The upcoming Xbox game streaming service Project xCloud will mimic one of Stadia's most transformative features: Click-to-play gaming.

On the surface, Project xCloud is set to absolutely annihilate Google Stadia. xCloud simply has a better value proposition. It will be an extension of Game Pass, complete with all-you-can-stream games on phones, consoles, PCs and laptops, and it'll also let you stream games you already own and connect directly to Xbox LIVE. Rather that starting from scratch like Google is with Stadia, xCloud lets you message and play with your friends wherever you are.

And now Xbox boss Phil Spencer confirmed xCloud will utilize the massively innovative click-to-play feature that will open a new dimension of access. This is absolutely huge for the instant-access versatility of game streaming service. With click-to-play you'll basically be able to click a link on Facebook or Instagram and jump right into a game without downloading anything.

Acer has announced a series of new computers today, including updated rugged notebooks that fit into the Enduro lineup. The first of the rugged machines is the Acer Enduro N7, which is a rugged notebook constructed with shock-absorbent materials that offer the reliability needed for first responders and other workers in the field. The N7 meets MIL-810G and is IP65 certified. Acer says that it was engineered to withstand drops on the hardest flooring and to resist dust and water.

The display is a very bright 14-inch full HD unit with a 700-nit brightness rating, making it visible outdoors and in. The N7 ships with dual batteries. Batteries include an integrated bridge battery and a hot-swappable battery promising 10 hours of use per charge. Acer fits the machine with an eighth-generation Intel Core i5 CPU with enough power to navigate between several applications and to work on multiple tasks at once. Acer also integrates a hardware-level Trusted Platform Module the checks for intrusion during startup.

Another rugged machine in the line is the Enduro N3 Rugged Notebook that is designed to strike a balance between durability and portability. The machine is resistant to drops and water with MIL-STD 810G and IP53 certifications. It measures 4.37 pounds and is 0.98 inch thick. The corners are reinforced to protect against drops, and the display is covered in Gorilla Glass.

Developers don't have to lift a finger to leverage the PS5's ultra-fast 5.5GB/sec PCIe 4.0 SSD, and their games are booting and running incredibly fast without any patches or optimizations.

A few months ago, Mark Cerny said the PlayStation 5's custom 12-channel SSD is so fast that devs may have to make their games run artificially slower so gamers aren't disoriented. This is a pretty crazy claim and for a while we haven't really heard developers talk about the PS5's solid state drive tech. But now devs are starting to chime in, and the claims are pretty huge.

On the PlayStation Blog, Crystal Dynamics' chief technology officer Gary Snethen says developers don't have to lift a finger to get faster speeds on the PS5. By virtue of its specialized flash memory, ultra-fast streaming channels, synergized hardware, and seek-less loading, the console's SSD will natively boost speeds by orders of magnitude faster than the PS4's slow mechanical HDD.

PS4 and Xbox One gamers who buy Crystal Dynamics' new Avengers game will get the next-gen version for free, the devs recently confirmed.

Square Enix is taking a friction-less and more streamlined route with next-gen upgrades. The new Avengers live game is getting two different versions: One for PS4 and Xbox One, and one for PS5 and Xbox Series X. Anyone who buys the game for current-gen systems also gets a free copy of the PS5 and Xbox Series X version too. This initiative also lets gamers easily transfer their saves between consoles, and cross-gen support ensures a wider pool of players

The devs at Crystal Dynamics promise Avengers will be massively enhanced on next-gen systems. The game aims to push the PlayStation 5's hardware to its limits, including the ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD with its 5.5GB/sec data transfer rates. Avengers is also continuing the awesome trend of performance vs resolution modes--similar to the new Demon's Souls remake, Avengers has two separate settings that prioritize frame rates or higher resolution. The high frame rate option targets 60FPS with dynamic resolution scaling.

Apple held its annual WWDC developer conference yesterday, and one of the things that it unveiled at the show was the next generation of macOS. The next operating system from Apple is called Big Sur, and Apple says that it will bring with it a "beautiful redesign" that's new but familiar. Apple's browser Safari is also getting new features, including a customizable start page, more powerful tabs, quicker and easier translation, and a new Privacy Report.

