Intel will have much more to share about its new Xe GPU architecture in 2020, but before then the hype train just spat out a little more steam with Raja Koduri teasing a new high-performance Xe GPU.

Koduri recently said the team designing the high-performance Xe GPU calls it the "faster of all silicon", and said it rubs shoulders with some of the largest silicon ever designed. Koduri recently met with the engineering team based in Bangalore, India -- where he tweeted out the Xe GPU was "the baap of all", which Wccftech's Usman Pirzada says translates to "the father of all".

With Raja referring to this Xe GPU as some of the largest silicon in the world, Pirzada thinks Raja is talking about a GPU with a die size pushing 750-800mm2 -- this would make Intel's new Xe GPU one of the largest GPUs ever designed. With this, we should expect some great performance but we're still a while out from that.

We keep hearing all about the PlayStation 5 and its V-shaped developer kit that is floating around, but now we know for a fact that an Xbox Scarlett development kit is in the wild -- with Xbox boss Phil Spencer himself confirming he has an Xbox Scarlett at home.

Spencer took to his official Twitter, tweeting out: "And it's started....this week I brought my Project Scarlett console home and it's become my primary console, playing my games, connecting to the community and yes, using my Elite Series 2 controller, having a blast. Great work by the team, 2020 is going to be an incredible year".

Microsoft must be a good way into the development of Xbox Scarlett, as Spencer's unit would be plugged into (or connected via Wi-Fi) to his internet connection. Is he playing games at higher resolutions and frame rates? Is he playing unreleased next-gen games? I have so many questions.

In its original state as an early port, The Witcher 3 on the Nintendo Switch ran like dog poo. The handheld mode of the game ran at just 10FPS, which is not good at all -- unplayable, really.

In a new interview between GamesBeat and Saber Interactive, who is working with CD PROJEKT RED on the Nintendo Switch port of The Witcher 3, studio CEO Matthew Karch said the port ran at just 10FPS and took up a pretty hefty 50GB of storage space.

The team was forced to start making some cuts to the game, and one of the first was considering the culling of the NPCs in The Witcher 3 -- but nope, can't do that. From there the team had to work a little harder, so they took a closer look at shadows and vegetation, because there's so much of it in The Witcher 3, and began cutting away.

Remedy managed to create one of the most spellbinding, bizarre, and unique games of 2019 with a small budget--and a smaller development timeline.

Making games is an expensive, time-consuming process. But when you're an indie dev like Remedy, you have to make a lot with a little. Development has to be streamlined and efficient, progress can't be scrapped too often, and every dollar has to be stretched as far as it can go. It's tough and often sees games being cancelled outright--or developers closing down.

To make Control, Remedy had a 30 million Euro budget ($33 million) and a three-year dev cycle. That's not a whole lot of cash, or a lot of time to make a game, especially not one as awesome as Control (sadly, another few months could've probably prevented the disastrous performance on consoles at launch). Games can take $50-100 million to make and have insane dev cycles of up to 10+ years.

Today Riot Games announced Riot Forge, a new initiative that recruits third-party indie studios to help make new League of Legends games.

Under Riot Forge, the studio is essentially conscripting third-party teams to help make new League of Legends games. They definitely need all the help they can get. Riot currently has a metric ton of new games in the works, including a hero shooter FPS game (yes, really), a Diablo-like ARPG, a mobile version of League of Legends, a card game, and even a fighting game.

Riot won't be working alone on these projects. With Riot Forge, the studio aims to make League of Legends into a multi-faceted IP focused on making tons of cash, whether it be from game sales or engagement-driven microtransactions. The latter is right up Tencent's alley--the company makes billions every year from massively successful mobile games.

Capcom won't reveal Resident Evil 3 Remake at The Game Awards 2019, host Geoff Keighley confirms.

Just yesterday we spotted some PSN images that confirm Resident Evil 3 Remake is happening, but the game won't be shown off at TGA 2019 as expected. The news comes from showrunner Geoff Keighley, who says none of the show's planned reveals have been leaked ahead of time.

"There are no plans (never were) to do anything with Resident Evil 3 at the show. A lot of these 'leaks' are completely wrong. Nothing about our show has leaked as of this writing," Keighley said in a recent Reddit AmA session.

Well, it seems Razer is some trouble right now -- with Kotaku receiving a bunch of emails from Razer staff, which see Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan threatening and abusing his staff.

Tan was mad that his company had reached the milestone of being one of the "Most Innovative Companies" in Fast Company's 2014 top list, seeing the Razer CEO rage at his staff. In an email as "part of an exchange obtained by Kotaku", Tan said to one of his marketing staff: "Are you guys fucking off?"

