Latest News - Page 1412

The world of hardware mods on graphics cards hasn't been anywhere near as good as it was a couple of decades ago, but it still happens -- with news of modder VIK-on breaking down a physically dead and no-longer-booting GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and seeing that it supports up to 22GB of GDDR6 memory (up from its stock 11GB GDDR6 memory).

VIK-on purchased a dead GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card that wasn't booting up anymore, with the modder noting that the graphics card was taken to 3 other workshops who didn't fix it but damaged it further. There were missing components from people who obviously didn't know what they were doing but VIK-on worked his magic.

The GPU was resoldered and each of the memory modules were replaced, and the PCB traces that were cut were fixed. VIK-on took his time adding in all of the missing pieces and components from the damaged GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card and then started to verify if a simple strap mod (tricks the GPU BIOS into supporting higher memory capacities) would work.

The hype engines for Battlefield are still humming away, but they were injected with a big one today with the official Battlefield Twitter account teasing a June reveal for something Battlefield related.

But that's the official Twitter account... and we all know how bad the marketing department for Battlefield has been over the years, with the Tom "one-man-marketing-team-for-Battlefield" Henderson saying we could be hit with a surprise trailer drop... TOMORROW.

Henderson tweeted out a new poll, saying that tomorrow is a "big day" for Battlefield and that either we get a surprise trailer drop or a confirmation on the June release date.

Sony is currently working on its next-generation PSVR, and if UploadVR's sources are correct, the new headset could have some tech that no other headset does. Namely, it's said to have a motor inside for haptic feedback. If that's true, it would be the first VR headset that we know of that offers such a feature.

The next PSVR will also get a significant display overhaul. The new device reportedly features a dual-screen setup (the current PSVR has a single display shared by both lenses) with adjustable lens spacing. The new PSVR should also have significantly improved image quality thanks to a 2000x2040 per-eye resolution. Supposedly, the next PSVR will also include gaze-tracking cameras for foveated rendering, which would help with the performance requirements to drive those high-resolution panels.

It seems like Sony may be working to reduce the cable clutter with the next PSVR too. The original model required a breakout box with a pair of cables that ran back to the headset. The new device will reportedly run off a single USB-C cable, which would plug into the front port of the PS5 console.

Roblox Corp's first post-IPO earnings soar on strong daily active user and revenue surges.

Roblox Corp just posted up its Q1 2021 earnings, and the results are quite positive. The company earned $387 million in revenues, up 140% over Q1'20. Operating income is likewise up 140% YoY to $164.5 million, which takes the $51 million expensive of Roblox's direct listing into account.

Roblox DAUs hit 42.1 million), up 79% YoY, and DAUs outside of North America were up 87%. Average Robux spending per daily active user was around $15.48.

Naughty Dog celebrates Uncharted 4'ths fifth anniversary with an interesting retrospective on the game's development.

Uncharted 4 was a major breakthrough for Naughty Dog. The team optimized its internal games engine specifically for the PlayStation 4 and pushed the platform's capabilities to new highs (Naughty Dog did this once again with The Last of Us Part II in 2020). One of the biggest new frontiers Naughty Dog crossed was motion capture.

As confirmed in a recent 5-year retrospective post, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End was the first time Naughty Dog used facial capture for its in-game mocap. At the time of writing, Sony's Visual Arts and Services Group is advancing AI-driven motion capture for PS5 using Sony's internal machine learning tech.

Sony's reported move to 6nm may not be enough to free up console stock in 2022 and supply is expected to be limited throughout next year.

The PS5 will be hard to buy from now through 2022, according to new reports from Bloomberg.

Sony Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki recently held a closed-doors meeting with industry analysts and made the following statement: "I don't think demand is calming down this year and even if we secure a lot more devices and produce many more units of the PlayStation 5 next year, our supply wouldn't be able to catch up with demand," sources attending the meeting told Bloomberg.

aThe official Battlefield Twitter account teases a June reveal for the next-gen Battlefield 6, likely during the E3-timed EA Play event.

EA's next-gen Battlefield 6 won't be revealed before the company announces its Q4 earnings report tomorrow (obviously that'd mean the game would be revealed today). Instead, EA and DICE will let the hype and anticipation continue brewing for a few more weeks with a June reveal for the game.

The new Battlefield game is expected to be EA's biggest next-gen splash to date. DICE has been updating its Frostbite engine for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X support for quite some time, complete with next-level physics systems, rendering capabilities, and environmental interactions that will rival any other Battlefield before it. EA's R&D spending is also up to new heights to help power this next-gen push.

Gears of War developer The Coalition is moving to next-gen game development using Unreal Engine 5, and aims to push the new Xbox Series X/S consoles to new heights.

