Latest News - Page 2002

Fallout 76 on PC is lenient on GPU requirements, but you'll need a decent CPU to run the game from the Bethesda.net client.

Although Fallout 76 shares a lot in common with Fallout 4, it's a lot more demanding PC spec-wise. According to the new Fallout 76 PC spec announcement the online-only service game puts more emphasis on CPU usage. Gamers will need a rig outfitted with at least an Intel i7 4790 or AMD Ryzen 3 1300X CPU to play, but the GPU side of things are more forgiving and require an NVIDIA GTX 780 or AMD Radeon R9 285. The standard 8GB of RAM is a minimum requisite and the game clocks in at 60GB.

Recommended specs are the same CPU-wise, but Bethesda advises an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 GPU or Radeon R9 290X with 4GB of VRAM to play Fallout 76. I'd like to see a preferred or required internet connection speed advisory on here too (remember Fallout 76 is purely an online game).

Predictably enough, Microsoft will bring its massively popular Xbox Game Pass subscription to PC at some point in the future. This means

As soon as the $9.99 a month Xbox Game Pass subscription was announced, I had a feeling it'd come to Windows 10 PCs at some point. After all, Xbox is now a cross-platform brand that bridges PCs, Xbox One consoles, and soon with Project xCloud, mobile devices. Let's also not forget Microsoft's love for monetizing its services (which is best handled by bringing said services to more places players spend money). All the signs were there and Microsoft's business plan clearly spelled out Game Pass' transition to PC.

We've had rumblings in the past about Game Pass arriving on PC, and now Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella continues the dialog. In Microsoft's Fiscal Q1'19 earnings, Nadella spoke about Xbox gaming, services, monetization, and how Game Pass' arrival on PC will strengthen the core Xbox community.

Red Dead Redemption 2's physical release will take around 90 minutes to install on a PlayStation 4, YouTuber GeekAloud reveals.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is an absolutely massive game. Clocking in at 99GB on PS4, Rockstar's Western opus ships on two discs, and like GTA V on Xbox 360 one of them is just for installing and the other is for play. Usually one of the main ways to avoid long installs is to buy physical games and install them on your PS4, a process that's usually pretty speedy. But Red Dead Redemption 2 will take a long while to install both discs.

According to a recent YouTube stream, RDR2 can take as much as 90 minutes to install data from the discs to your internal PS4 hard drive. If you're going to a 9PM or midnight launch tonight be sure to remember you won't be able to play right away.

AMD is reportedly preparing a 'new' Radeon RX 590 which seems to be imminent, with our first look at a branded card being in the form of the ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 590 graphics card, and now a new one from PowerColor.

PowerColor's purported Radeon RX 590 Red Devil has hit the Eurasian Economic Union certficate office, with a new product listing for the RX 590 Red Devil graphics card. The product listing is: AXRX 590 8GBD5-3DH/OC. This is virtually identical to the product listing for the RX 580 Red Devil 8GB GDDR5 which is AXRX 580 8GBD5-3DH/OC.

If this information is correct, the Radeon RX 590 is indeed a refresh of a refresh of a refresh with the Polaris 30 GPU reportedly powering the RX 590, while the RX 580 used the Polaris 20 GPU and the Polaris 10 GPU debuted with the Radeon RX 480.

AMD has already teased its upcoming Vega 20 GPU that will be the very first GPU on the fresh new 7nm node will be fully unveiled later this year, but there have been no firm benchmarks of it yet as it's so new.

Before the company even released its then-new Radeon RX Vega 56/64 graphics cards, my sources told me that Vega was in trouble and that the refresh (in whatever form it arrived in) wouldn't be that great, and that Navi would be "just as bad" as Vega. The same sources said that it would be the refresh of Navi that will put AMD into a better position to compete. This is a couple of years away as Navi isn't due until the second half of 2019, before it gets refreshed and replaced with something that isn't based on the GCN architecture... and that's the purported next-gen Arcturus GPU architecture which will succeed Navi.