In a huge email reply from Greg Agius, Razer's director of marketing, Agius had a plan to get Tan "in front of Fast Company" so he could be pushed into the limelight as the "Asian Steve Jobs". But it gets worse... Agius was doing his job and told Tan an in-person media tour would've given the Razer CEO a much better chance of making Fast Company's list of Most Innovative Companies.

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over, Amazon is still slashing prices on select products, and some of those products are Apple's line of new MacBook Pro's.

Amazon was and still is the place to go if you want to pick up a brand new MacBook Pro for the lowest possible price. The reason why Amazon is so good in this regard is because right now, the 16-inch MacBook Pro is actually more discounted than it was on Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Amazon has brought the price of the Apple MacBook Pro (16-Inch, 16GB RAM, 512GB Storage) with an Intel Core i7 CPU to just $2,249 from $2,399, saving buyers $150 or 6%. The Apple MacBook Pro (16-Inch, 16GB RAM, 1TB Storage) with an Intel Core i9 CPU is cheaper again -- currently priced at $2,588.93 from $2,799, saving buyers $210.07 or 8%. I'd imagine these deals aren't going to last for long since they are best deals on MacBook Pro's going around.

About two weeks ago, Feral Interactive announced that it would be releasing the port of Creative Assembly's Alien: Isolation on the Nintendo Switch. Now that the title has released, could this be the best Nintendo Switch port yet?

Digital Foundry has put the Alien: Isolation port for the Nintendo Switch under the microscope, and what they have found is truly impressive. Usually, porting companies like Panic Button do a great job at porting over heavy games such as DOOM to the Switch, but with these ports are obvious downgrades in visuals and performance.

Alien: Isolation is an outlier in this regard, as Digital Foundry has found many parts of it that are better than the original releases on the Xbox One and PS4. Digital Foundry says, "in reality the Switch version looks substantially cleaner in motion, and this is due to a reliance on a more modern accumulation temporal anti-aliasing solution. This approach massively reduces in-surface aliasing and edge shimmering to the point where it looks flat out better than the original console releases."

NASA has got the results back from their Parker Solar Probe flyby, and they have shined a new light on how space weather works.

Surprisingly, the results contradicted some expectations that scientists had regarding how solar winds behave. According to the results, there are flips in the Sun's magnetic field direction called "switchbacks", which can sometimes even point the winds back at the Sun. At the moment, the cause of these "switchbacks" is still unknown to scientists, but through the understanding of them, we could learn a deeper understanding of how stars are born.

Scientists were again shocked at the discovery of solar winds traveling at speeds that are "nearly ten times larger than predicted by the standard models", said Justin Kasper, principal investigator at the University of Michigan. Scientists also discovered that the Sun's radiation vaporizes dust particles at about 3.5 million miles around itself. The Parker Probe is at the moment suffering in terribly hot conditions, but scientists say the information that it is providing them is revolutionary.

If you have traveled to different countries and encountered a strong language barrier, then you would understand how much of a hassle it can be trying to work out simple things like directions.

Luckily, that problem can now be solved with the ONE Mini. The ONE Mini was created from a $100,000 Kickstarter campaign that birthed what is now fully called the ONE Mini Pocket Multilingual Assistant. This pocket-sized device allows users to translate languages in real-time and is a fantastic purchase for any avid traveler.

The device has the ability to translate 12 different foreign languages and also comes with a multitude of features. The device comes with artificial intelligence that captures the audio that has been spoken, and then produces extremely accurate text or audio in the requested language. Most likely, the best feature of the ONE Mini is that upon purchasing, users will gain access to a 24/7 live interpreter service that can assist in more complex conversations.

While Red Dead Redemption 2's map is already massive, what if it could get bigger and maybe even traverse into the Mexican region?

Well, that could actually happen as Red Dead Redemption 2 players have data mined the game and found some quite peculiar game files that point directly to that. Posted this past Tuesday on the GTAforums, VideoTechUK decided to data-mine the PS4 version (1.0.0) to see if he could find some unused locations. To his surprise, he managed to find a slew of Mexican map models that are disabled by Rockstar, but left in the game.

Not only were models of Mexican locations found in the game files, but another user, WildBrick142, was able to find "references to map region outlines in the minimap scaleform, unfortunately, the actual outline graphics for them were deleted". Now the juicy question should be asked -- did Rockstar initially plan to use these Mexican locations and then decided to scrap them? If so, why leave the models inside the game files to take up more HDD space? Another theory could be -- Rockstar is planning on expanding Red Dead Redemption 2 at some stage with a brand new region.

Ford and McDonald's are pairing up for a planet sustaining project. McDonald's will be giving their coffee bean husks to the car manufacturer so they can be recycled into parts.

