Latest News - Page 1692

Facebook has just announced that its F8 developer conference has been canceled, all because of the current coronavirus -- or COVID-19 outbreak.

It's not the first conference and it surely won't be the last, with Mobile World Congress (MWC) being canceled at the last minute over coronavirus. The upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) is most likely going to be axed with major players like Microsoft, Sony, Unity, and others pulling out of the event -- and now Facebook's F8 devleoper conference.

The social networking giant announced that it canceled the event on Thursday, which was scheduled to take palce at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California between May 5-6, 2020. Facebook's Director of Developer Platforms & Programs, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, explained that they tried working around keeping the in-person contact there, but it couldn't happen with it being such a big event with people flying in from all corners of the globe.

Logitech G has just announced that it has teamed up with Herman Miller, where the two companies will create "the world's most advanced gaming chair" together.

Logitech is a big name on its own with gamers, being one of the largest peripheral makers in the world -- while Herman Miller is known for its super high quality, ergonomic, and expensive chairs. Logitech teaming up with Herman Miller seems like it is preparing to take a fight at the best gaming chair company in the world: Secretlab.

The new gaming chair from Logitech G and Herman Miller will be unveiled sometime in spring 2020, with no details on pricing, what to expect... nothing. We should expect a high-end gaming chair which doesn't hold back, and if they want to fight against the likes of Secretlab which has been going from stride to stride, it'll have its fight cut out for them.

NVIDIA has just dropped their latest GeForce 442.50 WHQL drivers, which are Game Ready for a bunch of just-released updates to some of the largest games on the market. You can download NVIDIA's new GeForce 442.50 WHQL drivers right here.

The new drivers have Game Ready optimizations for Respawn's just-launched Apex Legends: Season 4, Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Warlords of New York expansion, as well as ARK: Genesis Part 1. Not only that, but NVIDIA has added in some new security features into the GeForce 442.50 WHQL drivers.

NVIDIA has also added in a bunch of VRSS profiles for VR games, fixes on a bunch of other games, and added in some new monitors to the G-SYNC compatible list, which include:

Corsair's new ONE PRO i200 compact workstation-grade PC has been announced, packing in some seriously kick-ass components into something near impossibly small.

The new Corsair ONE PRO i200 packs a high-end 14-core, 28-thread Intel Core i9-10940X processor and flagship NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. Corsair also installs a huge 64GB of quad-channel VENGEANCE DDR4 memory that can handle virtually anything you throw at it when it comes to workstation use.

Corsair also packs in a super-fast 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD that will ensure you have super-fast loading times, and super-fast read/writes for everything you want to do. Corsair's new ONE PRO i200 workstation is not just a kick ass workstation PC, but it would be an insane gaming PC that would handle everything you throw at it all the way to 4K 60FPS gaming.

We are still just getting our toes dipped in the waters of PCIe 4.0 thanks to AMD's recent launch of the X570 chipset, and Ryzen 3000 series processors -- but PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0 are also on the way. You know the story, technology never slows down.

PCI-SIG has officially announced version 0.5 of the new PCIe 6.0 standard -- yeah PCIe 6.0, not PCIe 5.0 -- which will have an insane 8x the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 that most people are using today. PCIe 3.0 starts things off with 32GB/sec of bandwidth on a full PCIe 3.0 x16 port, while PCIe 4.0 x16 offers up to 64GB/sec.

Things start to really ramp up with PCIe 5.0 x16 with a huge 128GB/sec, but PCIe 6.0 takes things to the stars with 256GB/sec on a PCIe 6.0 x16 port. This means we're looking at a huge 8Gbps per lane of bandwidth with PCIe 6.0 -- crazy stuff, and while graphics cards won't benefit too much from it (unless things change in a big way), next-gen NVMe SSDs, networking controllers, and other technologies will suck up all that additional bandwidth easily.

You simply can't escape hearing the words coronavirus or COVID-19 on the daily, but when it comes to Ndemic Creations' game Plague Inc. -- what could go wrong? Well, how about the game being banned on the Chinese iOS App Store.

Yeah, so the disease sim has been getting more and more popular with the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, and now the game has been officially removed from the Chinese iOS App Store. The news is coming directly from Ndemic Creations, that has explained: "We've just been informed that Plague Inc. 'includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China' and has been removed from the China App Store".

Ndemic Creations adds that "The situation is completely out of our control". The news is riding on the back of Ndemic seeing sales of Plague Inc spiking big time, and then Plague Inc. quickly becoming China's top-paid iOS game... weeks later? Banned on the Chinese iOS App Store. I'm not shocked to see this happen, and it's China of all places.

We probably would've heard more detailed specs about Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 if the company attended the upcoming Game Developers Conference, but it pulled out -- along with Microsoft, Unity, and many others.

But with Sony pulling out of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) it didn't stop GameStop from listing some detailed specs on the upcoming next-gen PlayStation 5 console. GameStop has a new landing page for the PlayStation 5 console, which starts off by listing that the PlayStation 5 has "the ability to play physical & digital media".

