Latest News - Page 1162

Sabrent has officially unleashed its super-fast, and super-huge 8TB variant of its Rocket 4 Plus NVMe Gen4 M.2 SSD.

The new Sabrent 8TB Rocket 4 Plus NVMe M.2 SSD has its absolutely gigantic 8TB of capacity, joined by a super-fast 7.1GB/sec (7100MB/sec) reads and equally large 6.6GB/sec (6600MB/sec) writes. You'll need a Gen4-capable motherboard of course, but you already knew that.

You can use the Sabrent 8TB Rocket 4 Plus SSD on your Gen3-based motherboard, but you'll only hit max reads of 3.4GB/sec (3400MB/sec) and writes of 3GB/sec (3000MB/sec). It wouldn't be worth it at that point, but for those with Gen4-capable motherboards (X570, Z690, etc) then you've just got the green light from Sabrent for your next storage-related purchase.

NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is now official, with liquid cooling leader EK announcing a bunch of new Quantum Vector water blocks for the new RTX 3090 Ti GPU.

The new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti might have the same 24GB of GDDR6X memory, but they're Micron's latest 2Gbit modules which means there's no double-sided GDDR6X here, thus no need for active backplates. NVIDIA's first GeForce RTX 3090 had double-sided GDDR6X memory and saw temperatures soaring to 110C when stressed.

EK knows that there isn't really a need to have an active backplate for the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti -- as the RTX 3090 Ti has the same 24GB GDDR6X as the RTX 3090, but with new 2GB chips so there's no GDDR6X modules on the back of the card -- enthusiasts don't care, they want active backplates for the RTX 3090 Ti.

E3 2022's all-digital event has been scrapped, and the ESA has sent out internal emails to business partners relaying the news.

While the E3 website says "see you next year" in reference to E3 2022, memos sent out to exhibitors tell a different story. According to info from Razer PR rep Will Powers, E3 2022's all-digital event have been cancelled and the show will skip 2022.

Then an ESA rep told IGN that it E3 will return for 2023 with an all-new format.

Capcom is giving all of its employees a big 30% pay raise as an incentive for retention and recruitment as it aims for its ninth consecutive year of operating earnings growth.

Today Capcom announced that it is increasing base pay for all of its employees. The move follows reorganization of its HR department, which could lead to layoffs and consolidation across the unit. "In order to sustainably strengthen its development and technological capabilities to create the world's finest, high-quality games, Capcom will reorganize its Human Resources around four departmental operations."

As for the pay raise, Capcom plans to increase employee salaries starting today, March 31. "Beginning with the 2022 fiscal year, Capcom will partially revise its compensation system. This will consist of an average base salary increase of 30% (includes the portion for pay raises) and the introduction of a bonus system more closely linked to the company's business performance."

Chinese gaming giant NetEase will reportedly buy Quantic Dream, the developer behind celebrated cinematic games like Beyond Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human.

NetEase is making a big move to buy Quantic Dream, sources have told Tom Henderson. NetEase had purchased a minority stake in Quantic Dream back in 2019 and the acquisition would solidify the company's focus on non-domestic investments; NetEase also gave Bungie $100 million to fund its "bold new vision" in 2018.

Quantic Dream is currently developing three new games: Star Wars Eclipse, a new mobile game, and another mystery project.

Sony recently combined PS Now with PS Plus and announced three new subscription tiers with different prices. One of these subscriptions isn't worth paying the annual rates for.

Sony's new PlayStation Plus tiers are strategically priced to push consumers towards the more expensive 12-month membership options. Sony is offering significant discounts for annual plans of its three new PS Plus tiers, which include Essential, Extra, and Premium (for example, paying month-to-month rates for a year's worth of the Essential membership is double the upfront cost of an annual subscription).

Based on our analysis, the Extra tier isn't worth buying for $100 a year due to the overwhelming added value from the yearly Premium tier option. The Extra tier is essentially the base PlayStation Plus with access to 400 downloadable PS4 and PS5 games.

Sony has confirmed that not every game will stay on the PlayStation Plus Collection.

Back in 2020, Sony released the PS Plus Collection to hit two birds with one stone. The first goal was to give new PS5 owners a bunch of PS4 games to play. The second objective was to help spark PlayStation Plus subscriber retention.

