Latest News - Page 1501

MSI has just unveiled its very first SSD... and boy, what an SSD it is. We're talking about PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD goodness at up to 7GB/sec.

The new MSI GAMING SSD was teased by MSI Product Marketing boss Bryant Lin, who said: "and here's a surprise for some" people during his CES 2021 keynote speech. The new MSI GAMING SSD comes in up to a huge 4TB in capacity, with read speeds hitting 7000MB/sec (7GB/sec) and write speeds of up to 6900MB/sec (6.9GB/sec).

We should know more details about the lower capacity MSI GAMING SSDs in the coming weeks, but for now we're looking at a huge 4TB capacity in an ultra-fast 7GB/sec world.

CD Projekt RED blames Cyberpunk 2077's dismal PS4, Xbox One console performance on lower-end hard drives and says the game's multitude of glitches took them by surprise.

Apparently CD Projekt RED was just as surprised about Cyberpunk 2077's bad console performance as gamers were. According to a recent update from CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski, the company performed rigorous playtests after each Cyberpunk 2077 build iteration and wasn't able to re-create many of the glitches and bad performance that're now immortalized as internet memes.

"Every change and improvement needed to be tested, and as it turned out, our testing did not show a big part of the issues you experienced while playing the game," Iwinski said.

Oculus has begun informing developers that it would be rolling out two of the Quest's most highly requested features in February. Soon you'll be able to have multiple users on your Quest 2 and share games between accounts.

Oculus announced on its developer blog that multi-user accounts and app sharing would begin to roll out to Quest 2 owners as early as next month. The initial rollout will come through as an experimental feature update for Quest 2 that owners would need to opt-in for. The update will be available for all Quest owners in a future update.

The developer blog post reveals several details about multi-user accounts, including what developers should expect from the new update. The blog explains that the headset's primary user would have to authorize additional accounts for the headset, and they could invite up to three other users to use the headset. Those users would need to log in with their own Facebook accounts.

The Switch is slowly sparking sales in China, and shipments have reached 1 million units in the overseas region.

China is a billon-dollar goldmine for the games industry, and every major player wants in on the revenues. Nintendo is one such player. Since being introduced in 2019, partner Tencent says the Switch has shipped 1 million units in China. beating out the PS4 and Xbox One in the region.

These might be impressive numbers for China, a market that typically restricts and thoroughly vets gaming content, but the sales don't stack up to other markets. Japanese consumers purchased 6.2 million Switch units in 2020 alone, and the Switch accounted for 87% of Japan's console sales. United States gamers purchased 6.92 million Switch consoles as of November 2020.

WB Games has delayed Hogwarts Legacy into 2022 to make "the best possible experience for all the Wizarding World."

Avalanche's new Harry Potter RPG will now release in 2022 on PS5, Xbox Series S/X, and PC, the developers today confirmed. The innovative Hogwarts Legacy was supposed to re-write a new Potterverse era in 2020, but Avalanche needs more time. This should be the first of many delays in 2021 as the coronavirus pandemic continues raging worldwide. Avalanche is set in Salt Lake City, Utah and its workers are making the game remotely.

Hogwarts Legacy has been in development since 2017, and is one of the more ambitious games WB has put out. It's set in the 1800s era of the Wizarding World and fleshes out important precursors to the Harry Potter saga, complete with unique adult themes, RPG character progression, interactive environments, and magic-oriented combat.

Respawn patches Jedi: Fallen Order for next-gen consoles that adds more performance mode tweaks.

Jedi: Fallen Order now plays better than ever on PS5 and Xbox Series X. The update is pretty small at about 800MB, but it brings some big performance gains. Respawn's Uncharted-like Jedi adventure game can now hit 1080p 60FPS native on PS5 and Xbox Series X on HD displays, and there's also improved dynamic resolution for UHD displays. The Series X can push dynamic res between 1080p - 1440p in performance mode, and from 1512p - 2160p in normal mode. Post-processing res has been boosted to 4K in the normal mode too.

On PS5, JFO now runs at a 60FPS frame rate and post-processing has been boosted to 1440p. The game no longer has dynamic resolution and now renders at 1200p, an up to 48% increase over the previous rendering range.

Amid massive pressure from stakeholders, gamers, and the industry as a whole, CDPR says it's trying to get Cyberpunk 2077 back on the PlayStation Store as soon as possible.

It's been nearly a month since Cyberpunk 2077 was removed from the PlayStation Store by Sony. The game's dismal performance on base PS4 consoles triggered a big controversy that led to mass refunds (even Sony, a company that hardly ever offers refunds, gave consumers their money back for CP2077) and the game being pulled from digital sale to some 113 million PS4 owners. CD Projekt now says it's working hard to get the game back on the storefront.

