Latest News - Page 1079

Rockstar Games may have cancelled its plans to release a next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S version of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Rockstar just announced that it will be paring back Red Dead Online content so it can exclusively focus on GTA Online and development of GTA 6. Rockstar confirmed that Red Dead Online content expansions have been halted, and sources say this wasn't the only project that was put on hold in favor of GTA 6.

Sources have told Rockstar insider Tez2 (and Kotaku) that remasters of Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto IV have also been put on hold, and possibly even cancelled. There's two main reasons for this: 1) Rockstar is all hands-on deck for GTA 6 right now, and 2) Rockstar wants to avoid another disastrous GTA Trilogy Remaster Definitive Edition controversy. To avoid that controversy it would need to double-down on making sure these remasters were quality products, and that would require pulling people off of the GTA 6 teams.

Sony's new INZONE brand of enthusiast game peripherals is made specifically for PC gaming, not necessarily PlayStation users.

Like Xbox did before it, PlayStation is evolving to include PC gaming. Sony has released a number of first-party PS4 exclusives onto PC and more are set to follow. In fact, Sony expects to make $300 million in revenues from PC game sales this year. Now Sony is making special high-end gaming peripherals to complement its PC gaming push.

Enter the INZONE brand, a new lineup of enthusiast-grade displays, headsets, and soon controllers. INZONE currently has two monitors (INZONE M9, a 27-inch 4K 144Hz display, and the INZONE M3, a 27-inch 1080p 240Hz display) and three headsets, the H3, H7, and H9. Although the peripherals are compatible with the PlayStation 5, they are targeting PC gamers first.

Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was recently assassinated during a political rally. Internet jokesters created memes on how the actual assassin Tetsuya Yagami looked similar to Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima. The memes circulated and French reporter Damien Rieu caught wind of it, re-shared the images on Twitter, and a Greek newscast ran the story as a video while another Iranian newspaper used the image on their print media.

Now Hideo Kojima says he is prepared to take legal action. In a post on the Kojima Productions Twitter page, the dev said this: "Kojima Productions strongly condemns the spread of fake news and rumors that convey false information. We do not tolerate such libel and will consider taking legal action in some cases."

All erroneous reports have apparently been corrected. The Greek news reports have been edited, mention of Kojima as the assassin have been scrubbed from Twitter, and images portraying him as the assassin have likewise been removed from social media as per service regulations. But the case of mistaken identity for such a high-profile crime could have lasting effects on Kojima's reputation for those that aren't in the know about video games, or for those that haven't seen the clarification reports.

Ubisoft has delisted two games from sale on Steam, and plans to revoke access to all current owners--in short, Ubisoft is taking your digital games away.

Today Ubisoft inadvertently kicked off a new controversy surrounding digital media ownership rights (e.g., when you buy a game on Xbox LIVE, PS Store, or Steam, you don't own the game--you own the rights to access the game). Steam listings confirm that Ubisoft has plans to remove ownership access to two particular games, Assassin's Creed Liberation HD and Silent Hunter 5.

Both games have now been delisted from Steam and cannot be purchased on the platform, but not before the wide Steam Summer Sale discounted both products (Google searches show that Liberation HD and Silent Hunter 5 were sold for 75% off). It's also worth noting that Assassin's Creed III, which will also be shut down on September 2022, has been delisted too. Current owners will have a two-month grace period to play the games. After September 1, 2022, the games will be unplayable and revoked from your digital library.

Sony's first-party PlayStation game dev Haven Studios is looking to use machine learning for its upcoming live games.

Today Sony completed its acquisition of Haven Studios, a new startup dev team created by Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge alum Jade Raymond. Haven is currently helping lead the charge in Sony's big new live service game plan which will see 12 first-party PlayStation live games released onto the market by 2025.

What's interesting is that Haven Studios wants to use the PlayStation 5's machine learning (ML) capabilities to help power its live games. Back in late June, Logan Olson, who's part of Haven's Creative ML team, announced he was building a group of engineers to help build ML solutions.

The new Robocop Rogue City first-person shooter game will use the same grid targeting system that was seen in the 1980s hero classic.

