Latest News - Page 1296

It looks like AMD has plenty of GPUs but just not for gamers, with a new crypto mining GPU spotted in a new AMD BC-160 mining card.

The new AMD BC-160 mining card uses a Navi 12-based GPU with 2560 Stream Processors and 8GB of HBM2 memory at 1.54Gbps on a 2048-bit memory bus. There's 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors required, with 150W TGP which isn't too bad considering it can mine ETH at around 69-72MH/s.

XFX China is reportedly the company designing the AMD BC-160 mining card, with a cluster of these new AMD BC-160 mining cards each hitting 72MH/s. There's 8 of the AMD BC-160 mining cards in this system, for a total of 579MH/s of ETH mining power, once again -- not bad for around 1000W of power.

Any regular Call of Duty: Warzone players will know that cheaters have all but ruined Activision's most successful shooter, but it seems that things are about to change with RICOCHET. What is RICOCHET? Check out this video:

Activision has introduced RICOCHET Anti-Cheat system that is supported by a team of "dedicated professionals focused on fighting unfair play". The developer explains: "RICOCHET Anti-Cheat initiative is a multi-faceted approach to combat cheating, featuring new server-side tools which monitor analytics to identify cheating, enhanced investigation processes to stamp out cheaters, updates to strengthen account security, and more. RICOCHET Anti-Cheat's backend anti-cheat security features will launch alongside Call of Duty®: Vanguard, and later this year with the Pacific update coming to Call of Duty: Warzone".

Perfect! Just as Battlefield 2042 is about to launch, Call of Duty: Warzone -- and soon, Call of Duty: Vanguard, have what should be world-class anti-cheat systems. On top of this, there's a new PC kernel-level driver that was developed internally for the Call of Duty franchise, and will be launching first inside of Call of Duty: Warzone. This new driver will help identify the cheaters, which Activision says will reinforce and strengthen the overall server security. We are to expect RICOCHET to launch on the PC and by extension, console players through cross-play against players on the PC will benefit. It seems that this is only a PC thing for now, with console gamers benefitting through cross-play and PC with the PC gamers having their hacking abilities taken away.

G.SKILL has just announced its very latest flagship Trident Z5 RGB DDR5 memory series, ready to rock and roll with next-gen speeds for Intel's upcoming Alder lake CPU launch. Check it out:

The new G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB DDR5 memory series will arrive in both RGB and non-RGB variants, with the highest-end offering blasting up to DDR5-6400 with CL36 timings. G.SKILL is tapping Samsung DDR5 memory ICs so you can e expect some of the highest speeds and lowest latencies.

Each of the DDR5 ICs has twice the amount of banks and bank groups, as well as each DDR5 memory module featuring an on-board power management integrated circuit chip meaning that we have more reliable, and better signal integrity at higher speeds... perfect for DDR5 memory overclocking.

It's hard to believe that Sony's PlayStation VR is five years old, but it is. That makes Sony's headset the longest-running VR headset on the market. The original Rift and the original Vive have long since been deprecated. In fact, Oculus discontinued four headsets in that timeframe.

In the world of VR headsets, if your device stays on the market for two years or more, you've got a winner on your hands. That must make Sony's headset the ultimate champion in this market.

To be fair, Sony has the VR console market cornered, with Xbox completely ignoring this space right now. You could make an argument that Oculus is competing in the VR console market with its Quest 2 standalone headset, but it's a little bit different and Quest has only been around for two years, and the Quest 2 dropped one year ago. We're still probably a year away from the PlayStation VR 2, so PSVR owners should look forward to continued support.

Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth sure know how to make a VR fan jealous. The company founder and Facebook Reality Labs leader both posted images of themselves playing with prototype Oculus VR headsets. That enthusiast in me is crying a little bit today.

Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook profile that he spent that day with the Facebook Reality Labs research team testing out next-generation hardware. The picture that he shared is of himself trying a prototype headset with "retina resolution." It's hard to tell from the image, but it looks like this is in a standalone headset like the Oculus Quest. This could be the Quest prototype with 2784 x 3000 per eye OLED microdisplays that Brad Lynch uncovered in a recent kernel analysis.

Bosworth shared two images. One of a futuristic headset that looks more compact than anything Oculus has ever produced before. The visor resembles a pair of ski goggles, and it seems an awful lot like the leaked images of HTC's new Vive Flow. Amusingly, Alvin Graylin, the President of HTC Vive China, offered to trade one of his company's new "production quality devices" for the prototype. You can probably guess what Boz said.

October is turning into a spicy month for VR fans. No less than four major VR events are happening in the next two weeks from some of the most prominent players in the XR space. Pimax is the latest VR company to announce an event.

As the anticipation for Facebook Connect heats up, more and more VR companies have jumped in on the October announcement bandwagon. Thursday, we have an HTC event with the official reveal of the Vive Flow, and next week, Varjo has a big announcement planned. It seems that Pimax didn't want to be left behind in this exciting news cycle. The company is preparing its own announcement on October 25.

