Cyberpunk 2077's astronomical 13.7 million game sales surge CD Projekt's earnings to new heights.

CD Projekt's Q4 is not only the best-performing quarter in history, but it actually dwarfs previous yearly earnings too. CD Projekt made more money in one quarter than it has ever earned in a full year's time, and it's mostly thanks to Cyberpunk 2077's 13.7 million unit sales in 21 weeks.

According to recent company financials, CD Projekt made 1.67 billion PLN in Q4 2020 ($447 million as of December 2020) in net sales in Q4, which is more than CD Projekt made the entire year of 2015, the second-highest period which included 8 months of Witcher 3 game sales.

Housemarque's new PlayStation 5 exclusive Returnal may hit 4K 60FPS with raytraced visuals with the trade-off of dynamic resolution scaling.

Returnal may be the first Sony-produced PS5 exclusive to achieve targeted 4K output at 60FPS with raytracing turned on. An official post on PlayStation's mainsite confirms the game can hit dynamically-scaled 4K resolution at 60FPS with real-time ray-traced global illumination enabled.

"Experience high-fidelity ambient lighting that is specifically designed to adapt in real-time to Atropos' dynamic environment. Thanks to the incredible power of PS5, the blistering combat and brooding visuals of Returnal's unique world are delivered at a consistent 60 frames-per-second and a dynamic 4K resolution," the website says.

In 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 sold more copies on PC than PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles combined, CD Projekt confirms.

According to CD Projekt RED's latest figures, Cyberpunk 2077 sold an astronomical 13.7 million copies in just 21 days, which is more than some games see in their entire lifetimes. PC was the most popular platform of choice for the 2020 launch, with 56% of total sales (roughly 7.7 million sales) on PC via Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store, and physical retail releases.

Consoles sold marginally less, likely due to the significant lower-end performance and controversy surrounding the base PS4/Xbox One gameplay. CD Projekt says CP2077 sold 3.67 million copies on PlayStation 4 (28%) and 2.33 million copies on Xbox One (17%).

It looks like AMD was working on a reference design Radeon RX 6900 XTX graphics card -- yes, there's an extra X at the end there that is what we're seeing released now with even-more-top-tier higher-binned Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards using the Navi 21 XTX GPU.

The images were discovered on Weibo with sources quoting Chiphell, which said the pictures were from an evaluation board for an unreleased reference Radeon graphics card. AMD was most likely working on a reference design Radeon RX 6900 XTX graphics card with water cooling, something that we're seeing with some of the new Navi 21 XTX-based custom Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards revealed over the last few days.

But if we're seeing a card in this state I don't think it's out of the realms of possibility to see AMD release a super-enthusiast Radeon RX 6900 XTX graphics card that is water cooled. I mean it looks super mean, and it would offer a few more FPS over the air-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card.

CD Projekt RED started developing Cyberpunk 2077's next-gen RED Engine tech all the way back in 2015 after The Witcher 3 shipped, the company today confirmed.

With advanced animation and cinematic capabilities, real-time AI, and living, breathing city simulations, RED Engine 4.0 is a big jump over the engine that powered The Witcher 3. Given TW3's excellent performance, visuals, and execution, that's saying quite a bit. Now CDPR says its current RED Engine iteration that powers Cyberpunk 2077 was actually five years in the making.

In its recent annual 2020 earnings report, CD Projekt RED confirms it started making the current RED Engine 4.0 technology way back in 2015. Major RED Engine innovations like high-end city creation and advanced motion capture and animation techniques occurred in 2017, a year after CDPR secured funding from the Polish government as part of the GameINN financing program for R&D innovation.

CD Projekt spent in excess of $300 million on Cyberpunk 2077's development, making it one of the largest video game investments in the history of the industry.

It's not often that a company reveals budgets for its games. We know AAA titles command tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of investment; paying developers alone can rack up lots of costs. CD Projekt's massively ambitious Cyberpunk 2077 game belongs to the latter.

The Polish company today revealed that it spent 1.2 billion PLN (roughly $321 million) total on the game including development and marketing costs. As of September 2002, CDPR had spent about $121 million on the game's development.

After announcing the new ROG Ryujin II AIO CPU cooler in January 2021, ASUS have now launched it into the wild.

The new ASUS ROG Ryujin II AIO CPU cooler comes in two flavors: 240mm and 360mm, with the AIO cooler rocking a 3.5-inch LCD display and beautifully styled all-black Noctua fans. ASUS uses the Seventh Gen Astek pump which is virtually silent, with a base operating speed of 840RPM.

ASUS Chief Operating Officer Joe Hsieh explains: "When developing the next generation of our premium Ryujin coolers, we again looked to Asetek and its most advanced technology to date which provides extreme performance, silent operation and industry-recognized quality and reliability. With ROG Ryujin II 240/360, not only did we want to max out performance, we wanted to enhance aesthetics while upgrading the screen to an LCD panel and retaining the FanXpert controls".

