latter of the two groups.

Musk took to his personal Twitter account to simply write, "Tolkien is turning in his grave", which was quickly followed by an additional tweet that gave some insight into Musk's reasoning. Musk wrote that almost every male character seen in the show is a "coward, a jerk or both", adding that "only Galadriel is brave, smart and nice". Stemming from Musk's previous comment, the Tesla founder switched to a screenshot of his comment section with the caption, "and 90% of my comments are bots", seemingly poking fun at the continuous debate over Twitter's total number of bot/spam accounts.

Reports indicate that several Russian soldiers have been baited by hackers using fake accounts of attractive women.

A new report from the Financial Times delves into a group of hackers called Hackyourmom that was founded by Nikita Knysh, a 30-year-old IT professional from Kharkiv, a northeastern city in Ukraine. Knysh informed the publication that he wanted to assist his country with the invasion and decided to form a group that consists of thirty hackers from various locations across Ukraine.

The founder of the group stated that last month he and his fellow hackers were able to gather the locations of several Russian soldiers in Melitopol by pretending to be attractive women on several social media platforms. The hackers communicated with Russian soldiers for quite some time, eventually convincing them to send photos of them on the front line, which immediately gave the hackers enough information to discern an approximate location.

Intel's next-gen GPUs are being talked about before gamers have the current-gen Arc Alchemist graphics card in their hands, with the Intel GPU ASIC team working on next-gen "Battlemage" and "Celestial" GPUs already.

We are hearing more about Intel's future GPU plans through an interview with Intel's Tom Peterson and PCGamer, where Peterson said that most of the ASIC team is working on the next-gen Battlemage GPU, while a "small portion" are on their future GPU: Celestial.

Intel hasn't even got its Arc Alchemist GPUs ready for consumers and gamers yet, but the Intel GPU ASIC team is already onto (hopefully) bigger and better things. The software team at Intel has been making great strides, getting the pot holes inside of their drivers and compatibility up to scratch over the last couple of months. Things aren't all doom-and-gloom at Team Blue.