Teyon, the studio that made Terminator: Resistance, is making a new Robocop FPS game called Rogue City. The project will apparently stay quite true to the original film, complete with new performances from original Robocop actor Peter Weller and many throwbacks to the 80's satirical dystopian film.

Robocop's arsenal is an authentic recreation with the signature Auto-9 pistol and the original grid-based target lock aiming seen from the film. The game looks to use the exact same simple-yet-futuristic targeting system lifted directly out of the retro sci-fi classic, and will auto-lock onto enemies and specific targets in what appears to be a potentially scripted or QTE moment where you have to pull the trigger during the right time.

The James Webb Space Telescope is slated to unlock the universe to researchers with powerful instruments capable of looking further back in time than ever before.

A new report published in Nature last Friday estimates that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be slapped by at least one meteorite per month for the rest of its life. Notably, NASA stated in early June that its next-generation space telescope was struck by a micrometeorite in May, and that the impact didn't cause any significant damage. However, over time NASA estimates that micrometeorite impacts will reduce the total lifespan on if the observatory.

So far, Webb has been smacked by five micrometeorites, with the fifth being the most recent and the largest. When Webb was being designed, engineers knew the large observatory would be prone to fast-moving dust particles impacting the mirrors, which is why they took a large amount of time testing how much Webb's mirrors could endure micrometeorite impacts.

NASA has explained that one of the asteroids left over from the formation of the solar system isn't what it appears to be.

Asteroid Bennu is a relic from the formation of the solar system, and is expected to hold many clues about the history of the solar system, ancient life, and more. With the aforementioned goals in mind, NASA launched its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to collect a sample from the asteroid, and it was successfully acquired in October 2020 when it briefly landed on the asteroid's surface.

NASA explains that it didn't expect Bennu's surface to be so loosely packed, and according to a recent blog post on NASA's website, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft would have sunk into Bennu if the spacecraft didn't fire its thrusters immediately after it collected the sample. According to Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx, "our expectations about the asteroid's surface were completely wrong". The space agency says a good way to think about what it would be like to walk on the surface of Bennu is to imagine walking in a plastic ball pit.

COLORFUL's new G-One Plus AIO gaming PC has received an awesome teardown treatment, after being teased and announced last month... the new AIO gaming PC is now for sale. Check out the teardown:

The new teardown of the COLORFUL G-One Plus AIO gaming PC was done by Chinese tech media "EJ Hardware", with the team pulling the AIO system apart and giving us a good look at the innards of the PC. The COLORFUL G-One Plus AIO gaming PC packs a custom motherboard for the Intel Alder Lake-H mobile CPU + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU.

There are also regular SO-DIMM slots for the DDR5 memory, as well as a secondary M.2 SSD slot -- so you can upgrade the DDR5 RAM, and add in a secondary M.2 SSD slot if you want. COLORFUL offers users multiple CPU configurations: Core i5-12500H (12-core), Core i7-12700H (14-core) or Core i9-12900H (16-core) but EJ Hardware tested out the COLORFUL G-One Plus AIO gaming PC powered by the lower-end Core i5-12500H processor.

NVIDIA can't let its competitor have all the upscaling technology fun, with the company coming out swinging and announcing its DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology is now used in over 200 games and applications.

NVIDIA has taken the time to announce that DLSS is now powering 200+ games and applications, with DLSS available for every major game engine, and that "adoption has accelerated rapidly, and we have even more DLSS games to announce today".

The new games getting NVIDIA DLSS support include Loopmancer, and Hell Pie, while during the recent Nacon Connect streaming event wee found out that The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Stellrising will be launching in September with both NVIDIA DLSS and ray tracing. Not only that, but NVIDIA has confirmed that both Warhammer 40,000: Darktide and A Plague Tale: Requiem will support NVIDIA DLSS at launch.

NVIDIA's next-gen Hopper GPU architecture is one of the most monsterous pieces of technology the human race has ever created... but it wasn't just humans... artificial intelligence (AI) helped in a huge uway, too.