This means the console has now been confirmed to pack a Blu-ray drive, and while the GameStop landing page doesn't detail whether it will be a 4K Ultra HD capable player, I would put good money down on it being a 4K-capable Blu-ray player. Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 will also be capable of digital games of course, so you can choose physical copies of your games or digital downloads on the next-gen PS5.

UPDATE: In a huge new live stream, Larian has confirmed Baldur's Gate 3 is turn-based only and won't have real-time wait pause mechanics.

French website JeuxActu just accidentally uploaded new Baldur's Gate 3 screenshots, revealing the inner workings of Larian's new RPG sequel.

The newly leaked Baldur's Gate 3 screenshots show two things: A mixture of Real-Time Wait with a Pause (RTwP) combat lifted straight from the original cRPG series, and turn-based combat similar to Larian's previous Divinity: Original Sin games. The two modes interact and complement each other during battles to allow for maximum strategic planning; the idea could be to mostly use RTwP to plan things out and then execute via the turn-based combat sequences.

The Xbox Series X's new Smart Delivery system isn't really new. Microsoft used similar intelligent delivery for the optional Xbox One X upgrades that boosted games to 4K HDR on the console. But the Xbox Series X will take things even further and give developers even more potential to breathe new life into older games.

A while back we predicted how the Xbox Series X's Smart Delivery system would work. The feature is designed around one purpose: Act as a conduit that carries current games forward to next-gen and boosts in-game performance. As with the Xbox One X, developers will have the option to roll out game updates that basically upgrade current-gen games and let them tap the Xbox Series X's raw 12TFLOP GPU, Zen 2 CPU, and synergized SSD and GDDR6 memory pool.

Smart Delivery will enhance backward compatible games and push them to new heights that simply aren't possible on the Xbox One family of hardware. Remember, next-gen is an extension and an evolution of current-gen, not a replacement.

The highest-ranking Super Smash Bros. Ultimate player is no longer a free agent, as he has just announced that he's signed with T1.

Leonardo Lopez Perez, also known as MkLeo in the Super Smash Bros. community, is the world's highest-ranking player for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. MkLeo has had a fantastic career in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate since it launched, taking out some of the other highest-ranking players with his notorious Joker play.

MkLeo was a free agent for a period of time, and being the world's number one player for Ultimate, it didn't take long for a sponsor to pick him up. According to MkLeo's personal Twitter account, he has now signed a new deal with T1 to create content under their banner as well as continue tournament play. The terms of the agreement were not revealed, but being the best player in the world, I'm sure MkLeo walked away from this deal happy.

Scientists have successfully made artificial brain neurons, and biological brain neurons communicate over the internet.

Researchers from the University of Padova in Italy, extracted rat neurons in their laboratory, while researchers at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich created artificial neurons on Silicon microchips. Then researchers from the University of Southampton used cutting-edge nanotechnology to create devices that link the two neurons together called synapses, or more accurately memristors.

The scientists from Southhampton University observed biological spikes being sent over the internet from the researchers in Italy. The researchers then distributed those spikes to the memristors and sent them down the line to the artificial neurons in Zurich. The process was a success as it works in reverse as well. If spikes are sent from the artificial neurons through the mesristors, the biological neurons receive them. Proving that artificial and biological neurons can communicate with each bi-directionally in real-time.

If you have finished the first season of The Witcher, then you are no doubt more than excited for the second season.

Whether or not you think The Witcher had a great first season or not, the show was a massive success de-throning the likes of Disney's 'The Mandalorian' for the most in-demand show. The first season for The Witcher is still raking in viewers even now, and it's still the most in-demand TV series globally across all platforms. Netflix wants to ride this wave of popularity and is no doubt hoping that The Witcher can create Game of Thrones-level popularity.

Back in late January, Netflix decided to change how they counted how many viewers watched their shows. Originally, a view would only be counted if the user watched 70% of a single episode. Now, Netflix has changed its metrics, and one 'view' is counted when a user watches just two minutes of a show. So why did they do this? To fluff their numbers, of course, but they aren't the only ones that do this. BBC's iPlayer, YouTube and The New York Times also measure viewers the same way.

In a new paper, researchers have detailed a brand new way to cool down computer chips. This idea manipulates the speed of photons.

Researchers at Stanford University have managed to develop a new way to cool down heated objects, and in this instance computer chips. In their paper, which has been published in the Physical Review Letters, the team of researchers describe in detail how heat radiation can be manipulated into cooling down objects faster. Firstly, objects both radiate and receive heat from the environment, and already established research has pointed out that objects radiate heat in a spectrum.

Heat radiated from an object peaks out at a certain frequency, this is determined by the current temperature of the object. A simple way to look at this is when the number of incoming photons to an object is more than the number of outgoing photons, the the object will begin to increase it's temperature. With all this in mind, the team of researchers came up with an idea that could speed up the radiated photons, and in theory would then be able to speed up the cooling process.

Amazon is notorious for posting listings for games that aren't even on a specific platform yet, and just this morning that that very thing happened for Horizon Zero Dawn.

