Latest News - Page 1420

ASUS is about to reveal their next-gen ROG Zephryus S17 laptop, which will rock Intel's also-next-gen Tiger Lake-H processor. The new ASUS ROG Zephryus S17 gaming laptops will be revealed on May 11.

The special May 11 reveal event will see ASUS unveil its latest ultra-premium design inside of the next-gen ROG Zephryus S17 gaming laptop, which packs special cooling enhancing technology that raises the laptop up and off your desk in a way that increases airflow under the laptop -- thus, keeping it cooler.

The current-gen ASUS ROG Zephryus S17 does this, so we should only expect the same if not better with the next version of the ROG Zephryus S17 gaming laptop. ASUS has put the keyboard higher than the previous-gen ROG Zephryus S17 laptops, but man do I want to see that hinge working IRL right now, please.

Damn... and just like that NASA and SpaceX have had their $2.9 billion Starship-based lunar landing system deal torn up and thrown into space -- I guess where no one can hear (everyone who wants to see this happen) scream.

The reason? Blue Origins Federation and Dynetics have submitted protests with the US Government Accountability Office, stopping the NASA and SpaceX deal far, far before liftoff. The space industry expected the historic $2.9 billion contract would go to two companies, but it went to one -- SpaceX -- and now its competitors are pissed.

Dynetics filed a protest with the US Government Accountability Office, arguing that NASA chose "the most anti-competitive and high risk option available" when it tasked SpaceX with using its Starship to build a Human Landing System for its mission to the moon.

It looks like Tesla has silently launched its upgraded Powerwall+ system, not long after Elon Musk updated the world through Twitter on the power upgrades to Powerwall.

The new Tesla Powerwall+ system has a much upgraded max power output, with 9.6kW max power output up from 7kW on the regular Powerwall. The new Powerwall+ system also has a new inverter with an integrated breaker that sits above the Powerwall+ which will provide Powerwall+ owners with a new unique look over the regular Powerwall installation.

Tesla explains its new Powerwall+ battery pack: "Powerwall+ is an integrated solar battery system to store energy from solar production. Its integrated design and streamlined installation allow for a simple connection to any home, and improved surge power capability brings whole home backup in a smaller package. System smart controls enable owners to customize system behavior to suit their renewable energy needs".

NVIDIA is getting into the spirit of Overwatch... at least in China, with NVIDIA GeForce China approving a slick custom GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics card inspired by Overwatch.

This isn't the first time NVIDIA has customized a GeForce RTX Founders Edition graphics card, with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Cyberpunk 2077 graphics card looking just as dapper -- but now we have the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition themed with Overwatch and it looks pretty damn good, if you could find it that is.

NVIDIA has painted the card in gold and black, with Tracer's face on the back of the card and an Overwatch logo sticker on the fan. I doubt there will be many of these Overwatch-themed GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card made or available, but if you can get it you're probably desperate enough at this point you don't care whatever the hell artwork is on your graphics card.

We are very close to the reveal of Intel's next-gen Tiger Lake-H processors, with the new Core i9-11950H turning up to the party a little early.

Intel's new Core i9-11950H processor is an 8-core, 16-thread offering that will have boost clocks of up to 4.9GHz according to the new leaks. The new CPU was spotted inside of the HP ZBook Studio 15.6 G8 Mobile workstation PC which normally features an NVIDIA Quadro RTX mobile GPU.

We might see this particular Intel Core i9-11950H processor being exclusive to HP for the time being, with some Geekbench 5 benchmarks run on it and throwing out a single-core score of 1365 while we have a multi-core score of 6266. Intel will be fully unveiling and detailing its new Tiger Lake-H series on May 11, which is just over a week away now.

There have been two new Battlefield images leaked onto the internet in the past hour, with Battlefield leaker Tom Henderson confirming the validity of the screenshots.

The two new screenshots from Battlefield show off the island with the flying vehicles and storm brewing off the coast, with a rocket about to take off -- while the second screenshot is from inside one of the helicopters, with the ability of blasting the rocket and its structure into dust.

Henderson confirms the Battlefield screenshots, which means he is also a damn talented artist with a pencil as his Battlefield sketches were pretty damn spot on.

Chia Coin is looking to do some damage to the HDD and SSD market now that it has pushed past using 1 exabyte of storage capacity -- a gigantic 5.7x increase since just the beginning of April.

Chia Coin will kick off its official launching into the crypto trading world next week, with the team at Chia reporting that storage capacity for Chia Coin has reached a peak of 1.14 exabytes -- or a huge 1143 petabytes, enough to install Call of Duty: Warzone a couple of times at least.

At the beginning of April, we saw Chia Coin consuming around 120 petabytes of storage -- but now that has flown up to 1143 petabytes and has people concerned. Chia Coin Mining requires gigantic amounts of free storage space as well as lots of reading and writing to your HDD or SSD, so consumer-focused SSDs aren't the best thing for Chia Coin Mining.

