Latest News - Page 1203

AMD's new RDNA 3-based GPU architecture is going to be unleashed later this year, with a new leak coming from an AMD employee who listed some new details on the Navi 3X GPUs coming in the next few years.

We haven't had confirmation on which process nodes that the new RDNA 3 chips will be made on, but the post by the AMD staffer (who is the Principal Member of Technical Staff - Infinity Data Fabric Silicon Design Team) posted some details about his projects in the pipeline that included Navi 31, Navi 32, and Navi 33.

Navi 31 would be on 5nm + 6nm, Navi 32 on 5nm + 6nm, and then Navi 33 on 6nm. The post also includes past and current projects that include Vega 10, Vega 11, Vega 12, Navi 10, Navi 12, Navi 14, Navi 21, Navi 22, and Navi 23 -- all made on 7nm. The AMD employee has also worked on the higher-end workstation-focused Vega 20, but then there's also the MI100, MI200, and MI300 (which will be on 6nm).

"Production isn't just halted, the RTX 3090 Ti has been delayed indefinitely".

Yeah, it has happened... but how did it start? NVIDIA announced the new flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card back during its CES 2022 press conference and said that it would tell the world more later in the month. Well, that month was January 2022 and that month has passed, and is now in the rear view mirror.

I exclusively revealed back on January 14 that NVIDIA had ordered its AIB partners to "halt production" on the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, and then in the weeks after it became obvious the new monster GPU was nowhere to be seen. NVIDIA has been absolutely silent on the matter, not a single word about the RTX 3090 Ti in weeks -- only from me on January 14, and now Tom @ Moore's Law is Dead has said his sources told him that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has been "delayed indefinitely".

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) system can now survey the entire night sky.

The ATLAS system is funded by NASA and run by the University of Hawai'i and initially comprised two telescopes that became fully operational in 2017. The telescopes were based in two different locations in Hawai'i, Haleakala, and Maunaloa, and were able to scan the night sky for asteroids every 24 hours. However, they are limited to only observing the night sky visible from the northern hemisphere.

Now, NASA funding has resulted in the completion of two more telescopes, both located in the southern hemisphere. The first was built in South Africa by the South African Astronomical Observatory. The second was built in Chile, supported by a collaboration between the Millennium Institute for Astrophysics and the private company Obstech.

The design of the Electric Batmobile is based on the Tumbler design from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy.

Nguyen Dac Chung is a 23-year-old graduate from the Hanoi University of Architecture, who along with a team of designers, architects, mechanics, and engineers, brought to life the iconic vehicle. The frame is built from tubular steel, with ABS, carbon fiber, and steel being used for the armor panels and the rest of the construction, for a total weight of 600 kilograms (1323 pounds).

The Batmobile features an automatic transmission, hydraulic doors operable via remote control, and four cameras that provide an almost 360-degree view to the driver and passenger via four monitors. It has a lithium-ion battery to power its electric motor, which allows it to reach a top speed of 65 miles per hour (105 kilometers per hour).

A new paper published in the journal Nature Energy describes the novel technology.

Engineers from the University of Delaware (UD) captured 99% of carbon dioxide in the air when using their novel hydrogen-powered electrochemical system. The team responsible has been attempting to improve fuel cell technology for over fifteen years, searching for a workaround to the reduced efficiency hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM) fuel cells experience when absorbing carbon dioxide.

They realized that the sensitivity of the fuel cell to carbon dioxide, while detrimental to its efficiency in converting the chemical energy in fuel to electricity, meant it could be used as an effective tool for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

A new study published in the journal PLoS Genetics describes the worrying finding.

Researchers have analyzed the genomes of a thousand Han Chinese people, determining the link between their genetic variations and their perception of ten different scents. They compared the results with the same experiment repeated with six scents with a more ethnically diverse group of 364 people.