In an invite email sent to press, Pimax said the Pimax Frontier 2021 event would showcase a new device referred to as "code name 'Reality.'" For the full reveal, we'll have to wait until January at CES 2022. For now, Pimax intends to give us a glimpse of its "vision for VR3.0," a device it says is "several generations ahead of anything on the market."

Final Fantasy XIV has become the single-most profitable game in the entire 35 year-old RPG franchise.

There's few franchises that've stood the test of time like Final Fantasy. The IP is a whirlwind galaxy of interconnected spin-offs complemented by anthology releases that set themselves apart--they're all different shades of the same crystal, Square Enix has said. But one game has surpassed all of the re-releases, remakes, and numbered titles: The mighty MMORPG.

In a recent PlayStation Blog post, Square Enix confirms that Final Fantasy XIV is the most profitable game in the franchise. This makes sense considering it's a live game that's been delivering 8 years of paid expansions, subscriptions, and more recently, in-game microtransactions. The MMO has also amassed a huge 24 million players (up 2 million users since April)--it's so popular that some worlds have been maxed out completely.

Rainbow Six Siege is one of the most competitive games out there. It is was also one of the few FPS shooters to include a dedicated ranked mode when it first came out. Now, however, almost every FPS shooter has a ranked mode.

Because of the competitive nature of R6S and the inclusion of a ranked mode, more and more players are trying to get the highest rank possible. Here we have compiled a list of tips that will drastically change the outcome of your matches and help you rank up faster.

Heading into a ranked match without a warmup is one of the most common mistakes that gamers make while trying to rank up. A warmup session can have drastic effects on the outcome of a ranked match. The purpose of a warmup in Esports is not to raise your body temperature; instead, its purpose is to fire up your muscle memory. How you aim and move your mouse is engraved in your brain in the form of muscle memory. Warmup allows you to get in the grove and perform at your best. We recommend that you play one or two matches of the casual mode before getting into a ranked match.

UPDATE: The original GTA trilogy has been removed from PS4 now too.

At the behest of Rockstar Games, Valve has removed and delisted the original Grand Theft Auto 3D trilogy from Steam.

Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas have been removed from Steam's storefront. Rockstar Games warned players that the original GTA trilogy would be pulled from all platforms as it readies the new remastered Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition re-release bundle for its November-December launch.

aOne of gaming's most iconic attacks started off from a simple premise: "You know what would be a cool ass move?"

Mortal Kombat is about to turn 30 years old, and to celebrate, Netherrealm's Ed Boon shared some interesting behind-the-scenes looks at the game's development. Boon posted up a recording of how Scorpion's legendary hook attack (get over here!) was made, and the dev says the move was conjured up on the spot.

"We certainly did a ton of prep for our video shoots, but some ideas came to us while filming. With Scorpion's spear, it started with "You know what would be a cool ass move?". From there you can be a fly on the wall and see us working through the details," Boon said on Twitter.

Bethesda's new Skyrim re-release will break compatibility with plugins and mods, forcing some creators to start from scratch.

Bethesda has a penchant for breaking mod support in its biggest games. It happened in Fallout 4 and Skyrim with Creation Club, and modders also had to adapt their creations for the newer Skyrim Special Edition re-release. Any time Bethesda touches or updates older games it seems like something always breaks. Now it's happening again.

Skyrim Anniversary Edition will sever compatibility with script extenders and native code mods like SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender), which are absolutely critical for some of the best mods to function. Creators are warning gamers to backup their .exe files and launch Steam in offline mode to avoid the update. It's a big, inconvenient mess that will drastically shake-up the mod scene, which is already rife with drama and difficulties with preservation.

Diablo 2 Resurrected's servers are having issues for the fourth day in a row, and Blizzard is still investigating solutions.

Over the past three days, Diablo 2 Resurrected servers have been taken offline for maintenance and emergency fixes. Many gamers have lost items, runewords, and in-game progress as the developers quietly rolled back the servers to a previous state. Now that could happen for the fourth day in a row.

Blizzard recently announced that Diablo 2 Resurrected's investigations are still ongoing, and the team is reacting to issues as they pop up. This means game creation and logins could be interrupted however it looks like Blizzard is doing its best not to take the servers offline again.

A mysterious radio signal has been detected by astronomers that "fit no currently understood pattern of variable radio source".

An international Ph.D. student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, Ziteng Wang, explained in a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal that mysterious radio signals were detected using CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope that's located in Western Australia. The Ph.D. student pointed the radio telescope towards the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and found "The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We've never seen anything like it."

The discovery of these unusual radio signals has suggested that it could be a new class of stellar object. Over the course of nine months, throughout 2020, more observations were conducted with international researchers, and in total, the astronomers were able to detect six radio signals from the source. Additionally, it should be noted that when the astronomers attempted to view the source of the radio signals in visible light, they saw nothing.

Researchers have used the world's most powerful radio antenna to detect signals from distant stars that suggest undiscovered planets are orbiting them.