"We have no knowledge of a specific date to return to the PlayStation Store. We are in constant contact with representatives of Sony Interactive Entertainment and we are working to ensure that our title returns to the Sony store as soon as possible," CD Projekt Group president Adam Kicinski told the Polish Agency Press.

CD Projekt RED reveals a roadmap for Cyberpunk 2077 updates and bug fixes that carries into 2021.

CDPR solidifies its commitment to fixing Cyberpunk 2077 with a new year-long roadmap. The company still plans to release two big PS4 and Xbox One optimization patches back-to-back in January and February, along with a host of hotfixes and other updates throughout the year. Based on the spacing on the roadmap, we can guess the free DLC won't release until May, which aligns with out predictions that the content has been delayed so CDPR has enough time to fix Cyberpunk 2077's last-gen game performance.

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S upgrades may not release until August or September 2021. CD Projekt promises that existing PS4 and Xbox One owners will get free upgrades to next-gen consoles, but they haven't detailed what kind of performance upgrades gamers can expect on PS5/SeriesS/X hardware. Expect better frame rates, faster loading times, reduced glitches, and possibly ray tracing support.

EA no longer has exclusive reign over the Star Wars games license, but that doesn't mean it'll stop making games in the sci-fi series.

Today Lucasfilm Games confirmed multiple publishers are working on Star Wars games, including The Division developer Ubisoft Massive, who's making an open-world game. Disney apparently hasn't renewed EA's Star Wars exclusivity contract.

Even still, EA still has multiple new Star Wars games in its pipeline--it's just no longer the star of the show. "We're really proud of the games we have created with EA," Lucasfilm Games VP Douglas Reilly says."We will continue working with them and our relationship has never been stronger. While we may not have a lot of details to share at the moment, we've got a number of projects underway with the talented teams at EA."

Ubisoft today announced that it's making a new Star Wars game. Based on market trends and Disney's big new Jedi series, we can make some educated guesses on what to expect from the new project.

Note: This article is speculative, but it's based on Ubisoft's business practices and the current trajectory of the Star Wars universe.

The Division 2 developer Ubisoft Massive is developing a new story-driven, open-world Star Wars game. That sentence alone is enough to give most gamers an idea of what the game could offer--wide exploration, lots of busywork and questing, tons of icons on a huge map, grinding, and slick third-person action.

The Division developer Ubisoft Massive is making a new Star Wars game, Lucasfilm Games today confirmed.

Lucasfilm Games was only just resurrected, but the new label has been busy. First Lucasfilm announced a new Indiana Jones game is in the works at Bethesda's MachineGames. Now they've announced EA has lost exclusivity to the Star Wars license, and Ubisoft is jumping on board.

The new Ubisoft-developed Star Wars game will be an open-world title with story-driven beats. The Division 2's Julian Gerighty will be the creative director on the project, and the Star Wars game is being developed in Ubisoft Massive's proprietary Snowdrop engine--the same engine that powered The Division games.

A new rumor is floating around that could be a game-changer for the PC industry, with TSMC reportedly set to manufacture Intel CPUs starting this year.

TrendForce reports that Intel will procure wafers from TSMC starting in the second half of 2021, for around 20-25% of the production required for some of its non-CPU products but where it gets juicy is that TSMC is making some of Intel's own Core i3 processors on their 5nm manufacturing node.

Intel can't do 5nm now, and it won't be able to do it for many years -- instead, Intel is almost reaching into the future by using its competitor -- and now business partner, TSMC, to make its new Core i3 processors on TSMC's in-house 5nm manufacturing process.

EK has just started off 2021 with such a great release in their new active GPU backplate cooling solution, which will now see NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards watercooled on both sides.

The new EK active GPU backplate cooling solution seems to be used on NVIDIA's reference design RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, which are different to the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 Founders Edition graphics cards as they have a single 12-pin PCIe power connector, and it's on a 45-degree angle.

EK is using two water blocks with one placed on each side of the graphics card, in what is a beautiful GPU sandwich of nerdy watercooling goodness. I'd love to see a pair of GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards with EK's new active GPU backplate cooling solution. Oh boy...

Lenovo unveiled its new ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga 5G at the all-virtual CES 2021 this week, with the flagship ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga 5G packing some serious heat under its skinny bones.

We have Intel's latest and greatest 11th Gen Core i7 vPro processors inside of the new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga 5G, with Lenovo getting that stamp of approval as the ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga 5G is Intel Evo certified. What this means is that Intel gives the ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga 5G a thumbs up for performance, features, and battery life.

