Latest News - Page 1282

AMD has released its new Radeon Adrenalin 21.10.4 drivers, which have a fixed issue with the Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards and visual corruption in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy.

The new drivers also fix some issues with Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy on some AMD Graphics products, with the company noting that these may include the Radeon RX 5500 series cards. AMD provides a temporary workaround by recommending that users disable the Radeon Anti-Lag feature in Radeon Software.

If you've got one of Samsung's huge new Odyssey G9 C49G95T gaming monitors, then you will still experience display corruption issues when you've got the monitor set to its native 5120 x 1440 @ 240Hz resolution and refresh rate. There are still issues with the Radeon RX 6800M graphics products, and more, in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

MSI has revealed quite a lot of interesting factoids on Intel's new Alder Lake platform, including DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 teases -- but now the company has revealed there are not 1 but 2 different dies of Intel's new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" desktop CPUs.

During its recent Innovation Event, Intel confirmed there are at least 60 different SKUs of their Alder Lake silicon in the works, and then during the MSI Insider stream the company confirmed that desktop Intel Alder Lake CPUs actually ship in 2 different variants.

The first is with 8 Golden Cove and 8 Gracemont CPU cores -- while another ships with just 6 Golden Cove CPU cores. Intel uses the Golden Cove CPU cores as its Performance cores (or P-core) while the Gracemont CPU cores are the Efficient CPU cores (E-cores). Intel hasn't used the 6P+0E die just yet and should arrive in early 2022 when we see Intel fill out its Alder Lake family of CPUs (non-K Cores series CPUs, as well as Pentium CPUs).

The future of AMD Radeon GPUs is going to be so very good in 2022 and beyond, with AMD reportedly taping out its new flagship Navi 31 GPU based on the next-gen RDNA 3 architecture.

AMD's new Navi 31 GPU has reportedly taped out according to leaker @greymon55 on Twitter, with the RDNA 3 graphics architecture fueling the new Navi 31 GPU -- but more importantly, the new Navi 31 GPU uses an MCM design. MCM or multi-chip module, will see multiple (2) compute dies (GPUs) on the card.

We've been living in a world of monolithic GPU designs for what feels like forever, with toes dabbled in multi-GPU cards over the decades. But this will be the first MCM design GPU, but we should expect a silicon explosion (but in a really, really good way) with a Goliath amount of shading units: 15360 FP32 shading units... which is bonkers.

NVIDIA is reportedly preparing a new high-end laptop GPU offering with the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Mobile, which will reportedly use the GA103 GPU.

The new rumor is coming from Matthew Smith, who maintains the TechPowerUp GPU and GPU-z database, that NVIDIA is working on a new flagship mobile GPU. It will reportedly use the GA103 GPU (GN20-E8) but we don't know the total configuration (CUDA cores, etc) just yet.

We should see the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Mobile be quite a beast hopefully, with around 7680 CUDA cores, and a 256-bit memory bus. We could see 8GB or 16GB of GDDR6 memory used, but it would be nice to see some of that ultra-fast GDDR6X memory used inside of a super-fast new RTX 3080 Ti Mobile GPU.

Apple has an expensive but glorious new $19 cleaning cloth if you want to clean your iProducts, especially the new M1 Max SoC-powered 2021 MacBook Pro laptops.

But in an even more glorious way, the folks at iFixit have given Apple's new $19 cleaning cloth the traditional teardown treatment. The company has confirmed that there's no hidden chips or anything underneath the fabric, but that's when iFix it found something interesting.

The team said: "Under a microscope the premium quality of Apple's polishing cloth comes to life. On the left, you'll see a plain old cleaning cloth. Boring. On the right? Miniscule fibers intricately woven together, uniting to become not just a tool for cleaning, but an object of beauty worthy of being cleaned itself. Amidst the beauty, a thin line delicately traces the form of mankind's foundational fruit: an apple".

MSI has teased its ultra-high-speed PCIe Gen5 M.2 Expander-Z card, oozing bandwidth from the next-gen PCIe 5.0 x16 socket on future PCIe 5.0-capable motherboards.

The new MSI PCIe Gen5 M.2 Expander-Z card arrives on a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and could be one of the first PCIe 5.0-capable devices outside of NVIDIA's purported GeForce RTX 3090 Ti which should arrive in January 2022 on PCIe 5.0 x16 if we're lucky.

MSI is promising a huge 128GB/sec of speed here which is the maximum that the PCIe 5.0 x16 connector can handle, while Phison has recently been teasing next-gen SSDs pushing a huge 14GB/sec. Right now we're maxed out at 7GB/sec or so for PCIe 4.0-based SSDs but we should see the world of 14GB/sec+ with PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

Intel's new Arc Alchemist desktop graphics card has been pictured once again, with Tom from Moore's Law is Dead showing us actual, real photos of the flagship Intel Arc Alchemist graphics card.

