Even with stock limitations, the PS5 is still breaking sales milestones in the United States.

According to the NPD Group's Mat Piscatella, the PlayStation 5 is currently the fastest-selling console of all time in the United States. In its first four-months on the market in the U.S., the PS5 has sold faster than any other console in the region's history. This news comes months after the NPD Group confirmed the PS5 had the best launch in U.S. history and helped push November 2020's games earnings to a record $1.4 billion.

"PlayStation 5 ranked as the 2nd best-selling hardware platform in February in both unit and dollar sales. PlayStation 5 is currently the fastest selling hardware platform in U.S. history (total dollar sales after 4 months in market)," Piscatella said on Twitter.

It was barely a month ago that Intel GPU boss Raja Koduri teased that he was benchmarking the gaming-focused Intel Xe-HPG graphics card, and now he's teasing it again.

Raja Koduri posted a picture to his Twitter account from the Folsom, California building at Intel -- testing the new Xe-HPG graphics card in some 3DMark benchmarks. You can see the CPU-looking device under Raja's arm, with its own heat sink and cooler -- connected to a PCIe riser and cable and then into a motherboard.

There are two power supplies, with one PSU plugged into the GPU evaluation board and another PSU powering the motherboard. I love the insider look that we're getting at Intel's return to the GPU market, this is something I've wanted to see more of -- I'd love to have livestreams from inside of the lab and fireside-style chats with Raja about GPUs.

Key Bethesda games like Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Skyrim Special Edition, Dishonored Ultimate Edition and Prey are all getting FPS Boost support on Xbox Series X consoles.

Xbox Series X/S backwards compatibility is the single biggest advantage over the PS5, adding in native upscaling and system-wide performance boosts to a bunch of games. Microsoft is going one step further by supercharging specific games with its new FPS Boost feature, which raises frame rates up to 60FPS and beyond.

Now Microsoft confirms that certain Bethesda titles will soon run at "nearly 60FPS" on Xbox Series X consoles, including Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition, both of which were natively locked at 30FPS on Xbox One (the latter required a mod to fully unlock).

Microsoft's Phil Spencer brainstorms about id's powerful id Tech 7 engine being used to power other internal games outside of id Software's repertoire.

The id Tech 7 engine is pretty amazing: It can hit an insane 1,000 FPS on PCs, and id says there's "no upper limit" on frame rates. The engine is ferocious, flexible, and future-proofed for next-gen hardware, and has been used for a multitude of games like Wolfenstein, Fallout 4/Fallout 76, and RAGE 2. Now that Microsoft owns id, the potent engine could help power other games from Xbox's 23 studios.

In a recent Bethesda/Xbox event, Phil Spencer daydreams about id Tech being used for other projects outside of Bethesda's ring of devs. id Tech 7 could be the basis on which multiple titles are made, not unlike how EA uses Frostbite to unify most of its games.

Shortly after Fallout 76's disastrous launch, Bethesda's Todd Howard reached out to Microsoft for advice on how to save the game, the dev reveals in a new video.

Fallout 76 was a mess when it released in 2018, but Bethesda got help from an unlikely source: Microsoft. Todd Howard actually contacted Phil Spencer for advice on how to proceed with the live game, and Spencer's teams worked with Bethesda to pare back Fallout 76 and inject features where needed. This led to massive overhauls that breathed new life into the game, including the Wastelanders expansion that added critical NPCs to the experience.

"When that game launched, the litany of issues we had...we let a lot of people down. There was very little we didn't screw up, honestly. One of the people I called was Phil, and I said 'Hey, you know there's so many things we're dealing with...what advice do you have?'" Howard said.

We'll finally get new updates on Dying Light 2 next week on March 17, Techland today announced.

It's been many months since we've heard about Dying Light 2, the ambitious open-world sequel from Techland. That will change next week when the studio holds a new stream focused on Dying Light 2's "development process." The game, which is purportedly 400% bigger than Dying Light, has been in development hell leading to an indefinite delay.

The new event is likely a reaction to scathing reports of Techland's upper management, namely a CEO who rules the studio with an iron fist. Similar to George Lucas, reports allege that Techland CEO Paweł Marchewka often changes the scope of projects mid-way through development.

All of Bethesda's new games are coming to Game Pass, but some of them could be unique and interesting passion projects that wouldn't have taken off in the past.

Game Pass isn't just great for business, it's also great for creative freedom. The flexible subscription model emboldens developers to try new things they might not have attempted in the past. In a recent roundtable discussion with the Xbox team, Bethesda's Todd Howard discusses how he's excited about experimenting with new games that may not have done well or found an audience on the traditional market.

