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NVIDIA is about to launch its mid-range GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card and with it, is cryptocurrency mining drama -- NVIDIA announced its new GeForce drivers will limit mining performance by 50% and now we have clarification on how exactly that is happening:

NVIDIA's Director of Global PR, GeForce, Bryan Del Rizzo, tweeted a reply to AnandTech's Ryan Smith who was talking about NVIDIA's driver-line crypto mining block and that he doubts "they're telling us everything" and that "one way or another we'll find out soon enough".

BDR replied with: "Hi Ryan. It's not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter".

Blizzard's new Diablo II Resurrected game is a remaster, not a remake, and contains old-school graphics alongside enhanced visuals.

Unlike the disastrous WC3 remaster, Blizzard isn't playing around with new Diablo 2 remaster, Diablo II Resurrected. The re-release is basically a re-skinned Diablo II Lord of Destruction, complete with the 100% same gear, items, armor and weapons as the original game, and the exact same game mechanics, including classes, skills, bugs and other features.

Diablo II Resurrected features some hefty upgrades to 4K 60FPS on consoles and 144Hz on PC, but anyone who wants to jump back into the old-school pixellated experience from 2001 can do so with a click of a button. The remaster will let you swap between the new upgrades and classic visuals at any point during gameplay, similar to Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. The only exception is cutscenes, which will run the remastered versions by default.

The new Diablo 2 remaster will have the exact same weapons, armor, items, and gear as the original D2 Lord of Destruction, but we don't know what patch update the game will mimick.

After months of rumors, Diablo II Resurrected was finally announced at Blizzcon 2021. Thankfully, Vicarious Visions has entirely preserved the legacy of Diablo II with a fully-fledged remaster, not a remake. That includes gear and items, which are 100% the same as they were in Lord of Destruction.

Read Also: Diablo 2 remaster coming to consoles, Blizzard makes dreams come true

It's official: Diablo II is getting remastered, but the core gameplay remains exactly the same.

Diablo II Resurrected is fulfilling something I've always wanted: Diablo II on consoles. The remaster was announced during Blizzcon 2021 and is coming to current- and next-gen consoles, including the Nintendo Switch. Cross-progression is also a thing, but that was always implied if you play online anyway and connect to the Battle.net servers. The great thing is you can transfer your saves to another platform and then play that platform offline.

We don't know much about the console port, however. A recent Diablo II Resurrected deep dive with Blizzard revealed some details on controller interactions. The skills can be mapped to face buttons, similar to Diablo 3, but we don't know how item selection will work on consoles.

Layers of Fear developer Bloober Team could be leading a new Silent Hill reboot, neatly tying up months of rumors and reports.

Rumors of a new Silent Hill game (or games) have been flying around for a while, but now we may have some actual concrete evidence.

It looks like Polish dev Bloober Team, who's responsible for the ultra-creepy Layers of Fear, Blair Witch, and The Medium, might be developing the reboot for Konami. Bloober CEO Piotr Babieno recent teased the news to GamesIndustry.biz:

Blizzard should reveal Diablo II Resurrected during today's Blizzcon 2021 stream, but new info suggests it could be coming to console as well as PC.

Today Blizzard may make one of my dreams come true by bringing Diablo II to consoles for the first time ever. The rumor comes by way of Redditor PracticalBrush12, a reliable source with an established track record with leaks. The report says Diablo II Resurrected is coming to consoles as well as the Switch.

This is speculation, of course, but it fits with Blizzard's business model, which emphasizes multi-platform releases and long-term monetization. I don't expect to see in-game purchases in Diablo II, and admittedly a console port seems iffy. But if Blizzard can pull it off they will achieve strong sales across the entire spectrum.

Bungie is transforming, and has plans to bring its wholly-owned Destiny franchise to "other media," possibly including films, books, and TV shows.

Today Bungie made some big announcements: It's nearly tripling the size of its HQ in Bellevue, Washington to prepare for big new games, and it has also opened a new publishing and marketing division in the Netherlands. Soon Bungie will morph into a developer-publisher and not only create its own games, but publish/distribute them too.

That's not it, though. Bungie also wants to make Destiny into a transmedia franchise, possibly similar to what Microsoft did with the Halo franchise. We could see Destiny books, films, TV shows, animated shorts, and a new fleet of action figures. This massive investment solidifies Destiny as a long-lasting franchise for Bungie, and also sees Bungie following a business model similar to The Embracer Group, who has their own publishing and film publication branches.

