Latest News - Page 1439

Twice within the last month, US military vessels have had to fire warning shots at Iranian war vessels for "unsafe and unprofessional" maneuvers.

According to TheGuardian, a US coast guard ship had to fire thirty warning shots at thirteen Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGCN) warships that were fast-approaching US navy vessels. According to John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesperson, the warning shots were fired at the Iranian ships after they came as close as 150 yards to US ships. Kirby said, "It's significant ... and they were acting very aggressively."

Kirby also stated, "After the second round of warning shots, the 13 fast attack craft from the IRGCN broke contact." As previously mentioned, this is the second time within a month that US ships have had to result in firing warning shots at approaching Iranian ships. In April, another US ship had to fire warning shots after three IRGCN vessels came close to an American patrol boat in the Gulf.

Netflix has just thrown three of its TV shows onto the chopping block. Each of the shows have been canceled with no further seasons to be renewed.

Cinemablend has reported that two newcomer TV shows and one fan-favorite of the platform won't be getting renewed for new seasons. The shows that have sadly been canceled by the network are; The Irregulars, The Last Kingdom, and The Duchess. Netflix has renewed The Last Kingdom a few times, and now the platform has said that season 5 will be the last season of the show.

As for The Irregulars, when the show was released, it made it #1 on Netflix for an entire day and placed in the Top 18 for 18 days. However, Netflix has found that the show isn't performing as it would have liked versus similar shows such as Bridgerton. Netflix has made the decision not to fund production costs for the second season of the show. The Duchess is in a similar boat to The Irregulars, as the streaming platform has now canceled season 2 of the show.

Elon Musk has been a long advocate for the now extremely-popular cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Now, the billionaire is asking if Tesla should accept payments in Dogecoin.

Back at the end of March, Musk announced that it was now possible to purchase Tesla vehicles with Bitcoin, which reinforced the idea that cryptocurrencies will eventually become more apart of everyday society. Now, Musk is publicly asking his 53 million Twitter followers if Tesla should accept Dogecoin as payment for vehicles. At the time of writing this, the public vote is sitting at 81% saying "yes", and only 22% saying "no".

Since the Tweet from Musk is so recent (10 minutes ago at the time of writing this), it's uncertain how the public vote will affect the price of Dogecoin. However, if the jump Bitcoin took when Tesla announced it was accepting the currency, is any indicator ($54K to $57K), we can expect that Dogecoin would have the same kind of reaction if Musk allowed purchases in Dogecoin.

The first glimpse of the prequel TV show to the award-winning Game of Thrones has been released by HBO. Introducing House of the Dragon.

House of the Dragon is based 300 years before the events of the now concluded TV series Game of Thrones. If you haven't already gathered it from the name, House of the Dragon will focus on the a time when House Targaryen ruled over Westeros. Daenerys Targaryen's ancestors Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Prince Daemon Targaryen, will be the show's centerpieces, Emma D'Arcy will play Rhaenyra, and Matt Smith will play Daemon (as seen above).

HBO has released a set of images showcasing some of the characters in the show. Actor Steve Toussaint will portray the Lord Corlys Velaryon, or "The Sea Snake". British actress Olivia Cooke will play Alice Hightower, and Rhys Ifans will play her father, Otto Hightower. House of the Dragon is scheduled to release at an undeclared date in 2022. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

The latest version of GPU-Z is here with GPU-Z 2.39 supporting Intel's new Rocket Lake and their integrated GPUs, AMD's upcoming mobile RDNA 2 chips, NVIDIA's new CMP crypto mining GPUs, and more.

GPU-Z now supports NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3050 and GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPUs that are both based on the new GA107 GPU, as well as at least 5 of NVIDIA's new Crypto Mining Processor (CMP) cards and AMD's unreleased mobile RDNA 2-based GPUs.

The new software also supports AMD's just-released highly-binned Navi 21 XTXH GPU, which is powering the range of new uber-high-end custom Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards. There's also the usual list of bug fixes as well, which I've got detailed and listed for you below in the GPU-Z 2.39 changelog.

Samsung is hard at work on its next-gen Exynos SoC which will be competing against Qualcomm's next-gen SoC, and Apple's current-gen M1 chip and next-gen M2 chip.

But what will be inside of Samsung's new SoC is going to be interesting: it's aimed at notebooks and will pack an integrated custom GPU from AMD which I'm sure is based on the RDNA 2 architecture. The news is coming from The Korean Economic Daily which said an industry source told them: "The new Exynos will offer improved functions, including extraordinary computing power and battery efficiency, by utilizing a 5-nanometer processing technology. It's good for both laptops and smartphones".

We should expect Samsung to unveil a new family of Exynos SoC-powered laptops and smartphones using its new chip, which will be made on the fresh 5nm node. We should see the Exynos SoC scale up from smartphones with lower power and TDP through to laptops with varying power and TDPs.

Intel's largest launch in a very long time will be later this year with its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" CPU family, which will reportedly be launching in November 2021 according to the latest rumors.

The introduction of Alder Lake-S will usher in Intel as the first with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory support, after AMD held PCIe 4.0 over Intel's head for a couple of years there, Intel will be the first with both PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support. PCIe 5.0 will be on all 600-series motherboards, but we will see some boards launching with DDR5 or DDR4 support -- some of that will be up to motherboard makers.

Wccftech says that Intel has told its partners that it is "planning to launch Alder Lake S in November of 2021. As with all timelines, this can move backward or forwards depending on a few variables but for now this has been communicated to partners and is mostly fixed".

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an incredible game, a system seller for the Nintendo Switch... but what about BotW in the glorious 8K resolution with some enhanced ray-traced graphics. Check it out:

YouTube channel "Digital Dreams" has done just that: got The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild up and running on the PC through the Wii U emulator CEMU, on top of that they ran Revolvere's "REVO ReShade REDUX" shader that adds Pascal Glicher's "Screen-Space Ray Traced Global Illumination" shader for some software-based screen-space ray-tracing effects.

If you already loved Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch, which I found to be an incredible experience in portable mode and not docked -- then running it on the PC through CEMU and cranking the resolution to 8K (!!!) and flicking on juiced-up graphics is music to my ears.

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.