Latest News - Page 1372

Asobo Studio has re-written Flight Simulator's engine to allow mid-range PCs to push great performance.

Microsoft's Flight Simulator used to be one of the most demanding PC games ever made, but a new update introduces significant engine optimizations that drastically reduce hardware usage.

"We have re-written a lot of the parts of the engine, the architecture, in order to get the maximum performance of the sim and minimize resource memory bandwidth footprint," Asobo Studio CEO and co-founder Sebastian Wloch said in a recent Flight Sim stream.

Battlefield 2042's new squad-based Hazard Zone is apparently a unique spin on battle royale, but it won't be a traditional BR mode.

DICE has already confirmed Battlefield 2042 won't have straight battle royale like Warzone or Apex Legends, but it looks like the developers are putting their own spin on the mode. Up until now details on the Hazard Zone mode have been somewhat light, but the devs have delivered some new comments.

In the August 2021 issue of Play magazine, DICE says that Hazard Zone will "move the battle royale concept on in a way only Battlefield can." It's possible that Hazard Zone mashes up team-based squadplay with BR mechanics like elimination-style deaths. DICE can't reveal official details just yet, and PR tells us Hazard Zone will be revealed closer towards the game's launch. EA Play will focus on DICE LA's new mysterious game mode.

Sony Group has acquired licensing rights to Sesame Street in Japan, and plans to create new games and other products based on the franchise, sources tell Nikkei Asia.

Sony's Creative Products division has re-acquired the rights to Sesame Street in Japan with the aim of creating and distributing products based on the hit kid's show. Sony's rights to Sesame Street expired in 2004 and have been renewed this year as expands into apparel, broadcasting the show throughout Japan, and eventually video games.

Other Sony Creative Products licenses include Thomas & Friends, Peter Rabbit, and Charles Schultz's Peanuts.

DICE LA will reveal Battlefield 2042's mysterious third game mode at the show, PR has reiterated.

Today we received a PR email re-confirming Battlefield 2042's new multiplayer mode will be shown at EA Play Live:

"DICE LA will reveal the next major experience coming to Battlefield 2042 at EA PLAY Live on July 22. This new experience is a brand-new game type, made as a love letter to Battlefield fans, and one that long-time players will feel right at home with,"the message reads.

Sony is spending more than it ever has on R&D, particularly for PlayStation gaming.

Gaming is a big part of Sony's yearly revenues. The company earned over $25 billion from PlayStation last year in FY20, roughly 30% of Sony's annual revenues and more than any other platform-holder in the history of the games industry. That kind of revenue influx also demands significant spending on R&D to maintain cutting-edge games, hardware, and services.

While taking a look at Sony's recent 20-F annual SEC filing, I noticed something interesting. The company says its Games & Network Services are at the top of its R&D spend, alongside its Images Sensors and Services division.

Sony just bought Housemarque, and it looks like Bluepoint is their next big acquisition.

Sony has accidentally revealed its intentions to buy Bluepoint, the gurus behind fantastic PlayStation remasters like the Nathan Drake Collection. Gravity Rush, and Shadow of the Colossus. More recent games include Demon's Souls, a PlayStation 5 launch exclusive of the original PS game. The news was spotted on a quickly-deleted Tweet from PlayStation Japan which welcomed Bluepoint to the PlayStation Studios team. Sony meant to upload the image welcoming Housemarque to the team, not Bluepoint, but the cat was out of the bag and spread across the internet.

The announcement has yet to be confirmed but we should expect official news in the coming days. PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst recently said that Sony only buys studios it knows very well:

As previous reports indicated, Konami has plans to license out key IPs instead of spending millions on games development. The first partnership is with Layers of Fear developer Bloober Team.

Today Konami announced a strategic partnership with Polish games developer Bloober Team to make new projects. Bloober Team, mostly known for unsettling horror games like Layers of Fear, Observer, Layers of Fear 2, Blair Witch, and 2021's The Medium, will work on a new Silent Hill game, sources tell VideoGameChronicle. It's unknown whether or not the Silent Hill game will be a big-budget experience or a smaller game.

Konami didn't 100% confirm Bloober was working on a new Silent Hill game and said "we will announce information about contents once details are decided". But it's pretty clear what it'll be. You don't conscript an independent horror game dev to work on something that's not horror-related.

One dataminer finds mysterious assets for Slipstream, which is listed alongside other Call of Duty games. Could it be for 2021's new WW2-themed Vanguard?

References to something called Slipstream have been found on Battle.net's code by Twitter user @Helba_The_AI, and it's possible it refers to Call of Duty Vanguard. While the name is confusing, it's likely the assets are to throw off dataminers with decoys, the same way Epic Games changed its internal references to FF7 Remake and Alan Wake to strange names like PineappleQA and Heron Staging on its storefront.

