Latest News - Page 1316

Alphabet has been running projects offering next-generation internet services for many years now, with its latest Project Taara blasting 700TB of data across the Congo River in a really new way.

Project Taara is a new technology that offers fiber optic cable-type speeds, without the cables -- with the Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC) technology developed for Alphabet's Project Loon, in its new Project Taara. Where Project Loon used stratospheric helium balloons to blast wireless internet to everyone, Project Taara uses the wireless optical link technology to connect services across the Congo River.

Alphabet has its own moonshot lab called X where it well -- shoots for the moon -- with projects like this. FSOC is capable of pumping a 20Gbps+ link between two points if it has clear line of sight. The way it works is through using light to transmit high-speed data between two points. 20Gbps+ is on offer using just light to transmit information at incredibly fast speeds through the air, as a very narrow, invisible beam.

Facebook has found itself in another mess, this one being one of the most under-reported, and one of the worst stories from the Mark Zuckerberg-led social media network.

In a new report by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook has been well aware of a massive human trafficking service on its platform and has done nothing about it. Apple got a little mad at Facebook over it at least, threatening to pull the Facebook app from its App Store after a 2019 report from the BBC said that human traffickers were selling people using Facebook.

Selling people on Facebook. Just thought I'd repeat that.

Call of Duty: Vanguard will limp onto the market in November, but there is some beta lovin' that people who pre-ordered the game can enjoy now -- meaning we have more information on Vanguard.

It looks like developer Sledgehammer Games will have support for AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology in Call of Duty: Vanguard, which will support both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and its super-popular (and hacker-filled) Warzone have DLSS support.

FSR support in Call of Duty: Vanguard was spotted in the game files, but you can't just enable it in the menu right now -- I'm sure it'll have full support by its launch on November 5, 2021. Interesting that Sledgehammer isn't tapping DLSS, as it was used to great effect in Warzone and helps drag those frames up to 120FPS in a big way at 4K.

Apple has been using dual Radeon GPU graphics cards in its highest-end Mac Pro systems for a couple of years now, with the latest AMD Radeon PRO W6800X Duo graphics card now benchmarked and man, is it an utter compute beast.

First off, the AMD Radeon PRO W6800W Duo graphics card features 2 x Navi 21 GPUs each with 60 compute units and 3840 stream processors. Each GPU has 32GB of GDDR6 memory for a total of 64GB of GDDR6 memory with 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

There's 30.2 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance, and a whopping 60.4 TFLOPs of half-precision compute performance. There's an onboard Infinity Fabric Link connection that connects the 2 x W6800X GPUs together, pumping 84GB/sec in each direction. Then there's an external Infinity Fabric Link connection that enables 2 x W6800X Duo modules to connect 4 x W6800X GPUs.

I'm a huge fan of NVIDIA's kick-ass DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology, especially in its DLSS 2.0+ form, but now we're going to be seeing more of DLAA (not a typo, that is Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing) which is going to first appear in The Elder Scrolls Online.

Zenimax unveiled the news during their recent ESO live stream, where we found more information out about the upcoming Deadlands zone DLC with base Update 32. The new patch will add DLSS to The Elder Scrolls Online, which will help out lower-end GPUs and those chasing 120FPS+ but what about high-end GPUs that want visual quality?

Where DLSS upscales the resolution, DLAA will offer "incredible anti-aliasing". ESO Creative Director Rich Lambert explains: "While we were working on adding NVIDIA DLSS, we also worked with them on some new tech that we're going to be the first game that's ever done this before. This is debuting their new tech, which is called NVIDIA DLAA. It's the same kind of concept, you won't get a performance boost out of this but what you get is absolutely incredible anti-aliasing. It's unbelievable, it's crazy how good it is".

Gamers speculate that Quantic Dream could be making a narrative-driven Star Wars game.

Quantic Dream, the studio behind ultra-realistic graphics and story-driven games like Detroit Become Human and Beyond Two Souls, could be developing a Star Wars game. The news comes via a Tweet from reliable Battlefield and Call of Duty leaker Tom Henderson. While Henderson didn't outright say QD's next game is Star Wars related, he did put out an image that led lots of people to believe that's the case.

