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It looks like Sony has officially teased the loading time of its next-gen PlayStation 5 console against the current-gen PlayStation 4 Pro, with Takashi Mochizuki from The Wall Street Journal posting a video titled 'Sony's official video comparing performance of PS4 Pro vs next-gen PlayStation'.

Mochizuki's video shows Spider-Man loading time and performance between the PS4 Pro and next-gen PS5, something that PlayStation architect Mark Cerny talked about when the first details of the next-gen PS5 were revealed. We can see in the video that the PS4 Pro loads it all in 8.1 seconds compared to just 0.8 seconds on the next-gen PS5.

Cerny explained the ultra-fast SSD tech inside of the PS5: "An ultra-high-speed SSD is the key to our next generation. Our vision is to make loading screens a thing of the past, enabling creators to build new and unique gameplay experiences. The raw read speed is important, but so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro and then I put in a SSD that cost as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro-it might be one-third faster".

During this week at the Cannes Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino will be revealing early screenings of his ninth film Once Upon a Time Hollywood. Tarantino has asked his viewers to please not reveal anything.

On the official 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' Twitter page, a picture of a note signed by Tarantino details how Tarantino would like viewers to come into his new movie. Tarantino begins by saying; "I love CInema, You love Cinema. It's the journey of discovering a story for the first time."

Tarantino continues and says that he is very "thrilled to be here in Cannes to share "Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood" with the festival audience. The cast and crew have worked so hard to create something original, and I only ask that everyone avoids revealing anything that would prevent later audiences from experiencing the film in the same way."

Taking a step back into the early days of World of Warcraft means surrendering many quality of life features, so Blizzard have provided a whole list of what is "not a bug" and is just old school WoW.

Last week I reported on Blizzard bringing out 'World of Warcraft Classic' for WoW players who want to taste a bit of nostalgia goodness. WoW Classic arrives on August 27th and is completely free of charge for WoW subscribers, the contents include players having the opportunity of jumping back into some of the most iconic stages in World of Warcraft history. Playing WoW Classic will take players to patch 1.12 which will mean much of what WoW consists of today will change.

Jumping back into 2006 certainly takes its toll bug wise, but it also takes its toll mechanic wise. While some players would see that feeling the agedness of the game is apart of the fun, some players happened to miss the memo. Blizzard have issued out a complete list of what is a bug and what isn't, the lists can be found here and here.

The Super Smash Bros. UItimate director, Masahiro Sakurai has detailed what he believes to be a three phase development plan that was implemented into the development of Smash Bros Ultimate.

Sakurai has returned to his usual collumn in Famistu and talked about the reception of the recently added DLC character, Joker. Sakurai says that he is "glad the response to the release of Persona 5's Joker as a character has been so positive" and that sharing has become real with the addition of video editing capabilities and user-created content.

The real question that Sakurai asked himself throughout the development of Ultimate was "What do we need to do to make things more fun?", the answer to this question was fell into three development phases "Competition, Sharing and Cooperation". Sakurai regrets to say that "cooperation', unfortunately ended up being shelved part-way through" due to a technology cap being reached.

AMD will be detailing its next-gen Navi GPU architecture at its Computex 2019 keynote and Next Horizon Gaming event before E3 2019, but now VideoCardz is reporting major AIB partner SAPPHIRE is launching not one, but two Radeon Navi graphics cards on July 7.

The news is directly from a PR manager for SAPPHIRE during a chat with Chinese press, with the rep saying AMD is working on two Navi SKUs: the first is going to cost $399 while the higher-end Navi will cost $499. The $399 card will reportedly compete with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060 while the $499 model will fight with the RTX 2070. This new rumor blows out the $330-priced Radeon RX 3080 XT that would be a RTX 2070 competitor, but there's no mention of the name here.

We can expect the previous rumors of AMD calling its new Navi-based cards the Radeon RX 3000 series with these two cards most likely breaking down into the Radeon RX 3080/XT and the 3090/XT depending on what AMD brand these new cards as. But for $399 and $499 is it going to be enough to pull people away from GeForce RTX cards?

Bandai and Supermassive Games' sci-fi horror Man of Medan has had its release date leaked online. Man of Medan will reportedly launch on August 30th.