The researcher was published in Nature Astronomy and details the use of the world's most powerful radio telescope dubbed LOFAR, or Low Frequency Array. Researcher at the University of Queensland, Dr. Benjamin Pope, along with other researchers from the Dutch national observatory ASTRON, discovered signals from nineteen distant red dwarf stars, four of the signals are best explained by "planets orbiting them", according to Dr. Pope.

Dr. Joseph Callingham at Leiden University and ASTRON, and lead author of the discovery, explained that the radio wave detection could be from the interaction between the red dwarf star and an orbiting planet, but this isn't 100% confirmed. However, Dr. Callingham says, "We can't be 100 percent sure that the four stars we think have planets are indeed planet hosts, but we can say that a planet-star interaction is the best explanation for what we're seeing."

If you happened to miss the news, William Shatner would be taking Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket to space very soon.

Shatner recently announced the news via Twitter, saying that he will be joining Blue Origin vice president of mission and flight operations and actor Audrey Powers on the mission. Originally, the launch for the mission was scheduled for October 12, but due to the bad weather conditions, Blue Origin announced the launch had to be pushed back by 24 hours.

In a video released by Blue Origin, Shatner said that he is very excited about the launch and that he plans to be looking out the window with his nose pressed up against it. In the same video, Shatner said that there is one thing he doesn't want to see, and that is gremlin looking back at him, which is a reference to the iconic 1963 episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." During that episode, Shatner played a character on a flight to space that spots a gremlin on the wing of the plane.

A very hot fresh new rumor has me scratching my head, with NVIDIA reportedly preparing a new GeForce RTX 3080 refresh with a tweaked GPU and more VRAM.

NVIDIA is reportedly refreshing the GeForce RTX 3080 with a new model that uses the GA102-220 GPU, and 12GB of GDDR6X memory. The original GeForce RTX 3080 has 10GB of GDDR6X and the upgraded GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has 12GB of GDDR6X, so the new GeForce RTX 3080 with 12GB of GDDR6X is going to find itself in an interesting position.

First off, what will it be called? NVIDIA already has the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, so maybe we'll see this card become the GeForce RTX 3080 SUPER.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are currently devising a plan to safely transport extraterrestrial cargo back to Earth.

NASA's Perseverance rover is collecting samples from the surface of Mars, and these samples will be stored on the rover until they are required to be transported back to Earth for analysis. This transportation process is no small feat and will require high levels of precision to pull off correctly and safely. The samples will be placed into sterilization storage containers that are sealed, preventing any contamination. The process of getting the samples back on Earth is a long one and will require several things to align correctly.

Perseverance is currently carrying Mars' samples, and when the time comes to send them back to Earth, the Mars rover will hand them over to a fetch rover that engineers are currently developing at NASA. This rover will then transport the samples to a lander that has a robotic arm that will place the samples into the head of a rocket. The rocket will then launch from the surface of Mars and transport the samples to an ESA orbiter that will prepare the samples for transportation back to Earth.

This week officials warned that Earth was going to get with large solar flare from the Sun, which could potentially affect satellites, internet connections, and more.

Officials at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned that a coronal magnetic ejection (CME) was on a direct collision course with Earth and was expected to arrive on October 12. NOAA warned that the effects of the CME would cause minor geomagnetic storms in Earth's atmosphere, which could result in auroras being seen in locations such as north of England and Northern Island.

The CME has impacted Earth, and officials are happy to report that everything went as anticipated. Solar wind speed increased by nearly 62 miles a second, and total interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength quickly elevated to over 15 nT. Additionally, NOAA states on its website that the CME arrival caused a G1-G2 geomagnetic storm which is categorized as "minor - moderate". The geomagnetic storm caused gorgeous auroras to be spotted in the sky. Those can be seen in the above video.

Battlefield 2042 started off as a full-on battle royale game, inspired by the likes of Apex Legends and Call of Duty: Warzone according to Battlefield insider Tom Henderson.

In a new tweet, Henderson explains: "In other news, the theory that #Battlefield2042 started as a Battle Royale is true, although I'm not sure how far in development it was changed to a more "traditional" Battlefield. The inspiration from CoD was there, but Apex was a BIG inspiration".

Interesting. So, Battlefield 2042 started out as a battle royale game and was changed into a "traditional" Battlefield game when it was in development, but we don't know when that change happened. It was inspired by Warzone and Apex Legends, which explains some of those battle royale-inspired feels in Battlefield 2042.

NVIDIA has just released its new GeForce Game Ready 496.13 WHQL drivers, which include Game Ready support for a few of the very latest and greatest games.

The new GeForce Game Ready 496.13 WHQL drivers include Game Ready Driver support for Back 4 Blood, which when used with DLSS will super-boost your performance by up to 46% when gaming at 4K. You'll also receive the very latest support for the Crysis Remastered Trilogy, and Buldar's Gate 3, both of which have DLSS.

There's also Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider updates for DLSS, providing the latest version of DLSS that will both increase the graphics quality and performance.