Latest News - Page 1333

Minecraft is a weird and wonderful place but now it is filled with some realistic-looking motherboards from both AMD and Intel thanks to a talented Redditor.

Redditor "MasterKnight48902" spent many hours building AMD and Intel motherboards, with some of MSI's latest and greatest AMD X570S-based motherboards including the EDGE MAX WIFI, CARBON MAX WIFI, CARBON EK X, UNIFY-X MAX, and ACE MAX boards.

It took around 2.5 hours to make each motherboard using MCEdit 0.1.7.1 -- and each motherboard has an awesome amount of detail to them. We're talking down to component level with VRMs, heat sinks, RGB LEDs, and even pre-installed EK water blocks on the CARBON EK X motherboard. It's actually very impressive indeed.

LG's smallest OLED panel is a 48-inch OLED TV but there was meant to be a smaller 42-inch OLED unveiled by LG, which has now been delayed until CES 2022 in January 2022.

The news is coming from Korea Economic Daily, with writer Su-Bin Lee explaining: "According to industry sources on Aug. 19, the South Korean home appliance giant will likely showcase the 42-inch model suitable for gaming during next year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January".

LG announced its smallest OLED TV yet at CES 2021, with the 42-inch OLED TV expected to be released this year, but now it has been delayed. At the time, LG explained that it would be making smaller OLED panels in the future -- below 42 inches and into the 20-30 inches which would "enlarge our business areas to gaming and mobility in addition to the TV sector".

Destiny 2's new Witch Queen expansion adds an awesome new melee/gun hybrid that shakes gameplay up a bit.

Destiny 2's new glaive weapon is the very first first-person melee weapon in the game, and it looks like Bungie's own unique take on Squall's gunblade in Final Fantasy 8. It's primarily an energy melee weapon that can slash out combos while also blasting mid-range projectiles--and even offers protection via an energy shield if it's leveled up. Plus it's not something you can find--it's something you have to make.

Weapon crafting is coming to Destiny 2, and the glaive will be the first piece of gear you make with the new feature. "This is a combat-based progression system. The more you use these weapons, the more objectives you complete with them, the more you'll level them up and the more powerful they grow over time," Bungie said in the Witch Queen stream. The devs confirm players will be able to make all Throne World weapons, raid weapons, and seasonal weapons with the new crafting mode.

The Fallout 76 community offers more feedback and tells Bethesda the kind of content they would most like to see in controversial live game as it enters its third year.

Fallout 76 will soon get Fallout Worlds on September 8, a new mode that's the closest thing to mod support the live game has received to date. With Fallout Worlds gamers can set custom parameters for in-game spaces including infinite ammo, zero AP cost for VATS, and CAMP free building. Only Fallout 1st players can set their own worlds, whereas free Fallout 76 players can join worlds made by Bethesda or other players.

This new feature isn't enough, though. Fallout 76 players want more--particularly more meaningful storylines, quests, and endgame content. These things are the foundations for any live game, and Fallout 76 engagement has apparently stagnated despite the new content Bethesda has rolled out. The core issue is that there simply isn't enough fresh and unique things to do, and things get repeatable and derivative to the point where the Fallout 76 community has to make their own fun (including in-game roleplays).

Final Fantasy XIV is so popular that Square Enix is currently having issues keeping up with demand.

Square Enix has announced that all of the worlds on its North American Aether data center are completely full, meaning players on these worlds can no longer create new characters. The devs suggest creating new characters on the Primal or Crystal servers for the time being. Square Enix's dev teams say they are working on adding new worlds and expanding the servers, but these fixes won't be in place any time soon due to COVID-19 restrictions. The European data centers are also heavily congested but are currently working as intended.

There's no news on whether or not Square Enix can add more data centers or worlds ahead of FF14's huge new Endwalker expansion on November 23.

Ubisoft is doubling the frame rate of one of the best Assassin's Creed games on consoles.

Today Ubisoft announced Assassin's Creed Odyssey is getting a surprise upgrade to support 60FPS on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. This effectively doubles the base 30FPS frame rate of the 2018 best-seller on PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X hardware. What's even more surprising is that this isn't a next-gen optimized patch, but an upgrade made through each console's backwards compatibility functionality.

That being said. don't expect other massive improvements like upgrade visuals, ray tracing, or even a significant reduction in loading times (although the PS5's PCIe 4.0 SSD starts Odyssey 67% faster and loads up a save game 57% faster than the base PS4's slower HDD). The patch clocks in at less than 500MB on both platforms which is a nice touch.

Everyone looks for an easy and quick way to perform a process. This is the same case with OST to PST conversion process. Though Outlook has options to convert OST file to PST, it requires a lot of time and effort to perform the entire process successfully. Also, Outlook is futile when it comes to converting an inaccessible or orphaned OST file. That's where a specialized OST to PST converter tool, such as Stellar Converter for OST comes into play. It can convert inaccessible or orphaned OST file into Outlook PST file, easily and quickly.