The Coalition today announced it's embracing Unreal Engine 5 to power its new next-gen games. This is a pretty big deal for Xbox and gaming as a whole. The Coalition is known for completely redefining the capabilities of Xbox hardware--they were able to push Gears 5 past PC Ultra settings on Series X, complete with raytracing and 120FPS support--and other Xbox studios will benefit from The Coalition's work thanks to the iterative nature of games development.

The devs say it'll be quite a long time before their next projects are ready, though. "As we look to future games, we're excited to start shifting our resources to next-gen development using Unreal Engine 5. Shifting to a new engine is a big undertaking, so we want to be clear that we will not be announcing any new projects or titles for some time."

Get ready to say Yippee Kay Yay (like the cowboys say) in Verdansk: 1980s supercop star John McClane is about to crash into Call of Duty Warzone.

Warzone is about to become a huge stage for 1980s macho heroes. Rambo is coming to Verdansk on May 20, and now Activision teases Die Hard's John McClane will show up at some point too. The devs put up a fake website for Nakatomi Duct Cleaning complete with an email address for john@nakatomiductcleaning.com.

Here's what the website says:

Activision just made it official: Rambo is coming to Call of Duty Warzone on May 20, likely as a paid skin for the free-to-play BR.

Legendary action hero John Rambo will soon wreak having in Warzone later this month, complete with his signature flaming arrows. Activision just put out a teaser that shows Rambo from First Blood nocking a fiery projectile of death in a jungle backdrop. Raven has yet to announce how Rambo will show up and what the pack will cost, but expect it to be a monetized skin pack of some sort.

Warzone's Verdansk looks like gaming's latest venue for retro 80s crossovers. A bit ago we talked about Activision's motivations for breaking the fourth wall and bringing 1980s action stars over to Warzone. The company essentially wants to follow Fortnite's model and create lots of buzz, in-game revenues, and hype. Activision wants to make its own splash in the Metaverse by using its 100 million-strong Warzone playerbase.

Epic Games has revealed email chains that show Apple officials decided to not to tell iPhone users of the biggest iOS compromise to date.

The mass hacking of iPhone users can be traced back to the iPhone 6S launch. Cybersecurity researchers identified 40 malicious "XCodeGhost" apps on the App Store, a number that soon increased to a staggering 4,000 malicious apps. All of these apps contained code that added the infected iPhone to a botnet that was then stealing information from the user. The malware appeared as Apple's own app development tool, "Xcode," and was covertly added infectious code into apps being created.

Epic Games dropped the evidence of Apple choosing not to tell 128 million infected iPhone users about the hack in court. App Store VP Matthew Fischer wrote, referring to Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak and Apple PR people Tom Neumayr and Christine Monaghan, "Joz, Tom, and Christine-due to the large number of customers potentially affected, do we want to send an email to all of them?" The email was never sent out to users.

Space is littered with the remnants of attempts of human space exploration, whether the objects be spent rocket parts, small bolts, discontinued satellites, or just chips of paint.

Most of these objects pose a big risk to future space exploration for humans, as even the tiniest of space junk could be traveling at high speeds could obliterate a working satellite if the orbits crossed. Now, researchers are saying that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is becoming overcrowded with space debris and that it should be a global priority to remove the junk.

Back in 1970, Donald Kessler, a retired NASA senior scientist for orbital debris research, predicted that as space rubbish increased, a collision would eventually happen that would cause more space rubbish, which would then start a domino effect that would lead to LEO being too dangerous for any space activities.

Coincidences can be viewed as very peculiar things, especially when the chances of one occurring are astronomically small.

When a coincidence occurs that has a very small chance to do so, some people are attracted to the idea that there is some kind of other power at play other than organic chance. An example of a coincidence like this is a "prediction" from Dr. Wernher von Braun, who wrote in his 1952 book Project Mars: A Technical Tale, that "a Martian government was created led by ten men, whose leader was elected by universal suffrage for five years under the name or title of Elon."

In the book, Dr. Wernher goes on to say that both sides of parliament will create laws that will be administered to the "Elon" and the cabinet. It seems that Dr. Wernher was referring to "Elon" being a form of position, rather than the name of the person. There is no direct connection between Wernher and Musk, and another thing to point out is that Musk wasn't even born at the time of the books writing, making it impossible for Wernher to be making a "prediction". Musk was born in 1971, the book was published in 1952.

There is no hard evidence of life being on any other planet other than Earth, but now researchers have found something that could be evidence of life.

According to a new paper published in the Advances in Microbiology, researchers have suggested that images captured of the surface of Mars show signs of fungal life existing. Researchers put forward the argument that patches of fungi that look like lichen, as well as spherical objects that resemble puffball fungi that is found on Earth. Additionally, the researchers show images of what they claim is bacteria growth occurring on the Opportunity rover.