Big Sur will also bring a redesigned Maps application that offers immersive features enabling users to explore and navigate the world. "macOS Big Sur is a major update that advances the legendary combination of the power of UNIX with the ease of use of the Mac, and delivers our biggest update to design in more than a decade," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. "With its modern and clean look, huge improvements to key apps including Safari, Messages, and Maps, and new privacy features, we think everyone is going to love the breakthrough experience that macOS Big Sur offers."

Apple says that Big Sur is the most significant design upgrade since the introduction of Mac OS X and is designed specifically to make navigation easier and put controls at the fingertips of users. Apple promises that everything about the operating system from the color palette and materials to the curvature of window corners has been refined. Icons in the dock are designed to be more consistent with icons across the Apple ecosystem without giving up their "Mac personality."

Acer has pulled the covers off of several different notebook and desktop computers today, including a new Chromebook. The machine is called the Acer Chromebook Spin 713, and there's a version called the Chromebook Enterprise Spin 713, with both machines being virtually identical. Both are powered by 10th generation Intel Core commercial processors promising superior performance with the Chrome OS.

Acer says that the new machines, "...deliver the latest in connectivity, productivity, performance and platform stability, designed to enable the superior productivity and performance that businesses need when working in the cloud. It brings together cutting-edge hardware, specs and design with the speed, security and simplicity that Chrome OS is known for." The new Acer Chromebook was part of Intel Project Athena and features a 2K resolution 13.5-inch VertiView display.

The screen has what Acer calls a "productivity-boosting" 3:2 aspect ratio that creates extra vertical space and reduces scrolling. The native resolution is 2256 x 1504 and has 18% more vertical screen space than normal displays. Both the touchscreen and touchpad are covered with Corning Gorilla Glass to resist scratches. The screen also features then bezels for a higher screened body ratio.

The world of streaming is change quite rapidly, and just yesterday Microsoft announced the closure of its streaming platform Mixer.

Microsoft announced that it was partnering with Facebook Gaming to transit its community over to Facebook's streaming service. This has left big name streamers such as Shroud and Ninja as free agents that have complete rain of choice for what streaming platform they want to start streaming on. The closure of Mixer may not affect the already established badly (as most already have monetary contracts signed), but it certainly will impact the streamers that have been slowly climbing the ranks of the streaming world.

So what do these streamers do? A moderately large Mixer streamer might have a hard time transitioning their audience over to a new platform. The transition could come at a cost of many streamers audience members leaving, essentially, throughout the transition period viewers are lost. Mixer streamers will have to make a decision of what platform they are going to begin streaming on soon, as Mixer will be officially killed off on July 22nd.

The coronavirus outbreak caused many TV shows to halt filming due to social distancing guidelines and overall safety requirements.

One of the TV shows that was hit by the coronavirus was Netflix's The Witcher. The Witcher Season 2 filming was postponed due to the pandemic, but recently we heard teasers that filming was to begin sooner than expected. Now, a new post from the official Twitter account of The Witcher has revealed when the cast of the show is will get back together and begin production on the second season of the show.

The Twitter post, which can be found above, comes in the form of a short poem that reveals "The Witcher and his bard - who's flawless will reunite on set 17th of August". Since filming for the second season of the show has begun much faster than initially expected, it could be assumed that Netflix will hit its release date of 2021 for the second season.

Uh, so Secretlab just teased a new gaming chair -- what appears to be a limited edition custom Cyberpunk 2077 gaming chair. Check it out:

We know absolutely nothing about this chair, but it is a 2020 series gaming chair from Cyberpunk 2077 -- but it seems as though it is in the current red/black theme and not the Cyberpunk 2077 theme of black and yellow. We might be early here, but the Secretlab logo is in the iconic Cyberpunk 2077 yellow/black theme.

Secretlab teases "June 26" which is when we should hear more about this new Cyberpunk 2077 gaming chair... until then, stay strapped in to your chair -- which you might want to upgrade later this year when the game drops.

Currently, the biggest particle accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, and when CERN decided they were going to build, it was a very large job to take on their shoulders.

