Latest News - Page 1141

AMD will be launching its RDNA 2 refresh GPUs on May 10, with ASRock preparing its new flagship Radeon RX 6950 XT OC Formula graphics card.

ASRock's new custom Radeon RX 6950 XT OC Formula graphics card has been spotted with the ECC (Eurasian Economic Commission) and will rock the tweaked Navi 21 XTXH GPU, and 16GB of GDDR6 memory that we should see clocked at 18Gbps. The current Radeon RX 6900 XT has the same 16GB of GDDR6, but it's clocked at 16Gbps.

GPU frequencies will reportedly hit 2475MHz boost, 10% higher than the reference GPU clocks of AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 6950 XT reference specifications. ASRock will be tweaking the hell out of the card like usual, with a fully custom PCB that has 21-phase VRM and 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

AMD hasn't confirmed what speeds of DDR5 memory will be supported out of the box with its new AM5 platform, which supports DDR5-5200 memory out of the box... according to Apacer.

Apacer has confirmed that AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series will support DDR5-5200 memory by default, beating the default DDR5 spec support for Intel and its new Alder Lake platform. Intel is supporting DDR5-4800 out of the box on its DDR5-based on Z690-based motherboards, so it seems AMD has 400MHz higher than JEDEC specs ready for its new Zen 4 architecture.

AMD's new Zen 4 architecture will be the star behind the Ryzen 7000 series show, with AMD entering the DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 ring with its new CPUs and chipsets later this year. AMD is expected to only support DDR5 with its new Ryzen 7000 series CPUs and AM5 platform, whereas Intel supports both DDR4 and DDR5 with its new Alder Lake CPUs (with different chipsets, of course: Z690 for DDR5).

Elon Musk has officially acquired Twitter in a deal that -- money aside -- has bluechecks losing their minds. But that could be temporary, as their minds can be calmed with a brain-computer interface (BCI) thanks to Neuralink.

Musk is going to do something with all of that data that is housed in Twitter's servers and algorithms, which could be fed into Neuralink... the perfect data set. Everything the world has typed into 140-character tweets since its inception, with an AI learning it all... and then the BCI (brain-computer interface) being inserted, quite literally, into your head.

If you thought the SpaceX and Tesla CEO was spending acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, and was just going to reinstate President Trump's account -- he's not coming back, he said so -- you'd be wrong. $44,000,000,000 is a lot of money, with so many 0s and 1s that could be used with Neuralink in the future.

MSI's internal overclocking team has broken a new world record for DDR5 memory overclocking, with MSI OC member Kovan Yang smashing the record: hitting DDR5-10004 speeds.

The MSI OC Team used some very heavily overclocked Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 memory, boosting it up from its stock frequency of DDR5-4800 up to an insane DDR5-10004. The team of course used an MSI motherboard, with the MEG Z690 Unify-X and Intel's latest Core i9-12900KS processor, which was gimped down to 4 cores and a 425MHz CPU clock.

Kingston's Fury Beast DDR5 memory was overclocked to 5001.8MHz with high timings of 72-126-126-126-127-2 -- the only way DDR5-10004 specs were hit. Insanity, absolute insanity, hats off to Yang and the MSI OC Team for this incredible achievement.

Starfield's game engine is a "piece of crap," a former Bethesda Game Studios developer has said.

Starfield's new revamped Creation Engine 2 may be having some issues, particularly with flight mechanics. A former Bethesda Game Studios developer actually says the "engine is a piece of crap," saying that space flight isn't all that fun.

The developer has been sharing Starfiled info on forum site ResetERA since 2021. The user has been authenticated by ResetERA's site admins, and Jason Schreier also confirmed the user was legitimate.

Sony's new game demo policy won't interrupt developer's workloads, and will instead be automated by the PlayStation Store group.

Sony has announced a new mandate that all games on the PlayStation Store that cost more than $34 in wholesale pricing need to have a 2-hour game demo. This is a pretty tall order as there are thousands of games on Sony's storefront.

There's been lost of concern that this would overload game devs with extra work (unless, of course, they asked Sony to lower MSRP of their games on the store to get under the $34 threshold). Now sources tell Kotaku's Ethan Gach that game devs won't actually make the demos. Sony's PlayStation Store engineers will do the heavy lifting and create the 2-hour demos themselves.

Blizzard's segment revenues have dropped to an all-time 8-year low as the developer gears up big projects like Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2.

