Latest News - Page 1804

Just last week I reported on Super Mario Odyssey being able to run on the PC at a stable 60FPS. Well, now we have another Nintendo Switch exclusive title that can also run at a solid 60FPS on PC, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.

Just like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening uses the Nintendo Switch emulator called Yuzu, and from the above gameplay video you can see the title is running very smoothly on PC. The reason for Link's Awakening and Odyssey running so smooth on this emulator is because of a new update that has introduced a brand new version of asynchronous GPU emulation, buffing performance for many Nintendo Switch titles.

How does the asynchronous GPU emulation work? Basically, the update allows for the game to utilize a second core to offload emulated GPU instructions, allowing for users' CPU to concentrate on more CPU bound tasks. You might notice that there are some visual artifacts displayed throughout the game, while this might be a slight downside to look at, I believe this is a small price to pay for a stable and very much playable game.

The professional gaming scene, or better known as eSports has been thrown right into the mix of a polical debate after Blizzard has banned one of their pro-players after he voiced his opinion on the Hong Kong protests.

During a post-match interview, Hearthstone pro-player Ng Wai Chung, or known as his gamer-tag 'Blitzchung' spoke out about the current protests that are running rampant in Hong Kong. The interview was held on the official Taiwanese Hearthstone stream and Chung appeared on camera wearing a gas mask, he then lifted the mask and said "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!" Blizzard has now come in and banned Chung for violating rules that forbid players from saying anything that "offends a portion or group of the public" or "otherwise damages" Blizzard's image.

Blizzard has also eliminated Chung from the Hearthstone Grandmasters, removed his winnings from the tournament and stopped all work with the two Hearthstone commentators that are present in the video. So why the crackdown from Blizzard? It could perhaps be because China is a massive market for the company, and having any opinion associated with the current events that are occurring over there could cause the Chinese government to ban Blizzard from conducting any work in their country.

As technology advances in cameras, motion sensors and every other form. Users are looking for better ways to protect themselves and their homes via security. Linksys could have the new best way to do it.

Just this pas Tuesday, Linksys announced a brand new service called "Linksys Aware" which allows users to monitor their home for potential intruders. Linksys will be able to this through the Velop mesh routers which can detect the motion of invaders in users' homes through Wi-Fi. Linksys Velop Tri-Band AC2200 router has the ability to be able to detect motion with its "Intelligent MeshTM" network, which could eliminate that use for camera setups in homes.

So how does it work? The service will send push notifications to the users phone via the Linksys Smart Wi-Fi app for both Android and iOS holders. I know what you are thinking, "I don't want to get spammed with notifications of the dog or cat moving around the house", Linksys has already thought of this issue and has equipped the service with a sensitivity setting that won't detect these kind of small movements. Linksys Aware comes in at a price of $24.99 per year, and at the moment the home security option is only available on the Velop routers. Linksys does plan on moving the service over to its other router variants, but no date has been announced for that yet.

What would be your dream car? Usually the first thing that comes to mind is either a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. Well, according to new data that has been scraped American's most dreamed about car is not a Lamborghini or a Ferrari, it's in fact Tesla's Model S.

Above we have a map that shows geotagged Twitter data that has been scraped over the past three months (July to now). The data was collected by Autowise through tracking any mentions of "dream car" or #dreamcar. Then the data was organized into what car is most wanted by each state, the results are what you see above.

According to Autowise's data, six cars dominated conversations; Tesla Model S, Ford Mustang, Range Rover, Jeep Wrangler, Chevy Corvette and Chevy Camaro. The Tesla Model S absolutely dominated the scene with 20 states saying that this car was their dream car. Coming in at second place we have the Ford Mustang with 13 states, and following not-so-closely behind is the Range Rover with 6 states.

Doppio Games and Netflix has announced a new partnership to push the boundaries of voice-controlled gaming and entertainment. This partnership will focus in on the launch of 'The 3% Challenge', a voice-only game based on Netflix's original show.

