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Microsoft has detailed a lot of the innards of its next-gen Xbox Series X console, codenamed Project Scarlett, at the Hot Chips 2020 virtual event. The semi-custom APU designed by AMD and Microsoft and made by TSMC on the N7 Enhanced node is a technological marvel. It's a truly exciting chip to power the next-gen Xbox Series X console.

This is it -- the delicious Xbox Series X 'Project Scarlett' SoC. The GPU is so massive that it takes up 47.5% of the entire die, consuming a huge chunk of those 15.3 billion transistors.

We have here the N7 Enhanced node from TSMC packing 15.3 billion transistors into a 360.4mm2 chip, with the chip co-developed between Microsoft and AMD and then made by TSMC. It's nice to see that 'Project Scarlett' nice and raw there on the chip -- which is super small.

Microsoft just launched Flight Simulator on the PC after months and months of teasing, with the game quickly impressing reviewers and gamers and becoming the highest rated PC game of 2020.

The feat took less than 24 hours, with Flight Simulator taking off with a Metacritic score of 93 -- where the only game close to that reception is Valve's VR exclusive Half-Life: Alyx. The new Flight Simulator has also quickly become the highest rated game in the series, too.

Flight Simulator didn't have the best launch on PC in the last 24 hours, with a turbulent start -- but things stabilized, and the drinks started flowing and snacks to gorge on. The game is breathtakingly beautiful, having just taken a quick flight across the Hudson River in New York -- from my hometown here in Gawler, South Australia.

It has barely been 72 hours since I wrote about NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card packing some serious heat: 24GB of ultra-fast next-gen GDDR6X memory at a rumored price of $1999.

But new rumors have the GeForce RTX 3090 priced at just $1399.

NVIDIA pricing its new GeForce RTX 3090 at $1399 would be an incredible feat, a $200 price hike on the Turing-based current flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti that debuted in Founders Edition form at $1199 back in 2018. It packed 11GB of GDDR6 memory, but the new RTX 3090 is said to rock a huge 24GB of GDDR6X memory from Micron.

The honkin' boys are back in town: Untitled Goose Game is getting two-player local co-op with a new update.

Two honks are better than one--at least that's what indie dev House House seems to think. Untitled Goose Game is getting multiplayer with a new update, which will roll out in September alongside the new physical releases and subsequent Steam release.

The update brings a second goose--a Chinese goose with its big yellow knobby-beak--to enact hijinks and to completely terrorize poor hapless townsfolk. The two goofy ducks run amok (bonus points if you get that reference) in the full campaign mode, and the update will be available on all platforms including PC (Epic, Itch.io, and Steam), Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch.

New reports say Microsoft's cheaper next-gen Xbox Series S console will feature a 61% reduction in compute units to power a ~4TFLOP GPU.

The Xbox Series S will have a Navi GPU with 20 Compute Units and a 1.550GHz clock speed, The Verge's Tom Warren reports. This is a 61% reducing in CUs and will translate to lower perf targets, aligning with past reports that the Series S is targeting 1440p 60FPS gaming. There's also a 275MHz difference between the Series X (1.825GHz) and Series S (1.550GHz) GPUs.

The news comes in response to our Series X vs Series S table, and up until now, we haven't really had much info on the weaker system's compute unit count. Reports have only mentioned the GPU TFLOP perf target, which is about 4TFLOPs, or 66% weaker than the Xbox Series X's monstrous 12TFLOP of power.

The Embracer Group (formerly THQ Nordic) recently posted record Q2'20 net sales games earnings of $174 million, up a strong 153% year-over-year, setting a new all-time quarterly high.

Like most games companies, Embracer rode the coronavirus wave to record quarterly games revenues. Embracer notes a sharp 71% uptick in profits to $9.76 million on the back of $222.03 million in net sales revenues, This surge was thanks to over-performance in the games segment across Deep Silver, THQ Nordic, and the newly-acquired Saber Interactive.

Embracer attributes stronger sales revenues due to COVID-19 lockdowns, and favorable adoption of new games like SnowRunner, Spongebob Battle of Bikini Bottom Rehydrated, and Deep Rock Galactic, as well as digital sales of back catalog games in the Metro franchise.

If you have ever seen lightning before, you would know its color just how fast it is, but what if you looked up at the sky and saw red lightning?

Well, red lightning isn't fake; in fact, it's actually a phenomenon scientists have been studying since 1989 when it was first discovered. The red lightning is called "sprites", and has been spotted on every continent except for Antarctica. Sprites only last a tenth of a second and are generally never seen by those observers on the ground, unless you are hunting for them like Stephen Hummel is.