Two new receptors for smell were identified, one for detecting the synthetic musk used in fragrances and another for a compound in the odor from the human armpit. They found that people with the ancestral versions of the genes, the same as those found in non-human primates, for their scent receptors, rated the corresponding scents as more intense compared to participants with the more recently emerging variants of the genes.

A new preprint paper has been published detailing the finding.

Astronomers witnessed a potential microlensing event in 2011 that has now been confirmed to be due to the presence of a free-floating black hole. Such black holes have been theorized to exist but hadn't been found, as they are much harder to observe amongst the black nothingness of space.

Researchers looked for lensing effects, the bending of light from stars close to a black hole, to find the black hole. When a black hole is further away from neighboring stars, its gravitational pull is weaker, and the lensing effect is lessened, making them significantly more difficult to find.

Call of Duty Mobile has made a hefty $1.5 billion in total lifetime earnings since it released in October 2019.

Activision's meager Q4 earnings brief confirms two big things: Call of Duty's premium sales are down, but the franchise's F2P earnings have doubled on mobile. The games-maker says Call of Duty Mobile generated $1 billion in revenue through 2021, up more than 200% from the estimated $480 million earned from 2019-2020.

The F2P game is a safe harbor for the publisher (and soon Microsoft too). With its separate revenue stream and progression system, Call of Duty Mobile anchors the franchise and helps Activision weather any sales misses from its mainline games.

Call of Duty Vanguard sold fewer copies than Black Ops Cold War, but we don't know the exact scope of COD 2021's shortcomings.

Activision recently confirmed that Vanguard didn't meet or exceed Black Ops Cold War's sales...but that's what management expected.

Activision's latest Q4 report delivered paltry bits of information on specific topics like Call of Duty earnings and sales. The upcoming buyout from Microsoft has changed how Activision delivers information; it went from a flood to a drip-feed with very little metrics.

Grand Theft Auto V is releasing on consoles for the third time on March 15, complete with high-end optimizations and features.

Rockstar just delivered updates on GTA V E&E and confirmed a few new details for the next-gen version, including:

There's still no word on how much GTA V E&E will cost. We predicted the game could cost $69.99, which is the new MSRP of PS5 games. Take-Two Interactive was one of the first to adopt the new price with NBA 2K21 years ago.

The Steam Deck is a gargantuan among smaller pocket-friendly handhelds.

Valve's new Steam Deck is big. Just how big? It's a heckin' chonker, to borrow a phrase from the parlance of our times. New size comparison pictures from gaming YouTuber Cary Golomb shows the Steam Deck's overall thickness--it's even wider than Nintendo's monstrous Virtua Boy.

The Deck is bigger than any other handheld ever made...and rightly so, because it's basically a PC that you can hold in your hands. Valve's new hybrid system packs a seriously powerful custom AMD SoC with an RDNA 2.0 GPU and Zen 2 CPU that's powerful enough to play most games at decent performance targets, but the core SteamOS fabric ensures smooth compatibility too.

Rockstar Games confirms GTA 6 is in development and says progress has been made for quite some time.

Today Rockstar announced what we already knew for a long time: Grand Theft Auto VI is happening. The studio didn't actually reveal GTA 6, nor did it show a teaser trailer or any kind of artwork. Rockstar did give a brief morsel to feed ravenous GTA fans though.

The studio says GTA 6's development is "well underway," which reiterates previous reports that the game has been in production for years. Our own predictions (which were later backed up by analysts) say GTA 6 will release by 2024 and help Take-Two's earnings surge to a record $9 billion.

Naughty Dog could be working as many as three new games for Sony's PlayStation brand, and one of them is definitely a live service game.

Sony is evolving, and it's now embracing live service games in a way it traditionally hasn't before. The modern PlayStation brand is mostly known for must-have cinematic-style singleplayer games with high production values, but following its $3.6 billion acquisition proposal for Bungie, Sony wants to jump head-first into the live service market. After all, that's where the money is.

