Latest News - Page 1775

Tesla pushed out a new over-the-air update to its entire electric vehicle line up, offering some big upgrades across the board in different ways. But there was one, for the Model 3 and its acceleration upgrade, that saw a drag race showing a clear winner.

Model S owners will get a little bit more range from the new update to their EV, with the Tesla Model S range increasing from 373 miles to 380 miles. SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO and founder Elon Musk said during Tesla's recent earnings call: "And there are some software improvements that we think will make that even better".

Musk added: "I forgot to mention, we're also expecting there's going to be an over-the-air improvement that will improve the power of the Model S, X, and 3. It should be in the order of 5 percent power improvement due to improved firmware". Not too bad for an update to your vehicle, right?

A new patch has just enabled AMD FidelityFX technology for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with the new Patch 18 update offering the option of FidelityFX to Radeon graphics card owners.

FidelityFX enabled in Shadow of the Tomb Raider offers the option of enabling upsampling and/or sharpening, so while it might sound like simple Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS) on the outside -- reducing the resolution to boost FPS, it's more detailed than that.

AMD offers through FidelityFX the ability to developers to build specific features into their game engines, enabling developers to specify which part of the rendered game receives Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, or CAS. This means developers can fine tune their game with FidelityFX to have sharpening to the game but not the HUD, whereas RIS would just sharpen the entire image including the HUD.

Doom creator John Romero has one simple bit of advice for FPS developers: Quality over quantity.

FPS games today typically have two trajectories: The long-winded live service approach, which inundates players with tons of varieties and ways to upgrade guns, and singleplayer experiences, which are more straightforward and streamlined. But either way modern FPS games suffer from a needless complication: Too many guns.

At least that's how John Romero feels about shooters these days. Shooters need to create a kind of intimate bond between the player and their guns--after all, your rifle is your only friend out there in the bloody wilderness. It's hard to get attached to weapons when there's so many to choose from. "I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don't identify with. I would rather spend more time with a gun and make sure the gun's design is really deep - that there's a lot of cool stuff you learn about it," John Romero said in a recent interview with The Guardian.

Sonic is looking more like himself in a new film trailer from Paramount.

A new Sonic trailer reveals the blue blur's brand new look, and it's pretty good. Gone is the freakish, anthropomorphized body shape and the absolutely terrifying face. Paramount Pictures has made good on its promise and dramatically redesigned the ultra-fast hedgehog with a more cartoonish look.

Replacing all of Sonic's scenes with the new design took its toll, though, and the team has been working tremendously hard to ensure the film hits its delayed February 2020 release date. Fans everywhere approve of Sonic's new look and are praising the production studio for its efforts. There's even authentic Sonic music and sound effects straight from SEGA's beloved retro classics.

Antec has just unveiled its latest P120 Crystal chassis, a new member of their Performance family of cases that continues the minimalist design of the Performance Series, but takes things -- in Antec's words "to the next level". Check out their video on the P120 Crystal:

The one thing that has me here is that Antec is saying goodbye to thumbscrews, with the P120 Crystal using an interesting slide button design on the tempered glass side panel.

You can quickly get inside of your new Antec P120 Crystal PC this way, without having to undo a couple of thumbscrews.

The fourth season for Rick and Morty has just kicked off, and what better way to celebrate its release than with some awesome mechanize?

The premier for Rick and Morty season 4 has finally kicked off and as a celebration for the long-awaited season Adult Swim have partnered with Spencer's for a new T-shirt line. According to the above announcement by Spencer's on the Twitter account, the clothing company will be bringing out a new T-shirt representative of every episode in season 4.

The first T-shirt can be seen above, and it shows off Holographic Rick, and while I won't be spoiling what scene this is from in the episode, I can say that its an excellent idea for a T-shirt. Spencer's is currently running a 'buy one, get 50% off' deal on Rick and Morty mechanize. Spencer's will be picking iconic moments from each of the episodes, and placing them on T-shirts as they run until December 15th.

Warner Bros has dropped a new teaser trailer for their upcoming animated Scooby-Doo movie called Scoob! The trailer shows off that the iconic duo is bound for a space adventure.

From the trailer, we can see that the movie takes place all the way back when Shaggy and Scooby were just a kid and a puppy. It also touches on how Shaggy and Scooby first met, and of course, the catalyst for their everlasting friendship was one of their iconic sandwiches. During their first meeting, we also find out how Scooby gets his name and how the rest of Mystery Incorporated gets brought into the picture.

So who will be voicing each of the Mystery gang? Frank Welker will be voicing Scooby-Doo, Shaggy will be voiced by Will Forte, Fred will be voiced by Zac Efron, Daphne by Amanda Seyfried, and Velma by Gina Rodriguez. Alongside those voice actors, stars such as Mark Wahlberg, Ken Jeong, and Tracy Morgan will also be present in the film. Scoob! is expected to hit theatres on May 15th, 2020.

