Latest News - Page 1654

The current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak is stopping the world, forcing the largest technology companies in the world to issue a joint statement.

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube have all joint forces against coronavirus -- with the joint statement reading:

"We are working closely together on COVID-19 response efforts. We're helping millions of people stay connected while jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus, elevating authoritative content on our platforms, and sharing critical updates in coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world. We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe".

NVIDIA was ramping up to reveal its next-gen Ampere GPU architecture at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in a few days time, but in the end the company moved to an all-digital event over the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, then outright cancelled it.

But now, NVIDIA has taken to its official blog with a new post titled 'GTC News Can Wait' to explain it is delaying the announcement oif its exciting new products. The company explains: "We have exciting products and news to share with you. But this isn't the right time. We're going to hold off on sharing our GTC news for now".

NVIDIA continued: "That way, our employees, partners, the media and analysts who follow us, and our customers around the world can focus on staying safe and reducing the spread of the virus. We will still stream tons of great content from researchers and developers who have prepared great talks. This is a time to focus on our family, our friends, our community. Our employees are working from home. Many hourly workers will not need to work but they'll all be fully paid. Stay safe everyone. We will get through this together".

We are all well aware of COVID-19 coronavirus right now, with entire cities in lock down, schools being shut, borders being closed -- and while it feels like it's the end of the world, I feel fine -- just like R.E.M. did in its 1987 hit song 'It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)'.

R.E.M's massive 1987 hit is once again on the charts now in 2020, where it has turned up in the top songs list on iTunes, where on Monday it was at #41. It has been 33 years since the release of R.E.M.'s It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) but with the recent outbreak of COVID-19 coronavirus, it is back on the charts as people are listening to it en masse.

Not only that, but funnily enough the US box office has been sinking as cinema attendance has been so low, so much so that it hasn't been this bad since 1995 -- coincidentally, since the year Outbreak was released. Outbreak, was a movie about a disease outbreak -- right at a time of the COVID-19 coronavirus frenzy. And now? R.E.M.'s hit It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).

Doom Eternal comes out in just 4 days, and id Software is already planning its next demon-slaughtering adventure.

Doom Eternal is set to unleash unholy chaos this week and we're ready to rip and tear like never before. But like any studio, id Software is already planning out what's next for the Doom Slayer. Game devs constantly iterate and plot out their ideas and often start working on the next project even while the current game is still in development.

According to Doom Eternal's creative director Hugo Martin, id is laying the foundations for a sequel. "We're already moving on...we already have ideas for the next thing. And DLC. DLC is guaranteed. It'll be like an episode; we released the movie, and now we're going to release an HBO series of it. It's basically the adventures of Doom Guy. But it's hard to say when we're going to move on to the next game," Martin said in a recent Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Memory cards are back and they're better (and more expensive) than ever. The Xbox Series X will use special memory cards to expand the console's built-in 1TB solid state drive. External hard drives are still supported, but they offer limited functionality and are locked to older games.

Microsoft has teamed up with Seagate to make special expandable memory cards for the Xbox Series X that plug into that vertical slot in the console's rear side. These cards pack fully-fledged PCIe 4.0 SSDs that're identical copies of the powerful drive used in the console. The Xbox Series X also supports current external HDDs as expandable memory. But things get a bit tricky with legacy HDDs.

Games that're optimized to use the new hardware aren't compatible with HDDs because of the huge performance disparity. Although Xbox Series X won't get exclusive games, it will offer enhancement upgrades of games that use the new high-speed SSD's DirectStorage and Xbox Velocity Architecture. Once a game is upgraded, it can hit high performance like 120FPS with ray tracing, 4K 60FPS, and more, but only if it runs from the internal SSD or the new expandable storage drives.

The Xbox Series X has baked-in boost mode functionality that will upgrade select current-gen games to run at native 4K.

Microsoft's next-gen Xbox is fully backward compatible with every Xbox One game, but it'll actually play all of these games better. Xbox Series X has two ways to boost in-game performance of older games: Native upgrades that're performed on a system level, and enhancement patches issued out by developers. What's incredible is that some first-party games will actually mix the benefits of both.

Microsoft today confirmed that select current-gen Xbox One games will be automatically boosted to native 4K resolution on UHD displays. The system's 3.8GHz Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU-outfitted hardware handles all the work, and there's no optimizations from the developer. Devs don't have to touch their games at all and there's no downloads. The games are simply automatically upgraded by the system itself, and is part of the console's new robust software stack and expanded backward compatibility support.

Microsoft's new Xbox Series X uses a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD to hit blazing fast speeds and open the doors to incredible new opportunities for game developers.

Today Microsoft revealed the Xbox Series X's full specs, confirming beastly hardware like a 3.8GHz Zen 2 CPU, 12.15TFLOP Navi GPU, and 16GB of GDDR6 RAM. The console's full might comes from the sum of its parts, the magical conjunction of hardware and software that allows serious performance boosts. One part, the console's new solid state drive, will help revolutionize console gaming as we know it.

