Latest News - Page 1326

Nintendo's premium Switch Online subscription service is reportedly getting games from the original handheld duo that dominated the late 80s and 90s.

Nintendo Switch Online will soon expand to include Game Boy and Game Boy Color platforms, sources tell Eurogamer. While the roster of included games is unknown, it's possible we could see heavy-hitters like the original Pokemon games cross over, complete with Pokemon Red, Blue, and Yellow, as well as later iterations like Silver, Gold, and Crystal.

There's also talk of other old-school Nintendo platforms coming to Switch Online, including the Nintendo 64.

XCOM developer Firaxis is making a new tactical RPG with Marvel superheroes, and yes, it will be monetized.

Like a number of other Marvel games (Avengers, Strike Force, Realm of Champions), the new card-based Midnight Suns game will also have microtransactions. The game's official Twitter points out that monetization is purely cosmetic and there won't be any pay-to-win scenarios where gamers can buy extra cards, and lootboxes aren't available either.

"Hey folks, regarding our battle card system, there are no loot boxes in Marvel's Midnight Suns or related microtransactions to get more cards (i.e. Gamma Coils). We will have purely cosmetic character skins for purchase that do not affect game balance in any way," the account said.

Back in 2019, Shawn Layden left Sony and PlayStation after 32 years with the company. Now the former gaming executive reveals why.

Shawn Layden has been a figurehead of the PlayStation 4's monolithic generation and helped lead the company to success with multiple big-name exclusives like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Marvel's Spider-Man. So why would he leave? Layden now says he wanted to depart on a good note--a strategy that many higher-level execs practice.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Layden says his decision was two-fold: the PlayStation brand's success was an excellent punctuation mark to his 32-year career at Sony, and he wanted to initiate a changing of the guard.

Following weeks of speculation and massive disappointment, Blue Box Game Studios says its game Abandoned was announced too early.

Blue Box Game Studios released a new Abandoned FAQ confirming a new playable teaser and outright says the hugely controversial game just isn't ready for the public.

"Abandoned was announced too soon. Also, we received a bigger audience than we initially had, so we had to polish the game even more. Even now, the game isn't ready for the public eye to see. We will release all media inside the Realtime Experience app and web for actual gameplay reveals and cinematic trailers," the site reads.

Sony confirms it will no longer offer free PS4 to PS5 upgrades of of future cross-gen first-party games.

Today Sony reversed its massively unpopular next-gen pricing scheme and will now offer a free Horizon Forbidden West PS4 to PS5 upgrade. In the same announcement, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan says Horizon Forbidden West is the last free upgrade. From now on, any PS4 to PS5 upgrade of a first-party cross-gen title will cost $10.

"I also want to confirm today that moving forward, PlayStation first-party exclusive cross-gen titles (newly releasing on PS4 & PS5)-both digital and physical*-will offer a $10 USD digital upgrade option from PS4 to PS5. This will apply to any exclusive cross-gen PS4 & PS5 title published by Sony Interactive Entertainment," Ryan said.

Due to extreme pressure from fans, Sony has reversed its wildly unpopular decision with Horizon Forbidden West next-gen upgrades.

Sony confirms it will now honor its original promise to offer free next-gen upgrades for some games including Horizon Forbidden West. Anyone who buys Horizon Forbidden West on PS4 will also get a free copy of the PS5 version, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan says. This is a complete 180 from the previous plan which would have forced gamers to buy an expensive $80 version in order to get both a PS4 and PS5 copy.

"Last year we made a commitment to deliver free upgrades for our cross-gen launch titles, which included Horizon Forbidden West. While the pandemic's profound impact pushed Forbidden West out of the launch window we initially envisioned, we will stand by our offer: Players who purchase Horizon Forbidden West on PlayStation 4 will be able to upgrade to the PlayStation 5 version for free," Ryan said.

Humans are closing in touching down on Mars and beginning the colonizing process, but can humans survive on Mars with all of its particle radiation?

A new paper has been put forward by an international group of scientists who explored that question. Due to Mars' atmosphere being much thinner than Earth's, human explorers will be subjected to high dosages of particle radiation from the Sun, distant galaxies, and stars. However, humans can withstand this exposure to this radiation, but only for a period of time before it becomes too dangerous to the body.

According to the paper, Mars explorers' maximum mission duration shouldn't be longer than four years as the astronaut will be exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation that could significantly reduce life expectancy. The researchers published the new study in Space Weather and found that most of the radiation astronauts would be exposed to over a four-year mission would come from celestial objects outside of our solar system.

Space satellites aren't just used for communication purposes, some are used to take images of the Earth to document natural events such as hurricane Ida, or a volcanic eruption.

