Latest News - Page 1647

Dell launched a pair of new gaming notebooks called the G3 15 and G5 15 that are aimed at gamers looking for performance on the go. The G3 15 uses 10th generation Intel Core i5-10300H or Core i7-10750H processors. The base GPU in the laptop is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 with 4 GB of GDDR6. Two versions of the GTX 1650 Ti are offered that only vary in the amount of memory they have, with one offering 4 GB and the other offering 6 GB.

The top-of-the-line GPU is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB video card. Several display options are available, all boasting HD 1920 x 1080 resolution in the top-of-the-line version boasting a 144 Hz refresh rate. Memory configurations range from 8 to 16 GB, and storage is up to 1 TB of PCIe M.2 SSD, and dual storage options are available that in another SSD or 1 TB 5400 RPM hard drive. Dell is offering the machine in black or white colors with up to a 68 Wh battery.

Dell's G5 15 has the same GPU options but adds in an available GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q Design GPU with 8 GB of RAM. On the display front, the full HD 144 Hz screen is a mid-range option with an available full HD 300 Hz screen. Storage options include SSDs and dual storage options, including a second 512 GB SSD or 1 TB hard drive.

Anyone who's ever read a Superman comic book has wanted some of Superman's powers. The ability to fly and super strength are probably the most common desires, but x-ray vision that can see through anything but lead would be pretty cool. While you will never get Superman powers, if you purchase a OnePlus 8 Pro, there is a special camera feature that few people know about that has an x-ray vision of sorts.

The OnePlus 8 Pro's 5-megapixel rear color filter camera can see through certain kinds of plastic. If users activate the Photochrom mode in the camera app, the camera can be aimed at a keyboard or other electronic device, and it's able to see through the plastic to the electronics inside.

The special feature won't work on any devices that have IR shielding, including things like set-top boxes or remote controls. It also won't work on clothing, so no one has to worry about the creep in the cubicle next door peeping on them. The secret feature came to the surface in a tweet from Ben Geskin, which can be seen below.

What if the PlayStation 5's DualSense controller actually had a built-in LCD screen? What if it transformed like Optimus Prime? One modder answers that question.

Renowned 3D artist Iskander Utebayev, who's known for crazy iPhone concepts, just made a mind-blowing PS5 controller concept befit for the futuristic year 2020. The custom DualSense is basically a miniature Switch-like hybrid that has a full-color LCD touchscreen panel housed in the center that mirrors the PS5's main output screen.

The rumors were 100% true. Gaming's second best-selling title of all time Grand Theft Auto V is the next free game on the Epic Store.

Epic is about to get a ton more account signups. GTA V is now totally free on the Epic Store, allowing anyone with a PC to access this generation's best-selling game. Everyone's trying to download it right now, crashing the Epic Store. Which is something they should've expected. The game will be available for free on the Epic Games Store until May 21.

This is a massively strategic move for Take-Two Interactive, and it's mostly predicated on one thing: Bringing more players into the digital GTA Online economy. GTA Online is a revenue monster that's generated over $1 billion in monetization earnings four years after launch, and last year alone the game raked in over $500 million from microtransactions and game sales.

Ubisoft once again teases a new Far Cry game could be a part of its huge FY2021 release slate, accompanying big games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Watch Dogs Legion. But COVID-19 may force a delay to next year.

Today Ubisoft announced its full FY2020 earnings, and outlined the future of its games. The company still plans a massive slate of titles to release from now until March 31, 2021. Some games, like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, are set in stone to launch alongside next-gen consoles. Other games could be delayed to the next fiscal year due to COVID-19 complications.

In the earnings brief, Ubisoft says it'll reveal another major AAA game from its "biggest franchises," and reports say this is a new Far Cry title. But it's not 100% certain that the new Far Cry will meet its FY2021 target.

Amazon has announced the launch of new versions of the Fire HD 8 tablets that are aimed at the entire family. The new range includes the all-new Fire HD 8, Fire HD 8 Plus, and the Fire HD 8 Kids Edition. The Fire HD 8 features an eight-inch HD display, 30% faster performance with 2 GB of RAM, and twice the storage space expandable up to 1 TB with a microSD card.

Amazon promises up to 12 hours of battery life per charge and easier charging using a USB-C port. The tablet also offers access to millions of movies, TV shows, songs, e-books, magazines, games, educational apps, and entertainment apps. The new Fire HD 8 retails for $89.99. The Fire HD 8 Plus has the same eight-inch display with the addition of 3 GB of RAM and wireless charging support.

