Latest News - Page 1479

NVIDIA hasn't made its GeForce RTX 3050 Ti mobility GPU official just yet, but ASUS may have just accidentally spoiled the RTX 3050 Ti reveal party with its upcoming TUF Dash F15 gaming laptop.

The new ASUS TUF Dash F15 gaming laptop will be powered by Intel's new Tiger Lake-H (35W) processors and will be customizable with up to NVIDIA's beefier GeForce RTX 3070 mobility GPU. But in the spec page for teh new ASUS laptop was the entry-level version with the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti mobility GPU.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3050 Ti mobility GPU has 4GB of GDDR6 on what should be a 128-bit memory interface, and should be a little faster than the GeForce RTX 2060 desktop graphics card. The interesting thing here is that you'll get RTX ray tracing features on an entry-level GeForce RTX 3050 Ti where previously we would've seen the RTX 3060 being the lowest in the RTX rung and could've had a GTX 1050 Ti without the RTX abilities.

AMD's next-gen Instinct MI200 has been in the headlines more and more over the last few months, with a new rumor suggesting the new Aldebaran -- a new compute architecture for Instinct MI200 that will be a dual-die GPU.

The new dual-die Aldebaran GPU has been spotted by Coelacanth's Dream inside of some new Linux patches and hidden in code, with a patch from February 24 referring to the Aldebaran dual-die GPU as 'alde_die_0' and 'alde_die_1'. This would, in very obvious terms, refer to a dual-die GPU -- or MCM (multi-chip module) which is similar to the chiplet technology AMD uses on its Zen CPU family of processors.

AMD's next-gen Aldebaran GPU will be their first multi-chip module GPU that will compete with Intel Xe-HPC and NVIDIA's next-gen Hopper GPUs which should be MCM designs also. In the same patches for Linux it shuold be noted that there are references to HBM2E, which is the faster variant of the super-fast memory technology.

Razer has just unveiled its latest gaming chair, a tweaked version of its Razer Iskur gaming chair that drops the black-and-green design everyone knows and loves from Razer with a new all-black Iskur gaming chair. Check it out:

The new Razer Iskur all-black gaming chair costs $499, the same as its black-and-green sibling with the same ergonomic lumbar support system, the usual Razer styling and quality, and more. There's multi-layered synthetic leather, high density foam cushions, and 4D armrests.

You're paying $500 for the Razer Iskur which is in the same territory as Secretlab's premium and very, very comfy TITAN chair. If you're sitting in your chair all day and all night long working or gaming or doing everything in between, and didn't want the green-and-black style that Razer is known for, then the all-black Iskur gaming chair could be the one for you.

Intel's new 11th Gen Core processors are still a few weeks away, but AnandTech has performed some magic trick and has a review of the Core i7-11700K close to a month before its official launch.

The thing is that Intel hasn't even announced the new series of CPUs and have been light on details of its Rocket Lake-S family of chips even though there's been a mountain of leaks over the last few months. AnandTech purchased a retail version of the Intel Core i7-11700K and even though they've signed an NDA, there's no new information shared that breaches that contract.

Dr. Ian Cutress of AnandTech explains that the information shared in his Core i7-11700K review: "Units obtained by that method are not under NDA by definition, and we obtained the Core i7-11700K for this review at retail, and as such we are not under NDA for any information we have obtained through using this processor".

AMD has just announced that Resident Evil Village and its ray tracing turned on will require an RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card -- skipping over the just-announced Navi 22-based Radeon RX 6700 XT.

AMD tweeted out one of the most lowest-quality, heavily-compressed videos showing off the next-gen ray tracing graphics with Resident Evil Village on Twitter. On AMD's own website it states that you'll require a Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card for ray tracing being turned on, but you'll only need an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 processor.

We don't know if NVIDIA will have RTX ray tracing inside of Resident Evil Village, but I'd dare say that if that happens it'll be many months before GeForce RTX owners will have it enabled. AMD will also have its own FidelityFX features inside of Resident Evil Village, which is part of their collaboration with Capcom.

Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control game developer Remedy Entertainment outlines its future plans for new titles, showing a very busy slate for the Finnish studio.

Remedy is currently working on five different projects across four teams. The games are a mix of live service and traditional single-player based experiences on the full AA and AAA spectrum. Remedy CEO Tero Virtala discussed future plans with GamesIndustry.biz, outlining what we can expect from the studio in the next few years.

Of the five projects, two of them are major games. The team behind Control is currently laying the foundation for Remedy's next AAA title, but details are quite sparse. We do know that Remedy's Sam Lake has finished the first draft for this next-gen PS5, Series X game, however.

Nintendo is enjoying astronomical success with its Switch family of hardware, but the specter of its past failures (like the Wii U) haunt the company. That's why Nintendo never rests and is continually planning on The Next Big Thing.

In a recent interview with Nikkei Business, Nintendo CEO Shuntaro Furukawa highlights the intense pressures of the entertainment industry. Unlike the affable Phil Spencer, or the smiling Jim Ryan, Furukawa expresses that every year is faced with anxiety and worry of falling behind--but this concern of failure propels Nintendo forward. The never-ending quest for innovation and unique experiences sets Nintendo apart from its peers, but this focus comes at a cost, one that executives must shoulder as they lead the company through the present while trying to lay the foundations for the future.