The promotion has apparently worked well, and in tandem with the PS5's release, PS Plus Collection was part of a big PS Plus subscriber push to 47.4 million in Q3 2020, up from 45.9 million in Q2. Retention took a dip in Q1 2021 as PS Plus subscribers fell to 46.3 million, then bounced back to 47.2 million in Q2 before finally settling at a record 48 million in Q3 2021.

A study on the cryovolcanoes titled "Large-scale cryovolcanic resurfacing on Pluto" has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

NASA's New Horizons mission has captured detailed images of the surface of Pluto, which new research has used to suggest two large mounds as being potentially active cryovolcanoes. The surface around these cryovolcanoes, or ice volcanoes, appears to have formed due to fairly recent activity.

The possibility of the active cryovolcanoes suggests liquid water could be flowing or have recently flowed under the dwarf planet's surface, and potentially more heat closer to Pluto's interior than previously thought. These conditions could allow for some form of life to exist on Pluto, hidden beneath the surface.

The moon sample will be auctioned by the Bonhams auction house on April 13th.

The sample contains lunar dust collected by Neil Armstrong on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. The item is expected to sell for as much as $1.2 million and was described by the auction house as "the only example of verified Apollo 11 Moon dust that can be legally sold."

Plans for SpaceX's Starlink satellites show that the constellation hopes to one day grow to 42,000 strong.

CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, has estimated on Twitter that within the next 18 months, over 4200 Starlink satellites will be operational. When disregarding defunct satellites still in orbit, this number will mean that Starlink satellites make up two-thirds of all operational satellites around Earth. This will also require more than a doubling of active Starlink satellites within the same period.

Before that tweet, Musk said that the progress of his SpaceX Falcon team was going well, which is responsible for the Falcon 9 rockets the Starlink satellites are launched aboard. Since the first Starlink launch in May 2019, over 2,000 Starlink satellites have been sent into orbit, with over 1,600 currently operational.

The area of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone dubbed the "Red Forest," only became known as such after the Chernobyl disaster.

In the "Red Forest," high levels of radiation absorbed by the pine trees in the area caused them to turn red. Since then, large swathes of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have come under Russian control and have been sites of active combat since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A Russian troop convoy has been spotted making its way through the area without protective gear.

Reports indicate Russian soldiers have acquired "highly active samples of radionuclides."

Russian forces could use the radioactive material stolen from a radiation monitoring lab near the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant to make dirty bombs, combining conventional explosives with radioactive material. The troops took radionuclides, or radioactive isotopes, and radioactive waste. The material can't be used to make proper nuclear weapons, as none of it contains plutonium or uranium.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced that Kaspersky anti-virus software is a "national security threat".

The announcement from the US regulator comes only weeks after Germany's Federal Office for Information Security advised all citizens to avoid downloading and installing Kaspersky as the regulator found doubt in the "reliability of the manufacturer." Relatively the same statements have echoed from the FCC, that have now added Kaspersky to its list of "communications equipment and services that pose an unacceptable risk to national security".

When Germany advised against Kaspersky, the anti-virus company responded by denying any ties to the Russian government or any other government and that the decision made by Germany's cybersecurity agency was politically charged and wasn't based on a technical analysis of Kaspersky's products. Kaspersky is a Russian multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus firm that has its corporate headquarters in Moscow and operates a holdings company in the United Kingdom.

Facebook's now parent company Meta has reportedly been funding an anti-TikTok campaign through one of the leading Republican consulting firms.

According to reports from the Washington Post, the consulting firm Facebook has been funding is Targeted Victory, which in 2020 managed to rake in $230 million, with its largest clients being groups such as the pro-Trump super PAC, America First Action. WAPO reports that Facebook has been paying Targeted Victory to run anti-TikTok campaigns that included planting op-eds and letters to editors to large newspapers across the US.

The report states that a Targeted Victory director instructed staff at the firm to "get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using." Notably, Facebook decided to hire Targeted Victory only weeks after the platform announced that it was losing daily active users for the first time in its 18 year history.

The International Space Station (ISS) remains at an altitude of about 250 miles, and regularly astronauts aboard the station venture out for a spacewalk to conduct repairs/make improvements to the station.

