Latest News - Page 1691

Reports say Microsoft's video streaming platform Mixer is having some issues internally, namely with keeping employee morale high.

Mixer is now under new leadership and employees may not be too happy with their bosses' new ethos, sources tell OnMSFT. Shilpa Yadla, who now heads the Mixer platform, has one rule: don't give up and stay positive through struggle. It sounds like good advice. But the way Yadla frames her speech in a recent clipped closed-door presentation makes it sound less like a guideline and more like a harsh decree.

In the video, Yadla repeatedly mentions how employees have a choice to either think positively, or to just "doom" everything. It's a strange thing to say to a group of people you're now leading...unless maybe there was a morale problem and you're trying to solve it by brute-forcing positive thinking and intent.

Sony may release two PS5 consoles in 2020: A more powerful, but more expensive PlayStation Pro, and a lower-end and cheaper base PlayStation 5 SKU.

Verified NeoGAF user VFXVeteran reinforces previous rumors of a dual-console PS5 launch. According to the user, who cites unnamed industry sources, the PS5 Pro is expected to match or exceed the Xbox Series X's 12 TFLOPs of GPU power, whereas the PS5 model is expected to hit about 9 TFLOPs.

No other specs were detailed for the base PS5, but if it's real, expect the console to use the same 7nm AMD SoC as the PS5 Pro, just dialed down quite a bit. The base PS5 should also have the same super-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD

Capcom will release a playable Resident Evil 3 demo next month to give us a taste of its new horror creation.

The upcoming Resident Evil 3 remake is shaping up to be the ultimate terror-fest, and thankfully gamers will be able to try it out sometime in March. Capcom confirmed a demo is coming but we don't know when exactly it'll launch, or if it'll be exclusive to one platform (likely not).

The game is a remake/re-imagining of the old-school 90s PlayStation classic, complete with amazingly revamped visuals, new streamlined mechanics, and a brand new anxiety-inducing Nemesis. The RE Engine looks better than ever and RE3make is a big step up from last year's RE2 Remake. Capcom has gone through great lengths to preserve the overall look and feel of the original, but upgraded the shooter mechanics, animations, and everything else.

Microsoft continues hyping its beastly next-gen Xbox Series X console and promises games will look, play, and feel better than ever before.

The Xbox Series X is shaping up to be the ultimate games console. Powered by a next-gen 12 TFLOP Navi GPU, an 8-core Zen 2, and a custom SSD, the system will allow 8K gaming, 4K 60FPS, and even up to 120FPS gaming--all with buttery-smooth variable refresh rates. Developers will use tons of new technologies like ray tracing, variable rate shading, and other software tricks to make games run incredibly well at all perf specs and resolutions. That's the theory at least. We haven't actually seen any games in action yet.

Now according to Xbox exec Jason Ronald, the Xbox Series X's in-game performance is unprecedented. The next-gen Xbox uses "bleeding-edge" tech from AMD to open a new dimension of high-FPS, high-resolution console gaming. It's basically a new era for the console market.

Microsoft's Project xCloud game streaming service will crush Stadia and other competitors for one simple reason: It won't make you re-buy games.

Project xCloud just keeps getting better and better. Not only will the service let you stream Xbox One console games you already own to other devices like mobile phones and laptops, but it'll do the same with PC games.

Sources tell Thurrot.com's Brad Sams that Project xCloud will let you stream PC titles over the cloud service, basically like GeForce Now. This is tremendously powerful and creates a unified link to your cross-platform Xbox games library and allows access wherever you go. There's probably some limitations here, and we don't know if Steam games will be included or if it's exclusive to Windows 10 games bought on the Microsoft Store.

Doom Eternal goes beyond even the craziest frame rate ambitions and can hit up to 1000 FPS of bloody, demon-slaying carnage.

The new id Tech 7 engine is absolutely mind-blowing and can run Doom games 300% faster than id Tech 6. The studio says Doom Eternal maxes out at 1000 frames-per-second thanks to the new engine optimizations--but only if you have the hardware might to throw at the game.

And that's only the theoretical limit; id is careful to say the game is future-proofed so that next-gen PC hardware can push the bar even higher.

UPDATE: GDC 2020 has been postponed, as per an official announcement:

This year's annual Game Developers Conference is likely to be cancelled as the biggest names in the industry skip the show.

Konami could be resurrecting Silent Hills from the dead and letting Hideo Kojima run the macabre show.

Kojima Productions might've just teased something Silent Hill-related on Twitter. Fans have scrutinized the Tweet and found some ties to Konami's stagnant franchise, and admittedly there's some reaching going on. The Tweet shows Kojima Productions' head of communications Aki Saito and says "sorry I've been so silent" (as in Silent Hills, of course) and the pencil has Pyramid stamped on it. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe it's a hint that Silent Hills is coming back. There's even mention of a reveal coming next week.