"The thing about the future there on Game Pass...the thing about consumers is they see Game Pass as 'gimme games.' But as a creator, it really unlocks the things you really wanted to do. Things like 'will this find an audience' or certain types of games that maybe in the past could kind of get lost sometimes," Howard said.

Xbox Game Pass is already the epicenter of Microsoft's gaming business. Now with Bethesda's games, the service will help skyrocket Xbox's yearly revenues.

Xbox gaming is already on track to earn more money this year than it ever has before. The recent ZeniMax buyout should be immediately accretive and add another layer of earnings potential for Xbox in the 2020-2021 year and beyond. How? It's simple: Adding value to Xbox Game Pass.

After the $7.5 billion ZeniMax acquisition closed, Microsoft made its first move: Boosting Game Pass value with new content. It's a logical move, as content drives subscriptions. Tomorrow, 20 of Bethesda's best games will be available on Game Pass.

Today Microsoft answered the $7.5 billion-dollar question once and for all: Yes, future Bethesda games will be exclusive to the Game Pass ecosystem.

Microsoft's huge $7.5 billion ZeniMax Media buyout was based on one overriding goal: To beef up Game Pass by providing tons of value. Content drives subscriptions, and Game Pass has materially affected Xbox's billion-dollar earnings every year since it was launched.

In a recent roundtable discussion, Microsoft's Phil Spencer makes things pretty black and white in terms of exclusivity:

EA has partnered with Silver Rain Games to make unique new experiences that could blur the lines between films and games.

EA could be branching off into new experimental realms with its EA Originals label. The publisher today announced it has teamed up with Silver Rain Games, the gaming division of Silver Rain, who developed the HBO show Raised by Wolves. The partnership aims at "generating thought-provoking and innovative games and content across different mediums of entertainment," EA says, and it's possible the team will draw upon its film expertise to fuel new indie titles.

Silver Rain Games, a team of 20 developers working entirely remotely, is currently working on a new IP. Not much is known about the project and the press kit has been removed from its website. The EA Originals label will help guide and fund the project, which might be something rather novel for the industry akin to Netflix's experimental Bandersnatch choose-your-own experience that game-ified film. EA has been pushing into new gaming fronts with its SEED division, an R&D branch that delves into AI, machine learning, and more.

Denuvo anti-cheat is now the official security tool for PlayStation 5 games, and will be used to protect online games for the platform.

Today Irdeto and Sony announced a partnership to bring Denuvo anti-cheat to PS5. Developers will have access to Denuvo's anti-cheat solution for next-gen PS5 and backwards compatible PS4 titles to help keep out cheaters, scripts, and other exploits.

This isn't to be confused with the controversial Denuvo anti-tamper, the DRM that has impacted FPS performance in a few games. The solution is a win-win for everyone involved: Devs get to secure their online-driven games, which will help player retention and consequently player spending. This is great for Sony because they get a cut from all microtransactions and game sales on the PlayStation Store.

A meteor coursed through the sky over Vermont on March 7th, causing a series of Earth-shaking booms as it burned up by entering the atmosphere.

According to NASA Meteor Watch, the meteor flew through the atmosphere at speeds of about 42,000 mph, and appeared as giant bright fireball. As the meteor was entering our atmosphere it released the equivalent of 440 pounds of TNT, which suggests that the meteor was around 10 pounds in weight, and 6 inches in diameter.

A local news station reported that people were calling in, saying that they heard a "loud boom and body-rattling vibration" as the meteor passed. Chris Hrotic, a commenter on NASA's initial post about the event said, "I was fortunate to hear and see it by the Missisquoi River at the Missisquoi Wildlife Refuge in Swanton, VT, just before sunset. No loud boom as reported by others, but a rushing sound that made me look up at just the right moment. It was extremely bright and absolutely spectacular!"

The militarization of space is ramping up with France starting its very first military exercises in space, ensuring it can protect its satellites in orbit from attack.

France recently announced its new Space Command, with Michel Friedling as its head, who said the space-based military exercise is a "stress test of our systems" and that the exercise "were a first for the French army and even a first in Europe". He also told reporters in Toulouse in southwest France at Space Command HQ: "A series of events appear and create crisis situations or threats against our space infrastructure, but not only this".

The military exercises in space started this Monday, and will run all week through to Friday. As for France's own Space Command, the space-based arm of its military was announced in 2019 and is said to have staff topping 500 by 2025. Defence Minster Florence Parly said at the time of announcing Space Command: "Our allies and adversaries are militarising space... we need to act".

NVIDIA has released a new GeForce 461.81 hotfix driver, which tweaks some issues in some games including Fortnite and Red Dead Redemption 2.

