Latest News - Page 1769

Epic Games is pushing out an update for Fortnite that will provide more performance for gamers with higher-end hardware, with the game getting DirectX 12 support.

Fortnite's new update will include DX12 support that will see "higher and steadier" frame rates, with Epic Games offering up better CPU performance and better distribution of 3D rendering tasks across multiple cores.

Epic isn't finished with the DX12 optimizatrions in Fortnite, with the developer promising to continue "adding features to Fortnite that are made possible by DX12. Allowing players to opt into DX12 before these features are added will give us valuable information in our development efforts and help us shake out any bugs".

ASUS has just announced its new ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X W730 laptop, with some incredibly beefy specs up on offer with an OLED display, Intel Xeon CPU, and NVIDIA Quadro GPU.

The new ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X W730 arrives with a large 17.3-inch OLED display with a native 1920 x 1200 resolution, in what ASUS calls a NanoEdge display -- for those slim bezels. The display itself covers 97% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, is Pantone Validated, and factory-calibrated to a Delta E<1.5 accuracy -- something not often seen on laptops.

ASUS uses an Intel Xeon E-2276M processor, an 8C/16T chip clocked between 2.8GHz and 4.7GHz with 12MB of cache, while the GPU goes to a glorious NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB of GDDR6. There's also a huge 64GB of DDR4-2666 RAM inside, and 4TB of storage to boot (this is done between 2 x PCIe 3.0-based x4 SSDs and 1 x HDD).

So it appears Rick from Rick and Morty has the only PC capable of running Crysis -- with the recent episode of the show 'The Old Man and the Seat' seeing Rick use one of his computers to perform a "reverse digestion extrapolation"... or a sh*t analysis, in laymen's terms.

Rick boots up his system and that's when we get a look at the specs, which are pretty insane. Rick is using a 128-bit CPU from AMD, while in the real-world we're limited to 64-bit right now with consumer AMD processors. It's not out of the realm of reality but it shows that Rick has a system that far outpaces your AMD Ryzen or Intel Core CPUs.

The system has 400TB of NVMe M.2 SSDs which once again is pretty crazy, but it's not petabytes of storage while Rick has 3,584,825,480GB of RAM. Rick isn't using Windows either, as he uses a Linux-based OS in Debian.

The latest rumor on Sony's launch date for the PlayStation 5 is November 20, 2020 and priced at $499 -- but what games will launch with the PS5? According to the latest rumor we will see Gran Turismo 7 as a launch title for the PlayStation 5 on November 20, 2020.

The new rumor comes from Twitter user PSERebus, who reported the November 20, 2020 launch date for the PS5 -- the same day Gran Turismo 7 launches. All the tweet said was: "Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) will publish Gran Turismo 7 on November 20, 2020 for the PlayStation 5 (PS5)".

Back in April 2019 we heard that Gran Turismo 7 would be work on the next-gen PlayStation VR 2.0 headset, something that should launch with the next-gen PlayStation 5 console. This would be another huge win for Sony, getting a next-gen Gran Turismo from Polyphony Digital for its next-gen PS5 and PSVR 2.0 products in November 2020.

You might not have heard about Heliogen before, but you will soon if their new technology continues breaking barriers -- the Bill Gates-backed energy startup has successfully concentrated solar energy at "breakthrough" temperatures breaching 1000C (1832F), making it hot enough that it could replace fossil fuels in industrial tasks like producing cement and steel.

Heliogen is tapping AI in the form of computer vision to precisely align a bunch of mirrors to reflect sunlight on a single target, therefore concentrating all of the sun's energy into one point. Until now, this wasn't exactly possible and it's what Heliogen has done differently - and successfully.

At their commercial facility in Lancaster, California, Heliogen experienced what is just our first taste at the realms of replacing fossil fuels by using carbon-free, ultra-high temperature heat from the sun, transforming that sunlight into fuels. Before now, commercial concentration of sunlight have only reached 565C (1049F) -- but Heliogen's work here saw them hit 1000C (1832F). These temperatures are normally only reached by burning fossil fuels, making this a big breakthrough.