This rumor comes at an interesting time for Quantic Dream. David Cage's studio recently confirmed it wanted to self-publish its own games. Lucasfilm Games could license the Star Wars property to Quantic Dream similar to its plans with EA and Ubisoft. QD says its latest move is to "preserve our freedom and our independence, to continue working on innovative and even more ambitious projects, to address greater challenges, and to create the unexpected."

Diablo II Resurrected will be limited to 4 players on Switch, and it should take extra time to level up as a result.

Diablo II is an extremely grindy game that demands lots of time. The game's RNG magic find roulette is one of the most time-consuming in all of gaming and requires gamers to do hundreds--if not thousands--of MF runs across Pindle, Ancient Tombs, Mephisto, etc. Just look at any of Dbrunski 125's Human Bot projects and you'll see how little amount of high-end loot comes from thousands of runs.

This is a big reason why I've warned gamers to avoid playing Diablo II Resurrected on consoles and stick to PC whenever possible. The grind will be extra intense for these users for a few specific reasons, including trading, which is apparently awkward on consoles (the entire reason to MF is to get gear that you can use or trade for better gear), and teaming up with other users to level up. Consoles don't have lobby systems to find/make games and must instead depend on a Party Finder, which is essentially a matchmaking tool that sets you up with random players.

Sony's new PlayStation 4 firmware update is reportedly hardware-bricking PS4 consoles.

Sony just released PS4's new v9.0 update alongside the PS5's big SSD expansion update, and some users are reporting that the firmware patch is hard-bricking their PS4 consoles. Multiple users on Reddit report that their base PS4s and PS4 Pros have stopped functioning after downloading the v9.0 update. Others report the PS4 is blinking blue, which signifies some sort of hardware or OS error. Reports say the consoles will not power on and do not work, however some users have gotten their systems to operate with a hard reset (unplugging the console for a minute or so and then rebooting).

Other users are reporting significant slowdowns on PS4 and PS4 Pro hardware, or consistent 35888 error codes (or SU-42118) preventing the update from being installed. The general consensus for a solution is trying to reinstall the update after a hard reset and praying for the best. The most frustrating part is that gamers can't use their PS4s or PS4 Pros online without downloading the update; Sony forces users to update to the latest firmware in order to connect to the internet or the PlayStation Store.

This fan-made Halo Infinite trailer really captures the original spirit of Halo's old-school marketing campaigns.

Halo's advertisements have changed over the years. Back in the day, the ads invoked a certain sense of fragility and sci-fi wonder that tapped into the heart of the Halo franchise; the Halo 3 Believe ads, for example, showed an epic war where humans were completely overrun. Halo Reach's Discover Hope showed the ultimate sacrifice, and the ODST ads exposed the brutality of the Human-Covenant War.

But where is Halo Infinite's marketing campaign? So far it's been kind of MIA and we haven't seen any real epic ads--at least not any live action ones. We've had two great campaign trailers but nothing in the vein of the old ads. YouTuber Infinite Forges steps in to bridge that gap a bit with a simple but effective fan-made marketing trailer that brings that old-school spirit.

A new batch of supposed leaked Halo Infinite images shows a high-res upgrade for Craig.

Despite intense controversy, something good came out of Halo Infinite's 2020 gameplay demo: Craig the brute. What started out as a meme making fun of Infinite quickly became one of the most recognizable Halo icons, and 343i confirms the lovable brute would bel be immortalized in Halo Infinite. Now we have our first glimpse into what Craig could look like in the final game.

A few new leaked Infinite images show snaps of high-res brutes from Halo Infinite, and one of them looks similar to Craig. This time around it looks like the Jiralhanae has grown a fashionable goatee and sports Kratos-like warpaint.

Addlink has just unveiled its new AddGame A95 M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD with a Premium heat sink, ready for upgrading your next-gen PlayStation 5 console.