So all we have between now and Navi is a new Radeon Instinct graphics card that will be the world's first to use a 7nm GPU in the form of Vega 20, which should just be Vega 10 with some small improvements. Most of the good stuff that will come from Vega 20 will be simply thanks to the 7nm node, with power savings and increased GPU clock speeds alongside up to 32GB of HBM2.

Capcom has just stabbed every North American Resident Evil fan in their metaphorical back, as the developer has just revealed that the Resident Evil 2 Remake will be receiving a Steelbook Edition, but it's exclusive only to Europe.

The announcement comes from the Resident Evil Twitter page who has shared an image of the Steelbook Edition. Included within the bundle is of course a copy of Resident Evil 2 in the form of a Steel cover, which can be seen above and also "Claire's Elza DLC outfit."It appears that inside the cover of the game we get a showcasing of Racoon City going through a sunset or a sunrise, while on the front we can see the bloodied mouth of a zombie grinning at the player. Below the mouth is the Resident Evil title and on the back is the Umbrella Corporation's logo.

It truly is a shame that Capcom has decided to only release this bundle in Europe as I would imagine there is a lot of Resident Evil fans across the North American region that would of loved to pick it up. Hopefully Capcom announces an exclusive Western bundle to complement this European release. Resident Evil 2 is planned for release on January 25th next year, it will be arriving on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

A new trailer has been released for Firaxis Games' Sid Meier's Civilization VI coming to the Nintendo Switch, the trailer showcases to players what they need to do when they jump into the title on their hand-held console.

The trailer has been revealed through Tweets onto the Nintendo America Twitter page, as well as the Civilization Twitter page. Within the trailer, Nintendo Switch owners are informed about what will be required of them if they decide to pick up Civilization VI for their Switch. Players will need to firstly select a leader of their civilization, then work towards expansion as they grow their city turn by turn. This is done through making farms to feed your population, building lumber mills and mines to increase production and much more.

It was also confirmed by the Civilization VI Twitter page that the title will be arriving on the Nintendo Switch with touch controls. Twitter user 'Taffer' asked the Civilization VI Twitter page "will Civ on switch have touch controls?" and then the page replied with "Yes, it has touch controls." This should make scrolling throughout the map, unit selection and other aspects of the game much easier for players while in hand-held mode. Civilization VI will be coming to the Nintendo Switch on November 16th, for more information visit the official eShop listing here.

The launch for Red Dead Redemption 2 is about to be upon us, but ahead of it we already have leaked gameplay footage from the title. A whole 20 minutes of it as well.

The video has been released by the YouTube Channel 'Shousinen', who appears to have already gotten his hands-on a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2. From the video we can see the player making some fairly questionable decisions, robbing cashiers, gun fights and more.

The video showcases the player tracking down a deer and hunting it through the snow, might I just say, despite the video being rendered in quite poor quality, the tracking of the snow around the players' character does look incredible. I also couldn't pass up on mentioning the fact that players can put their horses out of misery if they are injured, we can see in the video the player stabbing his horse in the heart after it was clipped during a gun fight.

Possibly the biggest Super Smash Bros. Ultimate leak has just surfaced online, revealing what is to be believed the full games roster. Just hours after the leak was found online Nintendo drop a new Smash Ultimate trailer, coincidence?

I just finished writing up the new 'leak' breakdown regarding the recently released image that showcases what is be believed the completed roster for Ultimate. While completing that article I got notifications for Nintendo's Smash Ultimate trailer, we see nothing new throughout the trailer but could this be a distraction from Nintendo, or perhaps a tease?

Putting our speculation caps on now, perhaps Nintendo caught wind of the extremely popular 'leak' that has neither been confirmed nor disproven and decided to quickly drop their trailer to take eyes off the leak. If this was their strategy the comment section for the video has certainly ruined that for them, most people seem to be taking this trailer drop as a distraction from leak which has in turn caused many to think it further proves its legitimacy. Maybe it was complete coincidence and Nintendo planned to drop the trailer today no matter what, we will never know, but this roster 'leak' is gearing up to look quite real. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is planned for release on December 7th exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.