Hummel is an expert on dark skies at the Austin McDonald Observatory, and back at the start of July, Hummel captured an incredible photo while he was on his vantage point on Mount Locke in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. Sprites usually look like alien jellyfish-style creatures hanging down from the above atmosphere, but in fact, they are the product of super-fast lighting bursts that occur 37 to 50 miles in the sky. If you are interested in more information, check out this link here.

Microsoft is getting closer to revealing its next-gen Xbox Series X console in all its glory, with the new console being spotted at the Xperion E-Arena by Saturn in Germany.

The images were posted on Twitter by @KeemaMr, who took the shots himself at the Xperion E-Arena by Saturn in Germany. Microsoft didn't have a final Xbox Series X unit, as you can see a clear 'PROTOTYPE - NOT FOR SALE' on the back of the unit.

These new images just give us a look at the Xbox Series X in the flesh, and damn does it look good. I love the design choice Microsoft went with for this generation of Xbox, and can't wait to see if the smaller Xbox Series S console is truly super-small or not.

With its new free multiplayer mode, Ghost of Tsushima just became Ghosts of Tsushima.

July's best-selling game in the U.S. is getting a free online co-op multiplayer mode called Legends so you can samurai slash with friends. It turns out that multiplayer was always planned for Ghost of Tsushima from the start, and Sucker Punch's new online mode is a spin-off akin to The Last of Us' Factions mode, or even the ill-fated Comrades mode from Final Fantasy XV.

Legends is entirely separate from the core game, and you won't play as Jin. Instead you'll pick a samurai and go slashing with up to 3 other players and build up different legends. There's four character classes that all behave differently in battle: Samurai, Hunter, Ronin, and Assassin.

The Xbox Series X represents a natural evolution in console hardware and planning, and its built-in SSD was planned as far back as 2007.

In 2007, just years after the Xbox 360 was release, Microsoft planned to switch to SSD flash memory to help reduce rising DRAM costs and supercharge data pipelines. In a recent Hot Chips presentation slide, Microsoft highlighted how the Xbox Series X's proprietary PCIe 4.0 SSD CFExpress flash memory is fruition of seeds sown 13 years ago.

The idea is that Microsoft wanted to use high-bandwidth NVMe flash memory as a backup, or a buffer/cache to hold high-resolution assets and data, to help offset a smaller DRAM footprint. This allows Microsoft to spend less on DRAM (which is 33x more expensive as flash) without losing performance.

The Xbox Series X will have an expensive price tag due to higher-cost chip production, Microsoft today confirmed in a presentation.

Today Microsoft released a bunch of new slides from its upcoming Hot Chips presentation. The Xbox Series X console's innards were laid bare, including GPU blocks, variable rate shading capabilities, discussions on the velocity architecture, and more. But one slide in particular caught my eye: Discussions on production costs.

The Xbox Series X's 7nm+ SoC costs more to make. Wafer prices are higher because of the newer 7nm enhanced process, which is optimized for higher transistor density in a smaller die. The Series X's SoC has 15.4 billion transistors on a 7nm chip, a 133% increase from those in the Xbox Series X's 16nm FinFet SoC.

In 2 weeks, Apple will cut Epic Games off from the iOS platform completely unless Epic removes its direct payment option in Fortnite. Without Epic compliance, or court intervention, Fortnite could be removed from iPhones, iPads, and Macs forever.

Epic's staged coup against Apple could have massive ramifications for the games industry. First Epic added a direct payment option to Fortnite on iOS that completely circumvented Apple's 30% revenue cut. Apple fired back by removing Fortnite from iOS. Epic predicted this, and had an anti-trust lawsuit at the ready, which it submitted to courts.

Now Apple is threatening to completely remove Epic's developer account from iOS if it doesn't remove the direct-pay system. Epic has two weeks to comply, or else its accounts will be closed and its iOS licensed revoked. If this happens, it won't just be Epic that's scrubbed off iOS. The entire Unreal Engine toolset will be removed too, and Epic would be forced to discontinue Unreal support for the platform. Epic is risking the ruination of one of its most lucrative business segments to force change.

WB Montreal is back with more teases for its big new Batman game, and this time confirms what we long suspected: The Court of Owls will be an antagonist faction.

Today WB Montreal put up a mysterious new R3dakt3d.com website up that teased its new Batman game. Through a bit of Chrome inspect wizardry, users have manipulated elements of the site's code and uncovered a message and some hidden content. The website clearly teases something for tomorrow, 8/18 and lets you enter codes--or it did, before WB Montreal turned off this functionality--that unlocked an image showing a specific area on a map.

Here's a Twitter thread with instructions on how to view all of this yourself.

Saber Interactive has 15 new projects in the works across its multitude of work-for-hire and internal dev teams, THQ Nordic confirms.