This OST to PST converter tool can easily convert large sized OST files to PST files without a problem. The software extracts all the offline Outlook data file items, including emails, attachments, contacts, calendars, tasks, notes, journals, etc. and saves them in PST file, maintaining the original integrity.

Stellar Converter for OST works with all versions of Microsoft Outlook, including Microsoft Outlook 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000.

Xbox One owners will soon be able to play Gen 8 Xbox Series X games via game streaming, Microsoft today announced.

Project xCloud game streaming is coming to Xbox consoles in Holiday 2021, bringing performance at up to 1080p 60FPS to both Xbox One and Xbox Series gen systems. Gamers will be able to jump right into any game with the press of a button without any downloads, offering a unique way to try and sample new titles.

One of the biggest benefits is that Xbox One owners can try out Gen 8 games without needing an Xbox Series X or S console. Microsoft confirmed that game streaming allows the 8 year-old Xbox One to be forward compatible with all upcoming next-gen exclusives when they start releasing in 2022, including the new Fable and Obsidian's Avowed RPG.

Google had a very definitive response to Epic's staged uprising: To force a hostile takeover with a mass share buyout.

Epic Games has earned the ire of mobile titans Apple and Google, leading to two very prominent monopolization court cases. It all started when Epic added its own payment processing system to both iOS and Android, and both Google and Apple responded by kicking Fortnite off their platforms. Now both are missing out on microtransaction millions. Ever since then, Epic has been a thorn in both companies' sides as court cases air their dirty laundry--like the time Google almost took over Epic.

A recent court documentfrom the Epic vs Google case confirms that Google was exploring options to subdue Epic. One of these possibilities including a hostile takeover with majority share buyouts. According to the document, Google thought about teaming up with Tencent to "buy 100% of Epic":

343 Industries has fallen into the age old trap of live games, juggling the catch-22 of updating a game and having to fix it at the same time.

Halo Infinite is a live game, and that means it can and will evolve over time. This offers many advantages like lucrative online monetization and being able to shift the game's meta, add new content, and adjust content on-the-fly. The disadvantages are also prevalent--live games are exceptionally hard to make because they take so much effort across a variety of spectrums. Developers have to inhabit three different timelines for a live game to be successful--the past, the present, and the future.

They have to look at the past and see what worked, keep the present intact and maintain servers, and continue planning for the future with new content. To put it simply: Developers have to keep a rickety ship afloat in a hurricane storm as they add and build new things that make it heavier and potentially more unstable.

Today Bungie will outline Destiny 2's ambitious future with its new Witch Queen expansion, which is unlike anything we've ever experienced before.

This year, Destiny turns 7 years old, a magical and mystical number for Bungie. The developer says its new Witch Queen expansion will deliver something new and mysterious and has been hyping its new expansion, The Witch Queen, for weeks now. Something big is on the horizon for Destiny 2 and there's speculation this could be Destiny 2's game-changing The Taken King moment.

Apart from the expanded content we also got our first look at Savathun, the macabre witch queen herself. In the teaser, Savathun, one of the most dreaded hive gods in existence, tells us "truth is a funny thing" amidst a sea of dead hive corpses. Bungie has also confirmed the Queen of the Reef, Mara Sov, will be coming back.

The United States military is currently debating over revealing a highly classified space weapon through a public demonstration.

The news is sourced from the publication Breaking Defense, and according to the report, a number of military leaders have been discussing for more than a year about unveiling the US's secret space weapon. The report goes on to say that weapon was created under the "Special Access Program", which is slapped with a "highly classified" stamp.

The debate between the senior military leaders is on whether to reveal the weapon by demonstrating its capabilities, according to the report. This isn't the first time the US government has thought about revealing the weapon, as the Trump administration was planning on an unveiling in 2020, but the event was canceled due to COVID-19. Additionally, the report says the weapon could be revealed at the 2021 Space Symposium, where there could be a public display.

Researchers have used advanced technology that has indicated that the previous historical age of Machu Picchu is slightly inaccurate.

In conjunction with other researchers, a new study by Richard Burger, an archaeologist at Yale University, took advantage of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), an advanced form of radiocarbon dating. The researchers looked at human remains, and according to the results presented in the journal Antiquity, the ancient Inca city Machu Picchu was active from around 1420 to A.D 1530, making the wonder of the world 20 years older than previously thought.

The researchers state that 1530 was close to the time of the Spanish conquest and that most of the historical accounts about Machu Picchu come from Spaniards. Furthermore, the AMS results from analyzing 26 human samples sourced from four cemeteries at Machu Picchu suggest that the accounts that were the basis of common understanding about the ancient city may not be entirely accurate and are in need of revision.

The University of California is spearheading a mission that will send two satellites to Mars, and these satellites are named "Blue" and "Red".

NASA announced the mission last week and said that it has been authorized for launch in October 2024. The mission is titled the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE), and the core idea of the mission is to show that a spacecraft can be built, tested, integrated and launched for less than $80 million.

