Latest News - Page 1531

AMD has just released its new Radeon Adrenalin 2020 20.9.2 drivers, which pack support for Star Wars: Squadrons, as well as a bunch of improvements especially for Radeon RX 5000 series graphics card owners.

We also have new Vulkan extension support, and improved stability across a number of games on Radeon RX 5000 series graphics cards. I have a full list below, but you can grab the new Radeon Adrenalin 2020 20.9.2 drivers right here.

AMD is about to come out stomping on Intel again later this year, with a new event planned for October 8 where the company will detail its new Zen 3 architecture. One of those chips should be the new Ryzen 7 5800X processor -- another, is the recently-teased Ryzen 9 5900X -- a 12C/24T @ 5GHz CPU.

A new sighting of the Ryzen 7 5800X processor has turned up inside of an Ashes of the Singularity benchmark, but like with any rumor (and especially one using AotS) I would be preparing that salt shaker -- but we should expect the Ryzen 7 3800X chip to be an 8-core, 16-thread CPU with some serious horsepower.

We should see the new Ryzen 7 5800X replacing the Ryzen 7 3800X as a new 8C/16T powerhouse on the Zen 3 architecture that should keep up with the Core i7-10700K -- and most likely be compared against that chip, but it seems it could actually beat the higher-end Core i9-10900K.

Xiaomi has just announced its flagship 82-inch Mi Master Extreme Commemorative Edition, which is a huge 82-inch 8K TV using mini-LED technology that sees 960 light control zones across its surface.

This will provide a beautiful picture, but the power draw is huge with 700W used on this TV that is more than a high-end GeForce RTX 3090 powered gaming PC that would use less than 500W under load. Still, the new TV packs an 8K resolution and 60Hz, but it can also do 4K 120Hz as well.

Inside, Xiaomi includes 5G connectivity, an Ethernet port (GbE), an HDMI 2.1 port, 4GB of RAM and even 256GB of storage. We have a huge price of $7300 or so (49,999 yuan) in China, or the 4K version for around $1465 (9999 yuan).

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone's new Season 6 update has gone live across consoles and PCs, so if you haven't updated yet -- the new update is ready to go.

The new Season 6 update packs some big changes to Warzone, with the Subway System introduced to the game which will change things up and make it spicy going into S6. We also have a new limited time Warzone Mode with Armored Royale, two new Operators (Farah and Nikolai) as well as two new weapons (SP-R 208 and AS VAL).

Call of Duty: Warzone's new Season 6 battle pass will cost 1000 CP, or $10. If you want to grab an additional 20 tiers on top, then that'll cost you 2400 CP. There will also be a new Halloween-themed event with The Haunting of Verdansk starting on October 20. It seems we'll see ghosts thrown into COD, which will be an interesting twist on zombies.

EA Play is coming free to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate in time for the Xbox Series X|S launch.

EA will bring its massive 89 game catalog to Xbox Game Pass on November 10, 2020, Microsoft today announced. The EA Play subscription, which includes access to heavy-hitting games like FIFA 20, Battlefront II, Titanfall 2, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect, will be free for all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers.

The strategy here is two-fold and benefits both companies. Microsoft gets more content to add value to Game Pass, a subscription that's now so powerful it's become the centerpiece for the Xbox brand. EA gets access to over 15 million subscribers and wants to take advantage of the Game Pass Effect, which uses the subscription to generate full game sales. EA has also included 48 monetized live-based games in its massive back-catalog list of EA Play titles in an effort to get microtransaction revenues.

CD Projekt RED is currently going through company-wide crunching to get Cyberpunk 2077 finished in time for its November release.

CDPR employees are now mandated to work six-day work weeks as it hunkers down in crunch mode, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. Adam Badowski initiated the new crunch policy to ensure no further delays of Cyberpunk 2077, a game that has been in development for years and has commanded a $121 million budget.

In a letter obtained by Bloomberg, Badowski admits the policy goes against the strict no-crunch promise CDPR made in 2019. Sources tell Bloomberg that Cyberpunk 2077 developers have been crunching for months now.

New info from PlayStation.com source code may reveal tidbits about the PlayStation 5's backwards compatibility support with PS4 games.

According to source code found on the PlayStation 5's console checkout page, PS4 game playback on PS5 may not always be a smooth experience. The code mentions many instances of the PS5 and outlines bullet points/info on specific features and warnings about the console itself.