Apart of The Dark Pictures Anthology, a line of standalone horror titles, Man of Medan takes players out to the deep South Pacific ocean aboard a supernatural ghost-ship. Players embark on what has been described as a cinematic delight that is packed with twists and turns that not only keep your attention heightened, but force players to be at the edge of their seat.

An official release date for Man of Medan has not been announced yet but according to Twitter user Wario64, the title will be released on August 30th. This news has reportedly been sourced from Target through a pre-ordering purchase transaction, a screenshot has been provided above. Since this isn't an official announcement, I would still take this news with a grain of salt is it could certainly be subject to change.

Since the release of Mortal Kombat 11 on the PC, many users have spoken out about the framerate lock in some sequences being 30FPS. An option for this to be unlocked will soon be added.

The news comes from the official Mortal Kombat subreddit where WB_Will detailed the May Patch Notes 3. Included within this patch was numerous bug fixes such as; "Fixed an issue that could cause players to die twice in a row when failing a puzzle in the Krypt"Several minor mouse/keyboard input fixes" and "Fixed a major source of desyncs that would occur in Group Battles".

The patch notes also reveal the topic of framerate caps in certain areas. The notes say "we hear you" and that "We're currently working on providing the option to increase the caps in those areas to 60 FPS. We'll have more details soon, stay tuned!" This is great news for PC gamers and will mean mods like these will be useless as there will be an official option.

AMD is gearing up for the big unveil of its next-gen Zen 2 CPU architecture which will power both the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs as well as the next-gen EPYC 'Rome' range of CPUs that will do some serious damage to the best Intel can offer.

The new Zen 2 chips will be made on the 7nm node including the beast 64C/128T in the new EPYC 'Rome' CPUs but we'll see radically improved IPC performance, more cores and faster CPU clocks, as well as improved power efficiency. There are new leaks now with benchmarks from SiSoft SANDRA which point to some monster performance.

There are two different EPYC 'Rome' CPUs listed here with the first being the higher-end 64C/128T offering while the other CPU is a 32C/64T chip, which points to our previous story about AMD silently killing off its Ryzen Threadripper CPUs make sense. The current Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX comes in with 32C/64T on 14nm, while the new Zen 2 architecture will offer up 32C/64T on 7nm with better power numbers and higher clocks than current 32C/64T chips on 14nm.

AMD's next-generation X570-series motherbaords will be debuting in the coming months with PCIe 4.0 technology, but current-gen boards are also seeing support for the new PCIe standard with GIGABYTE X470 and B450 boards receiving BIOS updates enabling support when paired with a new Ryzen 3000 series processor.

GIGABYTE's new BIOS updates for X470 and B450 motherboards include PCIe 4.0 support, with a post on Reddit by 'mVran' showing the F40 BIOS for the AORUS Gaming 7 Wi-Fi X470 has Gen 1/2/3/4 support. Then we have leaker Momomo_Us tweeting out that the F40 BIOS also adds PCIe 4.0 support to the B450I AORUS PRO Wi-Fi motherboard.

You will only get PCIe 4.0 support when you pair the PCIe 4.0-capable motherboard with a new Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 series CPU. The first PCIe 3.0 slot on supported motherboards will operate at PCIe 4.0 speeds over the CPU PCIe lanes while the rest of the PCIe slots would still flow through the PCH as normal, but this will vary board to board so you will need to be careful.

We are only weeks away from AMD unveiling its next-gen Navi GPU architecture in full, with two new Navi-based graphics cards turning up on 3DMark and Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks. TUM_APISAK found the benchmarks which look like engineering samples, and not finalized Radeon Navi-based graphics card.

The device ID for the first card is '731F:C1' which sees the Navi GPU clocked at just 1GHz and its 8GB of VRAM clocked at 1250MHz -- I'm expecting this to be GDDR6 memory but AMD could be using GDDR5 memory on its lower-end Navi parts. If AMD is using GDDR6 then we should see effective clock speeds of 10Gbps and on a 256-bit memory bus we're looking at 320GB/sec of memory bandwidth, beating out the Radeon RX 590.

The Navi GPU clocked at 1GHz is probably because it's an early sample, so the GPU clocks might be increased for final retail cards or this is a lower-end card with the GPU clocks firmly around 1GHz.