The Xbox Series X uses a custom-made proprietary PCIe 4.0 SSD that's specifically designed to synergize with the rest of the system on a hardware and software level. The SSD itself is being made in partnership with Seagate and can deliver up to 4.8GB/sec compressed data transfer rates. That's 40x faster than the mechanical HDDs found in the Xbox One X. This translates to speedy load times like booting State of Decay 2 in 8 seconds versus the 30 seconds on the Xbox One X.

Microsoft today revealed the full specs of its new next-gen Xbox Series X console, and they're absolutely monstrous.

The Xbox Series X is going to revolutionize console gaming. Outfitted with a beefy 8-core 16-thread 3.8GHz Zen 2 CPU with hyperthreading, a 12.15 TFLOP Navi GPU clocked at 1.825GHz, and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, the system's raw hardware specs rival today's modern PC builds. Digital Foundry's latest deep-dive on the Xbox Series X delivers an illuminating reveal at the transformative system.

The Xbox Series X's 7nm SoC has 15.3 billion transistors, up 118% from the Xbox One X's 14nm Scorpio Engine SoC.

Gears 5 can hit Ultra PC settings with Ultra textures on the Xbox Series X, maintaining 60FPS throughout--the game is even running at over 100FPS on the console. Now we have our first look at just how impressive backward compatibility enhancement patches can get.

Current-gen first-party games like Gears 5 are already tapping the Xbox Series X's 3.8GHz Zen 2 CPU and titanic 12.15TFLOP Navi 2x GPU to deliver insane upgraded performance. Digital Foundry reports Gears 5's performance on the Xbox Series X is equivalent to that of an RTX 2080 GPU-powered PC.

In just two weeks, the Coalition got Gears 5 running at Ultra-level PC settings with high-level textures and a ton of improvements. The Coalition is working closely to get UE4 running on Xbox Series X, and have produced in-game enhancements like UE4's new ray-traced global illumination lighting effects, improved contact shadows, and even 100FPS+ gaming. The studio wants to get 120FPS in multiplayer soon.

Control, our favorite game of 2019, is getting its first expansion. And it looks just as weird as the main game.

Today Remedy launched a new gameplay trailer for Control's electrifying and ultra-weird new Foundation DLC, which is coming out on March 26 on PS4, Xbox One and PC for $15. The expansion delves into the deepest roots of the game's true star: The Oldest House, a supernatural, constantly-shifting environment that has a life of its own. The photo-realism is absolutely mind-blowing and the world is just as bizarre as ever, complete with interdimesional brutalist designs.

The Foundation DLC brings a bunch of new abilities, too. Jesse can now summon crystals to stab enemies, and even prisms that act like makeshift platforms for those stellar vertical levels. There's also a Lovecraftian boss horror from some hellish abyssal plane waiting for us.

Minecraft being one of the most popular games ever created owes its success to its vast array of creative features. Now, those creative features are being used in a way that has never been before.

Introducing, 'The Uncensored Library' a new Minecraft server that boasts freedom of the press rights. Yes, that's right, this Minecraft server is open to the global public who want to read books that contain articles that are originally censored. The people behind this project are the organization Reporters Without Borders and BlockWorks.

These groups decided to make this Minecraft server for people in countries such as Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam where censorship has taken hold. Players who jump into the server can read censored articles from Mada Masr, grani.ru, Javier Valdez, Jamal Khashoggi, and Nguyen Van Dai. According to James Delaney, the Managing Director at BlockWorks and Architect of the Uncensored Library, "The Uncensored Library is a bold use of Minecraft. It really encapsulates everything that is great about this game and the community it has created."

Many fans of the Alien franchise were dying to know what 3D Realms had in store for its now-canceled Alien game. Back in late February, 3D Realms' VP, Frederik Schreiber, revealed some most-wanted details, and now he has done it again.

3D Realms' canceled Alien game was meant to be called Aliens: Hadleys Hope, and it was originally meant to be the ultimate Aliens gaming experience. From the pitch notes, players would have been able to play as both Marines and Aliens. Marines would have to work together as a team, and each marine would have its own unique abilities and classes. As you might've expected, if players decided to play as marines, their goal would be to eliminate all aliens in sight, kill the queen and escape the planet.

If players decided to play as aliens, they would start deep underground in a terraforming facility. Players would then spawn in a facehugger and begin to view the game world through the perspective of the facehugger. The first goal when playing the Aliens was to take the first facehugger and find a colonist to give birth to the first Xenomorph. From there, players would have been able to control every alien through a HiveMind, which means players could've controlled each alien individually and swapped between all of them in real-time.

The Nintendo Switch is no doubt an impressive console that has sold very well for Nintendo. But what is fueling that success?

Well, for game developers, the foundation for the Nintendo Switch's success is the hardware that is underneath the handheld console. Until now, gamers who are enjoying playing games on their Nintendo Switch haven't been able to see what that hardware is doing while games are being played-introducing the 'Tesla, The Nintendo Switch Overlay' mod.