DICE's Frostbite engine is like an unwieldy weapon. In the right hands it's tremendously powerful, but for the most part it's heavy and hard to control. The engine is great for shooters, but not so much for the kind of RPGs BioWare likes to make. Now ex-BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn talks about how Frostbite both enabled and inhibited the studio during Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda's development.

In 2010, BioWare made the decision to switch from its internal Eclipse games engine over to EA's new standardized Frostbite from DICE. Frostbite was complex, potent, and had lots of potential, but it was a thorn in BioWare's side from the start. The engine is extremely powerful and can create some incredible atmospheric effects and physics systems wrapped in high-fidelity graphics. But there was so, so much that was missing from it: Frostbite wasn't built for RPGs, and BioWare had to create a lot of its UI, camera, and basic RPG systems from scratch. With how much work and iteration BioWare had to do on the new engine, it's a miracle that Dragon Age: Inquisition even shipped at all.

Now in a recent talk at Reboot Develop Red, Aaryn Flynn shares what it was like to use Frostbite to make games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Destiny 2: The Collection has been rated by PEGI for consoles and PC, indicating an incoming release.

Right now Destiny 2 isn't sold as a complete package anywhere except for Stadia. To get everything Destiny 2 has to offer, you need to buy Forsaken at $20 and then Shadowkeep at $35. It's a bit confusing for new players who jump into Destiny 2's free-to-play New Light version and want to continue their progress, only finding out a good portion of the game is locked.

Now Bungie wants to remedy that with a GOTY-styled collection that gives buyers access to everything. The Destiny 2 collection comes with the base game, Curse of Osiris, Warmind, Forsaken, Shadowkeep, and the annual season pass. No pricing has been confirmed yet, but expect to see it for at least $49.99 (maybe full-price at $59.99).

Diablo IV is meant to be the penultimate Diablo game, complete with Diablo III mechanics, Diablo II's style, and never-ending gameplay. Endgame progression is a huge part of that and now Blizzard discusses what could happen with their macabre sequel.

In a recent development update, Blizzard strongly hints Diablo IV will have a paragon-like system that allows gamers to keep progressing well after they hit the level 40 cap. "We haven't decided whether the character leveling and experience system should be finite or infinite. We've been discussing the pros and cons of both," Diablo IV lead systems designer David Kim said.

"We have a couple reasons for having a different experience system in addition to a level cap. A level cap gives us the ability to grant players a sense of completion. But for players who want to go deeper into the game, a second experience system allows us to capture the fun of achieving those really difficult endgame goals and ranks."

We already knew Saints Row V was in development, but now Deep Silver confirms the game will be shown off in 2020.

In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Koch Media boss Klemens Kundratitz confirmed Saints Row V will be unveiled in 2020, possibly at E3 2020.

"Saints Row is very close to our hearts, and we'll talk about it next year. For the time being, we just wanted to get the word out that it's coming and it's going to be great."

Microsoft's beefy Project Scarlett console may match the PS5's rumored $499 price tag.

Project Scarlett is shaping up to be a beast of a console. Microsoft says Scarlett will deliver 4x the performance of the Xbox One X's 6TFLOPs of compute power, and even 40x more performance than current Xbox systems, all thanks to its boosted internal Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU specs. It may even deliver 4K 120FPS gaming, complete with adaptive sync support. Typically this kind of tech leap is accompanied by a steep price tag, but new reports say Scarlett could cost as cheap as $499 when it ships in 2020.

The info comes from Twitter user PSErebus, whose track record includes accurately predicting The Last of Us Part II's original February 2020 release date (which has been delayed). Nothing has been confirmed by either Microsoft or Sony, so this is speculation at best.

Stadia's a hog that rampantly consumes data. This really isn't a surprise, though, and signs were all there from the beginning. We originally reported Google's new game-streaming service is set to demolish data caps in no time flat, and that the service's launch lineup includes some of the worst games to stream across any kind of data-restricted environment. But now we have actual incremental data usage consumption to illustrate Stadia's voracious appetite.