Activision-Blizzard's latest quarterly earnings show declines in key segments including Blizzard, who has reported the lowest revenues in nearly a decade.

According to data provided by the publisher and compiled by us, Blizzard Entertainment made $274 million revenues throughout Q1 2022, a 43% decline from last year.

Microsoft confirms its Xbox division is currently investigating new fledgling tech like NFTs and cryptocurrency.

After microtransactions and live services, NFTs are gaming's latest craze. In fact, it's possible NFTs could radically change the video games business. Major publishers like Square Enix and SEGA are interested in NFTs, whereas Ubisoft and Konami have already released NFTs (to varying success).

Now Microsoft could be experimenting with NFTs and crypto at its Xbox R&D teams. An Xbox representative recently told Bloomberg that the division is "aware and looking into NFTs, cryptocurrency and other emerging technologies, but don't yet have anything to share."

Sony has clarified on exactly how subscription upgrades will work with the new PlayStation Plus 3-tier plans.

Sony plans to merge PS Plus and PS Now on June 13. So what if you're already subscribed to both services? Sony confirms that these users will get access to the higher-end PlayStation Plus Premium tier.

Existing subscribers of both PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now will migrate to PS Plus Premium at no cost, unlocking access to 740 games across six console generations including PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5 and PlayStation Portable.

Ubisoft's new video game releases have been delayed and pushed back farther than expected, sources have told Kotaku.

Ubisoft is a big publisher with even bigger value, but the company's long-term vision is potentially in jeopardy. Ubisoft's slate of upcoming premium games has reportedly been set back, with new entries in the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Ghost Recon franchises being farther away than Ubisoft would've hoped.

The absence of big game releases makes Ubisoft decidedly vulnerable. The company's live services aren't necessarily able to sustain long-term revenue growth; unlike Blizzard, who can make hundreds of millions every year from monetization, Ubisoft needs to release full games every so often to 1) make revenues from the sales and 2) establish new entry points for microtransactions and live services.

Activision promises that Call of Duty Modern Warfare II will be a spectacle unlike any other in the history of the franchise.

Call of Duty's last annual release is going out with a bang. Activision recently hyped up this year's Call of Duty and confirmed it was a sequel to 2019's Modern Warfare. Apparently Infinity Ward has been working on true next-gen features, optimizations, and content to help push the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S to new levels of immersion.

"This year's Call of Duty is a sequel to 2019's Modern Warfare, the most successful Call of Duty title to date, and will be the most advanced experience in franchise history," Activision said in its recent Q1 earnings report.

A study on the vessels titled "Composition of trace residues from the contents of 11th-12th century sphero-conical vessels from Jerusalem" has published in the journal PLoS One.

The ancient ceramic vessels originated from Jerusalem sometime around the 11th and 12th centuries, and new analysis indicates they may have been used as a form of medieval hand grenade. Researchers found similar vessels often contained scented oils, medicines, and various materials, but the vessels they analyzed appear to have been used to hold flammable and potentially explosive material.

Similar vessels have been reported as being used during the time of the Crusades and were known for "producing loud noises and bright flashes of light." The material inside the vessels analyzed indicates it was a unique, locally produced explosive, not black powder.

Rocket Lab has completed a test run of its next mission by capturing a dummy rocket booster using a helicopter.

Rocket Lab will be using a customized Sikorsky S-92 helicopter to retrieve a falling first-stage rocket booster from the sky in its upcoming "There and Back Again" mission. The mission is scheduled for April 28th if the weather allows, and if successful, it will mark a first-of-its-kind rocket booster retrieval of the company's Electron rocket.

In preparation for the mission, the company has conducted numerous test flights, the latest of which has involved a dummy rocket booster parachuting through the sky as the real thing will, before being collected by the incoming helicopter and its custom grappling hook.

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) has released a new Global Assessment Report.

The latest Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR2022) examines how structures and governance systems are evolving around the world to address systemic risk. The UN's introduction to the report states that despite commitments to tackle climate change and create a more sustainable world, current societal, political, and economic choices are achieving the opposite.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes measures like the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (Sendai Framework) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to help create a more sustainable world that would help mitigate the onset of more disasters.

