Latest News - Page 1576

During today's Summer Game Fest stream, Team 17 announced a huge new Stir of Dawn expansion coming to Blasphemous in August.

Get ready to jump back into the bizarre, hallowed world of Cvstodia, O' Penitent One. Team17 is rolling out a sizable free DLC for Blasphemous that adds a ton of content including the long-awaited NewGame+, new mind-bending storylines, and a new penitence system that's a more cruel version of the original Fallout's traits system.

Gamers will also get new maps, new enemies and NPCs, and a ton of new items and buffs/nerfs/balances. Essentially Blasphemous will take on a whole new scope with the free Stir of Dawn update.

Spider-Man Miles Morales may be among the first playable 8K resolution games on Sony's next-gen PS5.

Today Insomniac Games confirmed some surprising news: Their new Spider-Man game will run at 4K 60FPS on PS5 via an optional Performance Mode, hinting at higher resolution for the other mode. Insomniac didn't clarify if this was native 4K resolution, though.

Just like PS4 Pro Enhanced games, some next-gen PS5 games will have two modes: A performance mode that prioritizes frame rates and gameplay, and another that emphasizes resolution. The new Demon's Souls remake is another PS5 game that will have these two modes.

The PS5's new DualSense controller is somewhat chonky and outsizes the PS4's DualShock 4 in new side-by-side comparisons.

Summer Game Fest's Geoff Keighley recently went hands-on with the DualSense in the first-ever PS5 vs PS4 controller size comparison, and the results aren't too surprising. Keighley took a bunch of pictures of the new PS5 controller, but there's one that we're interested in most: the side-by-side shot.

Early images from Sony hinted the DualSense would be wider and taller than the DualShock 4, and that's indeed true. The controller has more fang-shaped handles and is somewhat reminiscent of a PS3 prototype and DualShock 4 mash-up. According to Keighley, the DualSense weighs more than the DualShock 4

The Morrowind Rebirth team just released a new v5.2 patch that eliminates a ton of bugs while tweaking features, textures, and more.

Who's still playing Morrowind in 2020? If you're on PC, you're likely using the ambitious Morrowind Rebirth mod, and you'll be pretty happy with the latest update. Rebirth v5.2 adds a lot of features and content, including a swath of tweaks to gameplay like speechcraft, combat, questing, and a lot of visual upgrades.

Some of the more noteworthy changes are traders letting you buy and sell goods if you have ghoul hearts, changing the early first-quest package to Caius Cosades into an actual package, new supply chests to other factions like Imperial Cult, Thieves Guild, and Morag Tong, making certain ingredients lighter, a new White Guard Hide ingredient, adding a brand new unique St. Meris Shield of Serenity item, and massive changes to the Speechcraft system where NPCs will stop talking if their disposition falls too low.

As we've said before, don't expect Xbox Game Pass to show up on competing platforms like the Nintendo Switch, and especially not on Sony's PlayStation ecosystem.

In a recent interview with German website Game Star, Xbox boss Phil Spencer discussed why critical services like Game Pass won't show up on other hardware platforms like the Switch, PlayStation, or even Google Stadia. The reason is pretty simple: Microsoft can't bring over the other Xbox ecosystem tidbits like achievements, friends, and more.

"The thing about other gaming console platforms is we're not able to bring a full Xbox experience on those platforms," Spencer said.

Nintendo has taken to their official Twitter page to announce that they will be posting a new Nintendo Direct video.

Above is the post from the official Nintendo of America Twitter account, and it says that Nintendo will be debuting what is called the Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase, which will be a Direct focused on titles from "our development & publishing partners". This will mark the very first Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase, but according to the post, this will be "series".

The video that will be posted will be around 10 minutes long and be pre-recorded. The contents of the showcase will also include "a few updates on a small group of previously-announced #NintendoSwitch games." Games that are suspected to be included in the video are No More Heroes 3, Shin Megami Tensei V, and more. If you are interested in viewing the video, it will be posted on the 7/20 at 10 AM ET.

A bunch of hot RDNA 2 information dropped today from Tom on Moore's Law is Dead, with his sources telling him that AMD's next-gen Big Navi will offer up to 225% more performance over RDNA... the GPU that powered the Radeon RX 5700 XT.

According to these sources estimates are that RDNA is a "major leap forward for them 195% to 225% of the current available cards. But their internal estimates are still projecting the performance per dollar cards up to the upper end of the range".