The company is offering its new AddGame A95 M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities with up to 7.4GB/sec (7400MB/sec) reads and up to 7GB/sec (7000MB/sec). The company includes a premium heat sink with high-grade aluminum, and a shark-fin heat sink design with a heat-conducting silica gel pad that keeps the PS5-compatible SSD as cool as possible.

Addlink is using a low-profile heat sink design that measures in at 9.1mm, fitting into the PS5 internal M.2 SSD expansion slot without a problem. You can get the AddGame A95 M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities with all of them having a 5-year warranty.

AMD has caught up considerably against NVIDIA with its new RDNA 2 graphics architecture, with the Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT both kick-ass graphics cards -- but man-oh-man, the RDNA 3 architecture is going to be delicious.

We have already heard rumors of the RDNA 3 GPU and its flagship Radeon RX 7900 XT powered by the Navi 31 GPU and shaping up to be a beast. Now we have Tom from Moore's Law is Dead teasing that RDNA 3 will "improve performance by 60% at a minimum" with multiple sources telling him that the Radeon RX 7900 XT will be "roughly double" the RX 6900 XT.

Tom does note that people need remember that "theoretical top performance, and real-world performance are not the same thing". Tom continues, adding that "just because the top model performs a certain way in a simulation, does not mean it will in practice once its actually fabricated in silicon, packaged, and requires cooling".

KIOXIA has just announced its new FL6 SSDs that use the PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1.4 interface, here to take up a battle against Intel's enterprise-focused Optane SSDs.

We don't have any hard numbers yet, but KIOXIA is saying that its new FL6 series SSDs are cheaper, and faster than Intel Optane offerings. KIOXIA is using its own in-house SLC XL-FLASH technology mixed with their BiCS 3D NAND flash memory on their new FL6 series PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

There's native dual-port support, with much faster program times of 7ms and lowered latencies of just 5ms -- a 10x improvement over TLC-based SSDs. KIOXIA is making its new FL6 series in capacities between 800GB and 3.2TB, so you'll be able to get something for any system with up to 3.2TB capacities available.

Vlogs are an important part of the content we create and share every day. Imaging approximately 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, all around the world. Unlike other videos, vlogs are typically recorded with a cellphone or a hand-held camera. They are not as hard to produce as other videos.

But when it comes to editing a vlog, you'll definitely need decent video editing software to put everything together. So, what vlog editing software do vloggers use? And what's the best vlog editing software? You'll find the answers in this round-up.

VideoProc Vlogger is a free vlog editing software newly released by Digiarty Software. This novice-friendly yet powerful non-linear program comes with a rich set of tools to suffice various editing demands. It's a free non-linear video editor with no watermark.

It's been eight years since Grand Theft Auto V has released, and to celebrate let's take a look at some of the milestones the game has made.

Right now fans aren't too happy about GTA V. The game is 8 years old today and will soon span three generations of console hardware (for comparison's sake, Rockstar released three separate Grand Theft Auto games on the PS2). Fans have expressed their frustrations by disliking the recent GTA V E&E PS5 trailer en masse--right now the trailer has 184,000 dislikes on YouTube.

Still, GTA V is a thundering success for both Rockstar Games and Take-Two. Since its release in 2013, the sequel has helped the franchise generate an incredible $6.4 billion in revenues across 150 million game shipments worldwide. GTA V is so big that it makes up 43% of total Grand Theft Auto franchise sales (325 million). Fun fact: Grand Theft Auto earned nearly $1.5 billion in sales revenue when GTA V released in Take Two's Q3 FY14 period (September 17, 2013).

SpaceX recently launched four ordinary people into space without any professional astronauts on board. The mission is called Inspiration4.

Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Chris Sembroski, and Dr. Sian Proctor took off from Cape Canaveral on September 16, marking a milestone moment in the space tourism industry as the first all-civilian mission to space. The launch was an all-round success, and the crew aboard SpaceX's Dragon capsule has already traveled "5.5 times around Earth, completed their first round of scientific research, and enjoyed a couple of meals", per SpaceX.

