Latest News - Page 1100

The last we heard about Nightdive Studio's remake of System Shock is that the game was done on the PC, with console ports the only thing left to do... and now... now, we have a new System Shock remake gameplay video. Check it out:

The System Shock remake is looking fantastic, with a graphical overhaul I can't wait to dive into when it releases later this year -- still, without a release date -- on the PC, and consoles. The new gameplay video gives us a great look at some of the visual overhaul the team at Nightdive has done, with graphics that are more in line with games of today, compared to the mid-90s.

Nightdive's upcoming System Shock remake has been completely reworked after a huge $1,350,700 from their original Kickstarter goal of just $900,000. The team started on the Unity Engine, but they've since moved over to Unreal Engine... as well as adding members from studios that worked on games like Fallout: New Vegas, Mass Effect, and BioShock.

Black Shark has just unveiled their latest flagship gaming smartphone, the new Black Shark 5 Pro which has some rather incredible specs in your hands.

The new Black Shark 5 Pro gaming smartphone has the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 processor, up to 16GB of super-fast LPDDR5 memory, and up to 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. It wouldn't be a new flagship gaming smartphone without a high-end, super-fast refresh rate display with the new Black Shark 5 Pro gaming smartphone featuring a 144Hz AMOLED display with 720Hz touch sampling... so your actions are near instantaneous at that point.

Black Shark cools its new gaming smartphone with "anti-gravity Dual VC liquid cooling" so that you can have "speed beyond gravity". There's also a magnetic pop-up trigger, 108-megapixel triple-camera system, and a dual-zone pressure-sensitive 144Hz OLED flexible display. The 120W Hyper Charge is capable of fully charging the Black Shark 5 Pro gaming smartphone in just 15 minutes.

One of my favorite games of all time would have to be Flashback, a game that is -- 30 years later -- getting a sequel. Flashback 2 now has a release window, where it will hit the PC and consoles later this year.

Details are scant on Flashback 2, but we do know that publisher Microids has announced Flashback 2 is currently in production and the release is later this year on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, and Xbox One. The portable Nintendo Switch will enjoy some on-the-go Flashback 2 sometime in 2023.

What we do know about the game is that it will feature puzzles and action, just as the original did -- with familiar locations including Neo Washington, through to a jungle -- with new locations for players like a mysterious space station, and Neo Toyko. Flashback 2 enjoyed a slick gameplay teaser during the recent Summer Games Fest, where we get to see platforming, climbing, and more.

Intel will be launching its new 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs later this year, with the flagship Core i9-13900K to be joined by the non-K variant -- the Core i9-13900 -- which is in the headlines because SiSoftware has posted up a "mini review" of the unreleased CPU.

It looks like an early engineering sample of the 24-core, 32-thread "Raptor Lake" CPU has been used in the wild -- the main attraction here being the updated Raptor Lake P-cores and Gracemont (E-cores) with an optimized 10nm (Intel 7+) package. Outside of the new P-cores and E-cores, we've got support for higher-speed DDR5 RAM, more cache, and more.

As for the SiSoftware "performance preview" of the upcoming Intel Core i9-13900, we have a purported 33-50% improvement in ALU/FPU tests, and 5-8% improvement in vectorized/SIMD tests.

Blizzard has announced that Overwatch 2 will be launching in early access form on October 4, for the PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch.

Overwatch 2 will be purely free-to-play with both cross-platform play, and cross-platform progression... with Blizzard to add new heroes, reworks to heroes, maps, modes, and premium cosmetics over time. Blizzard will be launching Overwatch 2 with a new tank character -- Junker Queen -- another Australian character (as an Aussie, woohoo) that joins Junkrat.

The cinematic trailer made me feel like a kid again, super exciting stuff, even though I was disappointed in the Overwatch 2 PvP beta... and have been playing OW1 ever since. We should expect more details during the June 16 Reveal Event, which isn't too far away at all... barely 48 hours now.

Intel's next-next-gen 14th Gen Core "Meteor Lake" CPU architecture is still a year+ away, but leaks have been good for a while now... the latest is a "Meteor Lake-P" die shot, check it out:

The new Intel 14th Gen Core "Meteor Lake" die shot teases 6 Performance and 8 Efficient cores, baked on Intel's new Intel 4 EUV process (previously referred to as 7nm process technology). Intel 4 will push +20% higher CPU clocks for the same power consumption according to ComputerBase.

The slides suggest that Intel is wanting to hit twice the High-Performance Library Area Scaling, extensive use of EUV lithography for process simplification, and work with Intel packaging technologies including EMIB and FOVEROS. Intel's new 14th Gen Core "Meteor Lake" CPU package will pack x86 compute cores, SoC, and I/O dies all on the single interposer, with Intel proudly declaring Meteor Lake is the lead product for Intel 4 process technology.

Hideo Kojima officially confirms that he's making a cloud game for Xbox.

The reports were right: Kojima is indeed making a new cloud game for Xbox. The project wasn't formally announced, but Kojima did say it will be a unique one-of-a-kind type of experience. It is likely this particular game is the recently leaked Overdose project starring Death Stranding's Margaret Qualley.

