Latest News - Page 1405

Tundra Labs, the company behind the Tundra Tracker SteamVR tracking puck, must be floating on cloud nine right now. The company's Kickstarter campaign has exceeded all its expectations, including hitting hard limits on some hardware.

Tundra Labs launched the Kickstarter campaign for the Tundra Tracker, a lighter, more compact alternative to the Vive Tracker pucks for accessory and full-body tracking in SteamVR. Tundra Labs first gave a sneak peek of the Tundra Trackers in December to create some hype before the campaign launch.

The plan must have worked because Tundra Labs doubled its intended goal within hours of launching the fundraiser. That was at the end of March, and all through April and into May, the momentum has continued. Currently, Tundra Labs has nine days to go, and it has raised more than five times the initial $250,000 goal.

And just like that out of nowhere, in comes the leaks about the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti...

ZOTAC's new FireStorm OC software update includes support for some of NVIDIA's unreleased graphics cards, including the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. VideoCardz reported the story sourcing Japanese PC Mania, adding that they have not heard anything about the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti yet, and neither have I.

The references to the new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card were found inside of the latest FireStorm inside of its own "resources" directory. In there, you'll find the RTX 30 series Ti logos, created on April 21 -- ZOTAC has the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti listed in FireStorm.

NVIDIA today announced that a handful of VR titles would soon add support for DLSS, providing a significant performance boost for anyone with a compatible GeForce GPU. No Mans Sky, Wrench, and Into The Radius will offer DLSS support in upcoming updates.

NVIDIA's DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, is a process to increase performance at high resolutions by rendering at a lower resolution and upscaling the image with a machine learning algorithm. DLSS gives impressive performance advantages when gaming at 4K and higher. In September, NVIDIA offered DLSS to VR developers to help them improve the performance and visual fidelity of their games. We're about to begin seeing the fruits of those efforts finally.

Hello Games, creators of No Mans Sky, is one of the first developers to implement DLSS in a VR-supported game. DLSS is coming to No Man's Sky in the next update, which can nearly double the framerate on a 4K monitor. The title also supports VR headsets, and the DLSS feature will extend to the fully immersive version of the game. NVIDIA said the DLSS doubles the game's performance in VR.

NVIDIA has just pushed out its new GeForce Game Ready 466.47 WHQL drivers, which include Game Ready Driver support for Days Gone on the PC.

Days Gone on the PC will feature increased levels of detail, higher foliage draw distances, native 4K rendering, a configurable field of view, ultra-wide monitor support, unlocked frame rates, and more. You'll also require this new GeForce Game Ready 466.47 WHQL driver with NVIDIA's just-announced GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 TI graphics cards with LHR.

NVIDIA has also fixed some issues with Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, with low performance and low frame rate issues when Bar1 is enabled in the SBIOS. Starbase gets some tweaking with the GeForce RTX 20 and GeForce RTX 16 series GPUs crashing, this should be sorted now.

Well, I don't know how much clearer we can get before we have city-sized ships hovering above our cities and Will Smith walks outside for his daily newspaper... but here we are, right on CNN

CNN's Chris Cuomo hosted two retired US Navy officers (Sean Cahil, retired US Navy Chief Master-at-Arms and Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies) who talked about UFOs (or UAPs as the military refers to them) that have technology that is 100 to 1000 years ahead of the very best that the human race has to offer. This isn't Alex Jones or something, they are respected men in some of the very highest positions of their industry.

Retired US Navy Chief Master-at-Arms, Sean Cahil, said: "First of all the aircraft had zero control surfaces, it had no means of propulsion that we could detect, it moved at hyper-sonic velocities and it preceded the pilots to their cap point, so it seemed to have some knowledge of where the pilots were headed ahead of time. We don't possess those abilities to do that in our arsenals at the moment".

After what feels like months of teases and unofficial leaks, NVIDIA has officially confirmed and announced its GeForce RTX 30 series in new Lite Hash Rate (LHR) form with an ETH mining limiter.

We saw NVIDIA release a new GeForce driver that gimped ETH mining with a built-in limiter, then it was removed... and now NVIDIA is reintroducing the limiter but through the entire stack of Ampere GPUs. There are 4 new GPUs with new PCI Device IDs under the new LHR series.

NVIDIA took to its official blog post, explaining that it is having "clear communication" with gamers by saying they want to "ensure that customers know exactly what they're getting when they buy GeForce products. To help with this, our GeForce partners are labeling the GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti cards with a "Lite Hash Rate," or "LHR," identifier. The identifier will be in retail product listings and on the box".

We all know the topic of power consumption concerns with cryptocurrency usage, the blockchain, mining, and everything in between -- but did you know Ethereum's power consumption is about to plummet.