The page specifically says not every PS4 game will be playable on the PS5, which is something Sony already confirmed. Sony's Jim Ryan said 99% of PS4 games would be playable on PS5. OS updates are required as more PS4 games are added to PS5's BC functionality. The full selection of these games may not be boosted, however; the code also says certain games are marked as "boost mode enabled."

Diablo IV is still in early phases of development and Blizzard still hasn't locked in key progression systems just yet. Now we get a glimpse at another experimental system that could power the final game.

Today Blizzard shared another Diablo IV quarterly development update that reveals a brand new skill tree. The main post is focused on skills, talents, and passives. At first glance the new skill tree is somewhat confusing and convoluted, but its branching paths still follow linear-style structure. There's three parts to the tree: Skills, Talents, and Passives.

The tree's branches are filled with unlockable main skills like Ball Lightning, Charged Bolt, and Blizzard, as well as Talents that buff specific skills. Skills and Talents are both on the branches of the tree. Then there's Passives, which are on the bottom and are denoted by red nodes. The upper portion of the tree has nodes that give you Passive points to spend on the bottom. These Passives can significantly change the viability, role, and efficacy of your character build.

The Xbox Series X is marketed with 1TB of included SSD storage, but only a portion of that will be available for games.

IGN recently confirmed the Xbox Series X's 1TB SSD only offers about 800GB of usable space for games. This means the system reserves roughly 14% of total SSD space for OS and other features like quick resume.

After partition formatting, a 1TB drive turns into a drive with 931GB of free space. A quick bit of math shows the Xbox Series X will have about 131GB of memory reserved for the operating system, virtual RAM data cache preparation via new Velocity Architecture technology, and quick resume functionality. All of these features are tremendously important for the Series X.

Xbox Series S|X SSD tech can significantly reduce loading times in backward compatible current-gen games right out of the box.

We know the Xbox Series X|S's SSD can hit up to 2.4GB/sec uncompressed data transfer speeds via a PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 drive. How will this affect games that aren't optimized? How will current-gen games play on the system?

Various websites are currently testing the Series X's SSD to find out. The data is pretty clear: Any game you play on the Series X or Series S will load faster. Some games will load in orders of magnitude faster on the Series X as compared to the slow HDDs in the Xbox One X. Control, for example, boots up in just 10 seconds as compared to 58 seconds on Xbox One X. That's an 82% reduction in loading times.

NVIDIA's new GeForce Game Ready drivers are here, introducing Reflex support into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and its battle royale mode Warzone, but we also have 8K DLSS ultra performance mode included.

The new drivers pack DLSS 8K ultra performance mode in particular games, including Control and Death Stranding -- which are both out now, as well as Minecraft and then Watch Dogs: Legion when it comes out, and others are they drop later this year and into 2021.

In games like Control, Death Stranding and Wolfenstein: Youngblood you'll see an option for DLSS "ultra performance" mode that is next to Quality, Balanced, and Performance. In this mode the rendering resolution is knocked down to 1440p while the AI-powered super resolution upscaling throws it up to 8K (7680 x 4320).

I can't imagine driving or walking down the street and looking out the window to see Boston Dynamics' AI-powered Spot robot dog. Check it out:

Spot was seen in North Ontario, Canada taking an evening stroll and was shown in the above video posted to Twitter. Boston Dynamics got in on the fun, tweeting that "one of our Spot robots was recently filmed while out for an evening stroll with its handler, who is one of our commercial customers".

Boston Dynamics continued, explaining that the customer was "conducting routine mobility tests of the robot and kept it away from people, as required by our terms of use. We are excited about the peaceful, productive and well-supervised users of our robots for commercial applications such as power generation, construction and process manufacturing".

NVIDIA has released some new GeForce Game Ready 465.55 WHQL drivers that have a few tricks up their sleeve, including NVIDIA Reflex support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Warzone.

The new drivers also improve stability in certain games with the new GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, where users are reporting slightly less GPU boost clocks but improved stability in their games. I will be testing this out more during the week on my GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards.

You can grab the new GeForce 465.55 WHQL drivers here.

It has been quite the launch for NVIDIA and its new GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, with plenty of people across the world sharing their issues since launch, and especially over the weekend.

I took a few days off after working hundreds of hours to get the reviews ready, so I've been playing catch up and need to do some re-testing of my cards on the new drivers. NVIDIA has now released a somewhat official statement talking about the issue.