Konami might be firing up the Silent Hill franchise again and Kojima could help lead the charge. Recent reports say Konami is working on two new Silent Hill projects, but nothing has been confirmed. Konami has been noticably absent in the AAA space, but promised in September 2019 that it's not giving up on new sequels.

The Xbox Series X could upgrade and enhance games from legacy generations including the Xbox 360 and even original Xbox era.

Microsoft has high aspirations for the Xbox Series X's extensive backward compatibility. The next-gen Xbox will play four generations' worth of Xbox games. If it's playable on Xbox One, it's playable on the Xbox SX, the company says. And the new console will play all of these games even better thanks to an on-console boost mode that natively upscales resolution, frame rate, and performance of older games. But Microsoft could take this even further and bring higher-end upgrades like ray tracing to older-gen games (look at Quake II RTX, for example).

In a recent Major Nelson podcast, Xbox exec Jason Ronald says the backward compatibility team wants to push the bar higher than ever before and enhance games beyond their current state.

Two pieces of seemingly new artwork have been spotted on Rockstar Games' mainsite, prompting lots of speculation on new games like Grand Theft Auto 6 and Bully 2. But it's probably not what you think.

Rockstar's website shows two interesting images that have fans buzzing. The art can be seen in the background when clicking ondrop-down menu on the upper left hand side of the site, and randomly rotates across three separate pieces--two of which fans are trying to somehow tie to rumored games like GTA 6, Bully 2, or even Agent, the cancelled stealth game for PS3.

The visuals in question are quite captivating and thought provoking. One shows a futuristic 1980's-style gynoid robot from renown artist Hajime Sorayama, who did the cover art for Aerosmith's Just Press Play album. The robot is hugging the Rockstar logo and there's a bottle of champagne from 1998, the year the studio was founded.

Riot Games' new Overwatch-meets-Counter-Strike first-person shooter is called Valorant, and features at least three major heroes including Viper, Brimstone, and Sage.

Fans and Twitter sleuths have uncovered the name of Riot's new competitive shooter, Valorant, along with key details on the game's new Sage character. A few days ago, users uncovered the PlayValorant.com domain was registered by Riot Games. Now a screenshot from an early pre-release build of Project A has leaked out to give eager fans an idea of what to expect with the game's pretty robust hero abilities.

The screenshot--which was likely leaked from a recent Valorant demo shown to influencers earlier this month--reveals Sage, the game's essential Mercy class.

Polish officials prohibit audience attendance at IEM Katowice 2020, the ESL has announced.

The coronavirus outbreak continues disrupting some of gaming's biggest events, this time with the ESL's annual $500,000 international CS:GO tournament held in Poland. IEM Katowice, Counter-Strike's biggest global tournament held in Poland, won't have an audience due to coronavirus health risks.

Polish officials have pulled the ESL's license just hours before the event launched, and attendees will no longer be able to watch the playoffs on-site, nor can they roam around the expo hall.

In a bid to diversify its revenues and prop itself up for long-term earnings potential, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and NieR: Automata developer PlatinumGames will open a new Tokyo-based studio to work on live service games.

The third announcement in PlatinumGame's Platinum 4 reveals is a big one, albeit not as exciting as Kamiya's new Project GG game. The studio will open a new branch in Tokyo, Japan in April 2020 that's centered on sustainability rather than new and catalog game sales.

PlatinumGames plans to use online-driven live games as a consistent source of income via monetization to better diversify its earnings. This is a natural evolution for any developer-publisher in today's gaming landscape and will offer an opportunity to tap Japan's rich vein of live gaming revenues, which will be re-invested in new wholly-owned IPs. Tencent's major investment in the company helped spark this evolution of PlatinumGames.

Since it's recent explosion into the app world, TikTok has been a subject of controversy as many people have claimed the app is spyware. Now, Reddit's CEO has spoken out about what he thinks about the app.

Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman was sitting down with some former Facebook executives at a conference in San Francisco. Huffman was then asked if small Silicon Valley startup companies could learn something from the recent explosion in popularity surrounding TikTok. Huffman's response was rather bleak, and straight to the point, "Maybe I'm going to regret this, but I can't even get to that level of thinking with them."

He continued, "Because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, that it's always listening, the fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying, and I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone. I actively tell people, 'Don't install that spyware on your phone". This isn't the first time TikTok has been linked to spyware, as the United States government banned the use of the app on any government-issued phone under "security threat".

Astronomers have just detected the biggest explosion in the Universe ever recorded. The only explosion that comes close to this explosion is the Big Bang.