The wireless charger does not come with the tablet, but it does include a 9W in-box USB-C charger for faster charging. For a limited time, the tablet also comes with six months of Kindle Unlimited for $109.99. The last of the new tablets is the Fire HD 8 Kids Edition. Huawei launched a new tablet recently for those wanting a bigger screen and more traditional Android experience.

Rumors have been flying concerning the coming Samsung Galaxy Note 20 smartphone. The latest rumor has surfaced via the YouTube channel called Greggles TV from an interview with the CEO of Display Chain Consultants, Ross Young. Young has been the source of numerous rumors focusing on the Note 20 over the last several weeks.

According to Young, the Galaxy Note 20 and its larger sibling the Note 20 Plus will be the first devices to use the second-generation Qualcomm 3D Sonic Max fingerprint reader. The fingerprint reader is an ultrasonic unit first introduced last December with the ability to read two fingerprints at the same time thanks to its large area. The larger read area is expected to bring significant improvements compared to the first generation sensor used in the Galaxy S10 and Note 10 smartphones.

Young also claims that the Note 20 devices will have the same selfie camera position as the Note 10. That means users can expect a hole-punch display. The leaker claims that the Note 20 will have a 6.42-inch display with the Note 20 Plus getting a 6.87-inch screen. Other tidbits tossed out in the latest rumor series includes up to 16 GB of RAM and batteries of 4000 mAh to 5000 mAh.

One of the most anticipated accessories that Apple has launched in recent memory was the iPad Magic Keyboard, aimed at both versions of the iPad Pro. Early on, the iPad Magic Keyboard earned praise for a responsive multi-touch trackpad, backlit keyboard, and its fancy counterbalancing magnetic stand. After using the Magic Keyboard for a while, some iPad Pro users are complaining about significant issues.

The latest round of complaints comes from iPad Pro users who say that battery life has become an issue when using the iPad Magic Keyboard. According to some of the users, the battery life of the iPad drops quickly when the keyboard backlight is enabled. Some are claiming that the battery drain issue arises even if the iPad is idle and not in use.

The Magic Keyboard has no battery of its own and uses the Smart Connector on the iPad to get the power it needs to operate. Unsurprisingly, Apple doesn't offer any indication of battery life impact that could be expected when using the Magic Keyboard. That means users have no idea what normal behavior is for the device.

NVIDIA has just made its new Ampere GPU architecture official, unveiling the first Ampere-based GPU in the A100 GPU. You can read more about that here, but alongside the NVIDIA A100 GPU is the new DGX A100 system.

NVIDIA's new DGX A100 3rd Generation integrated AI system packs a huge amount of computing power, centered around 8 x NVIDIA A100 GPUs, as well as 2 x 64-core/128-thread AMD Rome CPUs with 1TB of RAM. There's a huge 15TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs for kick ass storage, and 9 x Mellanox ConnectX-6 VPI for 200Gb/s over the network.

The new DGX A100 is built for data science and AI, with up to 5 PFLOPs of peak FP16 performance, and up to 2.5 TFLOPs of TF32 performance, right up to 156 TFLOPs with FP64 performance.

GTC 2020 NVIDIA has officially unveiled its first GPU based on the Ampere GPU architecture, the new NVIDIA A100, which the company has in full production and is already shipping to customers worldwide.

NVIDIA's new A100 GPU packs an absolutely insane 54 billion transistors (that's 54,000,000,000), 3rd Gen Tensor Cores, 3rd Gen NVLink and NVSwitch, and much more. The GPU itself measures 826mm2 (!!!) on TSMC's 7nm node, as well as packing a huge 40GB of HBM2 memory from Samsung, and up to 600GB/sec bandwidth through NVLink.

The new A100 is being compared against the V100, which is based on the Volta GPU architecture. NVIDIA's current-gen Tesla V100 comes with 16GB and 32GB HBM2 options, while the V100 was built on the 12nm node at TSMC it packs just 21 billion transistors in comparison.

On the eve of NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere GPU reveal, AMD has decided to unveil its new Radeon Pro VII graphics card aimed at professionals.