"Not matter the hits, in the entertainment business people someday do lose interest. Up until now, we have repeatedly had the experience of our business taking a nosedive," Furukawa said.

Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition for ZeniMax Media has apparently been approved by worldwide regulators, closing one of the biggest entertainment mergers in the history of the games industry.

The Microsoft x ZeniMax merger has apparently gone through. Providence Equity, the main stakeholder in ZeniMax Media, has listed ZeniMax as a "realized" investment on its portfolio webpage.

This essentially confirms a deal has gone through. Investments are listed as either active or realized; when an investment is listed as realized, that means the stakeholder has made a profit by selling the investment stake for more money than it was purchased for. Conversely, an active investment means no profit has been made yet. As part of the acquisition, Microsoft promised Providence a six-fold return of their initial ZeniMax Media investment.

Back in 2016, U.S. diplomats in Havana began to fall into sickness, and researchers weren't exactly sure why. After some testing, the scientists found that the U.S. diplomats were hit with a microwave weapon.

Radio-frequency (RF) weapons blast the target with a deadly amount of radiation, and for those that don't know, radiation isn't visible to the naked eye, making it one of the most deadly weapons that can be used in warfare. Now, the U.S. military, in particular, the Pentagon and the Defense Health Agency (DHA), are looking for a sensor that can detect radiation levels and be small enough to be equipped by soldiers.

According to the DHA research solicitation, "Without known patterns of R.F. injury to guide diagnosis, it will be difficult to differentiate R.F. injury from other common sources of illness and injury such as heat stroke. This ambiguous symptomology is aggravated by the transient nature of RF energy. Without a sensor it is possible that no residual evidence of R.F. attack will be available."

A new article has revealed quite an interesting fact about NASA's brand new Mars rover that recently touched down on the Red Planet.

In a new article published in NewScientist, we get a deeper understanding of all of the new interesting instruments and components found on the new Perseverance rover. One of the most astonishing facts about Perseverance is that it's using the same kind of chip that Apple used to power the first iMac, but the chips aren't necessarily identical.

Perseverance is equipped with the RAD750, which is a chip that is based on the PowerPC 750 processor from 1998 that is found in Apple's first iMac. The difference between the PowerPC 750 processor and the RAD750 is that the RAD750 is a radiation-hardened processor designed to withstand high-radiation environments such as onboard satellites spacecrafts. RAD750 is designed to withstand up to 1,000,000 Rads, and costs over $200,000. Sometimes it's not all about speed but longevity.

HTC Vive dropped a bit of a tease on Twitter on Thursday. The company's social media manager released a screenshot of what appears to be a closeup of a new device with a Vive logo that we've never seen before. Is HTC about to make an announcement?

The HTC Vive Twitter page posted a screenshot of what appears to be a new Vive device on Thursday with a post saying, "It's your move." The image shows a tight closeup of a dark chrome Vive logo embedded in a black textured surface.

It's impossible to tell what the object is from the picture, but that's not stopping people from taking a guess. From the comments in the Twitter thread, it appears most people are hoping for an XR2-based standalone headset that competes with the Oculus Quest 2. Some people would also like to see a low-cost VR headset to replace the original Vive and fill the gap that the soon-to-be discontinued Rift S will create. Still, there is no shortage of cynical comments from people who don't trust Vive as a consumer brand anymore.

We've been hearing about the upcoming ASUS ROG Phone 5 gaming smartphone with its teased 18GB of RAM, but Nubia has stepped way ahead of that and revealed their new RedMagic 6 gaming smartphones with 18GB of RAM, but there's a catch...

Nubia's new RedMagic 6 gaming smartphones are split into the RedMagic 6 and RedMagic 6 Pro, which both sport a 6.8-inch 1080p AMOLED display at an insane 165Hz -- a world-first. The 1080p 165Hz mobile panels have "the industry's highest touch sampling rate" which is 500Hz for single finger and 360Hz for multi-touch.

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 888 chip powers the new Nubia RedMagic 6 gaming smartphones, offering some of the best performance on a mobile chip as well as 5G and Wi-Fi 6E technology. There's some tricky marketing going on here because the Nubia RedMagic 6 gaming smartphones actually have 12GB of physical RAM but Nubia says "RAM Boost memory compression technology" expands virtual memory so it acts as 18GB. Alrighty.

AMD has its new RDNA 2 architecture powering the new Radeon RX 6000 series desktop graphics cards, as well as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles but now it's time for laptops to get some of that Big Navi lovin'.

AMD recently announced the new Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card powered by the new Navi 22 GPU and 12GB of GDDR6 memory, starting at $479 -- during this announcement CVP and GM of AMD Radeon, Scott Herkleman, said that the RDNA 2 architecture would soon make its debut inside of some new gaming laptops.