These new pictures of the Intel Arc Alchemist graphics card could be in pre-production state, or it might be the final design of the reference card we'll see in 2022, or we might not see it at all and this is all smoke and mirrors and free marketing for Intel and its Arc GPUs.

However, since we now have both rumored pictures, renders and now real photos of the Intel Arc Alchemist, comparisons can be made. The new photos of the card here today have a black PCB and silver shrout, compared to the previous teases with a green PCB and black shroud. No power changes have been made, with a single 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connector setup.

CD Projekt RED has updated its Cyberpunk 2077 content roadmap to reflect new content delays.

Cyberpunk 2077 isn't getting any new content for the rest of 2021. The developers quietly confirmed the news in a commitment timeline update which shows Patch 1.3 as the last major patch of 2021. To date CD Projekt RED has released 11 updates consisting of hotfixes and major game-changing patches that have fixed a multitude of bugs and memory issues on consoles.

The game's free anticipated next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X/S version has also been delayed to 2022, and it's likely these two are related. Also remember that CDPR is working on multiple new projects including Cyberpunk 2077's multiplayer mode and a new AAA title that's set in the Witcher universe. The next-gen version of Witcher 3 has also been pushed back as far as mid-year 2022.

Diablo 2 Resurrected servers are still a mess and Blizzard is coming up with fixes...but players won't like them.

Blizzard today outlined more details on its server fixes for Diablo 2 Resurrected, confirming the game will get its own PTR (Public Test Realm) to help beta test upcoming updates and patches. Starting next week, Blizzard is making a massive change to how D2's online servers work.

"Next week, our internal teams will begin testing a significant change by having saves occur more often on the regional end, rather than global, in hopes of alleviating some database stress. Once our internal load testing is complete, we will put up a PTR server with this fix to get some real-world testing before rolling out to the live game."

Ex-Visceral Games and Naughty Dog visionary Amy Hennig is working on a new Marvel game, and it sounds absolutely huge.

Marvel has announced they have conscripted Skydance New Media to make a new "narrative-driven, blockbuster action-adventure game" set in one of its franchises. Skydance's game division is led by Amy Hennig, who has worked on some of the biggest games in the industry including Uncharted 1-3 and the ill-fated Project Ragtag Star Wars bounty hunter game for Visceral Games (before the studio was shut down in 2017 and the game was cancelled, of course).

The new Marvel game is set in an unspecified franchise, but the press release confirms it will be a 100% original storyline. Job listings also confirm it's a singleplayer game made in Unreal Engine. The developers have free reign to create their own vision in the property with a new fresh take on the Marvel universe. It's possible the game could be multi-perspective, and Hennig says Skydance will incorporate the "humanity, complexity, and humor" of distinct Marvel heroes.

On October 28, the Sun blasted out an X-1 solar flare causing a coronal mass ejection of charged particles to be launched directly towards Earth.

The X1 classification for this solar flare is the most intense classification that is given to solar flares, and while the flare itself reached Earth only 8.5 minutes after it happened, the resulting coronal mass ejection (CME) is expected to arrive on October 30. While the large swath of charged radiation particles impacting Earth poses no danger to humans on the surface, the interaction in Earth's upper atmosphere can cause geomagnetic storms that can interfere with satellites, radio communications, GPS, and more.

According to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, there is a G3 (strong) geomagnetic storm watch scheduled for October 30. Looking back into what past solar flares have caused on Earth, this specific classification of solar flare has caused auroras to appear in the sky over certain parts of the planet. These auroras are similar to the Northern/Southern lights and can be seen with the naked eye. NASA recommends people who live in Northern US and Canada to keep an eye out for a possible light show that will coincide with Halloween.

NASA has taken to its blog with a new image and video centered around the Hubble Space Telescope and what it has recently snapped an image of.

According to the blog post, which can be found on the NASA website, the Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating Halloween with "creepy celestial sights". The above video posted to the NASA Goddard YouTube channel details Hubble's observation of a "giant space spider-web", which is actually the destruction of the red giant star named CW Leonis, located 400 million light-years away from Earth.

The "cobwebs" are dusty clouds of "sooty carbon engulfing the dying star", and after being created through nuclear fusion in the star's interior, it's thrown out into the void of space around it, providing raw materials for future star formation. CW Leonis is the closest carbon star to Earth, and due to its position and nature, astronomers have a great prospect of understanding how carbon stars interact and evolve with their surroundings. Over the past 15 years, researchers have observed a dip in the brightness radiating out of CW Leonis, which is an extremely small amount of time in astronomical terms.