May's full moon is known as the Flower Moon to signify the wildflowers that bloom throughout the month in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Flower Moon will undergo a total lunar eclipse on the night of May 15th to May 16th, with the eclipse beginning around 01:32 UTC on May 16th. The eclipse will nearly reach its maximum around the time of the full moon, which will happen almost three hours later at 04:14 UTC, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory.

These timings will vary somewhat depending on your location across the globe, as the moon needs to be on the opposite side of the Earth to the sun for a full moon to occur. The total lunar eclipse comes about two weeks after April's partial solar eclipse, giving another time for the Earth to come in between the moon and the sun for a total lunar eclipse.

Both The Boring Company and its founder Elon Musk have recently tweeted about plans for upcoming hyperloop work by the company.

"Full-scale" will begin at some point this year for a hyperloop, while according to Musk "in the coming years" the company will try to build a working hyperloop. He claimed that a hyperloop would be the fastest possible way to get from one city center to another for journeys under about two thousand miles, and Starship would be faster for anything longer.

Musk claims this comes "from a known physics standpoint," however, as of yet, other companies have yet to realize working hyperloops, with some claiming they are not commercially viable. Musk originally estimated in his white paper published on this concept in 2013 that a hyperloop would cost about $11 million per mile.

NVIDIA is reportedly testing a new board with its new AD102 GPU, powered by the new Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, and this one is a freaking monster.

The new AD102-powered test board rumor is coming from leaker "kopite7kimi" who said that "there is another full-fat AD102 SKU with 900W TGP, 48GB 24Gbps GDDR6X, 2x16pin and higher frequency". So we have an AD102 GPU, 48GB of GDDR6X @ 24Gbps, a very hefty dual 16-pin power setup and an insane 900W of power.

This sounds like a next-gen Ada Lovelace-powered TITAN RTX, especially with 48GB of GDDR6X memory. Even the newest flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti rocks 24GB of GDDR6X, same with the card it replaced: the RTX 3090 also had 24GB of GDDR6X. But dual 16-pin power connectors, 900W of power, and 48GB of VRAM? Yeah, that doesn't sound like a GeForce... at least not yet, maybe in 2024+.

KIOXIA has just introduced the latest member of its growing PCIe 4.0 family of SSDs, with the new XG8 Series of client SSDs for high-end notebooks, desktops, gaming PCs, workstations, and even data center boot applications.

The new KIOXIA XG8 Series SSDs are available in the super-fast PCIe 4.0 interface, in the M.2 type 2280 form factor. We've got the latest TCG Pyrite 2.01 and TCG Opal 2.01 standards. What does this mean? KIOXIA explains that these standards "ensure data is kept secure at home, in the office, or on the road. In addition, the XG8 Series features end-to-end data path protection for greater data integrity".

Neville Ichhaporia, vice president, SSD marketing and product management, KIOXIA America, Inc. said: "With the addition of the XG8 Series we are proud to offer a comprehensive client PCIe 4.0 portfolio. Built with our fifth generation BiCS FLASHTM 3D flash memory, the XG8 Series delivers a next-generation solution for client and data center boot applications in need of advanced performance".

v-color is a brand you might not have heard of, but the company is out of Taiwan and has just announced its new Manta XPrism RGB DDR5 gaming memory.

The new v-color Manta XPrism RGB DDR5 gaming memory comes in a 32GB DDR5 memory kit, with multiple speeds: DDR5-5600, and DDR5-6400. You've got a few kits here with speeds kicking off at 5600 CL36-36-36-76 1.2v, and topping out at 6400MHz CL32-39-39-102 1.4v.

DDR5 memory is exclusive to Intel's 12th Gen Core CPUs and the flagship Z690-based motherboards, with the 32GB kits coming in 2 x 16GB, if you fill most boards with 2 kits you'd have 64GB of DDR5 memory ready to go. The new v-color Manta XPrism RGB DDR5 gaming memory is available in both white and black, and is XMP 3.0 ready for optimal frequencies out of the box with a few BIOS adjustments.

NVIDIA has released its new GeForce Game Ready 512.59 WHQL drivers, which are Game Ready for Dune: Spice Wars, but as usual -- there's much more here.

The new NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 512.59 WHQL drivers offer supports for the latest updates to Chernobylite, which now offers ray tracing. JX3 Online has NVIDIA DLSS support now, which is supported inside of the new GeForce Game Ready 512.59 WHQL drivers, while the new drivers also offer support for the early access launch of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt.

You can download the new NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 512.59 WHQL drivers here (785MB download).