Latest News - Page 1345

ADATA has thrown its hat into the DDR5 memory module ring, with the announcement of its next-gen DDR5 memory modules.

The company revealed the new DDR5 memory modules during its online event on August 5, where ADATA not only unveiled DDR5 RAM but also new PCIe 4.0 SSDs, external SSDs, and more. As for the DDR5 memory modules, ADATA says that they will be cranking speeds up to DDR5-8400.

The new ADATA DDR5-8400 RAM will be operating at 1.1v, with improved power efficiency, and DDR5 kits that come up to 64GB. This will be perfect for next-gen HEDT systems of 2022 and beyond, where you could buy 2 x 64GB kits and easily enjoy 128GB of DDR5 memory in your PC.

The amount of hours that I pumped into Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 was crazy, they were such fun games -- especially if you had 3 more friends to play it with. Well, Back 4 Blood is nearly here -- and it's kinda here right now if you pre-ordered and can access the open beta.

There are plenty of keys being handed out all over the internet as well, with the Back 4 Blood open beta cranking along between August 9 and August 12, and then there's a full open beta of the game that will run from August 12 to August 16.

I'm seeing lots of positive feedback on Back 4 Blood so far, which is great -- and I'm looking forward to putting some time in over the next few days to play it, and see how the NVIDIA DLSS tech keeps those frames up as close to and above 120FPS when running at 4K with max graphics settings.

Apex Legends is close to making $2 billion in just 2 years' time, making it one of EA's most successful franchises.

Respawn's battle royale sensation has supercharged EA's business so much that the publisher now sees it as a blockbuster game, putting it alongside Battlefield 2042. EA's yearly live service net bookings have grown 39% since Apex Legends released in FY19, and reached a record high of $4.5 billion last year.

Apex is raking in serious cash. The BR broke $1 billion in lifetime earnings last year, and even made $600 million in FY21 alone. Now the free-to-play game is close to hitting $2 billion.

Who has the best console sales of all time? That'd be Nintendo, who has shipped over 800.7 million handhelds and consoles since reviving the global games market in 1983.

Back in the 80s and 90s, the console wars defined an entire generation of consumer products. The classic SEGA vs Nintendo battle evolved once Sony jumped into the ring in 1994, and the PlayStation brand (along with bad decisions on SEGA's part) eventually pushed the Blue Blur's parent out of the console market altogether.

Then Microsoft emerged in 2001 and kicked off the current three-way competition we see today between Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo. It's been that way ever since. So how much hardware has each console-maker sold?

Nintendo just reported its Q1 earnings for FY22 and total software is down by 17.7% compared to record-breaking pandemic surges, but overall Switch game sales are still growing.

Nintendo's latest sales figures reiterate that gamers buy Nintendo products to primarily play first party games, with over 70% of total game sales revenue coming from wholly-owned titles. Case in point: The entire Switch top 10 best-selling games chart is made up of releases developed by Nintendo.

The top 10 chart saw some interesting fluctuations from Q4 FY21 to Q1 FY22. The fitness game Ring Fit Adventure actually pushed New Super Mario Bros. U off the top 10 list, and Super Mario Party saw a healthy spike of 930,000 sales to beat out Let's Go Pokemon Evee and Pikachu. Otherwise the list positioning has remained the same.

By the end of 2022, the Switch should become Nintendo's second best-selling games hardware of all time.

Nintendo currently forecasts the Switch will beat the Wii by March 2022, but it should also dethrone the Game Boy as well. The company expects to ship 25.05 million Switch consoles in FY22, down more than 11% from last year's record highs. Nintendo has already sold 4.42 million Switch consoles in Q1'22, leaving 21.08 million Switch shipments left on the table for the rest of the year.

A quick bit of math (21.08 million + the Switch's current 89.04 million shipments) shows Nintendo expects total Switch shipments to reach 110.12 million units by March 31, 2022, which would beat the Wii by over 8 million. In fact, current trends show the Switch can easily beat the Game Boy by 2023 (or perhaps even in 2022).

Nintendo today announced that its Switch handheld-console family has shipped over 89 million units worldwide, solidifying it as the company's fourth top hardware system of all time.

As of Q1 FY2022, the Switch has shipped 89.04 million units since it launched in early 2017, and has sold-through a whopping 85 million systems in that time. This ratio means Nintendo has sold 95% of the Switch consoles it has shipped to retailers. The console remains Nintendo's fourth best-selling hardware behind the Wii (101.63), Game Boy (118.69 million), and DS (154.02 million).

Nintendo shipped 4.42 million Switch consoles in Q1'22, down 11.5% year-over-year from FY21, where it sold a record all-time quarterly high of 5.68 million units. Analysts note that constricted chip supply has led to lower shipments and availability of Switch hardware. The company earned 47.9% of its revenues from hardware in Q1, or roughly $1.31 billion.

Embracer Group has made eight new acquisitions including Duke Nukem developer 3D Realms.