This new mod allows gamers to get real-time diagnostic feedback on what that hardware is specifically doing (Tegra X1 chipset). In the above video, Digitial Foundry takes this mod and runs it through several big titles on the Nintendo Switch. DOOM, Mario Odyssey, Zelda, and more titles were tested, and what they found was those game developers utilized different parts of the Tegra X1 chipset. The mod showcased the current GPU/CPU temperatures, CPU core usage, memory clock speeds, RAM usage, and thermals. On top of that, users can also overclock their Nintendo Switch.

If you haven't seen the survival mechanics coming to Star Citizen, then you might want to check that out as they sound pretty damn amazing -- and even more immersive, which are set to drop in Alpha 3.9.

Cloud Imperium Games has announced that Star Citizen Alpha 3.9 will feature the aforementioned survival mechanics, with the developer teasing that Alpha 3.9 will include support for food, third, and temperature survival. You will need to keep your fluids up, with players in Star Citizen to drink things between bottled water through to energy drinks. As for food, you'll have to find things between fruits (that you can harvest youself), burritos to canned food.

Star Citizen Alpha 3.9 will see people having to look after how much they're eating and drinking, but not too realistic that it ruins gameplay. The developer explains: "In terms of how often you should be eating/drinking - the idea behind it was to make it long enough so that it was not intrusive to the gameplay - but short enough that at least you had to eat/drink once a play session (i.e. several hours)".

The US box office has experienced its worst weekend in 25 years, which coincidentally just so happens to be the year that Outbreak was released: 1995. Just in case you don't remember Outbreak, I've got the trailer embedded below:

It looks like all that social distancing with cinema chains like AMC Theaters implementing new procedures, along with advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommending social gatherings of over 500 people end, with CDC's new guidelines recommending just 50 people or less now.

COVID-19 coronavirus has forced US box office numbers into worrying lows, with the top 10 movies combined making just $50.3 million. This is the lowest for weekend 11 of the year since March 17-19, 1995 -- the year Outbreak was leading the US box office.

Starbucks has joined the growing list of companies implementing procedures to enable social distancing over COVID-19 coronavirus, with the retail coffee shop giant temporarily enabling a "to go" model in all of its US and Canadian stores.

The company will end seating in all of its US and Canada-based Starbucks stores, which will include both indoor and patio areas for the next 2 weeks. In its place, Starbucks will use its own app for ordering ahead of time -- and then depending on the store, walking up to the counter and picking it up, delivery, or drive thru.

Starbucks will physically close its stores in places like schools and shopping malls where "high-social gathering" occurs. Starbucks EVP Rossann Williams explained in a statement: "As we all know, the situation with COVID-19 is extremely dynamic and we will continue to review the facts and science and make the proactive decisions necessary to protect our partners, customers and communities. Every community's needs are incredibly different. We want to make sure we play a constructive role by taking responsible actions, in partnership with the CDC and local public health authorities, so we can continue to do what's right for our partners and customers".

So, Xbox Live is down and gamers are ripping their hair out -- especially with the world in panic lockdown mode over COVID-19 coronavirus, more gamers than ever before are at home and wanting to play games.

Microsoft has taken to its official Twitter account for Xbox Support, explaining: "We understand some users may be experiencing errors with sign in or matching making on Xbox Live, and are currently investigating". The service was down for just over 3 hours or so, with Xbox Support tweeting out again:

The tweet explains that players should "once again be able to sign in and access Xbox Live services normally". Yay!

EA has just joined the COVID-19 coronavirus lock down, where it has now limited social gatherings in an effort to "fight this pandemic". The company has said it has postponed all live game events until "the global coronavirus situation improves".

This means that EA has just temporarily halted live game events involving some of the biggest games in the world, including battle royale superstar Apex Legends. Other EA games included in the live event lockdown include the Apex Legends Global Series, FIFA 20 Global Series, FIFA Online 4 Live, and Madden NFL 20 Championship Series.

Online events will continue, with gamers and staff able to play and work remotely, respectively. EA explains: "This has been an unprecedented few days in an already unprecedented time. As the world works to limit the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, a sweeping set of societal and cultural changes are now impacting all of our daily lives. We'd like to take a moment to update all of you on what we're doing at Electronic Arts to ensure the health and wellbeing of our employees, while also making sure that everyone is able to keep playing their favorite games".

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The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that in-person events with over 50 people be limited, or outright cancelled in the United States over coronavirus.

In an update of COVID-19 coronavirus on March 15, the CDC has new interim guidance that recommends "in accordance with its guidance for large events and mass gatherings, recommends that for the next 8 weeks, organizers (whether groups or individuals) cancel or postpone in-person events that consist of 50 people or more throughout the United States".

The CDC includes "conferences, festivals, parades, concerts, sporting events, weddings, and other types of assemblies" in its criteria for "large events" and "mass gatherings". However, the new guidance over COVID-19 coronavirus spread doesn't include schools, institutes of higher learning, or businesses.