The listing was posted by Amazon France, and it claimed that Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn would be coming over to the PC. Funnily enough, the listing also says that Sony is apart of the transition, and not too long ago Kotaku's Jason Schreier said that Sony was looking at bringing Horizon Zero Dawn over to PC. While this could easily be a coincidence, the correlation is still there.

Maybe Sony and Guerrilla Games are currently working on a PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn behind the scenes. It should also be noted that the third anniversary for Horizon Zero Dawn is almost upon us (Feb 28th), so maybe an announcement could come soon? Another fact to take away from this is that Horizon Zero Dawn is built on the Decima Engine, which was given to Hideo Kojima to build Death Stranding and Death Stranding is arriving on PC sometime later this year. So maybe Horizon Zero Dawn will receive the same treatment?

The director of Knives Out and The Last Jedi may have just dropped a spoiler for every mystery movie that has a 'bad guy' in it.

According to Rian Johnson, who spoke to Vanity Fair, Apple does allow directors to hook up their actors with iPhones to use in movies, but there's one rule. Johnson says, "Apple... they let you use iPhones in movies but - and this is very pivotal if you're ever watching a mystery movie - bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera."

Johnson joked about the information that he just revealed, saying that "Every single filmmaker that has a bad guy in their movie that's supposed to be a secret wants to murder me right now". This isn't really that much of a surprise, Apple is known for their rules around how their products are shown off to the public, and as a company who wants their products shown off in the best light possible this rule makes sense.

GOG extends its refund policy to 30 days after purchase regardless of play time, making it the most open store in the entire industry.

Today GOG announced a surprise update to how it's handling refunds. The storefront's money back window has been extended to 30 days after purchase, giving users an entire month to try out and play the game to see if they like it. This is a hefty jump over the previous 14-day refund policy.

It's possible this decision could be overturned soon, though. Considering GOG is a DRM-free marketplace, there's nothing stopping buyers from simply copying the game files and then getting a refund. It's a potential worry for developers. While GOG doesn't mention a hard limit on play time, the company says its reserves the right to deny a refund for any reason.

One of the Xbox Series X's biggest features isn't its raw GPU power, or its high FPS functionality. It's a small quality-of-life improvement that has massive implications.

The Xbox Series X is designed for speed and power, and more importantly, to link the two indiscriminately in a cyclic fashion. The Xbox Series X's brute hardware is complemented by flexible, adaptable, and powerful software that intelligently uses the system's raw strength--it's a marriage of brains and brawn. The console's synergized 7nm AMD SoC, PCIe 4.0 SSD, and GDDR6 RAM hardware are held together by a sophisticated software stack that enables developers to tap the beastly 12TFLOP GPU while delivering effects like Variable Rate Shading or ray tracing, boosting frame rates and immersion in the process.

One big part of this emphasis on speed is the console's new enhanced quick resume functionality. This feature lets you basically turn any play session into a save state that's preserved even after you turn off the console. The Xbox Series X lets you pause multiple games at once and come back to them at any point without having to load anything. It's kind of like how Netflix and Hulu save your spot when you stop watching.

As consoles get more and more advanced, it's important that developers have access to more powerful software development tools to squeeze out every last drop of hardware might. No one knows that better than Microsoft.

Microsoft is going above and beyond with the Xbox Series X. Not only will the system have a huge 12TFLOP RDNA 2-powered Navi GPU that enables new effects like ray tracing, 8K resolution, and 120FPS gaming, but the next-gen Xbox also comes packed with massively optimized SDK dev tools for crafting new experiences. Flexible and fast software environments are just as important as hardware, and the Xbox Series X's true potential lies in the synergy between the two.

In a recent Major Nelson podcast, Xbox exec Jason Ronald reiterated just how important software is.

Riot Games will use Unity to power two of its major new League of Legends mobile games, the company today announced.

Thanks to Unity's cross-platform flexibility and intuitive network integration, Riot will use the engine for its two massive LoL mobile games including the League of Legends: Runeterra card game, and League of Legends: Wild Rift, a standalone MOBA designed from the ground up for smart devices and consoles.

"Unity's technology enables us to focus on delivering the beloved League of Legends experience to as many players across as many platforms as possible. We want to meet our players where they are, and Unity's world-class tools and platform optimization help us achieve that. With the expert support provided by Unity, we've been able to unlock the power of Unity's technology like never before," said Brian Cho, Head of Corporate and Business Development, Riot Games.

Cyber Shadow, the new rockin' retro hack-and-slash platformer from one-man indie studio Mechanical Head Studios, just got a Fall 2020 release date. And an amazing trailer.

Today Yacht Club Games' publishing arm showcased a new gameplay trailer for Cyber Shadow, a new stylish indie that we all need in our lives. If you're not convinced just check out the trailer above. Luckily we won't have to wait too long to play it.

Cyber Shadow has it all: A killer soundtrack, old-school graphics right out of an NES game, platformer action with fast-paced slice-and-dice combat, huge ridiculous monstrous bosses, a storyline straight out of a 1990s comic book, and even Shovel Knight's (well should I say Scrooge McDuck's) signature downward sword pogo bounce attack.