In a distant galaxy, about 390 million light-years away from Earth called the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, astronomers detected what is now recorded as the biggest explosion in the Universe since the original Big Bang. This explosion came from a supermassive black hole and released five times more energy than the last biggest explosion ever recorded. According to Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, "We've seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive."

Astronomers also don't know why the explosion was so big, Johnston-Hollitt states, "And we don't know why it's so big. But it happened very slowly-like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years." Researchers estimated how large the explosion was and found that it happened to tear a hole in the galaxy cluster that's so large that fifteen Milky Way's can be placed in a row there.

China has had a lunar lander stationed on the dark side of the Moon since 2019, and since it's been there, it has relayed back some interesting information. Now, the lander has relayed back some new information about the Moon's surface.

In a new paper published in Science Advances, China's lander called Yutu 2 has performed some new experiments on the Moon's surface using the rover's ground-penetrating radar tools. Yutu 2 used its radar to examine the Moon's surface and found that the top layer, which mostly consists of pale, dusty soil, sprinkled in with some rock that stretches down beneath the surface for about 39 feet.

After that layer is the second layer, which consists of much larger grains of soil and much more larger stones and rocks, this layer continues down beneath the Moon for about 40 feet. The final layer of the Moon stretches another 50 feet below the second layer and consists of even larger stones, but surprisingly has a mixture of both large and fine grains of soil. Unfortunately, the instrument that was used to measure these layers reached its maximum capabilities at this layer, so we don't know what's beneath it.

Elon Musk and his private rocket company SpaceX has gotten the thumbs up to build a manufacturing plant in Los Angeles for its deep-space Starship.

The Los Angeles City Council and L.A. Board of Harbor Commissioners granted a 10-year permit for SpaceX to build its manufacturing plant just last week. According to Reuters, the council votes to whether or not SpaceX should be granted the permit were a unanimous decision of 12-0 -- clearly, they want SpaceX there. Councilman Joe Buscaino, whose district includes the port, said, "It's crazy that here we are in 2020 preparing ourselves to send people to Mars, and it's going to happen in our backyard. We are becoming a spaceport."

If you are wondering whether SpaceX will be launching rockets from the L.A. port, that, unfortunately, won't be the case. This plant is purely for the manufacturing of parts, as all aerospace vehicles will be transported elsewhere for testing. If you don't know what Starship is, it's SpaceX's largest rocket standing over 387 feet, or 118 meters tall. Starship is designed to carry a large number of passengers to Mars, and Elon Musk plans on initiating test flights for the craft later this year.

Scientists have created a new AI-powered device that has the potential of saving hundreds, if not thousands of lives.

This new device, which doesn't have a name at the moment, is a patch that uses AI to monitor patients' heart rate. The device checks the patient's heart rhythm, breathing cycles, quality of their sleep, posture, and overall physical activity. The device then collates all this data and feeds it back into a smartphone app via Bluetooth. From here, the AI takes over to create a summarised baseline specific for every patient.

Once this baseline is created, the device will continue to monitor the patient and observe any deterioration of their condition. Scientists and researchers from the University of Utah Health and VA Salt Lake City Health Care System attached the device to 100 patients who have previously suffered from heart failure. Out of the 100 patients, the average age was around 68, and over the three months of monitoring, the device was able to successfully predict heart failure days before at a rate of 80%.

Over the years, Raspberry Pi's has only gotten better and better, but this year could very well be the best year yet.

Back in June last year, we saw the launch of the Raspberry Pi 4, which sported massive upgrades when comparing it to the first model of Raspberry Pi, which released back in 2012. Now, in celebration of the Raspberry Pi's eighth birthday, they are dropping the prices of the Raspberry Pi 2GB of RAM variant.

According to the blog post, due to the drop in RAM prices, Raspberry is now able to bring down the cost of the Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB of RAM to just $35 from $45, which is the same price as the original Raspberry Pi when it launched. When comparing the Pi 4 to the original Pi from 2012, it has 40x the CPU performance, 8x the memory, 10x the I/O bandwidth, can support 4x the number of pixels on screen as well as dual screens, and finally, has dual-band wireless networking.

Introducing Daisy, the tiny microcomputer that sports all of the necessary equipment for coding your musical instruments.

The company behind this little device is Electrosmith, and according to their announcement, Daisy comes with the following features. Two channels of line-level audio, MIDI connectivity, an in-built micro USB port, 64MB of SDRAM, and latency under 1ms. It doesn't stop there though; Daisy also comes with programming languages such as C++, Arduino, Max/MSP, and Pure Data.

At the moment, Daisy is available on Kickstarter and comes in at the cost of $29, which I think is a damn good price considering all the features that come with it. If you are interested in checking out the other things that Daisy can do, head on over to the Kickstarter page here. On a side note, Electrosmith also believes that Daisy would be a great addition to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) research and education. Quite a nifty little device Electrosmith, fantastic work!