Latest News - Page 1476

PowerColor is preparing its new Radeon RX 6700 XT HELLHOUND graphics card, with our first tease of the card and its new black-and-blue color scheme. Check it out:

The new black-and-blue color scheme looks nice, but it's very SAPPHIRE NITRO+ there, PowerColor. We have dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, a thicker near triple-slot design and the Navi 22 GPU + 12GB of GDDR6 memory underneath. There's HDMI 2.1 connectivity here as well for 4K 120Hz gaming on the TV and next-gen monitors.

We don't know the GPU clocks on the PowerColor Radeon RX 6700 XT HELLHOUND just yet, but I can say with confidence that they'll fall within a few percentage points of the rest of the custom Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards. This is the very first custom Radeon RX 6700 XT from PowerColor as well, and we should expect a couple of more models at least.

If you thought traditional GPU crypto mining machines were crazy with 6 or 8 or 10 graphics cards, well we haven't seen anything yet -- at least not until this insanity:

Yeah, inside of that system you will see 8 x NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 flagship graphics cards that are harder to buy than unobtanium. Better yet, the Vietnam-based crypto mining enthusiast that has 8 x GeForce RTX 3090s cooled wqith mineral oil, which is an interesting choice.

Mineral oil will cool the GPU, VRAM, and VRMs and keep them at the same temperatures -- rather than liquid cooling that keeps the temperatures of those three key components at varying temps. It's an interesting, and very scary thing to see -- a very expensive 8 x GeForce RTX 3090 rig cooled with mineral oil and used as a crypto mining rig.

Zack Snyder's Justice League is nearly here with an epic final trailer for the movie released, fully unleashing the hype engines. Check it out:

Snyder tweeted out the final trailer to Zack Snyder's Justice League with "The Time is Now. #ForAutumn", Autumn being his daughter that took her own life as he was finishing up Justice League. Warner Bros. removed him from the project as he needed time with his family and that didn't suit their schedule, they had Avengers director Joss Whedon step in and re-shoot Justice League into the theatrical mess it was.

It's a beautiful way to end this journey into the release of Zack Snyder's Justice League from the man himself, saying this is For Autumn. Many of the fans, myself included, have been with Zack throughout this entire journey. There have been large sums of money raised for suicide awareness because of it, with the Snyder family fully embracing the movement.

We all know the pain of trying to find a graphics card right now, and while we thought AMD was rumored to not experience as much of a shortage with its new Radeon RX 6700 XT as it has with its Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6900 XT cards -- it, very unfortunately, looks like that'll be the case.

Igor's Lab is reporting that there will only be a couple of Radeon RX 6700 XT cards for the entire of Germany, but there will just be a few thousand for the entire of the European Union (or EU). Igor explains: "If you condense the information of various board partners and distributors to a trend, then there are, depending on the manufacturer and model, only a few pieces (for Germany) to a few thousand for the EU as a whole".

But then there's the UK and Red Gaming Tech that reports that there should be 1000-2000 units of the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards made at launch -- and weekly afterwards. It looks like the UK will have many more cards than the entire of the EU, which is a bit of a shocker -- but I think we'll be finding the RX 6700 XT nigh impossible to buy at launch.

After nearly 8 years, Sony is pulling the plug on the PS4's Communities feature.

Sony confirms the PS4's Communities social feature will be removed in April 2021, displacing many gamers who still use the platform to communicate. Communities are a way that everyday gamers can come together and share screenshots and text messages in an open Discord-style chat. I myself have used them to discuss details, share info on how to beat certain quests, and discover new content and even make new friends with strangers.

Here's what Sony said in an email to PlayStation Network users:

Bungie plans to eventually rotate Forsaken content to Destiny 2's new content vault to keep the game more player friendly.

Destiny 2 can be pretty confusing and overwhelming to new players. There's so much to do, and the freedom to tackle expansions in any order means continuity errors can be prevalent--playing Forsaken before the original Destiny storyline, for instance. That's why Bungie is also moving story campaigns like those in the Forsaken expansion to the Destiny Content Vault, a separate storage section that carves off pieces from the main game in order to reduce bloat and improve streamlined access.

"Forsaken content will be vaulted at some point. I think in the same way we don't want eight raids, it's the same thing with storylines. We don't want when a new player enters into Destiny, there's five different competing storylines that they could start playing and in some of them, Uldren's a good guy, and in some of them he's a bad guy, and it's not clear if you're playing them out of order. We want to curate that experience," Destiny 2 general manager Justin Truman told Eurogamer.

Remember Konami's old-school TMNT arcade game from the early 90s? It's coming back. Well...sort of.

Dotemu, the publisher that brought Streets of Rage back to the mainstream market, is working their retro revitalization magic on TMNT. Introducing Shredder's Revenge, a spiritual successor to Konami's beloved TMNT beat-em-up from the golden arcade era.

The game is based on the old 1980s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series and not the newer films or TV shows. The beat-em-up features classic baddies like Rocksteady, Bebop, Baxter Stockman, and of course Shredder. It'll feature four-player co-op including online multiplayer and split-screen couch play, and also has a brand new story arc not associated with existing TMNT media.

Dying Light 2's big new info blowout is right around the corner, but in the meantime Techland shares a rather illuminating tidbit that gamers knew for a while.

Techland said something pretty interesting in a recent Tweet. According to the Polish developer, Dying Light 2 was announced way too early. The studio hasn't had enough time to prepare the sequel since its E3 2018 world reveal. Contrary to popular belief, however, the game isn't in so-called "development hell," a place of limbo where failed or interrupted projects fester and slowly wither away.

"Afaik the definition of a dev hell requires the game to not make any development progress, while DL2 keeps moving forward, we announced the game too early but it's far from being in a dev hell :P," the official Dying Light Twitter said on Friday.

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!"