A new report out of the Wall Street Journal has suggested that Google has access to and is collating millions of patients' sensitive health information.

The WSJ reports that Ascension, a company with the second-largest health system in the United States, is currently in partnership with Google. This partnership involves Ascension sharing lab results with Google regarding patients' hospitalization records, health histories, names, dates of birth, and more.

According to a person close to the partnership, the project has been called "Project Nightingale" and that reportedly 150 Google employees have access to tens of millions of health records. But why? Google is said to be using the data to feed into new AI-driven software that will be able to make accurate suggestions for patients. It's said that Google wants to eventually be able to develop a searchable cloud-based tool that will be able to examine patient data at large.

It was only a few days ago that we were teased with some renders of what could be PlayStation 5 cartridges, with 1TB/2TB/3TB of super-fast SSD storage on offer. Now the fine and talented folks at LetsGoDigital have some gorgeous new 3D renders.

It would surely make things interesting, but Derek pointed out that this tech would most likely be part of Sony's own line of electronic children toys. But, if we step into an alternate reality for a second and take these at face value -- Sony will have super-fast PCIe 4.0-based SSDs in cartridge form (for whatever reason) for the next-gen PlayStation 5 console.

If we go with that, Sony would have 3 different sizes on offer with 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB -- all a huge upgrade over the stock 1TB storage in the PS4 Pro and even more so with the 500GB in the original PS4.

Tencent wants to use its partnership with Nintendo to not only bring the Nintendo Switch to China but also learn how to make good games with Nintendo characters.

Well, at least that is what an undisclosed Tencent employee has told the Wall Street Journal. According to this unnamed employee, Tencent wants to "expand from China" by building console games for both the US and Europe. To do this the company wants to "create console games with Nintendo characters" while also "learn the essence of making console games from Nintendo engineers."

If you don't know Nintendo, the company is notorious for not letting any of their IP slip out from their control. Let alone let another company coming into their home, taking their characters to put in their own games while also learning what it takes to make great console games. Knowing that, you can see that it doesn't seem very likely that Nintendo will be working with Tencent as closely as the unnamed employee hopes they will be.

Researchers are currently designing an extremely unusual but still awesome spacecraft for NASA. The spacecraft resembles a stingray, but it's not all just for show.

Researchers out of the University of Buffalo are designing the Bio-inspired Ray for Extreme Environments and Zonal Explorations (BREEZE). This is a project that has been selected by NASA to receive funding as it has the potential of changing space exploration forever. The researchers designing the spacecraft are envisioning a morphing spacecraft that can flap its wings and make efficient use of the high winds that are in Venus' upper atmosphere.

Researchers are planning on having BREEZE circumnavigate Venus every four to six days, with solar panels also located on the hull it can charge over two to three days on the planets illuminated side. This solar energy would be stored and then power the other instruments that will take atmospheric samples, track weather patterns, monitor volcanic activity, and more.

Just this past Monday, astronomers viewed Mercury sliding past the face of our Sun in quite a rare celestial event.

Astronomers equipped themselves to see the most inner-planet in our solar system go in-between Earth and the Sun. From the above image, we can see a tiny black dot, that's Mercury in comparison to the size of the Sun. US, Canada, and Central and South America managed to get the transition for around 5.5 hours, while Asia and Australia only got a brief show.

Why is this a rare transition? Due to the orbit of Mercury, astronomers don't expect to this occur until 2032, and North America, in particular, won't be able to see it again until 2049. Unfortunately, there was some weather coverage in Maryland for NASA solar astrophysicist Alex Young, he said "It's a bummer, but the whole event was still great. Both getting to see it from space and sharing it with people all over the country and world." A set of images have been provided in the entirety of this article.

On Monday, SpaceX's Falcon rocket took off to the stars, and aboard the rocket was Starlink mini-satellites. 60 mini-satellites in total to be precise.

The satellites aboard the Falcon rocket are just 575 pounds each (260kg), and have joined the other 60, which were launched back in May. Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and chief executive eventually wants to have thousands of these Starlink satellites floating around in orbit, as the plan is to offer the world a global high-speed internet connection everywhere.

Not only are there 60 more Starlink satellites now in orbit, but SpaceX also achieved two new milestones with this launch. This launch was the first time SpaceX flew a rocket with a previously used nose cone and an orbital booster that has been used three times previously. According to Musk, "These boosters are designed to be used 10 times. Let's turn it around for a fifth, guys".

AMD recently announced and will soon launch its new third-gen Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, where we will eventually see up to 64C/128T on the desktop courtesy of the new sTRX4 socket -- a new socket from AMD that is actually worthy of being called "future-proof".