First Epic Games acquired Oodle, and now it's acquired creative powerhouse ArtStation.

The ArtStation platform is now owned by Epic Games, and developers are mostly pretty happy about the situation. ArtStation serves millions of artists and creatives across the interactive entertainment industry, offering a way to share and connect across a dazzling smorgasboard of fantastic creations. From a layman's perspective, ArtStation offers a unique look at the inner workings of the games industry, but to an artist it's an invaluable lifeline to jobs, portfolio building, and growth. ArtStation is basically the LinkedIn for graphic artists and also lets users sell their brushes and expertise to learning students.

As part of the acquisition, all of ArtStation Learning's tutorials are now 100% free and the platform will remain autonomous outside of Epic. Another huge win for creators is more profits from marketplace sales. Creators now get to keep 88% of revenues from content and products sold on the marketplace (down from 30%), matching the Epic Games Store's favorable 88-12 revenue split for developers. Pro members get a bigger slice with the fee dropping to a meager 8%, leaving 92% of earnings to creators.

IO Interactive's new IP might be a massive departure from its World of Assassination, trading Agent 47's guns and garottes for spells and swords.

Hitman developer IO Interactive is apparently working on medieval fantasy game with dragons, spells, and an all-original lore. The game is AAA in production quality and is being crafted for Xbox, sources tell Eurogamer. Recent job listings hint this will be a large online multiplayer game with a "new concept".

The new IP won't release any time soon, though; right now IO is strongly focused on its big new James Bond game, Project 007, which is the most ambitious title the studio has ever worked on. IO has expanded to a new studio in Barcelona, Spain to gear up for Project 007 and its new unannounced IP.

A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, Halo was a third-person shooter with a shaky reticle and some interesting weapons. Here's what classic iconic guns like the Halo CE magnum, sniper rifle, plasma rifle, shotgun and rocket launcher looked like in those old days.

Ex-Halo dev and series co-creator Marcus Lehto recently shared some prototype footage of Halo's early days. During that time, Halo was a third-person shooter--if it had stayed that way gaming would be very different today--and the weapons are familiar. Some, like the Pattern-2 Composite Sword, are not (yes, the UNSC originally game Master Chief a sword).

In the video, Lehto shows a bunch of these weapons in action. A lot of these weapons were obviously cut from the final game. Some of the guns were split up between Halos 1-3. There's the aforementioned sword, a flamethrower that made it into Halo CE on PC, and even highly-accurate assault rifle, an SMG from Halo 2. We may never get to play this build of Halo, but it's still an interesting little time capsule that captures the formative years of gaming's most influential shooter.

Konami is gearing up for big new projects and teases updates coming in the next few months...but it won't be at E3 2021.

Konami is making new games again...but it's latest, a remake of an obscure Japanese Famicom game, was kind of confusing and mystifying. Now the company says it's "deep in development on key games," possibly hinting at a new Silent Hill or even Metal Gear.

"We want to reassure our fans that we are in deep development on a number of key projects, so please stay turned for some updates in the coming months," Konami said in a Tweet.

There has been some confusion about Metro Exodus and it not receiving AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution support, with 4A Games issuing a statement to clarify things.

4A Games is about to release the new PC-focused Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, which has DLSS 2.1 support and is the first RT-only AAA game released. Well, that game won't support AMD's own DLSS competitor -- FSR or FidelityFX Super Resolution -- because FSR isn't out yet. Not only that, but 4A Games works with NVIDIA so they're not going to be testing the competitors' technology while baking in NVIDIA's next-gen DLSS 2.1 technology into Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition.

The developer reached out to VideoCardz, explaining: "4A Games has not evaluated the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution feature for Metro Exodus at this time. In our FAQ, we were referring to the AMD FidelityFX open source image quality toolkit which targets traditional rendering techniques that our new RT only render does not use, and noting that we have our own Temporal Reconstruction tech implemented natively which provides great quality benefits for all hardware, so do not currently plan to utilize any other toolkits".

Elon Musk will be hosting Saturday Night Live on May 8 and with it is a storm of controversy brewing just off the coast, with Musk's appearance on SNL triggering some cast members.

SNL cast members won't be forced to appear alongside Musk on May 8 when he hosts the show, which Musk has teased that he wanted to see "just how live Saturday Night Live really is". I guess this has broken the programming of the SNL cast members brains, with a source telling Page Six: "Speaking historically, if a cast member has been that unhappy, they don't have to do it. ['SNL' boss Lorne Michaels] won't ever make them do anything they don't want to do".

Musk followed him his tweet announcing he'd be hosting SNL with another tweet on April 28 which simply read "The Dogefather SNL May 8" which sent the price of Dogecoin pumping upwards.