NASA has taken to its blogs and social medias to confirm the existence of a massive solar flare headed directly towards Earth.

The solar flare was observed on October 28, and according to NASA, the flare came from the Sun's lower center which is directly facing Earth. At 11:35 a.m EDT, the Sun released the biggest of a series of flares, bursting out a large amount of radiation towards Earth that is expected to arrive very soon. The flare was categorized as an X1-class flare, X being the most intense categorization for solar flares.

The Sun entered Solar Cycle 25, and according to the space agency, this is the second X-class solar flare of the cycle, with the cycle lasting 11 years. Over the duration of the cycle, the Sun will go through active and quiet periods until it reaches its solar maximum, where its magnetic poles will flip.

Capcom reiterates its commitment to PC gaming, says the platform is a big part of its new aggressive push into digital markets.

Capcom's latest integrated report clearly explains its game plan. The company is doubling-down on digital gaming and wants to hit 50 million games sold per year--and eventually 100 million. There's a clear roadmap to making this happen and PC gaming is a big part of it.

In the report, Capcom says it has designated PC as a "priority platform." And rightly so, considering PC gaming is practically all-digital. Capcom says that PC gaming has helped it release games across 200 countries and massively expand its reach--think of PC as a gateway, and the bridge being digital platforms like Steam, where gamers are funneling across the bridge and buying games at the gate.

Capcom's latest integrated report shows just how much the company has grown over the last two decades.

Capcom's digital business plan is paying off big. The digital model has led to eight consecutive years of operating profit growth driven by efforts like expansion into emerging worldwide markets, bringing games to the digital-focused PC platform, timed sales, and more engagement-driven experiences in its games.

The company's recent metrics speak volumes and clearly illustrate just how much Capcom has grown over the years, and it's all because of its forward-thinking adaptation to growing markets. Capcom has embraced worldwide expansion in a way that sees its games being carried to non-traditional markets in an effort to maximize sales reach. The plan is working very well.

Capcom wants to sell 100 million games every year, and outlines its plan to make it happen in the near future.

Capcom is on a roll. Over the last decade the Japanese games-maker has made a radical shift towards digital. The results have paid off with eight consecutive years of record operating profit and over 220% in net income growth. Now the company wants more.

In a recent integrated report, Capcom has set an ambitions goal for itself: 100 million games sold every year. For reference, Capcom sold 30 million games last year and expects to sell 32 million games this year with an 82% digital ratio. Capcom makes it clear that digital is the key to achieving its lofty goal.

Ubisoft promises to support its new Avatar game with multiple years of post-launch content, including premium paid DLC, expansions, and more.

The new Avatar Frontiers of Pandora game coming in 2022 will have a long lifespan that stretches across years, Ubisoft has confirmed.

"For Fiscal '23 we have a very exciting lineup, a big lineup on the premium and free-to-play side. On the premium lineup side, as you know Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is a big game next to the highly-awaited movie. The development is progressing well and is a beautiful world delivered by the Snowdrop engine.That will be a very long game in terms of content delivered over many years," Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet said in a recent Q2 earnings call.

Ubisoft says it wants to be a key player in blockchain gaming, and sees lots of potential for play-to-earn mechanics.

Ubisoft is just one of the many publishers looking into blockchain (Square Enix and EA are also doing it). The decentralized network affords unique opportunities for gaming including play-to-earn, a nebulous concept that could give out pieces of cryptocurrency in exchange for playing a game.

So how will this work exactly? Ubisoft is vague on details, but says blockchain is "very attractive for the long term" and that they're interested in creating ne digital economies. It's likely blockchain will offer a new form of monetization as we predicted back in 2018.

Ubisoft gives slightly more details about its new never-ending Assassin's Creed Infinity game.

The next Assassin's Creed game is called Infinity, and it's rumored to be a huge live game that's more of a platform versus a standalone release. Now Ubisoft confirms Infinity won't be a free-to-play experience but instead will be a paid, premium game similar to other mainline titles.

"Infinity will not be a free-to-play. This game is going to have a lot of narrative elements in it. It's going to be a very innovative game but it will have what players already love in other Assassin's Creed games right from the start," Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in a recent Q2'22 earnings call.

Activision's new texture delivery technology will help shrink monstrous Call of Duty install sizes.

Call of Duty games are absolutely huge. Every annual release commands over 100GB, and Warzone is even beyond that. Considering the PS5 only has 667GB of space and the Series X has 802GB, it behooves publishers to shrink their games or be eliminated from the premium SSD space. That's what's happening over at Activision.

"New on-demand texture streaming tech expected to save up to 30%-50%+ on next-gen console and PC hard drive disk space," the official Call of Duty Twitter account says.