The reason we're able to call AMD's new sTRX4 socket 'future-proof' is that the company itself has confirmed on Reddit that sTRX has AMD's support in both "near- and long-term basis". AMD confirmed that while the new socket has the same 4094 pin count as the previous-gen Threadripper CPUs, it is the "mapping of those pins to voltage or data will be different" with sTRX4.

AMD confirmed you can't install a third-gen Ryzen Threadripper into an older motherboard, and you can't use an older Ryzen Threadripper CPU in a new sTRX4 motherboard. Now, before you get all mad and claim "this isn't how it should be done!" there are two reasons for this. AMD explains:

Qualcomm will unveil its next-gen Snapdragon 865 (and I'm sure much more) at its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit in Maui, Hawaii in just a few weeks -- but ahead of the event, we have some details of the new Snapdragon 865 to share.

New rumors suggest that Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 865 will have quite a few upgrades, one of which will be the upgraded GPU in the new Adreno 650. Qualcomm's current, and already fast Snapdragon 855 and Snapdragon 855+ feature Adreno 640 GPUs, but the new Adreno 650 will have a GPU clock of 587MHz -- providing 17-20% more performance over the Snapdragon 855-powered Adreno 640.

Remember that's versus the Snapdragon 855 and not the tweaked Snapdragon 855+ that powers the ASUS ROG Phone II, so we should expect maybe 10-15% faster than the Snapdragon 855+ with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 865.

Magic Leap is in the headlines in all the wrong ways right now, with the beyond secretive company signing over all of its patents 2 months ago now, to JPMorgan Chase as collateral.

Documents filed with the US Patent & Trademark Office on August 22 saw a huge 1903 patents from Magic Leap, and its various holdings companies including Mentor Acquisitions, LLC and Molecular Imprints Inc. were assigned to JPMorgan Chase. The patent security agreement was signed by Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz and JPMorgan Chase collateral agent Eleftherios Karsos.

The bigger issue here is that Magic Leap has burned through its gigantic $2.6 billion in funding so far, as well as its latest funding round of $280 million from Japan's NTT Docomo earlier this year.

Acer has just joined the Large Format Gaming Display (LFGD) game with its new Predator CG437K P available in the US for $1499.

The new Acer Predator CG437K P is a larger-than-life 43-inch monitor with a native 4K resolution, so we're looking at 3840 x 2160, with a super-fast 144Hz refresh rate. Acer is also providing DisplayHDR 1000 certification on its VA panel, with the native 120Hz refresh overclockable to 144Hz.

Acer supports both NVIDIA G-SYNC and AMD FreeSync/Adaptive Sync with the Predator CG437K P, with G-SYNC supported over the DisplayPort cable while Adaptive Sync/FreeSync is offered over the HDMI connection if you want to plug in an Xbox One console.

Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+ earlier this year, following it up with the larger and feature-packed Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy Note 10+ but what about 2020 flagship phones?

Well, the new Galaxy S11 specs that are leaking out sound delicious -- with 5G connectivity, bigger batteries, a huge 108-megapixel camera, and more teased. Notorious leaker "evleaks" AKA Evan Blass has said that Samsung will launch 3 different Galaxy S11 smartphones in February 2020.

We should expect a 6.4-inch, 6.7-inch, and 6.9-inch Galaxy S11 spread of phones which are a decent bump over the 5.8-inch, 6.1-inch, and 6.4-inch offered by the Galaxy S10e, Galaxy S10, and Galaxy S10+ respectively. But what's inside, is what'll impress.

The hype train for NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere GPU is really starting to gain traction, with new rumors fueling the release window of Ampere in 2020.

We heard about the purported GeForce RTX 3000 series cards not too long ago now, with NVIDIA reportedly preparing the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, GeForce RTX 3080, and GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards for 2020. But the big question is when exactly, in 2020?

Raymond James analyst Chris Caso has said that NVIDIA reportedly pushed Ampere back by a few months, with Team Green aiming for a GTC 2020 reveal and Computex 2020 release. Caso adds that Ampere will be introduced at GTC 2020 in a big way as an AI/datacenter/HPC product, and then an Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 series family of cards will launch in the months after.

Peripheral-maker 8Bitdo (the same company who made a Switch controller with two d-pads) brings another wacky creation to the table: a NES controller mouse.

8Bitdo's new N30 mouse has a very familiar design. It's literally molded after an old-school NES controller from the 80s, complete with two telltale red buttons for right and mouse click, and a D-pad fastened to the side for PageUp/PageDown web page navigation.

The N30 is wireless and runs on a single AA battery, and sports 1,000 DPI with a 2.4GHz dongle that works from up to 10 meters away. There's also a nifty touch-based scroll slider in the middle in lieu of a scroll wheel.