NVIDIA said: "Regarding partner board designs, our partners regularly customize their designs and we work closely with them in the process. The appropriate number of POSCAP vs. MLCC groupings can vary depending on the design and is not necessarily indicative of quality".

Pimax recently revealed that it's building a virtual environment called Pimax VR Experience that would allow you to control headset settings and launch VR content without taking the headset off. The software just entered public beta, and if you have a Pimax 5K or 8K headset, you can try it today.

The Pimax VR Experience is a virtual environment that allows you to control the PiTool headset driver settings and launch content from any VR platform from within VR. The software is reminiscent of the SteamVR when you disable the SteamVR home environment.

Pimax VR Experience gives you instant access to many of the headset's settings, such as FOV adjustment, refresh rate, resolution supersampling, and display brightness. It also gives you access to your entire VR content library. Pimax VR Experience taps into SteamVR, Oculus, VivePort and ReVive libraries to bring all your content into one easy-to-access location.

AMD is about to unveil its next-gen Zen 3 architecture on October 8, but before then we have some juicy leaks to go over regarding the Ryzen 9 5900X processor.

AMD's new purported Ryzen 9 5900X will be the new flagship 'Vermeer' desktop CPU in the new Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 range of CPUs. The new Ryzen 9 5900X will reportedly pack 12 cores and 24 threads at up to 5GHz with an IPC improvement of up to 20%.

We should see boost clocks reaching 5GHz from AMD this time around, where we saw them get close with 4.7GHz on the Ryzen 9 3900XT and 4.6GHz on the Ryzen 9 3900X. We are being told to expect a higher TDP, with up to 150W on the Ryzen 9 5900X -- up from the 105W on the Ryzen 9 3900X.

Picking up a PlayStation 5 this holiday season? You may want to re-up on PlayStation Plus, and now's the perfect time.

CDKeys is currently selling PS Plus subscriptions for just $30, which is about 50% off of MSRP. It's a great value if you're buying a next-gen PS5 this year: Not only do you get the free monthly PS Plus games on PS4, which should be backward compatible with the PS5, but you get access to a pool of some of the best PS4 games ever made with the new PS Plus Collection.

The PS Plus Collection adds lots of value to the subscription for PS5 users. It's a new free add-on to PS Plus that's exclusive to PS5 gamers and includes access to 18 high-profile PS4 games, including Bloodborne, God of War, Monster Hunter World, Final Fantasy XV, Persona 5, and Uncharted 4.

Tekken franchise sales have now beat Street Fighter on all platforms, Bandai Namco confirms.

The Tekken franchise has now sold over 50 million copies worldwide since 1995, Bandai Namco's Katsuhiro Harada recently announced. This number shows Tekken is the king of fighters and beats Street Fighter's total 45 million sales. The Tekken series has had many less releases than Street Fighter, too, with about 14 mainline releases on consoles and PC since inception.

Harada also announced Tekken 7 has sold 6 million copies since its launch in 2017. The fighting game is still going strong and received its latest DLC pack, which includes Kunimitsu and another mystery character, as well as a massive free update that adds in new moves for every fighter.

Final Fantasy XVI's debut trailer showed lots of bloodshed, chaos, and a brutal beheading in front of a child. So it's only natural it's rated mature.

New promo materials show Final Fantasy XVI has been provisionally rated PEGI 18, a rating that's typically reserved for more visceral and violent experiences. The trailer is rife with blood and mayhem, showing beheadings, battlefield slayings, and ends with the phrase "I'll kill you if it's the last thing I do." Obviously it's going to be a mature game.

This will be among the first PEGI 18 rated games since Final Fantasy Type-O HD, another dramatic game in the series.

Ring has unveiled its new Always Home Cam, a new autonomous drone that will lift up from its dock and fly around your house in case someone breaks in -- recording it all on-the-fly. Check it out:

The new Always Home Cam can be remotely enabled, and fly around your house when you're out and about -- and once it's done it will fly back and float down into its dock to recharge.

Ring will be selling its new Always Home Cam for $249, and will ship it next year. It all seems like it's out of an episode of Black Mirror, with Ring founder and "chief inventor" Jamie Siminoff explaining that the company spent 2 years developing the Always Home Cam saying that it was an "obvious product that was very hard to build".