"Yes, there is a game I have always wanted to make. It's a completely new game and one that no one has ever experienced or seen before. I've waited a very long time for the day when I could finally start to create it,"Kojima said at the event.

The Necromancer returns as Diablo IV's fifth and final class, bringing a bunch of old classic spells and abilities and a few new tricks.

Diablo IV's Necro looks like a big evolution over Diablo II and III with four total skill trees: Bone, darkness, blood, and summons. A recent quarterly update confirms some of the new skills and abilities coming to D4's Necro.

Bone skills are relatively physical in nature, and thus benefit more heavily from effects such as Critical Strike. These skills also benefit from having and spending large amounts of Essence, as they have various effects that can cause each of their individual attacks to be even more powerful.

Diablo IV will let players trade in spells, summons and abilities they don't want to use in exchange for character buffs and upgrades.

Blizzard is giving Diablo IV players more power to focus on specialized min-max builds. In a recent quarterly update post, the developers confirmed that Diablo IV's new necromancer class will be able to "sacrifice" certain summon spells in exchange for bonuses. It's unclear if this feature is exclusive to the Necromancer or not, but it could possibly be available to other classes.

"In addition to all this customization, we have also added the ability for players to sacrifice different components of their army for personal benefits. Next to each unit type in the Book of the Dead is an extra option to sacrifice the ability to summon that unit in exchange for a personal, permanent buff,"Diablo IV lead class designer Adam Jackson said.

Ubisoft will hold a special Assassin's Creed live stream event tomorrow, Tuesday, June 14 at 12PM EST / 9AM PST, the company today announced.

Ubisoft skipped its annual games showcase but it looks like they could make up for it with a new Assassin's Creed livestream. The developer is holding a showcase that should look at the past, present, and future of the Assassin's Creed franchise.

Speculation insists that Ubisoft could give teases on upcoming Assassin's Creed titles. Ubisoft is currently working on two new games in the franchise: One game, codenamed Rift, would focus on Assassin's Creed Valhalla's Basim as a standalone game that could launch in 2022 or 2023. The other game, Assassin's Creed Infinity, is a massive new game that could merge live and singleplayer gaming together.

Our predictions were right: Diablo IV will indeed launch next year to coincide with a significant revenue forecast jump at Activision-Blizzard.

Yesterday during the big Xbox showcase, Blizzard announced that Diablo IV, its most ambitious Diablo game yet, will launch in 2023 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. The developers outlined some major features coming to Diablo IV including cross-play and cross-progression, couch co-op, social events, and tons of endgame content that will keep players busy for many years.

In this article we'll outline a few of the things announced during the showcase and highlight what Blizzard developers said about Diablo IV. One thing remains clear: This is going to be a massively replayable game.

Squid Game quickly become the most popular Netflix series ever when it debuted last year, and now the streaming giant has just announced Season 2 of Squid Game, as well as a teaser for the new season:

The teaser is pretty simple, with a video of the massive doll from the first season of Squid Game that wipes out waves of the contestants in the infamous "Red Light, Green Light" game. Netflix uses this, teasing "Red light... GREENLIGHT! Squid Game is officially coming back for Season 2!"

Hwang Dong-Hyuk, writer, director, producer, and creator of Squid Game has said "a whole new round is coming. It took 12 years to bring the first season of 'Squid Game' to life last year. But it took 12 days for 'Squid Game' to become the most popular Netflix series ever".

We are all aware of the dangers of AI but now an engineer at Google has been placed on leave this week after he claimed an AI chatbot had become sentient.

Black Lemoine was talking with an AI chatbot that Google had created, as it was part of his job at Google's Responsible AI organization -- the AI chatbot is an interface called LaMDA -- or Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Google called LaMDA a "breakthrough conversation technology" in 2021... it was already aggressive in March 2017 when I was writing about it, but it seems it has matured.

In a Medium post on the weekend, Lemoine called LaMDA "a person", saying that he chatted with the AI chatbot about religion, consciousness, the laws of robotics, and more -- LaMDA then described itself as a "sentient person" that wants to "prioritize the well being of humanity". Not only that, but the AI wants to "be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property".

Tachyum unveiled their new Prodigy CPUs not too long ago, with some bonkers specifications that seem far too crazy as the company is getting closer to the launch of some of its Prodigy CPUs that are now in pre-order status for evaluation kits.

The flagship Tachyum Prodigy T16128-AIX CPU will reportedly pack up to 128 cores, crazy 5.7GHz CPU clocks, just-as-insane 16-channel DDR5-7200 memory support, and once-again-insane 950W TDP. The 128 custom-designed 64-bit cores will be running at 5.7GHz+ according to the company, made on the 5nm process node and support 1-2TB/sec of memory bandwidth depending on the setup.

Tachyum says that it will be sampling the 128-core CPU "end of 2022". There is also hardware coherency that supports both 2 and 4-socket systems for some truly crazy performance... there are a lot of performance claims here, where Tachyum uses NVIDIA's new Hopper-based H100 GPU in its benchmark comparisons.

Apple just announced its new M2 chip, with 20+ billion transistors on TSMC's still fresh 5nm process node, while it is testing its next-gen M3 chip in-house for a new iMac of the future.

In a new article, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that: "the company is already working on an M3 chip destined for a future iMac and other products". There are no other details of what Apple will pack into the M3, but I'd like to see something truly beefy for a next-gen Apple iMac desktop system.

Rumors began swirling of the new Apple M3 chip in April 2022, where Bloomberg began teasing the M3 for a future iMac. Bloomberg reported at the time: "Since then, I've heard that the M2 chips aren't the only one in testing within Apple. And if you're waiting for a new iMac, i'm hearing an M3 version of that desktop is already in the works - though I imagine it won't launch until the end of next year at the earliest. Also, for those asking, I still think an iMac Pro is coming. It just won't be anytime soon".

Apple unveiled its new M2 processor at its recent WWDC 2022 event, with detailed specifications seeing it pack an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU on TSMC's 5nm process node.

We quickly heard rumors on Apple's beefier M2 Max SoC but all we heard is that it would be made on TSMC's next-gen 3nm node... and now, we have rumors on the M2 Max specs. We're looking at the M2 Max packing a 12-core GPU (up from the 10-core CPU on the plain M2) while M2 Max reportedly packs a beefier 38-core GPU (up from the 10-core GPU on the plain M2).

Bloomberg detailed that the M2 Max chips in the new high-end MacBook Pro laptops will "include 12 main processing cores and up to 38 graphics cores, up from a maximum of 10 processing cores and 32 graphics cores in the current models".

SpaceX continues to push satellite internet technology, with their latest Starlink satellites rocking newer laser communication instead of radio links.

The company has been launching its lastest generation satellites into lower Earth orbit since September 2021, but they will soon go active and we'll see laser-based SpaceX Starlink satellite internet connectivity. The new inter-optical connectivity aka lasers will be used to serve users in the polar regions, where SpaceX filed an application with the FCC's International Bureau with the Committee approving the temporary use of Starlink satellites at latitudes higher than 53 degrees.

Elon explained in a tweet: "Starlink inter-satellite laser links should be operational by end of year. This will dramatically reduce global latency. Light travels ~40% faster in vacuum/air than in fiber optic cables & satellite path length is shorter (cables follow coastlines)".

AMD has confirmed a bunch of its next-gen GPU architectures at its recent Financial Analyst Day 2022, with details on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 architectures... as well as the world's first exascale APU: CDNA 3.

AMD's next-gen CDNA 3 architecture will be the first exascale APU design, packing both CPU and GPU chiplets on the same package. AMD has promised an insane 5x or higher (AI) performance-per-watt uplift for its new CDNA 3 architecture over the current CDNA 2 architecture.

The company said that the expected performance-per-watt uplift for CDNA 3 will be achieved through the new 5nm process and 3D chiplet packaging, the next-gen AMD Infinity Cache, 4th Gen Infinity architecture, unified memory APU architecture, and new math formats. A huge +500% increase... but the chart does note "AI performance/watt uplift".

AMD confirmed a few tidbits for its next-gen RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPU architectures during its recent Financial Analyst Day 2022 where Senior Vice President of Radeon Technologies Group, David Wang, showed off the roadmap for next-gen RDNA and CDNA GPUs.

In the update, AMD confirmed that its next-gen GPU architecture after RDNA 3 debuts later this year, is RDNA 4 which is expected in 2024. In the slide, we can see that AMD shows us that RDNA was made on 7nm, RDNA 2 was also made on 7nm, next-gen RDNA 3 is made on 5nm, and the next-next-gen RDNA 4 is made on an "Advanced Node".

This isn't new for anyone who keeps up with GPU rumors, where I reported on rumors about RDNA 4 using 3nm and 5nm nodes for RDNA 4 MCM GPUs (multi-chip module, or chiplet design as AMD just confirmed for its RDNA 3 GPUs). Back in August 2020, I was reporting from leaks that said the RDNA 4 is a "full product line with a common architecture, and RDNA 4 MCM will use 3nm+5nm". It seems RDNA 3 will be made on 5nm, and RDNA 4 to be made on 3nm+5nm (with GPU tiles on 3nm + I/O tile on 5nm).

AMD has provided more details for its next-gen RDNA 3 GPU architecture, confirming that RDNA 3 features a chiplet design -- compared to the monolithic GPU we've gotten used to.

The news on RDNA 3 is coming from AMD itself during its recent Financial Analyst Day 2022 where Senior Vice President of Radeon Technologies Group, David Wang, showed off the roadmap for next-gen RDNA and CDNA GPUs. We now know that AMD is promising over 50% more performance-per-watt with RDNA 3 over RDNA 2, cementing the rumors that NVIDIA's next-gen GPUs will be using FAR more power than RDNA 3 GPUs.

AMD says that the 50% performance-per-watt uplift is achieved through the shift to the new 5nm process node by TSMC, advanced chiplet packaging, rearchitected compute unit, optimized graphics pipeline, and next-gen AMD Infinity Cache technology. This means that we can expect a significant performance jump from new Radeon RX 7000 series cards, that won't require 1200W+ power supplies and 4 x 8-pin power connectors.