Ford and McDonald's have teamed up to make use of the excessive coffee bean chaff that McDonald's generates. Instead of the husks being thrown into the bin and becoming landfill, Ford will be taking the coffee chaff from McDonald's and heating it to high temperatures while mixing in other ingredients such as plastic to create durable products. These products will then help the company make car parts that are 20% lighter and more "greener".

Ford discovered that recycled coffee chaff is "significantly better" heat properties than the current material that is used in Ford's vehicles. Ford has also said that when the recycled coffee is in large development, they will be able to enjoy 25% energy saving on the entire process. At the moment, McDonald's alone produces 62 million pounds of coffee chaff each year, which seems like plenty of resources for other car companies to jump on the greener alternative.

Nintendo answers your holiday pleas with some new retro Switch Online games...including Crystalis on NES.

The only reason anyone buys the $20 a year Switch Online service is to play old-school NES and SNES games. Nintendo knows it, and that's why we're getting six new games on the service--that's six total, not six for each platform.

The lineup is a nice eclectic mix that has something for everyone, especially if you love classic RPGs like Crystalis (which just so happens to be one of the best games on the platform).

Hyundai Motor just announced it is making a truly gigantic investment into the future of transportation, with a $52 billion investment into flying cars, self-driving cars, and electric cars.

The investment is a push to see Hyundai Motor, which owns both Hyundai and Kia, to become a "frontrunner in the future mobility industry". The company said it wants to evolve from being just an "automaker" to a "smart mobility solution provider" by 2025.

Hyundai Motor will use the $52 billion investment into flying cars, which will fly into our lives in the form of something Hyundai calls personal air vehicles, robotics, and last-mile mobility. But there will be significant resources pumped into the R&D of electric vehicles to compete against other automakers, and especially industry-leaders and trendsetters in Tesla Motors.

It seems that just before Christmas kicks off and this decade ends, hype for the PlayStation 5 has kicked off again with some online retailers offering up sign-ups to the pre-orders on the next-gen PS5 console.

Now while this won't be an actual pre-order, it acts as the retailer more or so saying "so the PlayStation 5 pre-orders will begin soon, get your name down now so you can pre-order it when we're ready". It's another tidbit of news, and it seems this generation the hype is being driven 100x more than the previous-gen consoles.

As for the stores offering sign-ups to the pre-orders, we have Best Buy in the US, GAME in the UK, Dustinhome in Norway and then Game Mania and Ned Game both in the Netherlands.

Walking around the demo rooms at the Snapdragon Summit here in Maui, Hawaii -- I found something really interesting. Qualcomm had a Snapdragon 865 powered pinball machine on display, and it was kinda really cool.

The pinball machine has a huge LCD display in place of all the mechanics and physical parts of a real pinball machine, physically hooked up to a reference design Qualcomm Snapdragon 865-powered smartphone.

Qualcomm housed the Snapdragon 865 smartphone inside of the skateboard on top of the pinball machine, something that looks nice at the front -- but I snapped some photos on the back, too.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer brought home a Project Scarlett console and it's now his primary gaming system. This bodes extremely well for the system's backward compatibility.

Today Phil Spencer sent out a curious Tweet. The Xbox exec has a functioning Project Scarlett console at his home (like a devkit, or a very early consumer prototype build) that works well enough that it's replaced his other Xbox hardware. If it's replaced current-gen hardware, and no games have been released for next-gen, this practically means Scarlett's backwards compatibility is stable enough to run Xbox One games. Phil of course has access to all kinds of pre-release demo builds that gamers will never get their mitts on, but the observation still sands.

"This week I brought my Project Scarlett console home and it's become my primary console, playing my games, connecting to the community and yes, using my Elite Series 2 controller," Spencer said in the Tweet.

Ever wanted to bring a friend along into your Outlast nightmare? Red Barrels has you covered.

A new Outlast game is on the horizon, but it's pretty different than what we're used to. Instead of a totally singleplayer mind-bending horrorfest, the new Outlast lets you bring along some friend. It's called The Outlast Trials, is set during the Cold War and it features four-player co-op for tantalizing terror.

This time around there's no camera. Test subjects (aka players) have night-vision goggles strapped to their heads and are apparently trapped in an underground chasm. You could be American soldiers captured and subjected to nightmarish tortures--or the reverse, a Communist put through mind-breaking experiments on American soil.

Qualcomm may have launched a trio of new SoCs at its annual Snapdragon Summit, including the new Snapdragon 765, 765G and flagship Snapdragon 865 -- but mobile gaming and esports are a huge focus, too.

Let's start with the fact that gaming accounts for a gigantic 43% of all smartphone use, but an even larger (and more eye-opening) 74% of all app store spend. ThIs is serious business, and there are tens of billions of dollars per year to be made -- and it is all continuing to grow.

When it comes to esports, Qualcomm noted during its Snapdragon Summit that they expect 518 million esports viewers in 2020, which is a huge deal.