During astronauts' spacewalks, they are often photographed or filmed, but not regularly does someone capture a spacewalk from the surface of Earth. German astrophotographer Sebastian Voltmer snapped a high-quality image of the ISS that shows NASA astronaut Raja Chari and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer out on a spacewalk sometime last week.

According to Voltmer, the image was captured on March 23, 2022, using the C11 EdgeHD telescope. Furthermore, the astrophotographer said that throughout the spacewalk, the ISS started to appear in the bright morning sky over Germany. "I feel like I just made a once-in-a-lifetime image. It's probably the first ground-based picture showing two spacewalkers on the ISS at the same time," wrote Voltmer.

Officials recently warned that Earth is due to be impacted by a powerful solar storm on March 31 that will likely cause incredible auroras in certain locations around the planet.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned that active sunspot AR2975 erupted 17 solar flares over two days, resulting in two and possibly three coronal mass ejections (CME) to be hurled towards Earth. The massive wave ejected from the Sun is magnetized charged particles that are expected to hit Earth and trigger a moderate geomagnetic storm that NOAA has categorized as G3, which means it has little chance of causing any severe damage to infrastructure such as satellites.

The two CMEs heading for Earth have merged into what is called a "cannibal coronal mass ejection", which is when the second CME overtakes the first CME, combining together to form one large wave of charged particles. NOAA expects that the CME impact will trigger auroras that could be seen as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Oregon.

NASA and the European Space Agency's Hubble Space Telescope has broken a record for capturing the light from a star that existed within the first billion years of the universe.

Researchers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify what is now considered to be the furthest star that humans know of, breaking the previous record held by MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1, which existed 4 billion years after the Big Bang. NASA has announced that the newly discovered star is called Earendel, which means "morning star," and is 12.9 billion light-years away from Earth.

The light from the morning star has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth which means that it existed when the universe was only 7% of its current age, or 900 million years after the Big Bang. Researchers estimate that Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright. Additionally, the newly discovered star isn't expected to have any metal and would mostly be composed of only hydrogen and helium.

Intel has officially launches its new Arc A-Series Mobile GPUs with the lowest-end Arc 3 GPUs launching now, while Arc 5 and Arc 7 launch in the coming months... but what about XeSS?

Intel's new XeSS isn't making the launch, with the AI upscaling technology promised for "early summer" which better lines up with the higher-end desktop Arc Alchemist GPUs launching. AMD just launched its new FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 (FSR 2.0) while NVIDIA has DLSS 2.3 out (and should launch DLSS 3.0 in the coming months leading into Ada Lovelace).

There is something Intel did confirm: XeSS will support up to 20 games at launch, including big titles like Death Stranding: Director's Cut, Ghostwire Tokyo, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and many more. We will have a little while to go yet, but things are beginning to get clearer as Intel rolls out its Arc GPUs to the masses.

Intel has just launched its first Arc A-Series GPUs for laptops, detailing its Arc 3, Arc 5, and Arc 7 families of mobile GPUs that will be powering laptops throughout 2022.

Intel has launched its Arc A-Series Mobile GPUs with the flagship Arc A730M + A770M, with the A730M featuring 24 Xe GPU cores while the A770M rocks 32 Xe GPU cores. The Arc A730M has GPU clocks of up to 1100MHz while the flagship Arc A770M has GPU clocks of up to 1650MHz.

We will see 16GB of GDDR6 memory on the Intel Arc A770M on a 256-bit memory bus and 120-150W TDP, while the Arc A730M has 12GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit memory bus and 80-120W TDP. Under that we have the Arc A550M with 16 Xe GPU cores and up to 900MHz GPU clocks, 8GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit memory bus and 60-80W TDP.

Intel has just officially teased its Arc A-Series desktop GPU, with the official Intel Arc Alchemist Desktop Limited Edition graphics card teased by the company just now. Check it out:

The company teases its upcoming Intel Arc A-Series Limited Edition GPU, where inside we should see the full-spec ACM-G10 GPU with 32 Xe-Cores and 16GB of GDDR6 memory. For display connectivity we can see that Intel is going with 3 x DisplayPort and 1 x HDMI 2.1 connector -- at least we'd hope so.

We don't know how many PCIe power connectors Intel's new Arc A-Series Limited Edition graphics card will have, but I doubt it'll have one of those nice new 16-pin PCIe power connectors that NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has... not that Intel's more mid-range Arc A-Series GPU would need that.