'The 3% Challenge' is a prequel story to Netflix's critically acclaimed 3% series and will take players to 20 years before the events in the first season of the show. The game will require smart speakers such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant to play, and for fans wondering if the game will use the voice of the lead character in the show, it will. Bianca Comparato, who plays Michele in the show will be returning to voice-over the game.

The game will push players to make hard decisions that are described to be "custom-made voice-based challenges that test players' skills". It should also be noted that the games prequel story was written by the same people who wrote the show, Pedro Aguilera and Cassio Koshikumo. This means there should be no storyline confusion between the game and the show. Doppio Games' CEO and co-founder, Jeferson Valadares spoke out about the collaboration, saying "With AI changing the landscape of gaming, we are revolutionizing the gaming industry with captivating gaming experiences that can't be achieved on any other platforms."

Dark mode has now arrived on Instagram, and while users might be used to that slick white look that they have been ever so accustomed to, here's how to enable the black version.

Firstly, for you to get dark mode on Instagram users must have iOS 13 for Apple devices or Android 10 for Android devices. The first step will be making sure the Instagram app has updated to its latest version, so head on over to your respective store (App Store or Play Store) and update the app.

Once that has been completed, iPhone users can open their 'settings' app on their phone and head over to the Display and Brightness sub-tab, in here you will see 'Dark'. Android users can do something very similar, open settings, press Display, tap the Advanced tab and then select Dark. Adam Mosseri, the Head of Instagram via his Twitter account, his tweet can be found above. What do you think about Dark Mode? Personally, I love it!

I've been gaming since I was a very young kid, growing up with the Amiga 500 through to the NES through to every Xbox and PlayStation, the Colecovision, and being a PC gamer the entire time.

But how many gamers are there now? According to The NPD Group, a huge 73% of Americans are gamers. In their new report titled "2019 Evolution of Entertainment", The NPD Group reports that US gamers aged 2 years and older play games, noting a 6% increase since June 2018.

The survey also explains that gaming accounts to 17% of consumers' entertainment time, and a huge 11% of their overall spending on entertainment.

OnePlus seem to be gearing up for the announcement of the new McLaren Edition of their new flagship OnePlus 7T Pro smartphone, with the CEO of OnePlus practically unveiling it on Twitter.

OnePlus CEO Pete Lau took to his personal Twitter account with a simple image, which is definitely teasing the new OnePlus 7T Pro McLaren Edition smartphone. The previous-gen McLaren Edition handset for the 6T last year saw it with the beefiest specs of the 6T family of smartphones, with a black-and-orange McLaren-infused design, and ridiculously-fast 30W charging.

But with fast-charging taking the fast lane these days with companies like Vivo offering 120W fast-charging, and Samsung's new Galaxy Note 10+ supporting 25W out of the box and up to 45W with a specific charger, OnePlus will want to one-up the competition with the 7T Pro McLaren Edition smartphone.

John Wick is unstoppable at this point, just as he is in the franchise itself, with Lionsgate announcing that Len Wisemen will direct Ballerina -- a female-led spin-off of the hugely popular John Wick franchise.

Ballerina will be a story about a young female assassin, who like John Wick, seeks revenge -- except, she will be seeking revenge against the people who murdered her family. Shay Hatten will be writing the script, with Hatten's previous credits including Army of the Dead for Netflix (in which Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice director Zack Snyder is behind), as well as John Wick 3: Chapter 3 - Parabellum.

Keanu Reeves will be involved as an executive producer, as well as John Wick franchise director Chad Stahelski as a producer, with Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee joining Stahelski as producers on Ballerina. Reeves will be joined by Kaley Smalley as an executive director on Ballerina, who is the head of development for Wideman's own Sketch Films.

EA and Respawn will be getting into the Halloween spirit in the coming weeks with Apex Legends and its upcoming "Fight or Fright" event, with a bunch of Halloween-themed goodies.

There will be a new Shadowfall limited time mode, something that throws Kings Canyon into utter darkness, and then once players are killed they will turn into zombies. I really love the idea of that, it's a cool spin on the battle royale game introducing zombies.

