Latest News - Page 1538

We are so very close to the NDA embargo lift on NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition review -- our GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition unboxing article is here -- but now we have some new thermal images to check out:

The new thermal images are courtesy of a reviewer 'accidentally' uploading footage of their FLIR thermal image testing on NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics card. The reviewer heated the card up for 8 minutes, going from its idle 34C temperature through to 65C.

The video has been removed since, but some still images were captured thankfully -- I cannot confirm or deny how hot or how not-hot (haha) that the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition gets -- but we're not far away from those results.

AMD is still a while away from delivering its next-gen RDNA 2-based Big Navi graphics cards in gamers hands, but now we have yet another tease: this time, of the reference cooler.

We are looking at what should eventuate into the Radeon RX 6700 XT -- or even the Radeon RX 6900 XT -- with a dual-slot reference design and hefty triple-fan cooler. We have dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which looks so bulky against NVIDIA's new 12-pin PCIe connector on the GeForce RTX 30 series Founders Edition.

The new RADEON logo is right up top, looking very GeForce-y right there -- while AMD has 2 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI (this should be HDMI 2.1 which is 8K60/4K120 compatible) and a USB Type-C (this could be VirtualLink, but we'll have to wait and see).

Microsoft's Project xCloud streaming service launches tomorrow on Android and aims to revolutionize Xbox gaming with unfettered access.

Starting tomorrow, all Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can stream 172 Xbox games to their Android devices. Project xCloud goes live tomorrow and takes aim at Google Stadia by delivering a true cross-platform experience with mobile-to-console cross-saves and full cloud integration.

Gamers can start a playthrough of a Game Pass game on console and seamlessly pick up right where they left off while on-the-go. It's kind of like the Switch but only with some intense wireless data crunching. As always, bandwidth and latency are issues with game streaming, so keep that in mind.

Sony plans to ship PlayStation 5 consoles to U.S. retailers by air freight to ensure prompt availability at launch, Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad notes.

Sony is spending extra to prepare U.S. retailers for the PlayStation 5's holiday launch. Instead of shipping new PS5 consoles to U.S. retailers by sea, Sony opted to ship supply by air freight, a much faster, but more expensive, shipping method.

According to Chinese media group Caixin (spotted by analyst Daniel Ahmad), PS5 shipments to the United States will begin in October via Delta Air Cargo. A fleet of Delta 747 planes will make the shipments.

10 years ago today, Bungie said goodbye to the Halo franchise with one of the best PVE shooters ever made.

Halo: Reach released 10 years ago today on the Xbox 360 and changed my life forever. I had been looking forward to it since the classic Reach ViDoc, the one where Marcus Lehto said "every neuron in my head is firing Reach, Reach, Reach." Terms like "Move up the beach, Noble" were permanently etched into my memory. I remember standing in line at Gamestop for the midnight release, and blasting out round after round of Reach Firefight. I was hopelessly addicted: To this day I haven't played a single game of Reach PVP on the original Xbox 360.

Reach is an immortal game for me because of its PVE and campaign. 4-player Firefight survival is my favorite mode ever, and the armor abilities were just made specifically for this gametype. Add in an emotionally-driven campaign full of somber, sobering moments, over the top chaos, and, for the first time ever for Halo, a spaceflight mission, and you have a recipe for one of the most epic Halos ever made.

Although the Xbox Series S' PCIe 4.0 SSD delivers the same 2.4GB/sec speeds as the Series X, its size is cut in half. Microsoft says this storage reduction helped the Series S hit $299 MSRP.

The Xbox Series S has a dramatically smaller 512GB NVMe SSD, and Microsoft confirms this capacity drop also dropped the console's price. What's not apparent is how the SSD helps offset GDDR6 costs, too. The Xbox Series S is effectively cheaper to make on two fronts: The smaller 512GB SSD reduces flash memory costs, and the new Velocity Architecture actually reduces DRAM costs as well.

Here's what Microsoft in a recently leaked press briefing:

Rumor has it Microsoft wanted to buy Bungie and the Destiny IP, but Bungie CEO Pete Parsons says it was false. The rumor actually didn't make sense from the get-go, and here's why.

Bungie isn't going to sell itself and the Destiny franchise over to Microsoft. There's many reasons for this, but the biggest one is that it simply doesn't need to. Bungie is doing great right now, and like literally every other "Microsoft is buying x company" rumor we've dispelled, it has no reason to sell. And it has especially no reason to sell to Microsoft.

First, let's do a quick history lesson.

Someone at Facebook is having a bad day today. The cat is out of the bag now. The official announcement for the Oculus Quest 2 headset leaked, on a Facebook website no less. It seems someone was preparing for the Facebook Connect event and accidentally published the reveal videos.

According to UploadVR, the videos surfaced on Facebook's Blueprint website. Facebook had since pulled the page, but not before multiple Youtubers reuploaded the clips.

It's no secret that a new Quest is on the way. Details about the new device have been leaking out of Facebook for months now, including images and production numbers. We now have the details, and they are honestly a bit shocking.

Amazon has just announced it has 100,000 new positions in order to better position itself for the gigantic increase in online shopping because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new 100,000 positions will be available across the United States and Canada, throughout all of its operations, warehouses, delivery stations, and everything in between. Amazon is offering $15 per hour minimum wage with benefits, and even "up to $1000" in sign-on bonuses in specific cities.

Amazon will be hosting a virtual career day on Wednesday, where it will open up its arms to 33,000 new job openings in both corporate and technology-focused roles. The average pay for a corporate position at Amazon is $150,000 including salary, stock-based compensation and benefits.

I'm sure you didn't see this coming but IKEA has just announced it has teamed with the Republic of Gamers (ROG) division of ASUS to develop a "new range of affordable gaming furniture and accessories to bring the gaming experience at home to a new level".

IKEA's new ASUS ROG-powered gaming products will first land in China in February 2021, but later on in the year in October 2021 we'll see them appear in other IKEA stores across the world. IKEA explains that it wants to "combine home furnishing knowledge with ROG's expertise in creating exceptional gaming experience".

The company adds: "Together, we set out to help the many gamers (and their families) welcome gaming home through developing the new range of affordable and ergonomic gaming furniture & accessories, designed to increase performance while also blend in beautifully to homes".

If you are above the age of 21 or even a little bit younger, than you probably know the effects of what a hangover feels like.

But what if I could tell you scientists have concluded what supplements can be taken to reduce the effects of a hangover? A new study has been published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism, and the focus of the study was to find out if the amino acid L-cysteine has the ability to significantly reduce hangover symptoms such as headaches, lethargy, anxiety, and nausea/vomiting.

The researchers write, "Alcohol-related hangover symptoms: nausea, headache, stress and anxiety cause globally considerable amount of health problems and economic losses. Many of these harmful effects are produced by alcohol and its metabolite, acetaldehyde, which also is a common ingredient in alcohol beverages. The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of the amino acid L-cysteine on the alcohol/acetaldehyde related aftereffects."

If you've got $500,000+ burning a hole in your pocket, firstly -- I'll give you my bank details, but second if you wanted to buy all of the games on Steam -- and I mean all of htem, then it'll cost you a swift $538,000.

Well, if you want to be down to the dollar we're talking about $537,192.37 at full price, while the games currently discounted (at the time of writing) would cost you $521,909.63. Now remember, we're talking about every single damn game on Steam -- not just 100 or 200, but every single one.

The data is from Buy All Steam Games, which is constantly tracking Steam and all of its games and the entire price of every single one if you were to buy them at once. You can see when the huge Steam sales are on, as the price of the entire Steam library drops by so much -- look at July 2020, it dropped down to around $320,000 for the entire Steam library.

LG has some of the finest displays on the market, with their industry-leading OLED panels -- but now, the South Korean electronics giant has just unveiled its huge new Magnit TV.

The new LG Magnit TV is a mammoth 163 inches, providing your full 4K resolution -- but don't go expecting to play games on it. The new Magnit TV has LG's own MicroLED technology which sees self-emissive micrometer-scale pixels that should have some stellar image quality with great viewing angles.

LG applies its in-house Black Coating technology to the actual surface of the MicroLEDs that improves color accuracy and contrast. It also acts as a protector to the display, protecting LG's surely absurdly expensive Magnit TV from dust, external shocks, and moisture -- on top of that, it's also anti-glare and anti-fingerprint. Nice.

I'm a gigantic music score fan, with Hans Zimmer making some of the most beautiful tunes on this planet in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice -- but now it's time for Zack Snyder's Justice League.