Ethereum is soon transitioning from mining to staking with the move to proof-of-stake reducing power consumption of Ethereum. The Ethereum Foundation says that the blockchain's power consumption will drop by over 99% making it around 7000% more energy-efficient than Bitcoin which is still reliant on mining.

In a new post on the Ethereum Foundation Blog, Carl Beekhuizen said: "Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which brings a myriad of improvements that have been theorized for years. But now that the Beacon chain has been running for a few months, we can actually dig into the numbers. One area that we're excited to explore involves new energy-use estimates, as we end the process of expending a country's worth of energy on consensus".

Sony looks to be stepping into the esports betting world through its PlayStation family of consoles in the coming future, with a recently published patent teasing an esports betting platform that would accept bitcoin, and other currencies including in-game items, on live-streamed esports events.

The patent was filed back in 2019 but published in May 2021 which is why we're hearing about it now, and would see Sony using a system where people are watching live-streamed esports events and then betting on the outcome of the games while watching the game in real-time.

There would be a user interface (UI) that would pop up and be overlayed over the game you're watching, letting you bet on it. The patent reads: "Wagers may be pecuniary, e.g., money or bitcoin, or may be non-pecuniary, e.g. game assets, digital rights, and virtual currency". So you can use real money, cryptocurrency, in-game assets and more to bet on games... very, very interesting. Especially using the in-game items as currency, to bet on live-streamed esports games.

Starting July 15, eBay will no longer allow sale or auction of Adults Only-rated video games.

Adults Only games are an obscure if not seedy corner of the video games industry, and the rating is usually seen as a stamp of death for game sales. While the pre-ESRB Atari era had its fair share of porn games, modern AO video games are few and far between, making them rare items for collectors. Now with eBay banning the sale of AO titles, it'll be even harder to acquire these games.

UPDATE: Private Division has stepped in to confirm that Microsoft will indeed publish any future games in The Outer Worlds series:

"Private Division is still supporting and marketing The Outer Worlds, including the upcoming release of Murder on Eridanos DLC on Nintendo Switch. Moving forward, Obsidian and Microsoft will be publishing future iterations in the franchise, and we're absolutely thrilled to see where they take it... but we are more interested in the simple pleasures in life - like the smooth, artificially enhanced flavor of a Rizzo's Purpleberry Munch. Rizzo's Purpleberry Munch - the only snack in Halcyon officially endorsed by the Captain of the Unreliable."

Original story is as follows:

Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive gives clues on possible release timings for GTA 6.

No one knows when GTA 6 is coming, but Take Two's recent earnings call and report offers some hints. First we have to go over a few details on Take-Two's guidance. The company is projecting sequential growth over the next three years driven by a massive 62-game slate. A portion of these games will be mobile, but many of them will be mainline games. While not explicitly mentioned, it's likely Grand Theft Auto 6 is among these games.

Take-Two expects its earnings to continue rising from FY2022 and FY2024, with more net bookings generated year by year. FY2021 already delivered record net revenues ($3.373 billion), bookings ($3.5 billion), and recurrent consumer spending ($2.09 billion). FY2023 will be higher than FY2022, and FY2024 will be even higher.

Grand Theft Auto V is a sales monster that reached 145 million copies shipped to date.

Take-Two's latest financial report shows continued momentum for GTA V. The game has now shipped a whopping 145 million copies worldwide, up 5 million units from Q3 2021. The company also revealed how much Rockstar's legendary billion-dollar franchise has sold in total. The GTA series has sold 345 million copies since it launched decades ago, meaning GTA V makes up 42% of total franchise sales. It's also the only first Grand Theft Auto game to launch across two console generations.

In November, GTA V will also release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, marking the third time the title has launched on console platforms. Sales are just the tip of the iceberg, though; the real money is with GTA Online, the monetized online platform that's generated over $1 billion in microtransaction earnings to date.

Grand Theft Auto III turns 20 years old in October (feel old yet?), and Rockstar is doing something special to celebrate.

Today Rockstar announced GTA V's next-gen version is coming in November, and a month before that, GTA III will celebrate its 20th birthday. Rockstar cryptically teases some "fun surprises" in store for GTA III's anniversary:

"Plus, in honor of the upcoming 20th anniversary of the genre-defining Grand Theft Auto III, we'll have even more fun surprises to share - including some specifically for GTA Online players," the label said.

GTA V will launch on next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles on November 11, 2021, Rockstar today announced.