Here's some of what the researchers wrote, "Fungi thrive in radiation intense environments. Sequential photos document that fungus-like Martian specimens emerge from the soil and increase in size, including those resembling puffballs (Basidiomycota). After obliteration of spherical specimens by the rover wheels, new sphericals-some with stalks-appeared atop the crests of old tracks."

Researchers have located what they now believe as the most recent evidence for volcanic activity on Mars.

NASA's InSight lander measured two earthquakes back in March. The lander was able to trace the quakes back to a region of Mars named the Cerberus Fossae, and now using images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers believe that the Cerberus Fossae is the most recent evidence of volcanic activity on Mars.

Estimations have put the age of this volcanic deposit anywhere between 45,000 and 200,000 years old. On a geological scale, the age of the deposit is quite young, whether it be 45,000 or 200,000 years old, as volcanic rock elsewhere on Mars formed between 3 and 4 billion years ago. Additionally, Mars saw some volcanic activity regularly until around 3 million years ago. David Horvath from the Planetary Science Institute explains, "if we were to compress Mars geologic history into a single day, this would have occurred in the very last second."

Last week Bill and Melinda Gates announced that they would be divorcing, and now new reports have come out about why.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Melinda Gates has been considering divorcing Bill Gates for two years before the divorce was made official. The two were married for 27 years, and according to the Journal, Melinda had been meeting with lawyers across multiple different firms since 2019 in an attempt to fix a marriage that was "irretrievably broken."

Bill and Melinda haven't said what has caused the two to split up, but the Journal reported that the main speculative reason is that Melinda has been upset with Bill over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Bill and Melinda first met Epstein in 2011 after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in 2008 - "still haunts" Melinda Gates. People who were close to the meeting said that Melinda was "furious" over the relationship Bill had with Epstein.

Hubble is officially celebrating Mother's Day, and for all the mothers out there, the space telescope has published an incredible image of a region of space.

Hubble says that the region of space is known as 30 Doradus. It's located 170,000 light-years from Earth and has been the birthplace of millions of young stars. Hubble goes on to say that 30 Doradus has "raised" these young stars and that it's one of the largest "visible star-forming site in a neighboring galaxy."

The image that Hubble has captured with its Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys is roughly 650 light-years across. Hubble is able to look at individual stars, which allows astronomers to gather important information about the birth of the star and its evolution. 30 Doradus is described as a "star-forming factory", with any of the stars in the image being between 2 million to about 25 million years old. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has recently appeared on Saturday Night Live to host the show, and throughout his hosting, Musk revealed that he has Asperger's.

Musk's appearance on Saturday Night Live was highly anticipated, as many people believed that he would use his airtime time to promote topics such as dogecoin or cryptocurrency in general. During his opening monologue, Musk revealed that he was "making history tonight", as he is the first person to host Saturday Night Live with Asperger's, "or at least the first to admit it".

To most people's surprise, Musk didn't use his time on Saturday Night Live to promote dogecoin or any other cryptocurrencies. He instead used to make fun of certain aspects of himself in a humbling yet surprisingly comedic way. The only mention of dogecoin throughout the show was when Musk's mother mentioned that she didn't want to receive dogecoin as a Mother's day gift, to which he said, "it sure is". While Musk was on Saturday Night Live, the price of dogecoin was tumbling down, and over a 24-hour period, it dropped by 22%.

The hunt for former President Donald Trump's financial records has been reignited by a Democrat-led House committee.

The committee is currently pushing a federal judge to order former President Donald Trump to comply with a subpoena to release his financial records. The argument the committee is pushing is that Trump has no reason or claim not to release his financial records now that he is no longer the President of the United States.

The effort is being led by the chair Carolyn Maloney, and according to a source close to the matter, if the committee is successful, it would be moving closer to obtaining Trump's tax records. Douglas Letter, the general counsel for congressional Democrat, wrote, "While the committee's need for the subpoenaed information has not changed, one key fact has: plaintiff Donald J Trump is no longer the president".

We had heard that "Lite Hash Rate" (LHR) cards were coming with gimped Ethereum mining performance, but now it looks like they're going to be called "Lower Hash Rate" and GALAX has spilled the beans.

The new GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 LHR and GeForce RTX 3070 LHR are exactly what you think: GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards with Lower Hash Rate performance: gimped for Ethereum miners. GALAX's new GeForce RTX 3080 LHR packs 10GB of GDDR6 at 19Gbps on a 320-bit memory bus, while the GALAX GeForce RTX 3070 rocks 8GB of GDDR6 at 14Gbps on a 256-bit memory bus.

You should be seeing around 43MH/s of Ethereum mining power out of the RTX 3080 LHR while we can expect around 25MH/s out of the RTX 3070 LHR.