Bitcoin has been on an unprecedented run recently, with new all-time highs every few days so far in 2021. The excitement will surely wane eventually, but the rocket ship hasn't run out of gas yet on its way to the moon.

Bitcoin is on the precipice of surpassing $55,000 per coin. At the time of writing this, the price is sitting at $54,600, after a $3000 spike overnight from just shut of $52,000. On February 6, Bitcoin topped $40,000 for the first time in history, mainly in reaction to Tesla's announcement of a $1.5 billion investment in the cryptocurrency.

The coin's price is reaching incredible heights, but Bitcoin hit an entirely different and probably more meaningful milestone today. For the first time, the market capitalization (market cap) of Bitcoin has surpassed the $1 trillion mark. Suppose you compare that to the market cap of the biggest companies in the world. In that case, the Bitcoin network is worth more than Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Berkshire Hathaway, Tencent, Facebook and Alibaba. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Petro China are the only companies in the world that compare.

We all know how Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk feels about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin, with the engineer himself tweeting many times over the last few weeks about both cryptocurrencies on his Twitter.

But now, he's taking a swing at fiat money -- but first off, if you didn't know what 'fiat' was:

"The term is derived from the Latin word fiat, which means a determination by authority-in this case, it's the government that decrees the value of the currency and isn't representative of another asset or financial instrument such as gold or a check".

We've heard that AMD would be launching its mid-range killer Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card in March 2021, but now Cowcotland has reportedly confirmed the release of the Radeon RX 6700 XT for March 18.

The card was teased back in November 2020 but confirmed by AMD in January 2021 for a release in March 2021 -- it seems March 18 could be the day. The same day the Zack Snyder's Justice League debuts on HBO Max, what a day. The new Radeon RX 6700 XT will be the first use of the Navi 22 GPU, and it'll pack 12GB of GDDR6 memory.

AMD's upcoming Navi 22 GPU will feature 40 Compute Units, so 2560 Stream Processors -- leaving room for a lower-end Radeon RX 6700 graphics card in non-XT form.

The wait is finally over. You can now have more than one user account on your Oculus Quest, and games can be shared between those accounts.

It's now much easier to share your Oculus Quest 2 with family members and close friends. Oculus just rolled out an early version of the Multi-User feature for the Quest platform. With the latest Quest 2 update, you can find the new option in the headset settings' Experimental Features section.

Quest's Multi-User feature allows up to three accounts in addition to the admin account to log into Quest 2 headsets. The admin user retains ownership of the hardware, while the extra users can access the content installed on the headset with a new App Sharing feature. Admin account holders can share content with additional users, but other users can't share their content on a headset they don't own.

Activision is about to unleash a huge update for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, but also for battle royale mode Warzone with Season 2 on the way.

The company goes into great detail about what's coming in an official blog post, with changes coming to Warzone including new points of interest on Verdansk. There could be some more underground changes for the map, with rumblings around certain parts of the map that could lead to more clues.

Activision explains: "Operators within the vicinity are recommended to exercise extreme caution, as the ship is carrying unknown cargo, and its crew are not able to be contacted. Meanwhile, within Verdansk, something major is beginning to rumble deep underground. Although other reports on these new locales are still classified, we'd advise to explore these areas at your own risk".

NASA has successfully landed its Perseverance rover on Mars, with ground controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California celebrating the news just hours ago.

The Perseverance rover took just over 11 minutes to land on the Red Planet, with NASA reaching the tip of Mars' atmosphere at 3:48PM EST (8:48PM GMT). It was at this point that NASA refers to as the "seven minutes of terror" which is the time between the entry, descend, and landing of the Perseverance rover.

Once the rover had landed on the surface of Mars, it took 11 minutes and 22 seconds for the signal of its confirmed landing to transmit between Mars and back here to Earth. That journey is pretty long though, at close to 300 million miles... a journey that NASA started back on July 31, 2020.

NVIDIA will be releasing its new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card next week, and with it there will be a significant new driver release that destroys crypto mining performance by up to 50% on some algorithms.

The upcoming release of the GeForce RTX 3060 would've been very popular for crypto miners, as it would offer a card that is the most power efficient Ampere offering yet -- and it won't cost as much as the higher-end GeForce RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 graphics cards.