Another tease is that the "top RDNA 2" would feature 72 compute units, which is where the leaks on the flagship RDNA 2 graphics card being 40-50% faster than NVIDIA's current-gen flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card.

We heard about NVCache back in May 2020 with some Ampere leaks, with NVIDIA's purported NVCache acting like HBCC -- HBCC being AMD's own High Bandwidth Cache Controller that debuted with Vega.

Sony is using some truly next-gen storage technology inside of its PlayStation 5 console, with a deep dive on that here. Microsoft will be doing the same with their Xbox Series X console, but what about the PC? AMD will surely have something nifty up their sleeve with RDNA 2 -- while NVIDIA has NVCache.

Well, back in the May leaks about Ampere and NVCache we heard that it "leverages both your DDR & SSD for enhanced load times & VRAM". The new leaks from Moore's Law is Dead tease that NVIDIA's upcoming NVCache on Ampere cards in the GeForce RTX 3000 series family will "dynamically utilize bandwidth from SSDs, VRAM, and DDR for multiple tasks at the same time".

NVIDIA has some near GPU cheat codes when it comes to its DLSS technology (Deep Learning Super Sampling), with DLSS 2.0 providing double the performance in Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding.

But according to Moore's Law is Dead, DLSS 3.0 is going to be an even bigger game changer. In his latest video, Tom talks about some of the other Ampere GPU features (you can read more on the 3-4x ray tracing performance on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti right here) and one of them is DLSS 3.0 technology.

DLSS 3.0 will reportedly "work in any game with TAA" but it will require a Game Ready driver to do so, meaning developers will have to do some "specific programming per game to get it to work, but it should be easier than before".

AMD is having one of the best years in its history, with the successful launches of its new Zen 2-powered CPUs in the Ryzen 3000 series desktop CPUs, Ryzen 4000 series mobile CPUs, new Ryzen Threadripper PRO chips, new EPYC processors, and so much more.

But the GPU dominance hasn't started just yet, and while AMD might have shaken the GPU tree with the RDNA-powered Radeon RX 5000 series and its flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT -- we ain't seen nothing yet. The new rumors from Moore's Law is Dead suggests we should expect AMD to outright dominate 2020 in more ways than one.

We are already expecting a huge 40-50% increase in performance from the flagship RDNA 2 card over the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which would make the -- let's call it the Radeon RX 6700 XT -- twice as fast as the Radeon RX 5700 XT.

TSMC is in the headlines lately for all the right reasons, and today is another one of those. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the world's largest semiconductor when it comes to market capitalization.

TSMC has now flung right past both Samsung and NVIDIA, according to the latest data from South Korean industry tracker CEO Score and Yonhap News Agency, reports Taiwan News. TSMC's market value hit $306 billion on Friday, passing Samsung with $261 billion and NVIDIA with $257 billion.

TrendForce data points out that TSMC has 51.9% of the global foundry market share, a dominant force against its second-largest competitor in Samsung with just 18.8% market share.

The rumors for NVIDIA and AMD's next-generation GPUs is getting hot and heavy, with Moore's Law is Dead posting a new video with some updates from his sources for July 2020. Check it out:

There's a lot to cover with this video, with a July 2020 update confirming that we're still to expect a huge 3-4x performance upgrade in ray tracing performance with the Ampere GPU architecture over the current-gen Turing GPU architecture.

If this is true, the next-gen Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 series cards will indeed makes "Turing look like Kepler trying to run DX12". This is some exciting stuff, as the next wave of games coming through next-gen consoles that have hardware ray tracing thanks to RDNA 2 -- it means NVIDIA wants to go for the throat when it comes to ray tracing performance dominance.

If you're a World of Tanks gamer on console, you're going to be happy to hear that the developer will be making crossplay gaming possible between Xbox One and PS4.

The new crossplay feature for World of Tanks is coming on July 21, with developer Wargaming announcing the news on their website. Wargaming explains: "Cross-play is coming to World of Tanks on console, allowing Xbox and PlayStation Tank Commanders to play together or battle each other! Cross-play will be available from July 21".

World of Tanks is one of the most popular free-to-play MMOs on the market, and now with crossplay support between the Xbox and PlayStation consoles it's only going to continue succeeding.

Death Stranding has received its first patch on the PC, with publisher 505 Games and developer Kojima Productions pushing out the first patch now.

It weighs in at 5GB for the PC, with Death Stranding receiving AVX judgment to CPU check at startup, the usual stability improvements, and even more usual general bug fixes.