Now, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, wants to build a new one that is much larger, and of course, costs much more money. The Large Hadron Collider cost about $4.75 billion to construct, and took almost a decade before the construction was complete. CERN built the largest atom-smasher, which has a circumference of 17-miles, and while that might sound big - it isn't enough. Now, a report has come out on Nature detailing that CERN is pushing to build a new particle accelerator that is 62-miles in circumference.

The new project is titled Future Circular Collider, and just from the sheer measurements, we can already tell that it's going to be more than double the size of the current largest particle collider. With the size more than doubled, we can expect that the prize will also be more than doubled. According to the Nature article, CERN expects this new particle collider will cost $23 billion to construct, and at the moment, there is no blueprint on how long it would take until it would be finished.

ARM is in the news for all the right reasons today, where first Apple announced plans that it would be transitioning away from Intel -- where it has been a partner for its processors for many years now, to ARM. The second, is that ARM chips now power the world's fastest supercomputer -- and that supercomputer, is insanely fast.

The new RIKEN Center for Computational Science's Fugaku supercomputer packs Fujitsu's new 48-core A64FX system-on-a-chip. It has 158,976 of these 48-core processors, meaning there is a mind boggling 7,299,072 processor cores powering the Fugaku supercomputer. Yeah, 7.29 million CPU cores -- you read that right.

This means the new Fugaku supercomputer is 2.8 times more powerful than the previous #1 supercomputer; Oak Ridge National Lab's Summit supercomputer. Summit has 2,414,592 processor cores with 148 petaflops of computer performance, compared to Fugaku and its game-changing ARM chips pumping out 415 petaflops.

EK Water Blocks has just flexed into a new part of the graphics card industry, unveiling a new professional range of products that will keep your workstation and server-grade graphics cards watercooled.

The new EK-Pro GPU WB series will dip your Quadro, Tesla, or Radeon Pro WX graphics cards toes in water -- with the new range designed from the ground up to cool the GPU, VRM, and VRAM of those professional-grade cards with liquid across critical components.

EKWB is using an Open Split-Flow design on its new EK-Pro GPU water block, with the water block itself featuring a low hydraulic flow restriction which is good for low speed, or a not-so-great pump setup, but maintains high thermal performance.

Raijintek has just unveiled its new Morpheus 8057 cooler, which is an absolute machine of a GPU cooler. It has been designed to cool up to 360W of TDP -- which is insane. Check it out:

The new Morpheus 8057 packs a huge 12 heat pipes, 129 fins, a mirror copper base, and the option to install 2 large 120mm fans. Raijintek includes 3 copper and 8 aluminum heat sinks for cooling the GDDR6 and VRMs on Radeon RX 5000 series and GeForce RTX 2000 series graphics cards.

Raijintek has used a beautiful back-coated heat sink giving it a premium feel. The Morpheus 8057 can cool:

You can't escape the political machines of BLM and COVID-19 -- even hidden away in games, with Gearbox Software offering a new in-game face mask in Borderlands 3 to anyone who donates to Direct Relief to provide aid to medical workers responding to COVID-19.

All you have to do is donate $5 or more on Gearbox's own merchandise website, which then you'll receive a shift code that unlocks a new Antisocial head cosmetic for Borderlands 3. The donation you make goes go Direct Relief, providing aid and personal protection equipment (PPE) to medical professionals.

Thomas Tighe, president and CEO of Direct Relief, explains: "This campaign and these contributions are coming at a critical time in the pandemic. While states are opening, we continue to see surges in the spread of Coronavirus and there is still a need to provide PPE for frontline healthcare workers. Direct Relief is deeply grateful to Gearbox for its partnership".

The Order: 1886 developer Ready at Dawn has just been acquired by Facebook, and will be pushed into the warm, and waiting arms of Oculus Studios.

In a blog post on the official Oculus website, VP of AR/VR Content at Facebook, Mike Verdu, explains: "Having shipped titles to multiple platforms in the past, Ready At Dawn is a veteran game developer with some serious chops-as well as a VR pioneer. They've created four titles for the Oculus Platform, including Lone Echo, Echo Arena, Echo Combat, and Lone Echo II, which is currently in development".