We have our first picture of the GA102-225 GPU that powers NVIDIA's unannounced, but totally indefinitely postponed GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card. Check it out:

The source behind the picture of the GA102-225 GPU sent it over to our friends at VideoCardz, with the GPU itself ready to power the already-shipping GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card. NVIDIA is expected to have the GA102-225 GPU with 10240 CUDA cores, and coupled with 12GB of super-fast GDDR6X memory (10GB on the RTX 3080, 24GB on the RTX 3090).

But then things dive right into crypto mining of course, with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti reportedly capable of some pretty insane ETH mining numbers with 119MH/s of ETH mining power. This seems about right as the GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition and MSI GeForce RTX 3090 SUPRIM X graphics cards sit at around 95-115MH/s depending on GDDR6X memory temperatures.

DICE just opened up the hype engines for the new Battlefield on PC and next-gen consoles, but the developer took the time to announce that there is an all-new Battlefield coming to smartphones and tablets in 2022. Yeah, a mobile Battlefield game that we haven't heard of before, was just dropped into our reality.

You can read all about what DICE had to say about the Battlefield here, but when it comes to the new Battlefield mobile game it is being co-developed by Industrial Toys which is "working closely with all of us here at DICE" on "developing a completely new Battlefield game bringing all-out warfare to smartphones and tablets in 2022".

DICE wants us to know that this isn't the Battlefield coming to PC and next-gen consoles on mobile, but rather a "standalone game" that is a "completely different game from the one we're making for console and PC, designed specifically for the mobile platform". This mobile version of Battlefield (without a name for now) is "being built from the ground up by iToys to make Battlefield-on-the-go a reality and you can expect a fully-fledged, skill-based experience".

And here we go...

DICE has just given the next-gen Battlefield a huge injection of hype by revealing a few more details about the game, and some pretty big surprises. In a post on the official Battlefield website, the developer teases that while they can't wait to show us everything... they do have a couple of things they "wanted to tell you about".

The first thing out of the gate is that DICE has the "biggest Battlefield development team ever" and that Criterion and DICE LA are "working with us on our shared vision for the game, while the team in Gothenburg is taking technology in the game to the next level. Together, we are creating a jaw-dropping experience for you to enjoy later in 2021".

Naughty Dog developers have a large sway in what projects the studio takes on, and new IPs like The Last of Us was a project born out of passion.

In a recent interview with The Game Maker's Notebook, Naughty Dog President Evan Wells asserts that the studio picks its new games based on popular opinion. Wells says he doesn't want developers working on something that doesn't inspire them creatively.

"[What we choose to work on] is really driven by the team, just like almost every decision we make at the studio is somehow trying to represent what the team wants the most. We definitely don't want to have people working on something that they don't have the creative motivation to work on," Wells said.

Black holes are a thing of mystery, but at the center of every galaxy, there is one, and sometimes when two galaxies merge, those two black holes begin to enter each other's orbits.

So, what happens when two black holes enter each other's orbits? NASA has released a new animated video on the NASA Goddard YouTube Channel that gives a simple yet beautiful visualization of what begins to happen. The orange black hole is 200 million times the mass of the Sun, and the blue black hole is about 100 million times the mass of the Sun.

As the black holes approach each other on their orbital path, the gravitational pull of the foreground black hole begins to "distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas - called an accretion disk - that surrounds each one", NASA explains. Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who created the visualization, said, "We're seeing two supermassive black holes, a larger one with 200 million solar masses and a smaller companion weighing half as much".

So far, only 12 humans have ever stepped foot on the surface of the moon, but let's say lucky number 13 wanted to be the first human to walk around the moon. How long would it take?

In a recently published space.com article, it states that astronauts that landed on the moon during the Apollo missions were bouncing around the surface at the pace of 1.4 mph. The lack of speed from these astronauts can be attributed to their spacesuits not being built for mobility.

In 2014, NASA simulated lunar gravity to measure how fast humans could move on the moon if given the right equipment. The participants of the experiment were able to walk at the speed of 3.1 mph, very close to the maximum walking speed humans can achieve on Earth at 4.5 mph.

The American Rescue Plan signed in by President Biden will soon give American families $3,600 in stimulus checks.

Qualifying American families are set to receive $3,600 in stimulus checks that will begin rolling out in July 2020. Married couples that earn $150,000 a year or less and have children, or individuals that earn $75,000 a year and have children qualify to claim a monthly federal tax credit. Parents that have children between the ages of 6 and 17 will receive $250 every month for six months.

Parents who have a child under the age of 6 will receive $300 a month for six months. Additionally, those same parents will receive a tax credit next year of $1,500 for every child between the ages of 6 and 17, or $1,800 for every child under the age of 6. Due to how unusually busy the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is with having to train new staff, create a new online portal for people to claim these payments, and deal with an influx of tax returns, these payments won't begin rolling out until July.

Researchers believe they have found the closest known black hole to Earth, and they have slapped the name "unicorn" because it's so special.

The supposed black hole that was found by researchers is located just 1,500 light-years away and is in the constellation Monoceros (the unicorn). The location of the black hole isn't the only reason why the black hole was called "The Unicorn". Another reason is that the black hole is very, very small, compared to other black holes.

The Unicorn resides next to a bloated red giant star that researchers observed that the light it was giving off was shifting periodically, which means that some other object was influencing the shape of the star - the tiny Unicorn black hole. By measuring the red giant star's influence from an outside object, researchers determined that the object that was influencing the red giant was a black hole with a mass of about three solar masses (three of our suns).

Russians have dubbed the International Space Station (ISS) as a "catastrophe" waiting to happen as the Russian government moves towards building its own ISS.

The United States and Russia have been partnered for 23 years, but that partnership may soon run its course as Russian officials have suggested that they may withdraw from the ISS in 2025. The news comes from a state TV news report from April 18 that suggested that Yury Borisov, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister, said the ISS is currently in a deteriorating condition that puts lives of Russian astronauts (cosmonauts) at risk.

Borisov said, "We can't risk the lives [of our cosmonauts]. The structure and the metal [are] getting old, [and] it can lead to irreversible consequences - to catastrophe." Borisov somewhat backtracked on his statement by saying that a "technical inspection is needed, and then we can make a decision and inform our partners." Now, Roscosmos officials have said that "the first core module of the new Russian orbital station is in the works," and maybe completely finished by 2025.

The quest to get humans on other planets is a slow but fruitful process that deserves celebration when a milestone is reached.

Recently, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter that arrived on Mars with the new Perseverance rover back at the end of February achieved something very special. Ingenuity launched from the Martian surface marking the first powered aircraft flight on another planet and thus marking a massive milestone in the story of human space exploration.

Ingenuity hovered for around 30 seconds, three meters above the Martian surface, before it safely returned back down. While a 30-second flight from a small helicopter may not seem like that big of a deal - it is, and here's why; Ingenuity taking flight in Mars' atmosphere, which is 100 times thinner than Earths, is the equivalent of a normal size helicopter taking flight on Earth to 100,000 feet. Commercial planes fly anywhere between 30,000/40,000 feet, and the highest a helicopter has been flown on Earth is 42,000 feet.

NASA's goal is eventually to have humans on other planets, but one of the main problems is the oxygen supply of those said planets.

Now, NASA has reached a new milestone in the steps to colonize a new planet, and in this instance, this planet is Mars. Back in February, the space agency landed its brand new rover Perseverance on the Red Planet, and now the rover has used one of its instruments to successfully generate oxygen from the carbon dioxide-dominated air.

Perseverance used its Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument, and according to the associate administrator of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, Jim Reuter, "This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars. MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars."

Activision has taken things to a new level in Call of Duty: Warzone in a limited time named The Destruction of Verdansk Part One.

The limited-time event only lasted a few hours but replaced all other ways to play the battle royale. As you can probably imagine, the popularity of the new event caused the game servers to buckle under pressure, which caused several crashes for players. Players were also unable to "win" the game, as reported by EuroGamer, who survived until the end but was presented with a repeating cut-scene.

In quickfire modes, players would spawn into Verdansk with a Jak-12 shotgun and were given the objective of surviving. If the player died, they would turn into an endlessly respawning zombie to hunt down surviving players. Above is a video of the cut scene that shows the Verdansk being destroyed by a nuke that was deployed. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Cerebras revealed its next-gen WSE-2 (Wafer Scale Engine) chip last year during the Hot Chips 2020 conference, but the company has now provided more details at the Linley Spring Processor Conference.

We already knew that the next-gen Cerebras WSE-2 packed an insane 850,000 cores ready for AI work, and an even-more-insane 2.6 trillion transistors (yeah that's trillion with a T). Cerebras' new details on the WSE-2 include the fact that it has 40GB of on-chip SRAM, 20 petabytes of memory bandwidth, and 220 petabits of aggregate fabric bandwidth.

The new WSE-2 is the largest chip ever made, packing 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 AI-optimized, fully programmable cores. Cerebras crams all of that into a single silicon wafer, all on TSMC's 7nm process. The entire chip is simply gigantic -- and while it's the same 46,225mm2 as its predecessor in the WSE-1, the new WSE-2 packs some gigantic upgrades.