In a recent post on NVIDIA's own Developer website, the company underlines how it used AI to design the greatest GPU it has created so far: the new NVIDIA Hopper H100 GPU. NVIDIA normally designs most of its next-gen GPUs using Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, but AI helped out with Hopper H100 through the PrefixRL methodology, which is an optimization of Parallel Prefix Circuits using Deep Reinforcement Learning. This allows NVIDIA to design smaller, faster, and more power-efficient GPUs... all while having more performance.

Rajarshi Roy, Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, tweeted: "Arithmetic circuits were once the craft of human experts, and are now designed by AI in NVIDIA GPUs. H100 chips have nearly 13,000 AI designed circuits! How is this possible?" and then posted a link to the blog that he co-wrote on NVIDIA's website.

AMD's next-gen EPYC "Genoa" CPUs are coming soon, with the monster new Zen 4-based EPYC "Genoa" CPU spotted in the flesh with its new SP5 package, and huge LGA-6096 socket.

The new pictures of AMD's upcoming EPYC "Genoa" CPU are from "YuuKi_AnS" and were posted on Reddit, showing the 96-core, 192-thread CPU in all its glory. Not only that, but the new SP5 package and huge LGA-6096 socket are delicious to see as a tech nerd, but man... that heat sink.

AMD's new SP5 heat sink is absolutely mammoth, bloody huge... with 8 torx screws holding down the beast. The new 96-core EPYC "Genoa" CPU has a 360W TDP, so AMD is providing the cooling chops to keep its Zen 4-based processor as cool as possible. The new EPYC "Genoa" CPU has a 50% increase in CPU cores, and 28% boost in TDP compared to the Zen 3-based EPYC "Milan" CPU.

AMD will debut its next-gen RDNA 3 architecture later this year, where rumor has it that the big boy flagship Navi 31-based offering will feature a GPU chiplet-based design... and NVIDIA won't have anything with GPU chiplets, and AMD knows that.

In a recent interview with VentureBeat, AMD senior vice president, corporate fellow and product technology architect, Sam Naffziger talked about GPUs using up to 600W of power by 2025, and so much more. But then VentureBeat's last question was a doozy "Compared to NVIDIA and Intel, do you feel like we're in a state of divergence when it comes to designs, or some kind of convergence?"

Naffziger replied, explaining: "It's hard to speculate. NVIDIA certainly hasn't jumped on the chiplet bandwagon yet. We have a big lead there and we see big opportunities with that. They'll be forced to do so. We'll see when they deploy it. Intel certainly has jumped on that. Ponte Vecchio is the poster child for chiplet extremes. I would say that there's more convergence than divergence.

We all know that the next-gen GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA will be consuming much more power, especially for NVIDIA's highest-end Ada Lovelace GPUs, with AMD expecting to see GPUs using up to 600W of power by 2025.

AMD set an aggressive goal of 25x20 (hitting 25x better energy efficiency for its CPUs and GPUs by 2020) and has smashed it, so much so that the company has set a brand new 30x25 goal (hitting 30x better energy efficiency) by 2025 in the machine learning, and high-performance computing (HPC) markets in data centers.

The news is coming from VentureBeat, which spoke with AMD senior vice president, corporate fellow and product technology architect, Sam Naffziger. Naffziger said: "We've driven the frequency up, and that is something unique to AMD. Our GPU frequencies are 2.5 GHz plus now, which is hitting levels not before achieved. It's not that the process technology is that much faster, but we've systematically gone through the design, re-architected the critical paths at a low level, the things that get in the way of high frequency, and done that in a power-efficient way".

AMD has kinda released its new Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series CPUs to the DIY market, with companies like Falcon Northwest cramming in the super HEDT processor into their new gaming and workstation PCs.

But now an unreleased AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5990X processor has been secured, tested, benchmarked, and overclocked by SkatterBencher. The new engineering sample of the Ryzen Threadripper 5990X processor has 64 cores and 128 threads of CPU power was also put under an EK-Quantum custom loop water cooler, and installed into an ASUS ROG ZENITH II Extreme Alpha motherboard, joined by 32GB of DDR4-2144 (yeah, not DDR5 memory).