There's not much known about the RDNA 2-powered mobile GPUs apart from previous rumors on the TGP, which were from December 2020. At the time, Patrick Schur tweeted that Navi 22 (Mobile) would have a 146W TGP and 192-bit memory interface, while more offerings will be powered by NV22 and come in with 135W, 110W, and 90 TGPs and 160-bit memory interface.

AMD has officially revealed its new Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card, so AIB partners are now allowed to also unveil their custom variants with ASUS teasing their upcoming ROG Strix, TUF Gaming and DUAL variants of the Radeon RX 6700 XT.

Starting with the flagship ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT OC Edition, which will have the usual triple-fan ASUS cooler that will most likely be overkill for the Navi 22-powered Radeon RX 6700 XT but you know it will not run hot. ASUS is using a shorter custom PCB on the ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT, which lets hot air pass right into your case instead of into or onto the card.

There's no details on the GPU clock speeds of the ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT -- but expect it to have the highest GPU clocks out of the box and I'm sure the most manual OC headroom of all of the custom ASUS cards in the new Radeon RX 6700 XT family of cards.

We were hearing things about NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card through the entire of last year, but then hit a roadblock when news came out that it had been "indefinitely postponed". But like Arnie, the RTX 3080 Ti is now back.

According to new rumors from @kopite7kimi on Twitter, who said on February 6 that "things have changed" and that the current specs of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti according to his sources saw it with 10240 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6X memory. But now he has just tweeted again saying "it will have 12GB 19Gbps VRAM" and get this -- ETH mining nerfing will be on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.

No ETH mining for you on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, sorry!

Intel has been slapped with a massive $2.2 billion fine by a federal jury in Texas over the chip giant violating patents held by Dutch semiconductor company VSLI Technology LLC.

The patent violation is over two patents held by VLSI along with NXP Semiconductor getting a slice of the pie, as it owns a part of the patents, with the split of $2.2 billion going into $1.5 billion and $675 million. VSLI acquired NXP Freescale Semiconductor back in 2015, with the patents transferred to VSLI in 2019.

The two patents are first (patent 7,523,373) allows a processor to switch to a low-power state called "sleeping" when it's not in use, which is done through two voltage regulators where one of them will lower power consumption while the other provides enough power to keep the chip's memory in an active state. Patent 7,725,759 allows the chip to switch between programs super-fast, boosting processing speed.

Valve's failed DOTA card game has been put on ice, and is now free-to-play on Steam.

Artifact is officially dead, and Valve has cancelled all plans on a reboot. The reason? Artifact's playerbase simply didn't pick up, and Valve is no longer wanting to invest resources or manpower on the game (they're working on other things, including more Half-Life games). As a result, Valve has made Artifact completely free-to-play and removed all microtransactions from the card game. When's the last time you saw a publisher do something like that?

Ubisoft Massive is working on new ray-traced audio systems in its proprietary Snowdrop Engine that will boost immersion in new games like Star Wars and its Avatar saga.

Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment studio recently posted up a rather technical article on Snowdrop's new audio optimizations, and how the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles will significantly improve how audio is not only streamed, but processed, by the engine itself. Right now Massive is working on two major titles--a new Star Wars open-world game, and an Avatar project--that will utilize these next-gen Snowdrop upgrades.

According Snowdrop Audio Architect Robert Bantin, the Navi RDNA 2.0 GPU in the PS5 and Series X will help free up the CPU for other tasks. Massive now has access to real-time ray-traced data generated by the GPU, which can be used to bake in audio without hitting the CPU. So certain sound effects are now "free" and won't bog down the 8-core Zen 2 CPUs in both systems.

Rockstar and 2K Games parent company Take-Two Interactive hints more $69.99 games are on the way, but doesn't say which titles will get the price hike.

A major criticism of the new PS5 and Xbox Series X generation is pricing. Next-gen games now cost $69.99, and everyone from Activision, Sony, and even Square Enix are raising prices. Take-Two Interactive was among the first to charge $69.99 for its annualized NBA 2K21 sports game, and this trend should continue for other titles from the publisher.

In a recent Morgan Stanley conference, CEO Strauss Zelnick re-affirmed the publisher's stance on the price jump. Zelnick says consumers were prepared for the $10 increase, but not every game would cost $69.99; just the ones that provide tremendous value and replayability (like, say, Grand Theft Auto V's upcoming next-gen version?).

Blizzard plans to allow modding in the new Diablo 2 Resurrected remaster, but it may be quite limited and some high-profile mods probably won't work.

D2R's new Battle.net framework will make the remaster much more secure and prevent hacking, but it'll also be a headache for modders. The remaster's enhanced graphics engine is built on the existing framework of the original game, but the servers have been updated. D2R isn't running the legacy Battle.net online infrastructure and has moved to the Battle.net 2.0 network.

As a result, some of D2's biggest mods like Path of Diablo and Project D2 probably won't work. These mods have massively expanded the original games with lots of QoL improvements like shared stashes, as well as fundamentally changing core gameplay with new skills and unique additions. The mod creators warn gamers not to expect compatibility, and it's likely these mods will be exclusive to the legacy Diablo 2 versions. Blizzard promises to leave the older game alone, though, and the base Battle.net system will remain as it is.