It wouldn't be an event if EA couldn't make money off it, so there will be a bunch of new cosmetics that you can buy with real money -- from Apex Packs. You can create some of them with Crafting Metals earned in Apex Legends, or spend real money buying Apex Packs and scouring loot for the Halloween-themed goods.

Intel's next-gen Cascade Lake-X family of CPUs was unveiled lat week, with the new competitors to AMD's Ryzen Threadripper family of CPUs set to be a big one for Intel.

So big that the flagship Core i9-10980XE processor will reportedly rock a huge 5.1GHz all-core boost when cooled with liquid cooling. Intel's new Core i9-10980XE processor has a base CPU clock of 3GHz, Turbo Boost 2.0 clock of 4.6GHz boost, and an all-core boost of 3.8GHz boost under regular cooling.

Intel's EMEA Technical PR Manager, Mark Walton, told PCGamesN: "You can overclock the heck out of these and get some really interesting results. For example, we've had the 10980XE, the eighteen-core processor, up as high as 5.1GHz in the lab using standard liquid cooling. And that, I believe, is all cores".

Call of Duty: Mobile is now 'the largest mobile game launch in history' with over 100 million downloads since its launch on October 1.

This means Call of Duty: Mobile has outranked the huge mobile gaming juggernauts in Fortnite and PUBG, according to industry analyst outlet Sensor Tower. Randy Nelson, the head of mobile insights at Sensor Tower, told Reuters: "This is by far the largest mobile game launch in history in terms of the player base that's been built in the first week".

The 100 million downloads of Call of Duty: Mobile includes both the iOS and Android versions of the game, and accounts for worldwide numbers. If we compare the 100M downloads in the first week of Call of Duty: Mobile against PUBG and Fortnite, Call of Duty utterly dominates.

We have already heard rumors of Sony launching two next-gen PS5 consoles in 2020: the regular PlayStation 5 which will be joined by the PlayStation 5 Pro... but what would the big difference between them be?

According to the latest from LetsGoDigital and their new PlayStation 5 renders, which we covered here, the regular PS5 might not have a super-fast SSD. The higher-end PlayStation 5 Pro console would have the super-fast PCIe 4.0-based SSD while the regular PS5 will have, well, we don't know yet.

I doubt Sony would use a regular HDD so they could use a normal 2.5-inch SSD in the regular PS5 that maxes out at 500-550MB/sec, leaving the worlds of 4GB/sec+ speeds to the higher-end PS5 Pro.

The first round of 3D renders of the next-gen (and now confirmed) PlayStation 5 console by the fine folks at LetsGoDigital were amazing... but the team is back with some slick new renders that give us a closer look at what to expect from the PS5.

Sony confirmed the PlayStation 5 in the last 24 hours, so if you want to read up on that click here -- but now we're going to dive into these delicious new renders. Gizmodo broke a story last week from its sources that between June and August 2019, they talked with a game developer that is working on a next-gen game for the PS5 and Xbox Two consoles.

Let's start off at the front -- we can see the new PS5 renders show that it would have a stand-by button, and next to it a reset (or record) and eject button that will eject those huge 100GB Blu-ray BDXL discs. The three buttons are joined by two LED indicators above the Blu-ray drive.

Jedi: Fallen Order's PC spec requirements went up today, but EA erroneously listed 32GB as the game's RAM recommendation. The real recommendation is only 16GB.

EA's Star Wars team confused a lot of PC gamers today by accidentally listing the wrong system memory recommendations for Jedi: Fallen Order. The game was originally listed as recommending a huge 32GB of RAM, which of course made everything think Respawn hadn't properly optimized the game on PC. All the other PC specs are fine: minimum requirements sit at an i3-3220/FX-6100 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon HD 7750 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650. The recommended specs are also pretty mild and ask for a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU/Intel i7-6700K and a RX Vega 56 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU.