The new GeForce 461.81 Hotfix drivers sort some issues out with the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER graphics card, Fortnite and Red Dead Redemption, Rocket League, and Detroit: Become Human. There's also some fixes for NVIDIA Surround with new 4K HDMI 2.1 TVs, and more.

You can download the new NVIDIA GeForce Hotfix 461.81 drivers right here.

It was only a month ago that I was reporting Disney+ had breached 95 million subscribers, but now we're already at 100 million subscribers and the future is looking very pretty for Disney's huge streaming service.

Disney CEO Bob Chapek said in a press release: "The enormous success of Disney Plus ... has inspired us to be even more ambitious, and to significantly increase our investment in the development of high-quality content. In fact, we set a target of [more than] 100 new titles per year, and this includes Disney Animation, Disney Live Action, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic".

It should come as no surprise given the popularity of shows like The Mandalorian, the entire back catalogs of Star Wars, Pixar's entire library, the entire of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and a million-and-one other TV shows, movies, documentaries, sport and entertainment.

Intel's new Core i9-11700K had its first review posted nearly a month before the CPU officially launches, with our friends at AnandTech posting their review just days ago -- but now it's HardwareLuxx's turn with an early review on the same Core i7-11700K processor.

The new Core i7-11700K processor is an 8-core 16-thread CPU that has a base CPU clock of 3.6GHz and Max Turbo 3.0 boost CPU clock of 5.0GHz. HardwareLuxx used an ASUS ROG Maximus XIII Hero motherboard, where in The Division 2 at 1080p it beats the Core i7-9700K, but loses to the Ryzen 5 5600X, Core i9-10850K, and the rest of the high-end flagship CPUs on both sides of the fence.

It does better in Battlefield V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p, while power consumption while running Cinebench R23 saw the new Intel Core i7-11700K processor hitting 195W before it dropped to 125W and its default PL1 value. HardwareLuxx says that there is around a 15% performance increase with the new Rocket Lake-S offering, but we have to wait for the final BIOS and reviews to see how that goes.

I woke up not too long ago to news that the hash rate limiter on NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3060 being bypassed by Chinese crypto miners, but it appears to be fake -- they claimed a custom mod, but yeah nah that didn't happen.

Our friends over at Wccftech reported a story that Chinese crypto miners had somehow bypassed the hash rate limiter on the new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, which was then delivering around 45MH/s of ETH mining hashing power in what they thought was the DaggerHashimoto algorithm.

Well, it wasn't -- even though it looked so good having 8 x GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards in the single machine with a total hashing power of 362MH/s... it was fake.

Scientists have been left "speechless" after a man discovered something "mind-blowingly" rare scattered on his driveway.

A man from the UK heard a "rattling noise" outside of his house, and when he woke up the next morning and went outside, he was surprised to see meteorite fragments all over his driveway. Being the kind samaritan he is, the man picked up all of the pieces of meteorite and took them to the Natural History Museum for researchers to look at them.

Professor Sara Russell, a researcher at the Natural History Museum, said she was "speechless with excitement" and, "There are about 65,000 known meteorites in the entire world, and of those only 51 of them are carbonaceous chondrites that have been seen to fall like this one." Another researcher, Dr. Ashley King, said the man did a "fantastic job" collecting the fragments considering he had no idea what it actually was at the time.

HTC just announced two new products in its Vive VR hardware lineup. The company is releasing a revised Vive Tracker, and it just introduced a facial expression tracking camera.

HTC's new Vive Tracker 3.0 is a significant change from the previous generation tracking pucks. The Vive Tracker 1.0 and 2.0 are virtually the same, with the only real difference being the device's tracking sensors. The Vive Tracker 3.0 is a complete redesign from the ground up.

The new tracker is smaller, lighter, and offers dramatic battery life improvements. HTC said the new Vive Tracker is 33% smaller than the previous models, which resulted in a 15% reduction in overall weight. The batteries in the Vive Tracker 3.0 provide up to 75% more runtime per charge, which gives you up to 7-hours of use per charge.

Researchers and scientists have issued a warning for an infectious disease that they say is currently on the rise.

The infectious disease is called diphtheria and was previously thought to nearly be vanquished, but it is now making a return as new cases have been increasing over the years. The infectious disease is caused by strains of the bacteria Corynebacterium diphtheriae and is spread much like COVID-19 by respiratory droplets, and in some cases, skin contact.

Symptoms of diphtheria include a sore throat and mild fever. However, within a few days, the toxins that the bacteria produces can kill off many cells in the infected person's throat, which can cause a buildup that makes it difficult for the person to breathe. Additionally, people infected with diphtheria can develop a swollen "bull neck" due to the swollen lymph nodes. Most shockingly, if the infection is left untreated the toxin can make its way into the bloodstream, causing significant internal damage that kills about half of people that are infected.