The Slipstream asset could refer to something in the actual game, but it's most likely a banner placeholder that uses a decoy word instead of the game's Vanguard name. The font and style of the actual game could be exactly the same as the asset found on Battle.net.

It's very common for a person to think that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, but now new evidence has suggested the asteroid wasn't the only factor at play with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

66 million years ago, a space rock collided with Earth, causing mile-high tsunamis, fires, clouds of dust and sulfur that covered the sun, and more. The climate on Earth certainly changed after the impact of the asteroid, and it's currently believed by many researchers that the changed climate is what caused the dinosaurs to become extinct. However, new research is breaking that current theory as it suggests that the dinosaurs were already on their way out and the asteroid impact was what just finished them off.

The researchers examined 1,600 fossils from 247 different species of dinosaurs and compiled those dinosaurs into six families. The researchers then measured how the species of dinosaurs in those six families diversified over time and found that across all six of the groups, the number of species of dinosaurs was declining 10 million years prior to the asteroid impact.

Back-to-back heat waves have added to the already dry soil and vegetation across 91% of the western US states.

The Western half of the United States has been in a drought since June 22, and on the horizon are heatwaves arriving earlier than usual which will only increase dryness and the chance of wildfires. Additionally, reports indicate that water levels in Lake Mead are the lowest they have been since 1930, as well as California's reservoirs, are down by 50% than they usually are for this time of year.

The western US has been experiencing a 22-year-long drought, and this coming summer is certainly going to be a part of that. Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that this coming summer will likely be the worst drought of the last 20 years. Here's what Cook said, "Even in the context of those last 20 years of drought, this year really stands out. For the Southwest, it's very likely to be the worst single year of drought since 2002."

NASA has been combating a glitch on the Hubble Space Telescope for many days, and now a recent discovery may solidify its unfortunate demise.

The problem arose on June 13 with an issue with Hubble's payload computer, which resulted in the telescope putting all of its instruments into safe mode. NASA researchers then performed tests on June 23 and June 24, but weren't able to bring the telescope back online. Engineers also attempted to use the backup computer to get around the problem, but the backup computer was experiencing the same error.

Currently, NASA's teams are working on resolving the problem through alternative routes such as the telescopes power regulator. NASA recently stated, "A power regulator ensures a steady constant voltage supply," said the agency in the Friday update." If the voltage is out of limits, it could cause the problems observed." Hubble has been in service for 31 years, and throughout its lifetime, it has contributed to some of the most significant scientific discoveries of our cosmos.

An astrophysicist has explored the idea that there may be a link between the interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua and UFO sightings.

Back in 2017 'Oumuamua was discovered and astrophysicists inferred that the object was large, flat, came from interstellar space and appeared to have been pushed away by our Sun as if it were a light sail. The origin and nature of the object are still yet unknown, however, astrophysicist Avi Loeb has calculated the population of interstellar objects such as 'Oumuamua by taking into account what we know about the solar system and assuming that the objects came from natural planetary systems.

What Loeb found was "there should be a quadrillion 'Oumuamua-like objects within the solar system at any given time, if they are distributed on random trajectories with equal probability of moving in all direction," as written in an opinion piece by Loeb in Scientific American. This result lead Loeb to consider the thought that 'Oumuamua may be an artificial object that is designed to collect information, and perhaps its receiving information from probes (UFOs/UAPs) that its already scattered over Earth.

Former President Trump made moves against TikTok's parent company ByteDance as the former President's administration expressed concerns over the app's privacy policy.

Now, TikTok has recently made changes to its privacy policy which allows the app to "collect biometric identifiers and biometric identification" from user content. For those wondering if that includes faceprints and voiceprints - yes, it does. Here's what the company's privacy policy says, "We may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under US laws, such as faceprints and voiceprints, from your User Content. Where required by law, we will seek any required permissions from you prior to any such collection."

The TikTok insiders have come out to CNBC and said that ByteDance "has access to American user data and is actively involved in the Los Angeles company's decision-making and product development." Additionally, one TikTok insider said that ByteDance has the capabilities of accessing data for all American TikTok users, as the employee reached out to ByteDance in China to harvest data on a specific user. The parent company promptly sent back the relevant information after performing a global analysis of its user base.

Corsair today introduced two huge tower cases that have space to stuff almost any array of computer components and water-cooling equipment. If you've been around the enthusiast PC space for a while, these new 7000-series cases have a lot in common with the old Obsidian 800D from over a decade ago.

Corsair's 7000-series cases come in two varieties. The front of the 7000D AIRFLOW features a perforated mesh grill that runs from the top to bottom, exposing enough open area to accommodate up to four 120mm fans or three 140mm fans. The iCUE 7000X RGB features a glass panel instead of the mesh, with air vents lining the sides of the front bezel.