The goal of the mission is to raise $200 million for St Jude's Children's Research Hospital and funding research that explores the effects of deep space on astronauts' bodies. According to the SpaceX website, the Dragon capsule is at 357 miles from the Earth, which is higher than the Hubble Space Telescope at 335 miles and the International Space Station (ISS) at 260 miles. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

A team of researchers has run a simulation on nuclear war eruption regionally and globally, and they found that if nuclear war broke out at either level, it would cause climate change.

The new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmosphere explains that nuclear weapons cause large plumes of smoke and toxic gas, which impact the ozone layer. In the new study, researchers used a climate model to predict the effects of nuclear war erupting regionally between India and Pakistan and globally between the United States and Russia.

What the researchers found was that regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan would generate five megatons of soot, which would reduce the global column ozone by 25%, increasing the amount of ultraviolet light Earth's surface is exposed to, which endangers human health and food supplies. On a global scale, the researchers estimated that war between the US and Russia would generate 150 megatons, resulting in a 75% loss in the ozone column for around 15 years.

A team of researchers from the University of Washington has scanned the outer solar system for six years using the Dark Energy Survey (DES), and here's what they found.

The new paper has been published on the preprint server arXiv details the discovery of 815 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which is a classification for minor bodies located beyond Neptune. Of the 815 objects identified with DES, 416 were found for the first time. Additionally, the DES was very good at spotting "extreme TNOs", which are objects located 150 times farther from the Sun than Earth. DES managed to spot nine new extreme TNOs.

Recently, objects outside of our solar system have been a subject of debate as researchers have identified that some objects, especially Kuiper belt objects (KBOs), are experiencing gravitational tugging, which causes them to cluster no matter their specific classification. Some researchers have suggested that the gravitational anomaly is being caused by a massive celestial body that has a mass of five Earth's and is around 10 times the distance between Neptune and the Sun.

NASA is planning the next flight for its Mars helicopter, and according to the Chief Pilot of Ingenuity, the next flight will push boundaries of what NASA scientists know Ingenuity is capable of.

Harvard Grip has written a new NASA status update and has detailed what will be the fourteenth flight for Ingenuity. The title of the status update is "Flying on Mars Is Getting Harder and Harder", and Grip goes on to explain that the atmospheric density of Mars is changing to levels that helicopter wasn't designed to fly in. As a solution to this problem, NASA says it will spin the rotor blades faster than it ever has before as a way of testing Ingenuity's flight capabilities in lower atmospheric densities.

NASA will attempt to increase Ingenuity's rotor speed to 2,800 rpm, which is more than a 10% increase on NASA's previous rpm record of 2,537 rpm. Grip explains that at a rotor speed of 2,800 rpm Ingenuity's blades will be approaching the speed of sound on Mars, which is about 3/4 of what the speed of sound is here on Earth. Grip says, "A rotor speed of 2,800 rpm, in combination with wind and helicopter motion, could cause the tips of the rotor blades to encounter the air at nearly 0.8 Mach - that is, 80% of the speed of sound on Mars."

NASA's Chief Pilot for its Mars helicopter named Ingenuity has said that flights on the Red Planet are getting harder and harder.

Chief Pilot Havard Grip has written on NASA's website about the recent difficulties the Ingenuity team is facing with launches. Grip explains that due to Mars' seasonal variations drop, researchers are recording a drop in atmospheric density in the Jezero Crater where Ingenuity is located. While the drop seems significant when looking at in terms of numbers, Grip says that it has a major impact on Ingenuity's ability to fly.

Don't rule out NASA scientists just yet, as they do have a plan to combat this issue of atmospheric density. Grip says, "We will begin by performing a high-speed spin of the rotor without leaving the ground, reaching a peak rotor speed of 2,800 rpm (more than a 10% increase relative to our prior Mars experience of 2,537 rpm). If all goes well, we will follow this with a short test flight at a slightly lower rotor speed of 2,700 rpm. This would be our 14th flight."