Latest News - Page 1435

Sony is finally releasing a black DualSense controller eight months after the PlayStation 5's release.

Sony recently announced two new color variants for the PS5's DualSense controller: Midnight Black and Cosmic Red. Gamers have been clamoring for an all-black PS5 controller since launch and Sony has taken its time accommodating their requests. The accessories feature a new paint job that's also reflected in the clear D-Pad and face buttons.

Cost wise, the Cosmic Red is actually more expensive than the default white DualSense. The Cosmic Red DualSense controller will cost $74.99 versus the $69.99 MSRP of the Midnight Black and the basic white version.

Following some leaked concept art showing a very John Berkey-esque style, new in-game screenshots for Bethesda's new Starfield IP have leaked out.

New leaked Starfield screenshots give us a sample of the game's rendered environments, including ship interiors and confirmations of both a first-person and third-person view. According to SkulziTV, who found the images, the leaks are from an older build from 2018. These are nowhere near finalized images that represent the release version of the game.

Bethesda has likely made tremendous progress since then.

Demand for gaming hardware is surging and like competitors Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo is having trouble catching up.

COVID-19 has supercharged the games industry. Hardware is flying off the shelves, and Nintendo's Switch system just hit its all-time best sales five years after release. The heavy demands are squeezing chip manufacturers leading to constrained hardware availability. Nintendo boosted its Switch production in 2020, and it hopes to do the same to meet its 25.5 million Switch shipment target, but Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa says this might not happen.

In a recent Q&A session with investors, Furukawa gave a rather transparent response to possible chip shortages. The president reiterates the company's sales target reflects its current production allotment. Reports say Nintendo is planning to release a 4K-ready Switch model that may use a new custom NVIDIA SoC, but Furukawa didn't comment.

Warzone players can grab free double XP tokens on PS4 and PS5 as part of Sony's continuing Play At Home initiative.

A bit ago Sony gave away a bunch of indies and even Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4. Now the Play At Home freebies keep on flowing with a bunch of in-game items for premium and free-to-play titles.

All PS4 and PS5 owners can grab five double XP tokens in Warzone starting May 20th, the same day that 80s action stars John Rambo and Die Hard's John McClane invade Verdansk.

If you want one of the ultimate PC gaming setups right now, you owe it to yourself to have GIGABYTE's new custom Z590 AORUS Xtreme Waterforce motherboard to be on your radar. Check it out:

GIGABYTE is using not just 1 but 2 different LED readouts that will not only look great, but they'll provide you with useful information like displaying the temperature of the water or the CPU. It's not just the read-outs though, as the huge monoblock takes over across a huge chunk of the board across both the Z590 chipset and those super-fast PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs as well.

It wouldn't be a motherboard that cost $1600 and had a gigantic monoblock if it didn't rock great power delivery, with GIGABYTE using 20+1 stage VRM with 100A power stages. You should be able to crank everything to the max when overclocking, with GIGABYTE even including built-in leak detection with its new Z590 AORUS Xtreme Waterforce motherboard. If a leak is detected, it will automatically shut down your entire PC.

Corsair has said that it is preparing for the next generation of memory -- DDR5 -- in a new post on its website. The company said that DDR4 has "had a great run" with its DOMINATOR PLATINUM RGB, VENGEANCE RGB PRO SL, and VENGEANCE LPX memory kits.

But, the next-gen DDR5 memory standard is on the way and has some major improvements for the PCs of today, tomorrow, and into the future. Corsair begins by explaining that DDR5 will be increasing the memory speed cap that is on DDR4, right up to the huge DDR5-6400 with 51GB/sec of bandwidth -- up from DDR4-3200 and its 26GB/sec of bandwidth.

Not only that, but the single DIMM capacity is pretty insane when it comes to DDR5 where you can have 128GB in a single stick... incredible stuff, up from the 32GB single stick DDR4 and 8GB single stick DDR3. Imagine 8 x 128GB DDR5 memory sticks in your PC for a total of 1TB system RAM.

Minisforum is teasing its new ultra-compact gaming PC with an all-AMD CPU+GPU combo, and an interesting open-air design that I'm kinda liking the vibe of to be honest. Check it out:

The new Minisforum GameMini is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor, a GIGABYTE B550 AORUS PRO AX Mini-ITX motherboard, up to 32GB of DDR4-3200 RAM from Kingston and its HyperX family of memory, a 1TB M.2 SSD and an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card.

It's all installed into a really dope open-air case with a full-sized GIGABYTE Radeon RX 6700 XT GAMING OC graphics card on the other side. The CPU is cooled by a gigantic air cooler, while the entire system is powered by a SilverStone SX650-G PSU.

AMD has its specially-binned Navi 21 XTXH GPU powering the very, very fastest custom Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards that have been getting announced -- and now the PowerColor Radeon RX 6900 XT Ultimate graphics card has been used to crush a 3DMark Time Spy Extreme world record.