Now EA's Ben Walke jumps in to confirm it was an error. Jedi: Fallen Order recommends users have 16GB of on board RAM, matching up and balancing with the other specs.

UPDATE: Atari sent us word that the Atari VCS is still happening and on schedule, despite the departure of the lead hardware designer.

"The Atari VCS is proceeding according to its previously announced schedule. We remain confident in the Atari VCS as the entire team works diligently to bring forth its vision according to plan, and we will continue to communicate accordingly over the coming weeks and months, including hands-on presentations to key media and partners planned for later this fall."

Atari just lost the chief architect of its new VCS console after allegedly not paying the designer for six months.

Noctua, known for its excellent performance and quiet cooling solutions, today announced that the Chromax series will now be joined by blacked-out coolers as well. The models receiving the blacked-out treatment are the ever-popular NH-D15, the NH-U12S, and the NH-L9i.

Enthusiasts have long lambasted Noctua for having amazing coolers with a color choice they simply could not get behind. We ourselves have tested several Noctua coolers, and they regularly find themselves at the top of many charts, but styling, it's simply hard to justify brown and tan or whatever they want to call the original color scheme when very few if any components outside of Noctuas ecosystem are even offered in that color scheme.

I think I can speak for many enthusiasts when I say this is a welcome change and a sign that Noctua as a brand is genuinely listening to their customer base. Evidence of this can be found in the quote from the CEO Roland Mossig:

HP, the acclaimed purveyor of PC systems, printers, and other consumer and enterprise-level tech, announced it would move forward with plans to restructure and 'simplify operations.' The term 'simplify operations' is a cute way to say they want to lower headcount to match their business needs.

Needless to say, HP has seen a downturn in its formerly popular printing business as the world has become far more digital with less reliance on printers and printing technologies. HP has just made the planning announcements last week that they will be restructuring over the next three years and reducing overall headcount by 7000 - 9000 (up to 16%) employees.

This on the surface is not that uncommon as business units falter, companies will try to relocate or reposition employees to avoid the culling. But in this case, it appears between now and 2022, HP's goal is to make the necessary cuts. The strange part in all of this has to do with the fact that the board for HP just approved an extra budget of $5 billion for opportunistic repurchases of HP common stock.

The internet has been ablaze with the recent update from AMD in regards to both the 3950X and the upcoming third-gen Threadripper, or Threadripper 3000. We know that the top end AM4 CPU consisting of 16 cores and 32 threads, along with the HEDT platform of Ryzen 3000 Threadripper reaching an unknown, but potentially 64 cores on a single package will see the official light of day coming in November which is a mere month away.

The eagle-eyed among enthusiasts such as the team from Videocardz noticed an update from MSI on their promotional review program page. It has been recently updated to list a new model in the register for eligible products for the promotion, the Creator TRX40.

One takeaway from this listing is that the "Creation" moniker which was applied to Z390, X570, X399, and X299 seems to be going away. It looks like the "Creation" label will be pitched aside as the new Creator X299 and TRX40 show that they may be trying to clear up the marketing and targeting message to ensure users understand these boards are made for content creators.

The launch of AMD's Ryzen 3000 and the new X570 chipset has come with new memory speed capabilities for Ryzen. Also, supported is PCIe Gen 4, which is all but useless for GPUs, but one area definitely makes good use of it, storage! Storage supporting PCIe Gen 4 launched with GIGABYTE and Corsair leading the charge, but we knew it would not be long until others entered the ring. Enter TEAMGROUP and their well-established prowess in both memory and storage.

T-Force Dark Z DDR4

TEAMGROUP today announced its first entrants into official Ryzen 3000 and X570 targeted memory and SSD products. The memory labeled T-Force Dark Z is offered in several capacities and frequencies. The baseline for the Dark Z is 3200MHz, with kits reaching up to 3600MHz and 4000MHz. Most enthusiasts know that the proposed sweet spot for Ryzen 3000 is 3600 for a smooth plugin and go performance option as the FCLK and UCLK can all be synchronized across the platform for optimal performance.