According to VentureBeat, Google Stadia can consume over 100MB per minute when streaming games in 1080p 60FPS. After 13 minutes of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 1080p 60FPS, the outlet says Stadia had used 1.55GB of data. And honestly in an intensely grindy, slow-burn game like Red Dead Redemption 2, 13 minutes accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Obviously how much data you use depends totally on the resolution you stream at. Stadia's resolution settings can be changed on-the-fly only in the mobile app, and the service allows three settings: 720p 60FPS, 1080p 60FPS, and 4K 60FPS (which is only available on Chromecast Ultra streaming to your TV, not on PC or mobile).

Now that it owns some of the best RPG-makers in the industry, Microsoft is in a unique position to kick off an RPG renaissance. Apparently that's exactly what they plan to do.

Microsoft knows it needs more first-party games. This goes double for RPGs. The company's aggressive acquisition spree will bear fruit in this regard, especially now that Obsidian Entertainment and inXile now hail under the Xbox flag. Microsoft now pledges to double-down on RPG development for the Xbox family of consoles in an attempt to recapture those olden Xbox and Xbox 360 days of yore.

In a recent interview with Xbox On, Microsoft's gaming leader Phil Spencer assures fans that more RPGs are on the way. He also teases some big surprises for the XO event in 2020.

The developers behind Detroit: Become Human have announced that their critically acclaimed title will be arriving on PC next month.

Quantic Dream, the developers behind other well-known titles such as Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls have said that their previously PlayStation-exclusive titles would be making their way over to PC. Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls have already made the transition, and now its time for Detroit: Become Human to as well.

PC gamers might be worried about the port being rushed and not delivered correctly. Well, I can put your worries aside for you, as we have confirmation by Quantic Dream co-founder that this is no sloppy port. According to Quantic Dream co-founder David Cage, "Porting the game to PC has been a tremendous challenge, as we wanted players to get the original experience without any compromise. So we entirely redesigned the interface and developed a new engine to offer 4K resolution and high quality rendering on a wide range of PCs."

NVIDIA told me at E3 2019 during the GeForce RTX SUPER unveiling that there would NOT be a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SUPER, but according to the latest rumors it appears that the RTX 2080 Ti SUPER is really coming and it'll be a BEAST.

The latest rumors are coming from kopite7kimi on Twitter, who has leaked out other information on the previous RTX SUPER and GTX 16 graphics cards from NVIDIA. The new rumor pegs up some specs on the card with NVIDIA reportedly using the full Turing TU102 GPU with a mean 4608 CUDA cores, 576 tensor cores, 72 RT cores, 288 texture units, and 96 ROPs and even-faster 16Gbps GDDR6 memory.

We should expect NVIDIA to go above and beyond with the amount of GDDR6, with the non-SUPER GeForce RTX 2080 Ti having 11GB of GDDR6 the new purported RTX 2080 Ti could have 11-16GB of GDDR6. I would like to see it with 12GB minimum, but rather 16GB -- it provides a nice buffer between the insane 24GB of GDDR6 on the flagship TITAN RTX.

SpaceX seems to have just breathed life into its biggest rocket yet, the full-size Starship Mk1 vehicle. Are we ready to take off yet?

Perhaps not just yet, but the preliminary testing before take-off is underway. According to onlookers of the Starship testing at SpaceX's facilities near South Texas town Boca Chica, the Starship prototype entered a pressure testing phase. Above, we have a video from the NASASpaceflight YouTube Channel, who captured SpaceX employees working on Starship and then it's first-ever vent test.

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk has said that the Starship Mk1 will be companies deep-space transportation vehicles and that the rockets used aboard the ship will be reusable to minimalize flight costs. Starship is 165-feet tall and uses SpaceX's biggest rocket yet, the Super Heavy. SpaceX recently got selected by NASA to work on the Artemis lunar program to design a lunar lander, check out that article here.

It looks like we have a final date for Sony launching its next-gen PlayStation 5 console, with a new rumor saying the PS5 will launch in the US on November 20, 2020 -- for a price of $499.