We are back yet again with another potential leak for Super Smash Bros. UItimate, this time round we have a new image to decipher, let's just jump straight into it.

The above image with the clear outlines of the alleged newcomers to make it Super Smash Bros. UItimate has been sourced from no other than 4Chan. I know, when Smash fans hear '4Chan' and 'leak' a bad taste in your mouth instantly occurs, but since this time round its an image and not just text it will be much easier to tell if this ones fake or not (hopefully).

The two outside images are the officially announced roster so far, they have been placed on the outside of the leaked image to give a comparison to where each of the characters are standing/resolution. Now looking towards the leaked image, it has been supposedly taken on Snapchat and we can see outlines of Shadow the Hedgehog, Banjo Kazooie, Ken, Mach Rider, Chorus Kid, Issac and Geno. Obviously this leak is very blurry, which certainly raises my suspicions to whether it is real or not, blurry images are much easier to pass off as real as injecting renders into an already blurred image is much more believable. It also makes it extremely difficult for detail finding, due to most, if not all the pixels on the edges of the renders being blurred out.

AMD stock has dropped significantly following their Q3 2018 report, and even though it showed a 4% increase from this time last year. But, lowered sales of its Radeon graphics cards is an issue, with stock prices dropping by a hefty 28% after the report was released.

Before the markets closed there was a 9% drop in AMD stock, but after-hours trading was even worse with a 28% slice from Team Red stock. AMD explained to investors in a teleconference call that lowered GPU sales hit them hard, all blamed on the cryptocurrency mining craze from the first half of 2018.

But there's no new Radeon cards that have been released this year, while NVIDIA has released a next-gen Turing-based line up in the GeForce RTX series with the release of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and the just-released RTX 2070. AMD has... well... absolutely nothing from Radeon Technologies Group this year, at all.

NVIDIA revealed their next-gen GeForce RTX series graphics cards in Germany during Gamescom 2018 and their own GeForce Gaming Celebration event, with a huge showing of Battlefield V running with RTX abilities.

It looked out of this world, and even at the time I was talking to other tech press, YouTubers and friends over Messenger, etc that Battlefield V with real-time ray tracing is going to open up completely new gameplay situations. Being able to see real-time reflections will see you noticing enemies reflections in windows, or shooting out a window so they can't see YOUR reflection. I can't wait.

It was only a couple of days ago that I reported on Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and its just-launched Black Market, which includes a battle pass style progression system. This system features the Contraband Stream, where you can earn goodies by playing Seasonal Operations.

The grind for Black Market goods was huge, where it would take over 400 hours to reach the max level of 200. This is awful, as it works out to playing 8 hours a day, every single day, in order to hit that max level.

Treyarch has since pushed out an update that reduces the amount of time required to hit the max Contraband Stream level, with the developer adding earn-rate accelerators, challenges, and event-based tier skips on the way.

DICE has come out and confirmed some new information for Battlefield V now that it has gone gold and is weeks away from launch.

David Sirland, the Multiplayer Producer for Battlefield V at DICE answered some questions over Twitter, with one of them concerning the server tickrate on the PC and consoles. We now know that the PC version of Battlefield V will have a 60Hz server tickrate, while consoles are halved at 30Hz.

The team will improve the tickrate post-launch, which should be something that'll be applied to all platforms not just the PC. Sirland said: "We will start out with the same settings at BF1. 30hz on console, 60hz on PC. But that's a start, and we'll invest in improving that too".

We recently tested the new MyDigtalSSD BPX Pro in 960GB, 480GB, and 240GB sizes but started we would need to wait for the massive 2TB model. The wait is over according to MydigitalSSD's social media page.

The new 2TB BPX Pro comes with 1920GB of user available storage that offers impressive performance that breaks the 3,400 MB/s sequential read barrier.

There is very little competition in the 2TB NVMe space with most high-capacity shoppers choosing the Samsung 970 EVO 2TB ($577.99) as the default go to product for this category. The new BPX Pro gives the 970 EVO competition with a superior price and potentially superior performance. Our sample for review should arrive in the coming days. When it arrives we'll be able to say which is the fastest 2TB class NVMe SSD.

Fallout 76 is basically an online Fallout 4--for all the good and ill that brings. It's an interesting new start for Bethesda, but the beta test foreshadowed a lot of the same tedium I remember from 2015's Fallout entry...and I'm reticent to jump right in.

I want to preface this article by saying I've yet to play Fallout 76. TweakTown wasn't invited to try the game out during the press event, and I haven't pre-ordered because frankly I'm not sold just yet. The following is intuition based on numerous Fallout 76 beta streams I watched last night, which paint a particular picture in my mind of what to expect about the online-only Fallout game.

A while back I predicted Fallout 76 would use Fallout 4's assets, engine, and basic structure. Based on what I've seen I'm only half right. Yes, Fallout 76 seems to tap the tedium of scavenge-driven exploration across irradiated Appalachia, and yes, Fallout 76 uses a lot of the same structures, textures, and content...but it does something more. The online element actually infuses a sense of tension and dire frenetic chaos into what used to be a singleplayer-only franchise.

Microsoft kicks off a new fiscal year with strong gaming earnings, but its other segments reign above Xbox.

Microsoft today announced its Fiscal Year 2019 earnings for the quarter ending September 30, 2018, proving its wide-reaching Xbox gaming segment is still a versatile and lucrative branch of the tech juggernaut. FY Q1'19 saw total gaming revenue spike by a mighty 44% year-over-year driven by strong hardware and software sales. Xbox subscription services like Xbox LIVE and full game sales grew 36% from FYQ1'18 thanks to third-party titles.

Gaming--which includes full game sales, subscriptions, DLC content, and other game purchases on Xbox and Windows PCs--raked in a combined $2.738 billion during the quarter, up a tremendous 44% YoY from FYQ1'18's $1.896 billion. Microsoft's second quarters are typically the biggest for revenues thanks to the holiday season.

Today's cultural landscape makes for a veritable battleground of social issues--the kinds of things that Rockstar Games uses for fuel for its Grand Theft Auto fire. But company exec Dan Houser is glad GTA 6 isn't happening during these tumultuous times.

Like South Park, Grand Theft Auto games make fun of everything. Topics like politics, social issues, technology trends, film motifs, and cultural stereotypes are all lampooned and satirized in crude, often ridiculous ways. The series is a playground for this kind of violent and chaotic humor: whole metropolises are stages whose acts are filled to the brim with offensive jokes, themes, and vice. This has always been the formula for GTA, but today's political world is changing so much that Rockstar could have a hard time keeping up with relevant satire.

In a recent interview with GQ, Rockstar's Dan Houser expressed relief that GTA 6 wasn't happening during Trump's divided America:

Sony's new PlayStation Network name changes come at a hefty risk to gamers, and can potentially strip access to games content, in-game functionality, and more.

PlayStation Network ID changes are coming, but they come with a series of big caveats. Sony warned users to expect issues with name changes, especially in older games released before April 2018, but no one was sure exactly how this could affect our PSN experience. Now thanks to a recent firmware beta disclaimer we have more details.

Sony plans to extensively beta test the feature ahead of its 2019 launch, but anyone who's willing to try it out should be cautious (especially if you have a huge digital library). According to the disclaimer posted on ResetEra, PSN name changes can actually revoke your access to purchased (and free) in-game content, including DLC, virtual currency, and other digital pieces.

Today EA revealed the extended timeline for future Battlefield V content, confirm that the game's anticipated battle royale mode will miss launch in favor of a 2019 release.

Battlefield V's team-based Firestorm battle royale mode will actually miss the game's November launch by a whole quarter. EA today announced the game's post-release live service plan, confirming Firestorm is slated for a March 2019 release on all platforms.

Considering DICE isn't making Firestorm it's possible this delay is to ensure the mode is polished and mechanically optimized ahead of release.