505 Games explained the new patch on the official Death Stranding subreddit, explaining: "This update just contains a lot of small fixes around bugs and stability issues. Nothing too major!"

Apple is warning customers to not cover their camera over concerns of their privacy, as it may damage the MacBook notebook they're using.

The company is telling people not to cover their cameras up as it will also create issues with the automatic brightness and True Tone technologies, with the company explaining: "If you close your Mac notebook with a camera cover installed, you might damage your display because the clearance between the display and keyboard is designed to very tight tolerances".

Apple continues: "Covering the built-in camera might also interfere with the ambient light sensor and prevent features like automatic brightness and True Tone from working. As an alternative to a camera cover, use the camera indicator light to determine if your camera is active, and decide which apps can use your camera in System Preferences".

The Xbox Series X's Velocity Architecture features many revolutionary new technologies and architectural optimizations, one of which is Sampler Feedback Streaming, which can dramatically reduce texture pack file sizes by eliminating redundancy.

The Xbox Series X is a game-changer. The sum of its parts--whether it be the higher-end Navi GPU, Zen 2 CPU, and powerful PCIe 4.0 SSD hardware or the new software/OS/architecture optimizations--are all massively synergized to work together. Sampler Feedback Streaming is one of these parts, and it's featured in the new Velocity Architecture, a banner that's focused on making the Xbox Series X fast and efficient.

We've already outlined the basics of Sampler Feedback Streaming in our in-depth Xbox Series X SSD video, but now we have a developer's perspective on the topic. Despite Microsoft's transparency on the console, devs have been markedly silent on how the Xbox Series X's new features will benefit them. But now Team Blur Games' lead designer Gavin Stevens offers some golden insight.

The PlayStation 5's SSD is set to destroy loading speeds this holiday, but the devs at Sucker Punch are finding new ways to massively speed up loading on the PS4's old mechanical HDD.

Compared to most open-world games on PS4, Ghost of Tsushima has some pretty fast loading times. Whether gamers are respawning from death or fast-travelling, Sucker Punch's new samurai adventure takes roughly 8-10 seconds to load sequences, and sometimes even less than that. This speedy loading is made possible by the team's storage and engine optimizations, which significantly reduce seek times on the HDD.

As Mark Cerny explained in March, mechanical hard drives like the one used in the PS4 spend 2/3rds of their time seeking rather than actually loading data. So developers are forced to work around these limitations, and Sucker Punch's art team found a unique way to massively shrink and compress assets to adhere to the strict memory budgets.

Sony's official PlayStation Direct storefront now mentions PS5 pre-orders in its source code, hinting a big price reveal is incoming.

Internet sleuths on ResetERA have uncovered some interesting new updates on the PS Direct Store. The website's source code now explicitly mentions the PS5, and HTML error message code confirms users will only be able to pre-order one console at a time.

"addtocartrestrictionvalidation":{"errorType":"commerce-api-error","errorMessage":"You can only purchase one version of the PS5™ Console: Disc or Digital. You have already added one PS5™ console to your cart.," the code reads.

It has been a hard year for most Americans, and hell most human beings across the planet in all countries -- but some interesting news has flung across my desk -- or should I say screen.

University of Cincinnati graduate student Andrew Yockey has some interesting statistics to share, with Scientific American writing a story titled "Americans Increase LSD Use-and a Bleak Outlook for the World May Be to Blame". You can read the entire thing here.

Andrew Yockey, a doctoral candidate in health education at the University of Cincinnati and lead author of the paper explains: "LSD is used primarily to escape. And given that the world's on fire, people might be using it as a therapeutic mechanism. Now that COVID's hit, I'd guess that use has probably tripled".

The CDC doesn't list skin rashes, or any kind of rashes on its official COVID-19 symptoms list -- while the WHO on the other hand says that skin rashes are much less common in coronavirus patients.

We all know most of the common COVID-19 symptoms, where some people have a sudden loss of smell and taste -- but there's also fevers, coughs, diarrhea, and more. There's also others that have COVID-19 and have virtually no symptoms, or a very mild case of it -- making it near impossible to make a clinical diagnosis.

Researchers in Spain have published a new study in JAMA Dermatology, where they detail enanthem in patients. The study points to work from Italy that discovered skin rashes on COVID-19 patients, with Enanthem being a rash-like lesion that is discovered inside of a patients mouth.