The speed and cost of the entire process is the main exploration point for scientists and NASA as it will mean the agency will be able to create a craft and launch towards planets in a short amount of time. Usually, a planned launch towards a planet requires years of planning, sometimes even ranging up to decades. Not to mention that costs are extremely expensive, often ranging in the billions of dollars.

Back in 1896, geologist John Wesley Powell noticed that there was a large portion of missing rock from the Grand Canyon. This later became known as the "Great Unconformity" mystery of the Grand Canyon.

Powell was later able to date the rocks and found that some rocks dated between 1.4 - 1.8 billion years ago, and that more than a billion years of rocks were missing. Geologists in a new study propose that they have found out the reason why there are missing rocks from the Grand Canyon, with the researchers saying that the Grand Canyon is much more complex than researchers have previously anticipated.

The researchers used new methods to come to this conclusion, most of which rely on thermochronology, which is a chemical analysis of the rock that reveals how much heat is stored within the rock when it formed. The heat signature also corresponds to the amount of geological pressure it was under when parts of the canyon were shifting over millions of years. The researchers presented data that suggests the Grand Canyon experienced some small faulting events that can account for the gaps in the overall geological record.

NASA's Curiosity rover may not be the center of attention on the Red Planet, but it's still out there roaming around conducting significant science.

Curiosity recently climbed Mount Sharp on the Red Planet, which is a five-mile tall mountain that is within the 96 mile wide Gale Crater basin where Curiosity is stationed. Curiosity used its Mast Camera to capture a stunning panoramic view of the entire landscape, showing off layers of the mount that researchers back on Earth will use as information to attempt to derive the age of the rock formations. NASA describes the image as Curiosity findings a "changing landscape".

Curiosity also took a rock sample with its drill and then used its robotic arm to crush the rock into a powder so it can be placed into its chassis for examination. Once the now-powder rock is inside the chassis Curiosity proceeds to use its instruments to find out which chemicals and minerals are present in the sample. All of the data acquired from this process is added to the pile of information is being used to answer the question "Did Mars once have the conditions to support life?".

NASA has just taken a few steps towards the launch of a spacecraft that is designed to collide with an asteroid.

NASA is calling it the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART for short. The mission is to see if NASA is capable of designing a spacecraft that's purpose is to collide with an asteroid to knock it off course. NASA isn't alone in working on asteroid-deflecting technologies, and for good reason, if an asteroid lines its trajectory up with Earth it could be a potentially catastrophic event. As for DART, NASA will be launching it into space, and it will collide with an asteroid 6.8 million miles away that is of no danger to Earth - at 15,000 mph.

As the launch of DART approaches, NASA is revealing the technology the spacecraft will be sporting. Engineers are close to completing the installation of the internal imaging device called Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical (DRACO), which will be used to capture images of the asteroid along with the very last seconds of its imminent collision into the asteroid. This installation moves the spacecraft one more step closer to launch. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Researchers have known that Mars has ice on it for some time, but what they don't know is how much of this ice is water and how much of it is dust.

Using data acquired by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, planetary scientists Aditya Khuller and Philip Christensen of Arizona State University partnered with Stephen Warren, an Earth ice and snow expert from the University of Washington, set out to determine just how much dust is contained in Martian ice using computer simulations. The researchers found that the ice dug up by the Phoenix Mars lander formed from dusty snowfall that occurred sometime within the last million years.

The researchers also found that the ice found on the surface of Mars could be from dusty snowfall, according to Khuller, who said, "There is a chance that this dusty and dark ice might melt a few centimeters down. And any subsurface liquid water produced from melting will be protected from evaporating in Mars' wispy atmosphere by the overlying blanket of ice."

Astronomers are constantly looking out into the void of space, attempting to discover something that they haven't before.

Now, a team of astronomers believe they have located what should be considered as the fastest-orbiting asteroid in our solar system, asteroid 2021 PH27's. Astronomers discovered that this asteroid had the shortest orbital lap of the sun of just 113 days, the shortest known orbital lap of any object in our solar besides Mercury, which takes just 88 days.

The asteroid was first discovered on August 13 by astronomers that were using the Dark Energy Camera (DEC). Astronomers estimate that the asteroid is around 0.6 miles in diameter and that the asteroid originally came from the asteroid belt that is located between Mars and Jupiter. Additionally, researchers believe that it's likely the asteroid will collide with either Mars or Venus in the next few million years.

GALAX has just re-released some new graphics cards, with some tweaked NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards with blower-style coolers.

We don't see many high-end graphics cards with blower-style coolers, especially the toasty GeForce RTX 3090 but it looks like GALAX is going to do it. We have the introduction of the new GALAX GeForce RTX 3090 Classic which looks identical to the Turbo model from GALAX.

There's also the GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 Classic, which also rocks the blower-style cooler. I would not be expecting out-of-the-box factory overclocking on the blower-style-cooled cards, but I'm sure you'll be able to crank up the GDDR6X memory clocks and GPU clocks without an issue... it'll just run toasty.