Mount Etna has erupted for the 50th time in 2021, spewing out plumes of gas, ash, and lava. The 50th eruption occurred on August 30 and was documented by the European Sentinel 2 satellite with an overhead image. Volcanologists had known that Mount Etna was unstable when it began releasing clouds of ash and gas in late 2020.

According to volcanologist Boris Behncke from the National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), "Etna was building up for something big (we feared an eruption from the flank) with intense seismic activity, ground deformation, and degassing. On 16 February the real series of paroxysms [eruptions] started, seismicity stopped, ground deformation reversed to deflation."

At the moment, our solar system has eight known planets, but what if there is a ninth planet lurking in our solar system that we are yet to observe.

The overall chances of that being the case are in favor of Planet Nine not existing, however, a new study has put forward evidence that suggests that there is "something" out there causing a gravitational phenomenon. Astronomers have observed Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) and noticed that instead of being in random motion, they are in clusters, regardless of the objects classifications.

This observation of the clustering of KBOs leads researchers to believe there is an undiscovered celestial body with significant mass causing a gravitational anomaly. In 2016, researchers came to that very conclusion when they released a study that calculated the undiscovered celestial body to have a mass of around five Earth's and be around 10 times the distance between Neptune and the Sun. However, astronomers searched for this Planet Nine it couldn't be found.

NVIDIA has officially killed support for its Kepler GPU architecture with its 500 series drivers, after confirming the news a few months ago -- it's now official with the new NVIDIA 510.06 WSL driver.

The new NVIDIA 510.06 WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) driver has been released to Windows 11 users through the Microsoft Insiders Program, with the 894MB download having no changes to both the installer, or the control center.

Maxwell and Pascal GPUs are still supported with the GeForce GTX 900 series and GeForce GTX 10 series GPUs, but the Kepler GPUs under the GeForce GTX 700 series are gone. VideoCardz notes that there are no changes to the control panel, which is really disappointing -- but I'm hoping things change between now, and the final release of the 500 series driver.

Ubisoft has teased the PC version of Far Cry 6, detailing the PC features to expect with the best version of the game -- and man, does it look good. The console version of the game looked so underwhelming, but the PC version of Far Cry 6 looks fantastic. Check it out:

The developer has worked with AMD on Far Cry 6, cramming in improved multi-thread CPU support thanks to the Ryzen CPU series packing a ton of threads. Not only that, but we also have FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) support for the best mix of performance/graphics quality, and ray tracing support for both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards.

You'll need 60GB storage minimum, 8GB of RAM minimum, and an AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Core i5-4460 processor at a minimum. GPU-wise, Ubisoft requires an AMD Radeon RX 460 or GeForce GTX 960 graphics card with 4GB of VRAM.

You might not be able to find a new AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card, but Cryptominers Bahrain teasing they've received what seems like a truckload of custom Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics cards. Don't try to smash your screen when you watch the video, or see the pictures below:

Cryptominers is a company that specializes in crypto mining systems, with the company receiving boxes and boxes of PowerColor, SAPPHIRE, and XFX Radeon RX 6700 XT, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards. The company also offers up ASICs for crypto mining, but they put their biggest efforts into crypto mining rigs and crypto farms.

There's even some older-gen Radeon RX 580 8GB graphics cards thrown into the mix, with XFX custom Radeon RX 580 8GB cards pictured. There's some high-end Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards which seems like a waste of high-end RDNA 2 silicon for crypto mining, but this is the world we live in now.

NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card can pump away at 100-100MH/s hash rate, but now there's a new CMP 170HX mining GPU teased that is a true crypto mining monster.

The new NVIDIA CMP 170HX mining card packs the super-fast A100 accelerator, which means it doesn't have any display connectivity or any ability to play games. It's a compute and crypto mining beast, teased by Codefordl on Zhihu.

NVIDIA's upcoming CMP 170HX has 4480 CUDA cores, where the full GA100 GPU inside of the NVIDIA A100 accelerator has 6912 CUDA cores -- so where does all this hash rate power come from? Well, that comes down to the 8GB of super-fast HBM2e memory that is on a 4096-bit memory bus and offers up to an insane 1.493GB/sec of memory bandwidth... making it an amazing, and the very best single GPU mining card.

Back in July it was being reported that Amazon's new game "New World" was bricking EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards, and once the company had multiple RTX 3090 cards returned, investigations began.

The cards were ramping up to huge frame rates in games, where EVGA RTX 3090s were being killed from Amazon's new game and no one knew why. But now we know: it was a "rare soldering issue" that EVGA found after it performed an X-Ray analysis of the killed cards.