AMD's new Radeon Pro VII is the consumer-focused Radeon VII, but for professionals. We have the same 16GB of HBM2 on a 4096-bit memory bus with up to 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth. The same Vega 20 GPU on the 7nm node is used, with 3840 cores, 240 TMUs, and 64 ROPs.

What is new here with the Radeon Pro VII is that AMD has shifted over to the PCIe 4.0 standard, versus the consumer-focused Radeon VII on PCIe 3.0. The same GPU clocks are here, with peak GPU clocks of up to 1750MHz -- while AMD delivers a new multi-GPU bridge for the Radeon Pro VII which the company calls Infinity Fabric Link with up to 168GB/sec of bandwidth.

NVIDIA will be unveiling its next-gen Ampere GPU architecture tomorrow morning, with the super-insane Ampere A100 GPU to lead the charge as well as a bunch of A100-powered systems.

We are to expect NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang to burst out onto a (virtual) stage and unveil the new Ampere GPU architecture, talk about the latest innovations that NVIDIA has achieved in AI, high performance computing (HPC), data science, autonomous machines, healthcare, and graphics during the GTC 2020 online keynote.

I was fully booked and I'm sure many hundreds of others were, for the annual GTC 2020 which was meant to kick off on March 23 -- but was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. NVIDIA shifted gears to go all-online for GTC 2020 this year, with the full announcements that will be in the keynote to be found here.

The world's first real-time PlayStation 5 gameplay footage was a dazzling tech demo that pushed the hardware to its limits. How far? The PS5 devkit was able to steadily maintain 1440p 30FPS "most of the time" with cinematic-quality 8K textures, global illumination, and other new advanced techniques.

The new Unreal Engine 5 footage was absolutely incredible and gave us a taste of next-gen console gaming. But there's a few caveats. For one, it's a tech demo, not an actual game. Yes, it's playable with live source code on a PS5 devkit, but it won't actually ship. And two, the demo required intense horsepower for its Nanite system to render the billions of triangles needed for the scenes, and wasn't able to hit 60FPS on the PlayStation 5's 10TFLOP Navi GPU. It also required dynamic resolution scaling, which adjusts resolution on-the-fly to lock in a consistent frame rate. For reference, most of the PS4 Pro's 4K games have dynamic resolution scaling and few are native 4K.

Epic's VP of Engineering Nick Penwarden says the demo hit 1440p 30FPS on PlayStation 5 with dynamic resolution scaling enabled--the resolution spot between 1080p and 4K but at the lower FPS range for these kinds of action-adventure experiences.

Fortnite is coming to next-gen consoles (it's a service game that drives billions in revenues, so of course it is) and Epic will use it to experiment with its new Unreal Engine 5 tech later next year.

Today Epic Games announced Unreal Engine 5, a new powerhouse toolset that enables high-end visuals on next-gen consoles. Epic was the first to show real-time PlayStation 5 gameplay via a tech demo that uses the new Nanite geometry tech to inject cinematic-quality 8K texture assets into game scenes in real-time without texture pop-ins, and also uses Lumen, new global illumination tech. But there's just one issue: Unreal Engine 5 doesn't release until 2021.

Epic plans to bring Fortnite to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X at launch in 2020, but the game will use Unreal Engine 4 and not the beefy new graphics might of UE5. It'll be fully cross-progression between the console generations and it won't actually be a new version of Fortnite--although the next-gen version will take advantage of the new hardware.

Today Microsoft accidentally confirmed a ton of info about the Mafia Trilogy, a new definitive collection of 2K's crime drama series.

2K Games today announced the Mafia Trilogy, a collection that packs in Mafia, Mafia II, and Mafia III in one bundle that spans 40 years of organized crime across Illinois, New York, and New Orleans. 2K was light on details and planned to save announcements for a May 19 stream, but a now-deleted Microsoft Store listing confirmed a bunch of info.

The biggest surprise is how the first old-school Mafia game from 2002 has been completely remade. The game originally launched for the Xbox and PlayStation 2, and has been re-done from the ground up with enhanced visuals, textures, graphics, and improved animations. The results deliver eye-catching lighting effects, immaculate textures, and impressive environmental effects. "Faithfully recreated, with expanded story, gameplay and original score. This is the Mafia you remembered and much more," reads the listing.

Instagram has announced the fifth edition of its Community Standards Enforcement report that tracks its efforts to keep the social network safe. Along with that report, Instagram is also announcing new features that go along with its effort to fight online bullying. One of the key features is giving users the ability to manage multiple unwanted interactions at once.