So far all of the games that are using the ReShade ray tracing shader mod by Pascal Gilcher look great, these games include Crysis recently and other ray tracing-style mods like SEUS powering Minecraft. But now one of the best examples of a ray tracing shader mod are here with Grand Theft Auto V.

GTA V is a great looking game with mods applied but with ray tracing shaders it looks out of this world -- the lighting effects are actually bloody impressive. At the 2:00 mark the reflections on the glass table and floor look absolutely incredible, but it is the 2:21 mark when the sunlight is hitting the green Lamborghini and as the sun passes over the cars it lights up the white Lambo next to it with the reflection of green light, with the effect looking super-realistic.

The developer explains his methods: "What I'm doing is ray tracing in screen space, tracing rays against the depth buffer (a data buffer that contains the information how far an object is away, as opposed to the color buffer which tells you what color the object has and what you usually see in any game). When compared to DXR, it has several limitations: anything behind another object does not contribute, anything outside the screen does not contribute, backfaces do not contribute. The benefits of this shader is that it can run on every game and GPU and it's a step up from regular SSAO. I hope this serves as a sneak peek at what DXR ray tracing can do and why everyone in VFX can't wait to get real ray tracing for their games".

NetEase will help Marvel develop new games for Chinese consumers, including mobile games aimed at tapping the $37.9 billion market.

Today Marvel announced a new partnership with NetEase to develop all-new projects based around the superhero brand. The duo will make "games, television series and comic books," the announcement says, which falls perfectly in line with Disney's preference to license games projects rather than making their own.

NetEase is a fantastic choice for Marvel's expansion into the massively lucrative region. The company is well-versed in the Chinese market and knows how to make tremendous revenues from monetized mobile games. According to Newzoo, NetEase raked in $6.2 billion in 2018 thanks to its heavy-hitting titles like Knives Out. Right now it's number #6 in the top 10 biggest games companies on the planet, beating out Nintendo and Electronic Arts.

This year's big Call of Duty game may have a free-to-play multiplayer component to help boost Activision's monetization earnings.

Activision is currently exploring free-to-play avenues for Infinity Ward's upcoming Call of Duty game, sources tell Kotaku's Jason Schreier. Whether or not Call of Duty 2019, which is believed to be Modern Warfare 4, will get a permanent free-to-play mode remains to be seen. The decision would depend on how much money a F2P mode could make, and whether or not it'd interfere with premium game sales.

Activision has only dabbled with F2P in its premium Call of Duty blockbusters. Black Ops 4's Blackout battle royale went F2P for a brief period of time, aligning with advice analyst Michael Pachter gave in 2018.

With its next-gen PlayStation 5 on the way, Sony is accelerating development on its lucrative services to accompany the hardware jump and provide a foundation for long-term earnings. This new service-driven focus will include a merger of some of its biggest strengths, including films and gaming.

Today Sony announced PlayStation Productions, a new in-house branch that will turn its biggest wholly-owned gaming franchises into films and TV shows. Sony is in a unique position to pull this off. Sony Pictures and its subsidiaries are well-versed in production and distribution, and will help the new fledgling studio with its projects.

The new production company is a direct result of its new investment into PlayStation-driven services, and should offer exclusive shows and films to its entertainment subscriptions. A bit ago I predicted Sony could merge its gaming and film strengths into one cohesive service to create interactive experiences exclusively for the PlayStation 5. It appears this is what Sony is doing, minus the Bandersnatch-style interactivity.

Game of Thrones has truly taken HBO to the next level in terms of viewer ship and since the show is ending, the television network has decided to tease its user base with a new Westworld season.

The new teaser has been uploaded to the official HBO YouTube Channel and is the first trailer for the upcoming season that plans to be returning to our screens sometime throughout 2020. The new trailer shows us Breaking Bad star, Aaron Paul becoming immersed in what seems to be a futuristic metropolis.

While the teaser didn't really show off much else we know that HBO have strategically dropped this trailer to keep users on their streaming service after the finale of Game of Thrones. The timing is more than just a coincidence, and HBO are smart to do so as well since Westworld's previous seasons were also quite popular.

A new Steam sale coming under the title of 'Skulls for the Skull Throne' has taken over the Steam Store, bringing heavy discounts to many Warhammer titles.