EVGA says that it was only the cards made in 2020 that were affected, so any of the GeForce RTX 3090s made by EVGA in 2021 should be fine. PC World's Gordon Mah Ung explains:

Intel has just teased the first official artwork for its ARC Alchemist gaming graphics cards, teasing the artwork with our friends over at HotHardware. Check it out:

Intel Alchemist is the codename of Intel's first Xe-HPG gaming architecture, with the Alchemist being one of the characters from tabletop role-playing and RPG games. HotHardware explains the Alchemist: "Alchemists rely on their intuition and knowledge of potions and metallurgy to craft powerful enhancers from simple elements, herbs, and other crafting materials, and play a support role in just about every game in which they're found".

Better yet, in Final Fantasy XIV the Alchemist is pretty much me IRL... the alchemist are "typically reclusive loners who tinker away in their homes and laboratories endlessly". Sounds not just like me, but most of the tech review community who love playing and tinkering with GPUs... like the team that Raja Koduri has built inside of Intel. In Final Fantasy XIV, the alchemist creates potions you can consume -- and for your party in the game, as well as wands for the magic characters.

First Sony reinforced the new $69.99 price tag for next-gen games. Now it's setting another trend by eliminating free PS4 to PS5 next-gen upgrades.

Sony is the latest games-maker to start charging extra for cross-gen releases. Similar to EA and Activision, Sony is locking new first-party games like Horizon Forbidden West behind higher-priced paywalls if you want to buy both a PS4 and PS5 copy.

A new support page confirms Horizon Forbidden West on PS4 won't get a free next-gen upgrade on PS5, and Sony currently has no plans to allow PS4 buyers to pay to upgrade their game to the PS5 version. To get both versions, you have to spend at least $80 on the digital deluxe edition.

The global chip shortage has been hitting industries across the board, including 5G phones, graphics cards, and cars, with critical components holding back the production of finished goods. In the past, Intel has been able to avoid being the bottleneck in production, but it seems that the shortage has been sneaking up to Intel's doorstep. Although Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently made predictions that the shortage will get worse in the "second half of this year," it seems that the company had already been experiencing an extremely low inventory on mobile and other low-power CPU parts for months.

Intel's problems with the low inventory became noticeable in the middle of March. At the onset, manufacturers stated that the delays were due to global shipping issues related to the pandemic. In early April, specific products in the channel had their supplies quickly drying up, with vendors giving estimates of 3-4 weeks for orders that were placed in March. By the end of April, after notifying some customers of additional delays, those dates had slipped to the end of June. We had been hearing rumors in April from our sources that shipping delays were not necessarily the issue, but increased demands by specific partners were causing the shortages.

This story played well until we saw similar issues with Intel's larger partners. International computer manufacturer Lenovo shifted their estimated delivery dates from mid-June to October. One of Intel's largest partners, Dell, went even as far as to start proactively contacting customers stating that they would be unable to ship specific system configurations that had been accepted and recommended other models due to constraints on acquiring specific CPUs.

Hello Games recently released another mega update to No Man's Sky that's so big that it makes most AAA publishers look bad.

No Man's Sky's anticipated Frontiers update is here, and it's better than anyone expected. Frontiers is the 17th free update to the game, and it adds a ton of new content that further transforms No Man's Sky into a competent space sim.

The content includes procedurally-generated planetary settlements, and even the option to become mayor of a particular city and oversee its denizens and help the settlements grow into fully-fledged communities. You'll even have to defend your city against attacks in chaotic FPS combat, and the cities and towns will generate resources should you prove to be a benevolent ruler. The game has come a long way from the lonely worlds of 2016.

PlayerUnknown has left PUBG Corp and has brought an entire game development team with him.

Brendan Greene is no longer with Krafton the parent company of the billion-dollar battle royale PUBG. When Greene went independent he took an entire studio called PlayerUnknown Productions with him. Many outlets report this is a new studio, but PlayerUnknown Productions was actually established in 2019 as a subsidiary of PUBG Corp to lead development on a project called Prologue. This mysterious new game pivoted away from PUBG; Prologue isn't a shooter, it's not a BR, and it's set in a new IP.

Now Krafton has spun off PlayerUnknown Productions directly to Greene. We don't know exact terms of the deal, but Krafton does have a minority stake in the new company. Greene is leading PlayerUnknown Productions in Amsterdam with the aim of "building the biggest sandbox worlds ever attempted." Job listings confirm the team will use latent technologies like AI and even blockchain to achieve their goal. It's unknown if Prologue is still in development or not.

After tons of fan speculation, Sony finally confirms a September showcase for future PlayStation 5 games.

Sony's new PlayStation event is set for Thursday, September 9 at 4PM EST.

The show will focus exclusively on next-gen PS5 games with 40 minutes of reveals, footage, and content from first-party PlayStation Studios teams as well as third-party partners from "some of the industry's most imaginative developers, for games releasing this holiday and beyond."