That could mean Sony's biggest brands are focusing more on live services. We know that Firesprite is working on a Twisted Metal game for Sony, which could be free-to-play with online elements. There's also Haven Studios who is making an online game, and Deviation Games is also working on a new IP that could have live services.

The discovery has caused some controversy on whether it truly is the Endeavour.

Researchers found the shipwreck off the coast of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. Researchers from the Australian National Maritime Museum have claimed it is the remains of Captain James Cook's ship, the HMS Endeavour, which sunk in August 1778. However, the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project has claimed it is too early to say definitively.

The losses come following Apple's privacy changes that went into effect in April 2021.

The changes Apple made to iOS made it so that users must opt-in to allow ad-tracking by social media applications instead of an opt-out from it being enabled by default. Rather than an opt-out option being relegated to deep in the settings menu, a pop-up now appears before opening an app that uses advertising and data collection.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Germany's NFT collection is known as the "non-fungible animals" (NFA) project.

The NFA project is an effort by the WWF to raise awareness and funds for conservation efforts for ten endangered species. The number of artworks per species is limited to the number of each left in the wild, and funds from each artwork will go towards protecting that animal. The endangered animals featured are the Vaquita, Amur tiger, Baltic porpoise, Cross River gorilla, Giant Ibis, Giant panda, Mountain gorilla, Persian leopard, Riverine rabbit, and Saola.

The NFA's use the "green" Polygon blockchain, an Ethereum sidechain. According to the WWF-NFA website, Polygon uses proof-of-stake validation instead of proof-of-work to ensure low power consumption. A single transaction on the Polygon blockchain uses only "0.001kWh of electricity, and has the equivalent carbon emissions of 1 pint of tap water, charging 0.036 phones or boiling 0.014 cups of tea."

The new capability was achieved by the Toyota Research Institute (TRI).

TRI researchers modified a Toyota Supra to operate autonomously and drift around obstacles on a racetrack at Thunderhill Raceway without any human input. The TRI states that the objective of its work is to make autonomous vehicles more capable, and therefore safer, in scenarios such as driving on black ice or avoiding sudden obstacles.

A new study published in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science highlights the accelerating ice loss Mount Everest is experiencing.

Researchers from the University of Maine have concluded that several decades worth of accumulation in Mount Everest's glaciers are melting and sublimating away annually due to human-induced climate change. The decaying glaciers will likely increase avalanches' occurrence and decrease the glacier's capacity to store water, which communities depend on for drinking water and irrigation.

It is also expected that expeditions to climb the mountain could become more challenging, as bedrock becomes exposed with snow and ice cover wearing thin. The research, resulting from the 2019 National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition, show that impacts of human-induced climate change are reaching the highest glaciers around the world, significantly more so since the later 1990s. An ice-core taken from the South Col Glacier shows that ice is thinning 80 times faster than the time taken to accumulate.

The Switch broke 100 million shipments in 2021 and helped push handheld sales past 553 million.

While compiling Nintendo's latest hardware numbers I noticed something interesting: The games-maker sells a lot more handhelds than consoles. Actually that's a no-brainer. The DS is the best-selling handheld of all time and remains Nintendo's top system. What is surprising, though, is how many handhelds total that Nintendo has sold.

Based on numbers provided by Nintendo, the company has sold 533.7 million handhelds. That includes the entire 33-year span of games systems from the original Game Boy to the current Switch. Total consoles are lower at 384.41 million, and runs even farther back to the NES days. That's a split of 65% handhelds and 35% consoles.

As we predicted, the Switch family has beaten the Wii's lifetime shipments. It is now the third best-selling Nintendo hardware of all time, and it could beat the Game Boy this year.

Nintendo announced the Switch has amassed 103.54 million shipments since launch. This milestone is a monumental achievement that shows just how powerful and long-winded the Switch generation currently is--and has the potential to be.

Interesting figures from Nintendo's Q3'22: