Latest News - Page 1478

Pico Interactive recently raised $37 million in a Series B+ financing round, ensuring the company has the capital on hand to launch its third-generation 6-DoF standalone VR headset. The company plans to launch the Pico Neo 3 in the next few months.

Pico Interactive is a small VR headset maker that largely caters to the VR industry's business side. The company makes standalone VR headsets that are used in corporate training simulations and medical applications. Pico does sell to consumers in China, but it doesn't have a consumer presence outside of the country.

With Pico's newly acquired investment, the company plans to put a larger focus on its consumer market. Pico's next headset, the Neo 3, is set to launch sometime in Q2 2021, and the company wants to capture a bigger slice of the booming consumer VR market in China.

Zack Snyder's Justice League is still 10 days away and yet the movie "accidentally" debuted on HBO Max when users searched and tried to stream 'Tom & Jerry'.

Streaming Tom & Jerry on HBO Max surprised viewers with an early viewing of Zack Snyder's Justice League, but what happened? HBO Max parent company WarnerMedia explained in a statement: "Zack Snyder's Justice League was temporarily available on HBO Max and the error was addressed within minutes".

The movie was then made available in various sources across the internet, but it took many hours before Warner Bros. responded and in the end Twitter sent takedown notices on behalf of Warner Bros. to Twitter users who were sharing screenshots from the leaked Zack Snyder's Justice League movie.

SpaceX has some world-leading technology with its Starlink internet service already up and in lower earth orbit offering satellite internet access to regular users. But the plans are much more vast for Starlink according to Elon Musk.

In a recent SpaceX filing with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) where it was requesting permission to install internet terminals on moving vehicles. This is where Tesla, SpaceX boss and Dogecoin enthusiast Elon Musk tweeted out: "Not connecting Tesla cars to Starlink, as our terminal is much too big. This is for aircraft, ships, large trucks & RVs".

SpaceX director of satellite policy David Goldman wrote to the FCC, where he said: "This application would serve the public interest by authorizing a new class of ground-based components for SpaceX's satellite system that will expand the range of broadband capabilities available to moving vehicles throughout the United States and to moving vessels and aircraft worldwide".

MSI has just very quietly introduced two new custom GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards, with the new MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING Z TRIO and MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING TRIO PLUS variants.

The new MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING Z TRIO is now the new flagship GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card from MSI in their GAMING range (not the SUPRIM range) with its GPU boosted up by another 15MHz over the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING X TRIO -- now sitting at a factory overclocked 1830MHz. It'll be interesting to see if manually overclocking the GAMING Z TRIO against the GAMING X TRIO is any different.

MSI has also added some subtle venting on the backplate of the card, and it's also thinner and lighter than the MSI RTX 3080 GAMING X TRIO. That's welcomed and all, but unless properly explained on the box it will go unnoticed -- and who knows if there will be review samples of this (email has been fired off already).

We've seen a GeForce RTX 3070 modded from 8GB to 16GB and even a GeForce RTX 3090 modded to work on an M.2 slot inside of a laptop -- but now a GeForce RTX 3070 has been modded with 16GB of VRAM and it works.

Russian modder VIK-on is behind the mod once again, with a video that shows how he upgraded his NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 from its stock 8GB of GDDR6 memory up to a much better 16GB of GDDR6 memory and it works without a problem. VIK-on used the custom Palit GamingPro GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card for this mod.

He replaced the 1GB GDDR6 modules (K4Z803256C-HC14) that are made with Samsung with 2GB GDDR6 (K4ZAF3258M-HC14) also from Samsung, doubling the 8GB of GDDR6 on the GeForce RTX 3070 up to 16GB. Pretty awesome stuff right there.

AMD has announced it will be officially launching its next-gen Zen 3-based EPYC processors on March 15, with an all-new all-digital reveal event.

The new 3rd Gen EPYC processors are based on the latest Zen 3 architecture, and will succeed the current 2nd Gen EPYC processors that are powered by the Zen 2 architecture. AMD will have a heap of models, with 19 new EPYC processors to be rolled out over the coming months.

The flagship AMD EPYC 7763 is a beast, packing 64 cores and 128 threads with a base CPU clock of 2.45GHz and boost CPU clock of 3.5GHz with 256MB of L3 cache and a 280W TDP. There are plenty of other models, with CPU and thread counts ranging down from there.

Zack Snyder's Justice League is less than 10 days away if you can believe it, with Snyder and HBO Max dropping individual character teases with seconds of new footage in each trailer. Check out the official trailer to Zack Snyder's Justice League before that, and below I have the individual trailers and character posters.

The team have been slowly releasing character trailers leading into the release of Zack Snyder's Justice League on March 18 where it will debut and I'm sure break many records on HBO Max. We started with Batman, and went right into the beautiful black suit Superman, then Aquaman and The Flash and today Wonder Woman.

Zack Snyder has referred to Cyborg as "the heart" of the movie, so it's fitting that his individual video has been left until last. Every single video has given me goosebumps, I've literally cried in a couple of them with pure happiness and geeking out, but holy f***ing shit this is looking absolutely phenomenal.

Elder Scrolls Online kicks off its new Gates of Oblivion story arc with its first major DLC, Flames of Ambition, which is out now on PC. Here's what you need to know.

The gates of Oblivion have opened anew, and Molag Bal is back for revenge. The new Flames of Ambition DLC for Elder Scrolls Online starts the epic year-long Gates of Oblivion story arc, which will be spun in four major expansions across 2021.

The big selling point of the Flames of Ambition DLC is its two new dungeons, The Cauldron and Black Drake Villa, both of which come with four new gearsets apiece (check below for full stats).

V1 Interactive, the lesser-known indie studio behind the ever lesser-known FPS/RTS mashup Disintegration, is shutting down.

Lots of gamers didn't know about Marcus Lehto's new game, Disintegration. The project was published by Take-Two's Private Division, a very new subsidiary, and mostly fell off the radar for multiple reasons, whether it was publicity or loss of traction during an immensely competitive 2020 period. Not many people knew about the game, or that Lehto, the co-creator of the Halo universe, was even making a new game let alone started up a new studio.

As a result, Disintegration was a commercial failure and simply didn't take off. The new IP floundered, and V1 Interactive pulled online play just five months after release because it was simply not worth paying to keep the servers active. Now less than a year after the game launched, the studio is closing down.

Worldwide regulators have approved Microsoft's buyout of ZeniMax Media, solidifying one of the biggest acquisitions in gaming history.

Both the SEC and the European Commission have greenlit Microsoft's $7.5 billion buyout of Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media. Today, the European regulation board endorsed the takeover today with "unconditional approval" under Article 6(1)(b):

"The Commission concluded that the proposed acquisition would raise no competition concerns, given the combined entity's limited market position upstream and the presence of strong downstream competitors in the distribution of video games. The transaction was examined under the normal merger review procedure," the European Commission said in a press statement.

Anyone who has lost their smartphone into an ocean, river, or lake would think it is gone forever -- well, not for this iPhone 11 which survived at the bottom of a lake for 6 months.

The iPhone 11 was discovered at the bottom of a lake in British Columbia, and once it was discovered it was taken out and cleaned -- it was turned on and discovered to work. In an interview with CNBC, Chilliwack free divers Clayton Helkenberg and his wife Heather said that they were looking on the bottom of the lake for lost items... and what a find.

They discovered many other lost items including other smartphones, but this particular iPhone 11 had survived 6 months and was lost by Fatemeh Ghodsi. Once the iPhone 11 was recovered from the bottom of the lake, it was returned to the owner who explained it had been dropped during a boat ride.

In a strange twist of fate, Google's fledgling game-streaming service Stadia can now be run on Xbox consoles.

Xbox has transformed from a closed ecosystem into one of the most open platforms in gaming, complete with cross-publisher subscriptions, the industry-defining Game Pass, and even emulator support on Xbox Series X/S consoles. Now that openness is expanding to Stadia.

Xbox owners in the new Skip-Ahead testing program are now able to run Stadia on their Xbox consoles and play games via controller support. This is due to the new Chromium-based Edge browser that's offered in the update, which allows compatibility with Google services like Stadia as well as other extensions and plugins. The functionality is particularly interesting as Microsoft's own streaming service, Project xCloud, doesn't yet stream games to Xbox consoles.

A new job listing for a backend cloud developer hints that Digital Extremes could branch out to new streaming platforms.

Now that Tencent owns the company, it appears Digital Extremes is exploring new cloud-based gaming opportunities. The Warframe studio has opened up a new internal division focused on cloud experiences, and is currently looking for a senior backend dev to help fill out their ranks.

Here's the excerpt from the job listing: "Digital Extremes is seeking a Senior Back-End/Cloud Developer to join our team with experience in game development for our external project endeavors; this is a specialized role, and we're trying to find just the right person to fill it. This posting is for a new internal team working with cutting edge technologies, in an exciting novel area of development for the company."

The recent server hack delays one of CD Projekt RED's most important events: Its annual earnings reports.

The malicious cybersecurity intrusion has set CD Projekt RED back quite a bit. The hack blocked developers from working on Cyberpunk 2077's anticipated Patch 1.2 for consoles and PC, delaying the big update into late March. Now the hack is also affecting how CDPR talks to investors.

In a recent press release, CDPR says it has delayed its yearly earnings report from March 30 to April 19, citing the hack as the main reason.

It looks like AMD is working on RDNA-based cryptocurrency mining cards, with new information coming through Linux kernel patches with a new Navi 12-based GPU for crypto mining.

The new GPU does not support DCN (Display Core Next) and VCN (Video Core Next) that would see the new Navi 12 GPU without the ability of display output. The headless GPU would be the perfect compute acceleration card for working in clusters of GPUs, or in crypto mining farms.

It was back in October 2020 when the first tease of AMD working on a blockchain GPU first started, but that was with a Navi 10 part -- this is a new Navi 12 GPU. The Navi 12 GPU was only made for Apple and its Mac with the Radeon Pro 5600M, which had HBM2 memory. It would be interesting to see the Navi 12 with HBM2 memory as the Navi 10 chip has GDDR6.

The entire PC hardware and gaming market exploded in 2020 with the pandemic, with millions more people at home many gamers were upgrading and tweaking their machines like never before. NVIDIA launched new graphics cards, AMD launched new graphics cards that were actually kick ass enthusiast entries for the first time in ages.

But the issue is, you just can't buy Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards right now. If you thought buying an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series card was hard, Big Navi is a Big Hassle to find worldwide.

The reason? AMD's entire 7nm silicon allotment from TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) would be pushed into their semi-custom SoCs for Sony and the PlayStation 5, as well as Microsoft with the Xbox Series X/S consoles. Not only that, but AMD is using that 7nm silicon for its Zen 3 processors, Zen 3, EPYC, Threadripper, and everything in between.

Take-Two Interactive CEO Straus Zelnick says the company won't start releasing a ton of next-gen remasters, and re-releases will still be additive to its slate of new IPs, annual games, and in-development titles.

Remasters are a great way to capitalize on a new console generation. Take-Two knows this quite well; they've released GTA V on Xbox 360/PS3, and again on Xbox One/PS4. Now the billion-dollar GTA V is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles with significant upgrades. But Take-Two doesn't want to saturate the market with remasters. Company CEO Strauss Zelnick affirms their remasters are more specialized games with dramatic improvements (case in point: the recent Mafia trilogy re-release).

At a recent Morgan Stanley conference, Zelnick says remasters won't become a bigger part of their business despite the new console generation. Greater care will be put into any re-releases, and these older games are additive to the company's current slate of games--a massive pipeline of 93 titles across mobile, consoles, and PC.

Watch Dogs Legion's online mode has been delayed on PC, but will arrive on consoles next week, Ubisoft announces.

The anticipated online mode for Watch Dogs Legion is coming to PS4, Xbox One, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S consoles on March 9.

The mode is standalone, not unlike GTA Online, complete with seasonal objectives that rotate over time. The main drawing point is the online co-op that lets players team up to take on missions with emphasis on stealth, all-out chaos, and hacking.

A new Dungeons and Dragons RPG is currently in development from a Counter-Strike veteran team that's helped Valve over the last few years.

Wizards of the Coast is pushing more video game adaptations in key franchises, including Magic The Gathering, a new interesting sci-fi IP, and even Dungeons and Dragons is getting new titles. In fact, a new open-world third-person AAA D&D game is currently in the works from Hidden Path, a Washington-based developer that has collaborated with Valve for some time. Hidden Path helped Valve make Counter-Strike Global Offensive for consoles, and even helped released Age of Empires II HD.

"We are in development on a AAA, third-person, open-world fantasy RPG that will be taking place inside the Dungeons & Dragons franchise," reads a recruitment call from Hidden Path's Twitter account.

Samsung had one of the biggest and most bad ass gaming displays of 2020 with its Odyssey G9, which has just had some 2021 refreshes done to it and is better than ever.

The new Samsung Odyssey G9 2021 gaming monitor has some new upgrades up its sleeve with a new Quantum Mini LED panel, with its huge 49-inch super-ultrawide 5120 x 1440 rocking along at up to 240Hz. But where the new 2021 goodies come from in the 49-inch Odyssey G9 2021 gaming monitor is the Quantum Mini LED tech.

Samsung explains: "At just 1/40th the size of conventional LEDs, Quantum Mini LEDs allow for ultra-fine light control. With deep blacks, bright lights, and upscaling technology smarter than any Samsung TV has ever offered, Samsung Neo QLED delivers an ultra-realistic picture-whether you are watching a football game, or playing one on your gaming console".