3D Realms just found a new home in one of gaming's most celebrated retro publishers. Embracer Group went on another buyout spree and purchased eight new studios:

"The Transactions improve the group's capabilities within mobile publishing and development, indie development, VR development as well as story driven, retro shooter and other development for PC/consoles," reads a press release.

A tablet that dates back some 3700 years has been found to be the oldest example of applied geometry in the history of mathematics.

Australian mathematician Dr. Daniel Mansfield from UNSW Science's School of Mathematics and Statistics revealed the oldest known origins of applied geometry on a 3700-year-old clay tablet named Plimpton 322 that dates back to the Old Babylonian period between 1900 to 1600 BCE. According to a new study released on August 4 in Foundations of Science, the clay tablet was used to survey the land with "Pythagorean triples", which are used to make accurate right angles.

Dr. Mansfield says, "The discovery and analysis of the tablet have important implications for the history of mathematics. For instance, this is over a thousand years before Pythagoras was born." Dr. Mansfield added that "It is generally accepted that trigonometry-the branch of maths that is concerned with the study of triangles-was developed by the ancient Greeks studying the night sky in the second century BCE. But the Babylonians developed their own alternative 'proto-trigonometry' to solve problems related to measuring the ground, not the sky."

A new article on Bloomberg has stated that Elon Musk, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of SpaceX and Tesla, is the highest-paid CEO in the US.

The Bloomberg piece states that Musk has actually held the role as the highest-paid CEO in the US for three consecutive years. Musk's ambitious drive comes, at least in part, from his all-or-nothing moonshot CEO package with Tesla from three years ago. The package gave him a $33 billion stock award payout if Tesla grew to $650 billion in size within 10 years, which it did - netting Musk that $33 billion.

Since the details of Musk's ambitious package deal surfaced, many executives began to follow with board members, and corporate chiefs reevaluated their current packages. According to Bloomberg, an anonymous consultant that worked with boards at some of the country's largest countries said Tesla executives felt, "The takeaway from Musk's package was that if performance requirements are high enough, it doesn't matter how much we pay."

Blue Origin has posted a new info-graphic to its website that states that SpaceX's method of transporting NASA astronauts back to the moon is "immensely complex & high risk".

The Jeff Bezos-founded space exploration company, protested NASA's decision to award SpaceX with a $2.9 billion contract to construct the next lunar lander and transportation system to put NASA astronauts back on the moon. Blue Origin officially protested NASA's decision, and NASA told SpaceX to halt any construction until the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a decision, which they gave on Monday.

The GAO said, "NASA did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award," which was Blue Origin's entire defense in protesting the initial decision. Since then, Bezos' Blue Origin has been slinging criticisms out at NASA and SpaceX for being denied the opportunity to construct their own method, and the recent info-graphic that was discovered on its website is another example of how the company is expressing itself about the decision made.

Over the many years, humans have been exploring what is in and around our solar system. We have sent many spacecrafts out to relay data back to us that has been used to piece together a better idea of our home.

Researchers know that Earth is the third planet furthest from the sun, and they know that Earth is the sixth planet from the edge of the solar system, or more accurately referred to as the outer heliosphere. The solar system's edge is defined by locating the region of space where the sun's charged solar particles are "deflected" by interstellar radiation present in the vacant space behind the edge. This border is defined as the heliosphere.

Researchers used data from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) that NASA launched in 2008 to create a new 3D map that shows the size of the heliosphere in relation to the sun and our solar system. Below is an image, and as you can see, the sun is located in the middle. On the right-hand side of the image is Voyager 1 and 2, two satellites now in interstellar space where there is abundant interstellar radiation. To the left of the image is the heliosphere, and as you would have probably already noticed, the heliosphere isn't symmetrical. This is due to how the sun is moving throughout the Milky Way.

SpaceX will be conducting its first all-civilian mission with Crew Dragon soon, and the astronauts aboard will have a series made about them by Netflix.

Netflix has announced what is called "Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space", which is a new documentary series that Netflix confirmed is in production on August 3, 2021. The new documentary series is produced by Netflix and Time Studios and is directed by Jason Hehir, the director behind the Michael Jordan documentary series "The Last Dance".

Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Chris Sembroski, and Sian Proctor will be boarding SpaceX's dragon capsule for launch on September 15. Netflix is planning on releasing one episode for the show on September 6 and then another on September 13. The final will be released closer to the end of September. Deadline reports that the creation of Inspiration4 represents a business shift by Netflix into real-time documentary production.

Researchers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have documented the presence of a new class of fire known as "cool flames".

Peter Sunderland, a Professor of Fire Protection Engineering and Keystone Professor at the University of Maryland, said that this discovery could transform what we know fire can be and increase the possibilities of what it can do. Sunderland continued and said that the current goal of his research is to understand these "spherical cool diffusion flames" and eventually model how they work, which can lead to designing "a new class of clean combustion engine."