It might not sound like much but the pre-binned Navi 21 XTXH isn't just ready for additional overclocking headroom, but AMD allows the GPU to be clocked past 3GHz -- far beyond it, with the overclockers from team OGS over in Greece using the PowerColor Radeon RX 6900 XT Ultimate graphics card + LN2 cooling to push the Navi 21 XTXH GPU to 3.3GHz.

AMD allows up to an insane 4GHz so that overclockers can reach for the stars with a Navi 21 XTXH-powered Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. The previous record was by overclocking legend Der8auer who hit 3.2GHz on the same PowerColor Radeon RX 6900 XT Ultimate, but he didn't include benchmark results with that OC.

TSMC was expected to spend between $10 billion and $12 billion on its next-gen 3nm chip factory in Arizona, USA -- but it seems that the Taiwanese semiconductor world leader has much bigger plans.

According to people familiar with the matter, Reuters reports that TSMC is "weighing plans to pump tens of billions of dollars more into cutting-edge chip factories in the U.S. state of Arizona than it had previously disclosed, but is cool on prospects for an advanced European plant".

TSMC is building a next-gen 3nm fabrication plant in Arizona and could spend somewhere between $23 billion and $25 billion to get it operational, which would put them ahead of Samsung which has just begun construction of its new 5nm plant in South Korea. TSMC is already pumping out 5nm chips for companies, with Apple using a custom M1 chip on 5nm inside of its new MacBook and iPad Pro.

Samsung has announced that construction of a new production line has started and that the company expects the plant to be operational in the second half of 2022. This is part of a $151 billion investment into Samsung aiming to be the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology against the likes of so-very-dominant TSMC, Intel, and others.

The new state-of-the-art facility will be making 14nm DRAM and 5nm logic semiconductors, both of which will be based on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology. NVIDIA's next-gen Hopper GPU architecture will be made on 5nm and according to my sources, NVIDIA suffered the blows it has taken with Ampere on the 8nm node from Samsung -- against TSMC and its 7nm node for AMD with Radeon (and Ryzen) because after that, it could get to tap Samsung's new 5nm tech.

This is where NVIDIA will play catch up in a big way, with Samsung's new 5nm plant up and operational in the second half of 2022 we can begin to expect that NVIDIA's next-gen Hopper GPU will be unveiled sometime in the second half of 2022. NVIDIA itself even teased "Ampere Next" for 2022 just last month.

Samsung has just announced that it is boosting its investments in bleeding-edge chip manufacturing, with the South Korean giant spending $151 billion between now and 2030 to boost research into next-gen process technology, and the construction of a new production facility.

The company had previously said that it would be investing $115 billion between now and 2030 but has now revised that, with a larger $151 billion. Samsung Electronics will be pumping the investments into its System LSI and Foundry business, with Samsung "closely collaborating with various semiconductor design companies, component and equipment manufacturers, as well as academia in making progress towards that goal".

Samsung said that the expansion of its Foundry Business will "fuel entire new industries on next-generation technologies like AI, 5G and autonomous driving".

Nintendo is spending more than ever on research and development to help fund new next-gen hardware, games, experimental technologies, and innovative services.

In a recent Q&A session, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa discussed Nintendo's increased research and development expenses. The condensed version of Furukawa's response is that game development costs are rising, Nintendo is currently doing research and studies on beefing up its digital content and services business, and that early phases of next-gen hardware development is underway.

To give Furukawa's statements more context, I decided to put together a look at the company's historical R&D spend since 2002. The results are pretty illuminating. Nintendo has spent $793 million on R&D in FY2021, more than any other period, and rightly so given the higher costs of game dev during this period. The Switch is in the middle of its lifecycle, but Nintendo wants to keep the console's momentum going with a fusillade of games.

AMD will have another Navi GPU out this year with rumors swirling on the new Navi 24 being teased, codenamed "Beige Goby" and spotted in new Linux drivers.

For reference, Navi 21 was codenamed "Sienna Cichlid" while Navi 22 was codenamed "Navy Flounder" while Navi 23 is codenamed "Dimgrey Cavefish" because reasons. The new Navi 24 GPU should be powering the not-yet-announced Radeon RX 6500 or Radeon RX 6400 series graphics cards.

The new RDNA 2-powered Navi 24 GPU will reportedly have 1 SDMA engine (normally discrete GPUs have 2 SDMA engines), 16MB of Infinity Cache, and 16 Compute Units (1024 shader cores). But then our friend Tom @ Moore's Law is providing more details in that the single small 16 compute units + tiny IC + single GDDR6 chip = great low-power Radeon RX 560 replacement that should consume under 75W.

1980s action stars John McClane and John Rambo are coming to Activision's billion-dollar Call of Duty trifecta.

Activision already teased big crossovers from Die Hard and Rambo, but now they've confirmed the classic macho heroes are coming to more games other than Warzone. In a recent Tweet, the company announced guerrilla survivor John Rambo is coming to Warzone, Black Ops Cold War, and Warzone on May 20.