Verdu continues: "In addition to setting the bar for narrative VR experiences, Lone Echo re-wrote the playbook for VR movement mechanics with the debut of Ready At Dawn's signature innovative continuous locomotion system and full-body IK (inverse kinematics). The zero-g mechanic is used throughout the Echo Games franchise and lends itself well to VR beginners and competitive VR esports alike".

You can expect to hear the words "ray tracing" about 5.43 million times in the next 6 months, with both NVIDIA and AMD launching next-gen graphics cards that will have ray tracing front and center.

AMD has confirmed that its next-gen RDNA 2 architecture will see hardware ray tracing on next-gen Radeon graphics cards, with a new GPU ID spotted by Rogame. The new GPU ID is 'GFX1032' which should be Navi 23 -- according to the original GPU IDs found by Komachi we know that Navi 21 should be GFX1030 and Navi 22 should be GFX1031.

Where will Navi 23 fit into the picture? We could see it being a lower- or mid-range product, where Navi 22 will be a more mid-range card and Navi 21 should power the flagship new RDNA 2-based Radeon graphics card later this year -- aka Big Navi. We should see this possibly arrive as the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which you can read more about here.

NVIDIA has just unveiled its new A100 PCIe 4.0 accelerator, which is nearly identical to the A100 SXM variant except there are a few key differences.

The new A100 PCIe accelerator has powered TDP specs compared to its SXM brethren, with the new A100 PCIe accelerator a little more tame at a 250W TDP compared to the SXM variant with a 400W TDP. Don't be fooled though, as NVIDIA says the peak power for both models are the same.

NVIDIA notes that during sustained loads the new A100 PCIe accelerator has between 10-50% lower performance compared to the SXM variant. The same 6914 CUDA cores based on the Ampere GPU architecture alongside 432 Tensor cores are here (no RT cores here), while it also retains the same (and huge) 40GB of HBM2e memory.

The last couple of Battlefield games have not caught my attention, and with DICE splintered apart from the developers who made classics like Battlefield 1942, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 3 -- there is a glimmer of hope that Battlefield 6 could be an all-out chaos fest unlike anything we've seen before.

The hype is real, where EA recently teased what I think is an entire building collapsing during its recent EA Play 2020 event -- where during the event EA boss Laura Miele dialed the hype meter for Battlefield 6 up to 11. She said: "Our studios are taking their crazy ambitious ideas and making them real".

Miele continued, adding: "Every console generation DICE sets the bar for excellence in audio and visual presentation. We are creating epic battles at a scale and fidelity unlike anything you've experienced before".

SuckerPunch's cinematic open-world samurai epic Ghost of Tsushima is 100% finished and ready to meet its July 17 release date.

As Sony readies the PS5 for holiday 2020, Ghost of Tsushima may be among the last major PS4-exclusive games to come out. The stylish samurai slasher combines a stunning worldscape right out of 13th century Japanese history and chronicles a bloody story of Jin Sakai, a lethal swordbearer. As you play, you're essentially forging his legend and legacy with your actions. Choose to play as the dishonorable and stealthy ninja, or stand tall as an unflinching samurai as you slice your way through enemies.

"We're thrilled to announce that Ghost Of Tsushima has gone GOLD! This is the culmination of years of hard work from our team and we can't wait to get it into your hands-on July 17!" SuckerPunch said on Twitter.

Fortnite isn't just a game. It's a platform. Fortnite is the place you go to advertise an IP, movie, or entertainment property, or to even hold an interactive concert. It's a billboard that can broadcast a huge message. Even still, Epic is taking a somewhat muted stance against the civil unrest in the United States.

As the world's biggest companies rally against police brutality and proclaim black lives matter, some like Epic Games have yet to use their powerful billion-dollar megaphone to do the same. But Epic is doing something in their own way. Today Epic has removed all police cars from Fortnite's in-game map as a symbolic protest against the slaying of George Floyd and the resulting riots, protests, and civil revolution that's surging across the United States.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Epic doesn't feel this move is explicitly political. "I wouldn't say it's a political statement. I think it's just us being sensitive about the issues many people in our audience are dealing with," an unnamed Epic rep told the WSJ's Sarah Needleman.