The new class of fire is known as "cool flames" due to how extremely low the temperature is and how hard the blue hue of the flame is to see. In 2012 "cool flames" were first discovered on the ISS, but only for a brief moment before all fuel was exhausted. This event sparked interest in "cool flames" due to how very little was known about them. To push the humans' envelope of understanding of fire even further, a team of researchers partnered with astronauts aboard the ISS to test different gas fuels.

Back in 2018, a team of astronomers and astrophysicists measured all of the light in the history of the observable universe.

Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at Clemson University, led the team that used NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to view all of the light within the observable universe bubble, which is estimated to be about 14 billion light-years in radius. This bubble represents how far researchers are able to see back in time to the beginning of the universe, and so far researchers know that the observable universe contains, "contains at least two trillion galaxies and a trillion trillion stars," writes Dennis Overbye in New York Times Science.

Ajello and his team analyzed all of the relevant data acquired by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and found, "From data collected by the Fermi telescope, we were able to measure the entire amount of starlight ever emitted. This has never been done before. Most of this light is emitted by stars that live in galaxies. And, so, this has allowed us to better understand the stellar-evolution process and gain captivating insights into how the universe produced its luminous content", says Ajello.

Researchers have been able to link an oxygen event 250 million years ago to Earth's largest extinction event.

The largest extinction in Earth's history, where 96% of the planet's marine life and 70% of the land animals died, has been linked to an oxygen event. The largest extinction event to ever happen on Earth marked the ending of the Permian period 250 million years ago, and now according to a new study published in Nature Geoscience by researchers from Florida State University (FSU), a sudden rise and then a drop in the ocean's oxygen levels coincided with the mass extinction event.

Sean Newby, the lead author on the study and FSU graduate research assistant, said, "There's previous work that's been done that shows the environment becoming less oxygenated leading into the extinction event, but it has been hypothesized as a gradual change. We were surprised to see this really rapid oxygenation event coinciding with the start of the extinction and then a return to reducing conditions."

We are receiving drops and drops of information on Google's next-gen ultra-high-end Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro smartphones, where they will be manufactured using Samsung's next-gen 5nm process node.

Google is using a custom in-house Tensor chip inside of its next-gen Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro smartphones, with new rumors suggesting that Samsung will be making the chip using its new 5nm process technology. The news is coming from sources that go against Nikkei, that reported TSMC was going to be building the Tensor chips for Google.

The new Tensor core is going to built on Samsung's new 5nm process according to the latest reports, but of course -- Google and Samsung are refusing to comment.

I'm old enough to remember the hype of 3Dfx (capitalized D made the difference as they changed to 3dfx years later) and the original Voodoo 1. Man... it was an absolute game-changer. Super smooth frame rates, bi-linear filtering, 4MB of RAM and the ability of SLI... dual VGA cards at once?! It was a gamers' wet dream, literally.

Well, 3dfx eventually died down and NVIDIA acquired its assets in December 2020 -- most of it was IP rights. This is where NVIDIA took SLI from, 3dfx created the technology and NVIDIA acquired 3dfx and its SLI technology in the process, tweaked it, and then pretty much gave up on it with the lastest-gen GPUs.

But now... a San Francisco-based company called Jansen Products has acquired 3dfx assets and is trademarking that iconic name. Jansen Products... doesn't that smell fishy... NVIDIA owns 3dfx for the most part, with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang... and now Jansen Products is teasing a return of 3dfx.

I just finished writing the world exclusive review of COLORFUL's beautiful iGame GeForce RTX 3060 Bilibili E-sports Edition OC graphics card, but now the company has unleashed its new iGame GeForce RTX 3070 LHR Bilibili E-sports Edition OC graphics card. Check it out:

It looks virtually identical to the GeForce RTX 3060 variant with one very, very big difference: COLORFUL is rocking out with the 12-pin PCIe power connector that has been exclusive to NVIDIA's in-house GeForce RTX 30 series Founders Edition graphics cards.

The new COLORFUL RTX 3070 LHR iGame Bilbili E-Sports Edition is a semi-custom design with a PCB that is probably a re-used NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 PG142 SKU10 reference design. The same 12-pin PCIe power connector is here, with some factory overclocking with the physical OC button on the back of the card driving GPU boost up to 1695MHz (1.8% increase).

Imagine in a few month's time you'll be able to maybe buy an ASUS graphics card with a wicked Noctua cooler on it, it looks like it'll be happening and I couldn't be happier.

According to a new filing with the Eurasian Economic Commission, it seems ASUS is teaming up with Noctua on some new cooling technology for GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards. Noctua is well known for their beige/brown combo cooling solutions, which don't just look great, they're some of the best-performing coolers in the industry.

The reason for all this hype is a model that was slipped in called "RTX3070-8G-NOCTUA" which kinda gives it away, doesn't it -- a GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card with 8GB of GDDR6 memory and a Noctua branded cooler. I guess you'd have to be blind to not see it.