The crossover is complete with a new area set in Die Hard's Nakatomi Plaza. It's also likely that John McClane will show up too (Activision made a fictional website for Nakatomi Duct Cleaning and a fake email account for John M.).

Remedy wants to be in full control over publishing and financing of certain projects, but company CEO Tero Virtala is careful to say it'll still pursue third-party deals.

Like independent developers IO Interactive and Bungie, Remedy too has aspirations to self-publish its own games. In a recent earnings report, Remedy CEO Tero Virtala outlined a tentative plan for this endeavor.

Remedy plans to use portions of the 41.5 million Euros generated from its recent share offering to help fund new projects. Virtala was light on exact details and didn't say which of the companies new games would be self-published or self-financed, but he did say the company will carefully evaluate its options. Being in total control of financing, marketing, and publishing is very risky, and Remedy is intent on balancing these risks, therefore it's pursuing a varied business model.

NASA has dropped a very cool video on its Perseverance Mars Rover Twitter page that shows a close-up of the surface of Mars.

NASA has taken to the personal Twitter page for Perseverance, the most recent rover to land on Mars. The Twitter account for Perseverance tweets from the first-person perspective, which is a neat and kind of comical personification that I believe NASA does to also include children in space exploration - not just adults.

According to the tweet, Perseverance blasted the rock with its laser and then used its robotic arm to get a nice close-up of it. A Twitter user asked Perseverance 'what's the scale of images', Perseverance replied by saying, "The main rock in the wider shot is around 20 in / 50 cm wide; the darker section I focused in on is about the size of a thumbprint." If you were wondering if the laser makes a cool sound when it blasted the rock, you can actually listen to it on the NASA website, check out this link here.

According to reports, on Friday, May 14, China will be attempting to successfully land on Mars with a lander and rover.

Back in July 2020, China launched a spacecraft carrying the Tianwen-1 lander and rover towards Mars. If China can pull this off, it will be the first nation to successfully send a spacecraft into Mars' orbit, drop a lander down, followed by a rover all in the same mission. The orbiting spacecraft is currently preparing for the capsule's release that will carry both the lander and the rover.

Once preparation is complete, it will drop the capsule that will fall through the atmosphere and deploy a parachute to carry it safely to the Red Planet's surface. The lander will fire its thrusters downwards to gently lower itself to the surface. From there, the lander will deploy a ramp for China's rover to exit onto the Martian ground.

Trading cards are leaving Target after a man pulled a gun out in a dispute over trading cards in a Target parking lot.

Target has announced that it will be removing all trading cards from store shelves from May 14 onward after a man on May 7 pulled a gun out during a fight over trading cards. Target states it is temporarily suspending the "sale of MLB, NFL, NBA and Pokemon trading cards within our stores, effective May 14." Target added that it decided to remove these trading cards "out of an abundance of caution", and that shoppers can still purchase them online "Guests can continue to shop these cards online at Target.com."

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the value of trading cards to increase drastically, with some Pokemon cards such as a mint condition Charizard sold for $300,000 in January - it was worth $16,000 in 2019. According to Joe Maddalena, executive vice-president at Texas-based Heritage Auctions said, "When Covid-19 hit, a lot of Gen X and Millennials were looking for things to do and we found a lot of these guys and girls started playing Pokemon again because they grew up with it."

The United States Customs and Border Protection agency made a very surprising announcement on Monday regarding cow poo and traveling.

According to the announcement Customs agents located cow dung in a travelers luggage, and now the agency is publicly telling all travelers to stop packing cow dung into luggage because of the health risks that come with it. Just last month Customs agents found two cow dung patties in a suitcase that was accidentally left behind by a Air India flight traveler. So, why cow dung?

There is a seemingly growing belief that cow dung offers some health benefits, and some of those beliefs stretch as far as cow dung offering protection against COVID-19, hence the the dung being placed in the travel luggage. It should be noted that Customs has prohibited cow dung transportation from India to the US because of the risk it poses to transmitting Foot and Mouth Disease to livestock. Foot and Mouth Disease has been wiped out of the US since 1929.

Elon Musk's tweet about Tesla now not taking any Bitcoin as payment for Tesla vehicles caused a significant dip in cryptocurrencies value.

It was only a few days ago that Musk announced that Tesla would not be taking any Bitcoin as payment for Tesla vehicles, citing the energy needed to mine Bitcoin. Musk said that Tesla still intends to use the currency for transactions "as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy". Since Musk has halted Bitcoin payments to Tesla due to environmental concerns, Tesla is now looking towards other cryptocurrencies that use much less energy.

According to attorney, John E Deaton, Musk has handed "the best ad campaign" to Ripple's (XRP) executives. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and other executives aren't strangers to promoting how energy-efficient Ripple is, with Garlinghouse recently stating that XRP is 10,000 times more energy-efficient than Bitcoin. XRP isn't the only energy-efficient cryptocurrency on the market. Other options include one of Musk's personal favorites - Dogecoin.