Instagram wrote, "We know it can feel overwhelming to manage a rush of negative comments, so we've been testing the ability to delete comments in bulk, as well as block or restrict multiple accounts that post negative comments." Instagram reports that early feedback has been "encouraging," noting that the feature is particularly useful to those with large followings that want to maintain a positive environment on their account.

Enabling the feature on iOS requires users to tap on a comment and then the dotted icon in the top right corner. Users can then select Manage Comments and choose up to 25 comments to delete at once. Tapping More Options to block or restrict accounts in bulk is also available. To block or restrict accounts on Android, users press and hold on a comment, tap the dotted icon, and select Block or Restrict. Another new feature is giving users a way to highlight encouraging and positive interactions, called Pinned Comments. Instagram says it will soon begin testing Pinned Comments.

Dell has officially announced the new XPS 15 and XPS 17 notebook computers. It's been a decade since the XPS 17 was offered, and it's being hailed as the most powerful Dell XPS laptop ever made. One of the highlights of the XPS 17 is that it's the smallest 17-inch laptop around featuring a "virtually borderless" four-sided InfinityEdge display that allows the 17-inch notebook to be smaller than 48% of 15-inch machines on the market today.

Dell uses the latest 10th generation Intel Core processors inside the XPS 17 along with GPUs up to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 with Max-Q design. To keep all the high-end hardware cool, the laptop uses a unique thermal design for increased fan airflow for ideal performance. Dell has also announced the redesigned XPS 15 laptop computer.

Dell says that the XPS 15 is the smallest 15.6-inch performance class laptop on the market. It features a larger 16:10 display and up-firing speakers. The machine uses the latest 10th generation Intel Core processors and up to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti GPU. Both of the machines have some of the same features, including a chassis crafted from two pieces of machined aluminum, making the laptops lightweight and strong.

As rumors continue to persist about a Galaxy Fold 2, new rumors are going around about another device that will slot into the Galaxy Fold family. According to the latest rumor, Samsung is working on a significantly cheaper version of the Galaxy Fold that will skip some features of the original. The rumor says that the device is believed to be called the Galaxy Fold Lite 4G.

The smartphone would be a mix of parts sourced from older and newer smartphones that launched between 2018 and 2020. One way Samsung is said to be keeping costs low on the Galaxy Fold Lite is by ditching the ultra-thin glass used on the Galaxy Z Flip and relying on a plastic screen like the original Galaxy Fold.

Another cost-saving measure would be a smaller external display. The exact size of that external display is unknown, but speculation suggests it could be more like the external screen on the Galaxy Z Flip rather than what was seen on the original Fold. The cheaper device will use an aluminum frame according to reports with the external portion made out of glass to enable wireless charging.

Epic Games' Tim Sweeney praises the PlayStation 5's raw power and storage tech, calling Sony's next-gen hardware 'unprecedented' and 'absolutely phenomenal.'

Today Epic announced Unreal Engine 5, and showed the first-ever real-time gameplay running on a PlayStation 5 console in the form of an advanced tech demo. The Unreal Engine 5 looks to push the PS5 to its limits with 8K texture rendering alongside high-end and ultra-versatile Nanite tech, which allows for cinematic movie-quality assets to be injected right into a game using virtual geometry. To create these kinds of dev tools, Epic has nurtured an intimate relationship with the PlayStation 5 and knows its ins and outs.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney had some choice words about the PS5 that come from an actual understanding of the hardware itself instead of marketing hype-speak.

A new report is going around the claims Apple is looking to have its employees returned to the office during 2020. This is in contrast to other major technology companies that have announced plans to keep employees out of the office the remainder of the year due to coronavirus. The report, which first originated with Bloomberg, says that Apple has already begun the first stages of returning employees to work with essential workers unable to do their jobs from home already returned to the office.

Some Apple workers who have returned to the office were having issues working from home in some regions. Apple reportedly told staff that major locations will begin returning to work later this month or in June. Apple is also said that workers may return to offices globally starting in July.

However, those plans are not firm and can fluctuate according to the changing status of state and local emergency orders. Managers will inform their staff what phase of reopening they will fall under, and if they are required to be at the office daily or just for periods of time. The first group of employees expected to return the office will include those who work in data center management, software deployment, sales, and hardware testing and development.