Gran Turismo 7 will reportedly be a PlayStation 5 launch title, with the game launching on November 20, 2020 as well. The new rumor is from the PSErebus Twitter account, which teased: "Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) will launch PlayStation 5 (PS5) in several countries in the holiday season of 2020 and will make PlayStation 5 (PS5) available in North America on November 20, 2020 at a recommended retail price (RRP) or $499".

Another thing is that Sony may have been a little too quiet at E3 2019 earlier this year, but the hype quickly ramped up for the PlayStation 5 and now it's being said that E3 2020 will be a hot spot for details on the PS5. Sony CEO Shawn Layden recently said in an interview with GameInformer: "Just because PlayStation is not at E3 2019 doesn't mean we won't be there in 2020".

Following up on my post from a few days ago, as expected The Game Awards have released the official nominees for 2019.

Just this past Monday, Geoff Keighley, the showrunner for the annual Game Awards ceremony, announced that on Tuesday, we would be receiving the full list of the games that have been nominated in their respective categories. Well, now that its Tuesday we have that list and it's quite a long one. To keep things short and sweet, I'll only be mentioning the titles in the first two categories, Game of the Year and Best Game Direction.

The titles that have been nominated for Game of the Year are as follows, Remedy's Control, Kojima Productions' Death Stranding, Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Capcom's Resident Evil 2 Remake, FromSoftware's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Obsidian's The Outer Worlds. For Best Game Direction, all the previously mentioned titles are nominated. The full list for each of the award categories is provided in the entirety of this article. If you want to participate in voting, a link to the voting website can be found here.

Since humans could see there were other planets nearby, we have always wanted to pursue these distant worlds, but what are the risks of traveling there?

NASA has recently conducted a new study on astronauts that spent some time on the International Space Station (ISS) and returned back to Earth. The study showed evidence of the human being affected by low-gravity, and more specifically, in the astronaut's upper body. The study looked at eleven astronauts, nine men and two women who spent an average of six months aboard the ISS.

NASA used ultrasounds on the astronauts and found that by the 50th day aboard the floating lab that seven of the eleven astronauts had a lack of blood flowing through their internal jugular vein. The study also found that the blood sometimes even went in reverse. For those that don't know what the internal jugular vein is, it's a vital vein located on the side of your neck that collects blood from the brain and face. NASA also found that one of the astronauts developed clotting in the vein while still in flight back to Earth.

So what happens when we run out of food due to climate change pushing us in that direction? A Swedish scientist has said that we should consider the idea of eating human flesh.

A Swedish scientist called Soderlund spoke throughout an interview on the State Swedish Television channel TV4. Throughout his interview he gave a power-point presentation called "Can you Imagine Eating Human Flesh?". As you can imagine this power-point included many topics that pointed towards cannibalism being the solution to the ill effects of climate change.

Soderlund explained that he isn't calling for people to go out and kill their neighbours and eat their corpses for dinner like humans did back in ancient times. Instead, he argues that over time food sources will become more scarce which would then result in people having to think outside the box to obtain food. That outside of the box thinking would first start with humans consuming pets, insects and then eventually other humans. The scientist believes that if people were introduced to human flesh over a long period of time there wouldn't be that much of a resistance.

Scientists have been pondering the origins of life since they have had the mental capacity to do so. Today we have been brought one step closer to the answer.

A team of scientists has made a brand new breakthrough discovery regarding the origins of life and how they occurred on Earth. The team has found ribose, arabinose, and xylose sugars in two different meteorites, which has now been added to an already growing list of biologically relevant compounds that have been found in space rocks. Ribose is a critical component of RNA (ribonucleic acid), and in modern life, RNA is the messenger molecule that copies genetic instructions from DNA.

Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University, Japan, lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said "Other important building blocks of life have been found in meteorites previously, including amino acids (components of proteins) and nucleobases (components of DNA and RNA), but sugars have been a missing piece among the major building blocks of life. The research provides the first direct evidence of ribose in space and the delivery of the sugar to Earth. The extraterrestrial sugar might have contributed to the formation of RNA on the prebiotic Earth which possibly led to the origin of life."