The Embracer Group (THQ Nordic) reveals that its Saber Interactive branch is working on more than a dozen new projects. Saber, which has now become a label that oversees the newly-acquired Metro developer 4A Games, is developing 15 new games. One of these games is a new Metro title with online multiplayer, which Saber is co-developing with 4A Games and will utilize the World War Z online live service framework.

The company's financials confirm Saber's Madrid and St. Petersburg studios are both working on new games--the latter of which is the native land of Metro writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, who is also helping write the next Metro title.

You don't need to be a scientist to understand that the mining industry is, at least to some degree, impacting Earth negatively. So, how do we solve this problem?

Well, there are a few ways humans can solve the pollution issue from the mining industry, and one of them is to take our mining ventures off Earth and into space. As explained by Kurzgesagt in the above video, many of the metals found in very common devices are metals that are ripped out of Earth, and through the extraction process there's a loss of "biodiversity soil erosion, and contamination of surface water, groundwater, and soil."

Luckily, these same metals are also found in space but are trapped inside the surface of asteroids. If humans pooled their resources together to attempt landing on one of these asteroids to harvest its resources, and when considering the sheer size and resource capacity of some asteroids floating close to Earth, we could potentially rule out any mining done of Earth altogether. The idea would be to change one of the resource-heavy asteroids' trajectory and redirect it, so it was much closer to Earth.

Alright, switching gears between the flagship NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card and its tease of 24GB of GDDR6X memory that Micron has clocked at a ridiculous 21Gbps -- we have the GeForce RTX 3080 with some juicy specs.

According to a new Device ID listing confirmed by leaker _rogame on Twitter, we have some preliminary specs on NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080. The new GeForce RTX 3080 will have its GPU clocks at a limit of 2.1GHz -- which is identical to the Turing GPUs which have a 2.1GHz GPU clock ceiling for the most part.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 should have 10GB of GDDR6X which according to these leaked specs, will be clocked at 19Gbps. Micron is making the memory for this batch of Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards with Micron providing NVIDIA with some blistering fast 21Gbps chips for its flagship GeForce RTX 3090 (which I really, badly want to be called the RTX 3090 ULTRA or RTX 3090 ULTIMATE).

We are getting more and more information on the flagship GeForce RTX 3090 (I hope it's called the GeForce RTX 3090 ULTRA or ULTIMATE) where now we're hearing about price.

According to new rumors we're looking at a price of $1999 for NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3090 (which is meant to be 40-50% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti), where if it does indeed feature 24GB of next-gen GDDR6X memory at an absolute blistering 21Gbps from Micron then the price seems about right.

NVIDIA priced its Turing-based TITAN RTX graphics card with 24GB of GDDR6 memory at $2499, so it would make sense to offer a faster card for less money this time around. It will give NVIDIA more wiggle room between the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 pricing, without completely cutting the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti off at the knees.

Google is saying that it could "no longer guarantee" accurate search results, as well as news organizations having the power to "artificially inflate their ranking online" and Google services to Australians could change under new laws proposed by the Australian government.

Where is this coming from? The ACCC (or Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) ruled that Australians should be paying for the news it uses. Google hit back, saying that the proposed changes would make internet and video search results "dramatically worse", adding that "the way Aussies search every day on Google is at risk".

In a new "open letter" to Australians, Google Australia managing director Mel Silva said: "We're going to do everything we possibly can to get this proposal changed so we can protect how search and YouTube work for you in Australia and continue to build constructive partnerships with news media businesses; not choose one over the other".

Japanese adult book enthusiast and kamehameha blaster Master Roshi is coming to Dragon Ball FighterZ, Bandai Namco today announced.

Master Roshi is one of the most ridiculous characters in Dragonball Z, and since practically every other character is in Bandai Namco's new DB Fighterz, it's only fitting Roshi gets added too. The affable curmudgeon will be the third DLC character in the latest DB FighterZ pass, and will come with signature moves and stylish attacks in place like the Evil Containment Wave, which was used in the old Dragon Ball series.

We didn't get to see Roshi transform with his Max Power move and get ultra-buff, nor did we see the signature kamehameha, but expect both of those to be included. And I'd love to see a return of the turtle Umigame too.

The Last of Us Part II is Sony's third best-earning PlayStation game of all time in the United States, beating historical legacy games and second behind other PS4 mega-hits.

According to NPD Groups latest U.S. earnings for July 2020, The Last of Us Part II has cemented itself as the third best-earning Sony game of all time, and is currently the third best-selling game of 2020 to date. The game sits behind PS4 games like Spider-Man and God of War, which conquer the U.S. sales revenues charts.

No exact sales revenues were given for the sequel, but Sony did confirm The Last of Us Part II was the fastest-selling PS4 exclusive of all time with four million copies sold in 3 days.