Junkie XL has teased his Justice League theme on Twitter for Zack Snyder's Justice League, teased during the huge DC FanDome event. Take a listen above, and if you're like me -- prepare for goosebumps. Junkie XL is working side-by-side with legendary composer Hans Zimmer on the score for Zack Snyder's Justice League (more on that here), who worked on Zack Snyder's Man of Steel and Batman v Superman.

Junkie XL was scoring the original Justice League, but was thrown out like trash when Warner Bros. used Zack Snyder's daughter taking her own life in the post-production of Justice League -- to remove them all. They changed the movie completely, which is an entire story on its own -- and used Danny Elfman to score the movie.

We're about to get some big camera upgrades on the Red Planet, with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and broadcaster NHK teaming on making new 4K and 8K cameras.

These new 4K and 8K cameras will be sent to capture images of Mars and its moons (both Phobos and Deimos) for the future Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) missions. Unlike Intel's multimedia instruction set, this version of MMX will take pictures and send them back to Earth to "create a smooth image".

The originals, however, will be stored on the capsule that will return to our pale blue dot. Japan is expected to have its MMX spacecraft liftoff in 2024, reaching Mars by 2025 -- then add another year for the capsule with the original pictures taken to arrive back home.

I'm sitting here benchmarking NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition, which you can check out my unboxing right here, but now we have some juicy rumors on the Ampere-based TITAN RTX graphics card.

The news is coming from Moore's Law is Dead and his latest video that you can check out here, where he teases that Micron is allegedly working on even faster GDDR6X memory. MLID says that Micron will have 23Gbps GDDR6X memory available in Q1 2021 and that NVIDIA could use it on a next-gen TITAN RTX graphics card.

NVIDIA's purported TITAN RTX graphics card could pack 24GB or 48GB of GDDR6X memory, which I personally would be leaning into 48GB (to give a good distance between the RTX 3090 and its 24GB of GDDR6X). The super-speed 23Gbps GDDR6X would be used on a 352-bit memory bus that would provide a huge 1012GB/sec (1TB/sec) of memory bandwidth.

NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Corp (SBG) have announced a definitive agreement where NVIDIA will acquire Arm Limited for $40 billion.

The deal will see NVIDIA grow into an even bigger beast, days before the GeForce RTX 3080 launches, where the company explains on its own website that the deal will combine NVIDIA's industry-leading work in AI with Arm's huge ecosystem to create the "premier computing company for the age of artificial intelligence, accelerating innovation while expanding into large, high-growth markets".

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA explained: "AI is the most powerful technology force of our time and has launched a new wave of computing. In the years ahead, trillions of computers running AI will create a new internet-of-things that is thousands of times larger than today's internet-of-people. Our combination will create a company fabulously positioned for the age of AI".

The PS5's price could start at $399 for the digital-only option, and $499 for the disc-based system, new store catalogs hint.

El Corte Ingles, Spain's biggest department store retailer, has reportedly added two mysterious consoles to its internal database: Aurea for $399, and Enigma for $499. These are likely codenames for the PlayStation 5 duo. If accurate, this would put the disc-less PlayStation 5 at $399, which will effectively seal the 9th generation for Sony.

These names seem to align with previous codenames used for Sony PlayStation hardware:

UPDATE: Deep Silver's Senior PR manager Alex Ryan confirms the rumors are totally fake:

Unverified 4Chan rumors may have leaked Saints Row V story and gameplay details. If accurate, Volition is taking the series back to its crime-infested roots.

New 4Chan leaks outline some possibilities for Saints Row V's content and features. We know Volition has been working on the sequel for years now, and THQ Nordic's financials hint the game could release in FY2020 (ending March 31, 2021). The studio has been tight-lipped on key details though.

The new customized PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD in next-gen Xbox consoles can significantly reduce loading times by default without requiring upgrade patches from developers.

The Xbox Series S/X SSD is a game-changer, and can natively boost loading times in games that aren't even optimized for the system. As shown in a recent Series S showcase video, the 2.4GB/sec PCIe 4.0 SSD cuts loading times in games like The Outer Worlds by more than 70%.

The Outer Worlds on a Series S loaded in just 12 seconds, compared to the 53 seconds on Xbox One S. That's a 77% reduction in loading times. The game wasn't optimized for Series S/X and was simply running in backward compatibility mode.