In November, Grand Theft Auto V will become the first game in the series to span three console generations with a PS5/Xbox Series X/S release. GTA V is a cash crop for Take-Two, and the game is so big that it's sold 145 million copies as of February 2021. That's 43% of Grand Theft Auto's total franchise sales. The reason for the huge sales is because the game is available on so many platforms, especially the PS4, which has crested 116.4 million shipments worldwide.

China has officially become the second country in the world to land a rover on another planet successfully.

Last week, reports indicated that China was going to attempt to land on Mars with its new Zhurong rover, and now the China National Space Administration (CNSA) Twitter account has announced that it has successfully landed on Mars.

The Zhurong rover was aboard the Tianwen-1 spacecraft and was launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in China on July 23, 2020. The spacecraft entered the orbit of Mars back in February, and it successfully landed on the Red Planet around 7:18 p.m. EDT this past Friday. So far, China and the United States are the only two countries in the world that have successfully landed on another planet.

A new bombshell report has come out of CBS News "60 Minutes" segment where former U.S. Military officials revealed that the U.S. government is well-aware of unidentified flying objects (UFO).

Next month the U.S. military will be presenting Congress an unclassified report regarding UFOs, and the 60 Minutes segment has certainly increased anticipation for the U.S. military's report. According to Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who said in the interview that the report will shock people because "frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public."

The 60 Minutes segment featured many jaw-dropping statements U.S. Military officials, and some of the best quotes from the segment are provided in there entirely below. According to Lue Elizondo, former U.S. Military official that led the U.S. government's effort to investigate UFO's, "Imagine a technology that can do 600-to-700 g-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space."

Fox made a surprise announcement on Monday, telling advertisers that it will be creating a new animated TV series that is fundamentally tie-in NFT's and the Blockchain.

According to what Fox told advertisers, the new TV show is called Krapopolis and is an animated comedy show that is set in mythical ancient Greece that follows greek gods, mythical creatures, and human learning to coexist. The backbone storyline of Krapopolis sounds very similar to Solar Opposites, a Hulu animated TV series by Rick & Morty co-creator Justin Roiland that follows a family of aliens attempting to fit into human society.

So, how is the Blockchain and NFT's involved? Essentially, the NFT's for the show would act as digital collectibles for fans, as fans would be able to purchase and sell digital goods on a dedicated marketplace for the show. According to Fox, "The company will launch a dedicated marketplace for KRAPOPOLIS that will curate and sell digital goods, ranging from NFTs of one-of-a-kind character and background art and GIFs, as well as tokens that provide exclusive social experiences to engage and reward super fans."

According to a report from New York Post's Page Six, Elon Musk, Grimes, and Miley Cyrus all attended a crypto-themed party after filming Saturday Night Live (SNL).

Elon Musk attended the after-party with his musician girlfriend, Grimes, and the musician Miley Cyrus. Sources said that women at the party were dressed as aliens and served Dogecoin cupcakes. The source added that a dog handler brought out a Shibu Inu, which is the breed of dog that is seen on the front of the Dogecoin.

The source said to New York Post's Page Six that the Shibu Inu was brought in as a "like a good-luck token." As for the location of the party, according to the source, the party was held at The Public in New York City's Lower East Side, and was the first time in the 14 months that the hotel had been opened by the owner Ian Schrager. "Ian opened it just for Elon and his guests," said the source. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

If you have never seen a black hole devour a star, you are in for a treat, as what you are about to witness is a violent but super interesting process called "spaghettification".

700 million light-years away, a star began to be torn apart by a black hole that it passed too close to. The black hole was estimated to be around 5 million times the mass of the Sun, and when the star passed too close to the black hole, it got caught in its gravitation pull which led to it being torn apart into long, thin, thread-like strands of material that resemble a spaghetti noodle.

Back in April 2019, the Zwicky Transient Facility, which observes the skies for any cosmic-level events, found an event such as the one described above. The event was later named AT2019dsg, and in the above video, you will find an animation of what that event would have looked like. It turned out that AT2019dsg was unique in some ways, and if you would like to find out how and why check out this link here.

A company has announced that it will be using deepfake technology to create a synthetic voice that celebrities and other prominent figures can license out.

Veritone has said it plans to use its Marvel.au platform to monetize deepfakes of celebrities, politicians, and any other public figure. The AI-enabled synthetic voice can be licensed out by the celebrity to companies, brands, and influencers. By having a deepfake of a celebrity's voice media companies will be able to "accelerate and amplify content creation", according to Veritone.

Essentially, Veritone would create a deepfake, or a clone of a celebrity's voice that can then be bought by companies to do brand duties that the celebrity would get paid for. Veritone mentions that creating a voice clone for a person to perform brand deals would remove the physical need for that person to on set to shoot it, which could raise the ceiling for that celebrity's total monetized content output. For more information on this story, check out this link here.