Games Workshop has been conducting this same event for the past three years now and just like the previous years many gamers now have the opportunity to grab some great Warhammer titles at some even better prices. Focus Home Interactive and many other studios are taking part in the event. Discounts are ranging from 10% to 80% off and include both downloadable content for games and the initial games themselves.

Some of the titles that are discounted are; Total War: Warhammer 2 with 33% off, Man O' War: Corsair with 60% off, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 with 60% off and Warhammer: Inquistor at 50% off. There is many other titles on sale and numerous other DLC content that is also available at a discounted price. For more information you can visit the official Steam listing for the sale here.

Some new details have surfaced online regarding the coming free DLC for Celeste titled 'Farewell'. Celeste developers have taken to Twitter to release some small bits of information.

Matt Thorson has taken to his personal Twitter to announce that the script for Celeste's Chapter 9 DLC is almost finished. Thorson also mentions that him and his fellow developers were originally not planning on involving a story within this DLC, but plans changed and a story is now included.

Not only did Thorson comment on the development of the game, but Lena Raine, the composer for the game also gave some information regarding the DLC's soundtrack. Raine said; "Similarly, I was only planning on writing like ... 4 tracks max for the DLC. And then I ended up writing a lot more". The 9th Chapter will be arriving on all platforms completely free, at the moment there is no known release date planned.

Last week we heard about the new Mortal Kombat movie adaption produced by Aqua Man director James Wan. Recent news has now suggested that we can expect the movie to hit theaters around 2021.

The initial announcement came from South Australia's Premier, Steven Marshall who said that SA would be home to the filming of the new Mortal Kombat movie. Wan commented on the decision of SA being the filming location, saying "I'm really happy and excited to be bringing another show back to Australia with Mortal Kombat, especially after having such a great experience filming Aquaman. Now we get to experience South Australia with its scenic locations and a wealth of artistic talent to work with. It will be perfectly suited for this fantasy-action project."

Wan will be producing the filming and Simon McQuid will be directing it, McQuid also commented on the location saying; "Having lived in Adelaide early in my career, I am thrilled to be back in South Australia to make my directorial debut with Mortal Kombat. We need many different elements for its success and have found them all right here-the uniquely beautiful landscapes, the outstanding world-class stage facilities and VFX houses, and the brilliant artists and technicians from across the film-making community. I'm grateful to the Premier and people of South Australia for having us, we're all very excited to be here."

Pokemon Detective Pikachu starring Ryan Reynolds has remained at the number one spot at the box office for the second week in a row.

Pokemon Detective Pikachu has paved the way for future video game adaption movies becoming a success. Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment would be proud to know that Detective Pikachu has remained at the number one spot at the box office for the second week in a row.

Detective Pikachu has almost reached the $200 million mark from overseas markets, more specifically, Variety reports that the title has earned $193.4 million. For the second week in a row, Detective Pikachu has remained at the top for the international box office, pulling in $53.8 million from 72 foreign markets. At the moment, Pokemon Detective Pikachu is sitting on top of a quite impressive $287.4 million worldwide.

Jack Tretton led Sony's PlayStation business for 8 years and spent two generations competing against Microsoft. Sony is winning this gen, but next-gen gives Microsoft's multi-faceted business strategy an opportunity to shine.

Sony's PlayStation 4 has absolutely annihilated Microsoft's Xbox One console insofar as sales. Right now the PS4 is up to 98.6 million and the Xbox One is believed to sit at 41 million (Microsoft stopped giving out sales figures years ago). To stay competitive, Microsoft was forced to get creative, and get creative it did: the company fused together Windows PCs and consoles, using Xbox LIVE and its huge array of billion-dollar services to hold it together. New additions like backwards compatibility one-upped Sony's noted lack of native legacy game play. Armed with new initiatives like Game Pass, Mixer, and Project xCloud, the Xbox brand is a strong $8 billion business that taps services, game sales, and engagement instead of raw hardware numbers.

Thanks to Microsoft's innovation, Jack Tretton sees the company as a major force to be reckoned with when next-gen rolls around in 2020. Microsoft isn't the same company it was in 2013. It's grown into something bigger, smarter, and laser-focused on the long game. In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Tretton said Microsoft could give Sony a run for their money with the next generation of console hardware.