Facebook today announced that it acquired Downpour Interactive, the independent game studio that created the popular VR war simulator Onward. Facebook said this move would give Downpour the resources to improve the game even further.

Onward is one of the most popular VR games. Downpour Interactive originally released the game on PC VR platforms, where it saw great success on both the Oculus and SteamVR ecosystems. Recently, the developer ported the game over to the Oculus Quest platform, which exposed a much wider audience to the game.

Facebook recognized the Downpour Interactive is one of the pioneers behind social VR experiences. Under the Oculus Studios umbrella, Downpour will have the resources to take Onward to greater heights. Facebook also said the move would give Downpour the ability to pursue future projects.

Crytek has just pushed out its new PC Update 2.1.2 for Crysis Remastered, which adds in a new "experimental Ray Tracing Boost" mode into the game.

The developer took to Reddit to detail the new Crysis Remastered patch, with the new experimental Ray Tracing Boost mode enabling RT reflections on "nearly all surfaces in game" with "Ray randomization has enabled for proper support of rough surfaces" and "about 5% of specular reflectance has been added by default to all surfaces".

Crytek explains: "During the development of Crysis Remastered, the team came up with the concept of adding a boost to RayTracing. This boost mode is more of a fun/experimental feature that we wanted to bring to all the RayTracing enthusiasts out there, to give more effects with minimal impact on performance. This option has been added to the in-game Graphic settings menu and can only be activated when Global Raytracing option is enabled".

Intel's next-gen Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPU has been spotted with an MCM (multi-chip module) design packing an insane 80 cores in a new shot of an engineering sample of the CPU.

The new photo turned up on Bilibili with the 4th Gen Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPU featuring an MCM design with 5x4 configuration -- which works out that each die has up to 80 cores, but we probably won't see the full 80-core silicon ever being released due to the mesh layout.

Wccftech reports that theoretically, the new Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon CPUs "could feature" a maximum of 72 cores and 144 threads, but we could see them tap out at 56 cores and 112 threads. Another leak pointed to the fact of an engineering sample with 60 cores (15 cores per die, with a 5x3 layout) while the CPU itself had just 56 cores and 112 threads enabled (14 cores per die).

NVIDIA is less than 3 weeks away from the unleashing of its new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, with MSI's new flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti SUPRIM X spotted a little early. Check it out:

We have already seen MSI's custom GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Ventus 3X OC listed online, but this is the flagship big daddy SUPRIM X version of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. VideoCardz had the image sent to them by a source, who said that the photo is from a distribution center.

MSI's flagship SUPRIM X range are the company's new flagship line above the GAMING X TRIO family of custom cards, with super-premium styling and a polished finish from MSI that is a step above the rest. The new MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti SUPRIM X should be one of the best custom GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards that you will (hopefully) be able to buy.

Intel Inside has been a marketing term for what feels like forever, but now Intel is Inside of NASA's Perseverance rover that is rolling around on Mars -- not only is Intel inside, but so is SSD controller giant Phison.

Inside of the Perseverance rover is a credit-card-sized computing module that stores, and sends the photos we've been seeing from the Red Planet back to our Pale Blue Dot. The module itself is running Linux, and is powered by an Intel Atom (BayTrail) processor -- the module was made by Israel-based CompuLab in the form of the COMEX-IE38.

There are 2 x COMEX-IE38 modules inside of the NASA Perseverance rover, an off-the-shelf product that you could buy from CompuLab for around $150. There are 23 cameras on the Perseverance rover, with the data from each individual camera being fed in raw format to the DSU (data storage units) through an Ethernet link, compressed by the COMEX-IE38 module, and then stored on a 480GB SSD (thanks to Phison and its PSS4A111-8G) and then blasted back to NASA engineers back on Earth.

The Zelda franchise turns 35 this year (feel old yet?) and Nintendo should release a bunch of games to celebrate.

The Twilight Princess and Wind Waker remasters may not be the only Zelda games coming to Switch this year. There's speculation that Nintendo will also drop N64 hits Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask in 2021 as well. It's possible these games will launch as straight re-releases on the Nintendo eShop and won't get the remaster treatment and instead just launch as Virtual Console titles.

The tidbit comes from YouTuber NateDrake, but this seems like a no-brainer from Nintendo.

Halo Infinite will shine bright on PC as Microsoft and 343 Industries double-down on high-end optimizations for today's top enthusiast hardware.

343i is taking the PC version of Halo Infinite very seriously. The game will support a myriad of options and high-end optimizations on the platform, with tons of graphics settings, uncapped FPS, 4K resolution support with native UHD textures, and even support for 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratios. There's 120 FOV options, dynamic resolution scaling, anti-aliasing and refresh rate toggles, etc.

The studio says Infinite will run on a range of PC hardware, from lower-end rigs with older GPUs and CPUs to today's high-end hardware including NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series and AMD's RX 6000 series graphics cards.