SkatterBencher put the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5990X processor through its paces including PBO, Curve Optimizers, and of course: manual overclocking. The manual overclocking by SkatterBencher achieved the best results in performance, with each of the CCDs on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5990X processor tested (there are 8 in total). CCD4 had the best tuning results, hitting 4.82GHz at 1.45V.

I'm sure you've heard by now, but Elon Musk is no longer buying Twitter... after a huge kerfuffle over the world's second-largest social networking site, Twitter is now suing Elon Musk.

Twitter has lawyered up, hiring Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz LLP to sue Elon Musk after the SpaceX and Tesla CEO pulled out of the $44 billion acquisition deal. The news is coming from Bloomberg, which is reporting that the social networking giant will file its lawsuit early this week, while Musk has secured Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP (which is the firm that successfully defended Musk against an ongoing shareholder lawsuit after a failed attempt to take Tesla private in 2018).

Twitter stock isn't doing well, where a week ago it was sitting at the $38 to $39 mark, but has dropped to $36 recently... we'll see how this week goes for the company, and I'm sure it's not going to go down well at all. I'm sure all those nasty "right-wing" and "alt-right" peeps around the world will get blamed, somehow.

President Donald Trump held a rally in Ankorage, Alaska over the weekend where he had some choice words to say about the world's richest man: Elon Musk. President Trump called Elon Musk a "bullshit artist" for backing his opponents during the 2016 and 2020 elections, at the rally speech.

President Trump said: "Nah, he's got himself a mess. You know, he said the other day, 'Oh, I've never voted for a Republican.' I said, 'I didn't know that, he told me he voted for me.' So he's another bullshit artist, but he's not gonna be buying it. He's not gonna be buying it. Although he might later, who the hell knows what's gonna happen. He's got a pretty rotten contract. I looked at his contract, not a good contract. But he's not...Sign up for Truth".

President Trump continued: "I tell you what - Elon... Elon is not gonna buy Twitter! Where did you hear that before? From me. From me".

A study on the creature titled "A three-eyed radiodont with fossilized neuroanatomy informs the origin of the arthropod head and segmentation" has been published in the journal Current Biology.

Researchers from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada, discovered a collection of fossils from the Burgess Shale dating back 506 million years, including "incredibly well preserved" ones of the extinct Stanleycaris hirpex, a kind of arthropod known as a radiodont. The S. hirpex was an ancient marine predator, measuring no more than 20 centimeters (~7.8 inches), existing when few animals grew larger, making it rather formidable.

The fossil collection includes 84 S. hirpex with the brain and nerves intact, showing that the brain of the Stanleycaris was made up of two segments, called the protocerebrum and deutocerebrum, which connect to the eyes and front claws, respectively. This differs radically from present-day arthropods like insects, which have a brain comprising three segments: the protocerebrum, deutocerebrum, and tritocerebrum. Stanleycaris also had a central, third eye on its head between its two stalked eyes, differentiating it from any other known radiodont.

NASA has issued a statement in response to Russia using the International Space Station (ISS) to spread 'anti-Ukraine propaganda.'

On Monday, July 4th, 2022, Russia's space agency Roscosmos shared images of three of its cosmonauts aboard the space station posing with flags representing Russian-backed breakaway states in the Donbas region of Ukraine. This immediately prompted strong responses from retired astronauts and the multiple space agencies involved in the ISS.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Senseable City Lab (SCL) has unveiled a new concept its calling "space bubbles."

Space bubbles would be a form of geoengineering, also known as climate engineering, but not one that focuses directly on Earth-bound systems that could be manipulated to alter the climate, as these pose "tremendous risks to our living ecosystem." Instead, the SCL has conceived of a space-based solution, noting that if we could deflect 1.8% of solar radiation before it hits Earth, "we could fully reverse today's global warming."

The SCL team has tested thin-film structures in its lab, inspired by the work of Roger Angel, who first proposed using them in outer space. The SCL solution would be manufactured in space, easily deployable, and reversible. The ideal position would be the Lagrangian Point between the Earth and the Sun, known as L₁. At this point, the Sun's and the Earth's gravitational influence on an object effectively cancel out, and the object can stay at that same relative position with limited corrections.