Both models of Corsair's 7000-series cases can accommodate seven 140mm fans or up to 12 120mm fans. The 7000D AIRFLOW includes three 140mm CORSAIR AirGuide fans, while the 7000X RGB includes four SP140 RGB ELITE AirGuide and an iCUE COMMANDER CORE XT controller.

DecaGear revealed that it hit a temporary setback in its production progress. The last component required to build the DecaMove input devices was delayed and set the production back by roughly two weeks.

DecaGear opened pre-orders for the DecaMove controller earlier this year, and the company promised that its first backers would receive their order in June. Unfortunately, due to a delay from one of its component suppliers, DecaMove fell short of that promise.

Fortunately, the delay appears to be a short one, and DecaGear posted in its Discord channel that it expects to have all June and July orders fulfilled before mid-July.

DOOM Eternal's new update is live for both the PC and next-gen consoles, where on the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 next-gen consoles it'll add ray tracing -- while the PC side of things gets some awesome NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 lovin' that injects major performance into the game.

We're looking at up to 50% more performance with DLSS enabled and turned to Performance mode, but from my very quick testing there is no Ultra Performance preset for 8K which means the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti doesn't have the VRAM allocation ready for 8K gaming with DOOM Eternal at 8K. I'll have to play around with that more, and test the GeForce RTX 3090 exclusively thanks to the 24GB of GDDR6X memory on-board.

DOOM Eternal also has ray tracing on both consoles and the PC, with ray traced reflections inside of the campaign for DOOM Eternal -- increasing the graphics fidelity to another level. Enabling ray tracing will reduce performance, but that's why NVIDIA has its dark magik DLSS 2.0 technology, boosting performance by up to 50% at 4K in DOOM Eternal.

EVGA has been at the top of enthusiast motherboards for years now, but they've been totally absent from the AMD chipset world -- and that is all about to change:

The company teased "Darkness is coming" on Twitter, teasing that EVGA is working on a new DARK series motherboard with an AMD chipset -- presumably X570S (without the active chipset cooling). EVGA wasn't clear on what motherboard is coming, nor was the company clear about when its new DARK series motherboard would grace AMD Ryzen gamers.

Just as we're ramping up into the next-gen AM5 chipset and new Zen 4 architecture, EVGA has waited in the wings with what should be one of the most enthusiast level motherboards that money (will soon be able) to buy. AM4 is sticking around for a while it seems, and EVGA should have a truly kick ass Zen-ready X570/S motherboard.

EA and DICE have a lot to say about Battlefield 2042 today, with hardware partners announced: EA DICE have teamed with Xbox to make Microsoft's next-gen console the "official console" of Battlefield 2042.

We don't exactly know what that means, but if you cut through the BS then it means Microsoft paid a considerable sum to EA and gets to have their consoles be the "official console" of what should be one of the biggest games of the year. In a press release, EA says that they teamed with Xbox to "ensure that the next entry in the Battlefield franchise is the best one yet".

This doesn't mean that Battlefield 2042 is exclusive to the Xbox, as it is coming to PlayStation 5 and PC -- and EA DICE were super light on details. We should know more at EA Play Live on July 22, where EA will be showing off some more details of Battlefield 2042 as well as an entirely new game mode.

EA and DICE have come out today announcing their official partners for Battlefield 2042, with the likes of Xbox, NVIDIA, Logitech, car maker Polaris, and WD_BLACK on supporting Battlefield 2042.

NVIDIA will be providing its amazing DLSS technology, which will provide better image quality and even more performance squeezed out of your GeForce RTX graphics card. Not only that, but you'll also have access to NVIDIA's in-house Reflex low latency technology.

Battlefield 2042 supporting NVIDIA DLSS is absolutely fantastic, as it brings it up to line with Call of Duty: Warzone which has DLSS 2.0 support and is the only thing that allows NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card to hit 4K 120FPS. Battlefield 2042 should now reach the realms of 4K 120FPS thanks to the newly-announced support for NVIDIA DLSS technology.

Doom Eternal's free next-gen Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 optimization patch is now live, adding higher FPS and ray-traced visuals to the game.

Doom Eternal gets three new graphics modes on next-gen consoles, including a 60FPS ray-tracing mode at 1800p and Performance Mode with 120FPS (1584p on PS5, 1800p on Series X. There's also the new Balanced Mode that hits 4K 60FPS on UHD displays. The Series X/S optimizations also utilize Variable Rate Shading, a new feature that allows the console to maintain higher frame rates at the cost of faraway texture resolution. The results see a moderate impact on FPS.

id confirms that dynamic resolution scaling is used in order to hit the frame rate targets.