But it seems NVIDIA will be discouraging crypto miners in a big way with new GeForce drivers coming that will automatically detect mining-specific algorithms, and then limit the hash rate performance by 50%. NVIDIA seems to make this specific about the GeForce RTX 3060, but I wonder how long it'll be until all GeForce graphics cards are gimped from mining.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 can get pretty hot, but how just how hot does the card get if it is passively cooled... with no fans at all? Not that hot, actually.

The folks at Turemetal which is a brand that specializes in fanless PC systems, posted some photos of their Turemetal UP10 case with a passively-cooled NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. This isn't the first totally fanless GeForce RTX 3080 but it is the first that has an entire PC passively cooled and running super stress tests like Furmark.

Inside of the Turemetal UP10 case is an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor with a 65W TDP, and ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. The entire system is using around 410W of power, with the CPU and GPU both using custom heat spreaders that are then connected to a huge heat sink with what feels like 100+ heat pipes.

We all know how impossible it is to buy a graphics card these days, fighting between a lack of supply, scalpers, the COVID pandemic, supply chain issues, and especially cryptocurrency miners.

Well, NVIDIA has just announced its new Crypto Mining Processor HX series, new cards that are made specifically for crypto mining and more specifically Ethereum mining. There are 4 new CMP HX cards announced: the 30HX, 40HX, 50HX, and 90HX with varying levels of mining performance, power consumption, power connectors, memory sizes, and availability.

Starting with the new NVIDIA CMP 30HX with its 26MH/s Ethereum mining power at 125W, this will require just a single 8-pin PCI power cable and have 6GB of VRAM. The higher-end 40HX ups the Ethereum hash rate to 36MH/s at 185W, uses the same single 8-pin PCIe power cable but ups the VRAM to 8GB. Both of these CMP mining cards will be available in Q1 2021.

Diablo II Lord of Destruction was so big that it practically counted as a sequel, but it wasn't the only expansion Blizzard North was working on.

On the eve of Diablo II's expected remaster announcement, original Diablo developer David Brevik shared a bit of recent news on what could've been for the ARPG classic. It turns out Lord of Destruction was actually one of two expansions the team had been planning. Brevik said he was designing a second expansion before LOD's transformative 1.10 update, but the progress never manifested--Brevik had only created a design document. No actual levels, characters, items, or animations had been made.

At the same time Brevik was putting together the expansion's framework, Blizzard North had been designing their own Diablo III, a dark and medieval game that would've been very different from the cartoony version Blizzard launched in 2012. The Blizzard North breakup interrupted progress as key developers like Brevik left the company due to differences with Vivendi, who then owned Blizzard.

Bungie has opened a new business studio in the Netherlands that will exclusively focus on publishing and marketing.

Today sees Bungie one step closer to its ambitious plan. The Halo and Destiny developer is shifting from an indie powerhouse beholden to Activision into its own self-contained force, and soon the company will become both a developer and publisher, not unlike Electronic Arts. The new publishing division is helmed in Amsterdam, and will handle the vital business operations of marketing and distribution. The division will "support multiple project teams, including those outside of the Destiny Universe."

After the Activision split, Bungie hasn't really had to ship its own games outside of physical collector's editions. All of Destiny 2's updates thus far have been digital add-ons. Soon, though, the company will have to secure deals to ship new games--the first of which is a brand new IP set for a tentative 2025 launch. This new IP could be called Matter and it may be an RPG with live services.

Today EA secured one of the most dominant racing forces in the industry and adds even more billion-dollar might to its empire.

EA has officially acquired Codemasters for $1.2 billion, and key franchises like Grid, F1, Project Cars, and Dirt are now owned by the live services titan. EA promises that its Need for Speed IP isn't going anywhere, and that the buyout will lead to a "regular cadence" of racing titles.

"With this critically acclaimed portfolio, Electronic Arts and Codemasters will be positioned to bring fans a regular cadence of new and exciting racing content, in addition to reaching across more platforms and more regions of the world,"EA said in a press release.

According to newly leaked press materials, the Burning Crusade expansion is World of Warcraft Classic.

Blizzcon 2021 goes live tomorrow, but Blizzard has sent out press materials early that confirm some exciting updates. The old-school WoW Classic experience is expanding with The Burning Crusade, bringing all the content of the original 2007 launch including Blood Elves, Draenei, and Outland. Burning Crusade will be available free to all existing WoW subscribers.

Activision-Blizzard has noted extremely positive results from WoW Classic insofar as engagement and continued subscriptions. Expect to see many more classic expansions roll out in the coming years.