Lenovo will let you customize the ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga 5G with up to 16GB of DDR4 memory, up to 1TB of PCIe SSD storage, 5G connectivity, and dual Thunderbolt 4 ports for connectivity. The new ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga 5G will start from $1899 and be available to purchase towards the end of January.

AMD only just unveiled its new non-X Ryzen 7 5800 and Ryzen 9 5900 processors, with the Ryzen 7 5800 still an 8-core, 16-thread part but with 400MHz less base clock, 100MHz lower boost, and a 65W TDP.

But it seems as though the new Ryzen 7 5800 can be easily unlocked to a Ryzen 7 5800X through some PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) optimizations. Yeah, that non-X chip can be made into an X-series processor without much of a deal at all -- but remember, the new Ryzen 7 5800 is being sold as an OEM part to companies like Lenovo, Dell, and HP.

Out of the box the Ryzen 7 5800 is running at 4.55GHz while when PBO is enabled the Ryzen 7 5800 boosts up to 4.79GHz -- compare this to the 4.78GHz that the Ryzen 7 5800X runs at and you're effectively gaming or content creating away like a Ryzen 7 5800X processor.

ZOTAC has just announced two new custom GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards, with the new RTX 3060 AMP White and RTX 3060 Twin Edge series graphics cards.

The new ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 AMP White Edition looks just as it sounds -- white, with ZOTAC using its IceStorm 2.0 and FREEZE Fan Stop and Active Fan Control features with the card. We have a card that measures in at 231.9 mm or 9.13 inches long. There is a dual-fan cooler, and LED logo that gives the card a sleek, yet toned down look.

But it's the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 Twin Edge and Twin Edge OC that are a little more interesting, with a dual-slot design and thickness of just 8.8 inches. Nice and thin, but rocking that RTX 3060 power and 12GB GDDR6 memory with an overclocked GPU to boot.

Palit has just taken the wraps off of its new GeForce RTX 3060 Dual and GeForce RTX 3060 StormX series graphics cards.

First off we have the new Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Dual which uses 2 x 90mm fans to keep the card cool, and a bunch of ventilation across the card. Palit provides RGB lighting on the side of the shroud, so you're not going to get all blinged out looking at your card.

But then we have the super-small Palit GeForce RTX 3060 StormX graphics card which is a powerful, yet mini graphics card measuring in at just 17cm long. If you've got a small form factor (SFF) gaming PC and needed something with a good amount of grunt but didn't want to spend over $500 then you've got a new option on your hands if you can buy the Palit RTX 3060 StormX in your market.

LG has introduced a bunch of new 2021 OLED TVs at the all-virtual CES 2021 this year, with the new C1 series powered by their latest 4K processor. But it's the introduction of the new 83-inch model that piqued my interest.

The new LG C1 series of OLED TVs comes in its original 77, 65, 55, and 48 inch models but the new C1 series introduces the massive 83-inch model into the mix for 2021. LG's new C1 series isn't much different from the already great CX series, but the new 83-inch model will be an amazing TV with its HDMI 2.1-powered 4K 120Hz for IMAX-style gaming.

LG has however added in the latest fourth-generation A9 processor, which gives the new C1 series OLED TVs scene detection and upgrading object enhancement. I don't think you're going to really tell that apart from the CX to the C1 series OLED TVs.

Thousands, and if not millions of people around the world, have said they have seen a UFO at one stage in their life, and now the CIA has provided the public with "all" of its documents on the subject.

The CIA has made it possible to download "all" of its files on unidentified flying objects (UFO), stating that what is available for download is "all" of the agency's files on the UFO's. The documents have since been published on The Black Vault website, which is run by freedom of information activist John Greenewald Jr. John Greenewald Jr caused the CIA to release this information after submitting 10,000 freedom of information requests over many years.

RT reports that more than 2.2 million pages have been uploaded to The Black Vault website. Some of the documents' contents mention unexplained encounters with what the CIA calls an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), or UFO, for layman's terms. Additionally, some of the documents mention a mysterious "wonder explosion" in a small Russian city. For more information on this story, visit this link here.

AMD has just announced that its new Ryzen Threadripper PRO workstation CPUs will be able to be purchased directly, starting in March 2021.

At the moment, AMD's new Zen 3-based Ryzen Threadripper PRO chips are limited to the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 workstations exclusively, but that ends in March. We have seen motherboards from the likes of ASUS and GIGABYTE, ready for Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors on the sWRX8 package.

These new Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors break away from the regular Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series CPUs, with the new Ryzen Threadripper PRO chips using fully unlocked "ROME" multi-chip module re-configured for workstation. We're talking up to 64 cores and 128 threads (Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX), 8-channel DDR4 memory, and an insane 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes.