Latest News - Page 2088

Not too long ago we saw Sony make their sign-ups for PS4 v5.50 firmware beta available, today the new firmware update goes live to those who signed up to the beta.

In this new firmware update Sony will be adding a slew of new quality of life features such as hiding apps, play-time management, library UI updates and background music availability.

Users that get selected for the beta will be lucky enough to be some of the first PlayStation 4 players to customize their console background, as Sony has added support for selecting new background images through USB.

Battlegrounds was undeniably the biggest game of 2017, but now developer PUBG Corp have released some statistics behind their Battle Royale smash hit.

Since PUBG's release early last year onto Steam Early Access, Battlegrounds has broken all of Steam's concurrent player records with it recently smashing 3.15 million concurrent players and over 26 million copies sold between the PC and Xbox One versions of the game.

PUBG Corp's infographic states that players have spent over 2.7 billion hours in the game, have scored over 130 million chicken dinners,r and broken things down into many other interesting facts. We know that 13 million PUBG players have been killed with frying pans, while over 10 billion bandages have been used.

It has been a few weeks of manically high graphics card prices, but things are finally starting to settle - at least a little, with pricing now falling on the higher-end cards to not-so-insane-but-just-as-insane prices. I broke a story about GPU prices a couple of weeks ago, but now things have gotten slightly - but not totally better.

The most expensive listing on Amazon for a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition is $3370, but you can buy an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC Black Edition GAMING for $859, or an ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for $1099. EVGA's other GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 GAMING costs $1159, while the AORUS GTX 1080 Ti costs $1197. Crazy stuff, but a few hundred dollars cheaper than the post-crypto crash over the last couple of weeks.

Over on the Team Red side of things, the most expensive listing of a Vega-based graphics card goes to the GIGABYTE Radeon RX Vega 64 that costs a whopping $1999, or the retail version of the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition which rolls out with a $1799 price tag. Other than that, we have a PowerColor RX Vega 64 for $1099, while SAPPHIRE's RX Vega 64 is $1329, and the XFX RX Vega 64 is $1449.

InWin had a huge CES this year, unveiling a slew of new products and teaming with ASUS on a TUG Gaming-specific chassis; the InWin 101 TUF Gaming chassis.

Starting with the new 101 TUF Gaming PC chassis, which InWin says has a "fresh new look" thanks to its ASUS TUF Gaming motherboard design, which sports a "fresh coat of orange-yellow" that provides a beautiful style that compliments the ASUS TUF Gaming motherboards.

Then InWin gets into the curves with their new 915 chassis being their latest full-tower E-ATX case that is "uniquely curved" and features RGB lighting, of course. InWin's new 915 features tinted tempered glass side panels, and rocks a top panel that automatically rises to increase airflow when you're gaming... or mining.

Pornhub is on the offensive, with the site to delete something that I've never heard before - "deepfakes", which are AI-generated videos that "realistically edit new faces onto pornographic actors - under its rules against nonconsensual porn, following in the footsteps of platforms like Discord and Gfycat", reports The Verge.

The company recently spoke with Motherboard, where they said: "We do not tolerate any nonconsensual content on the site and we remove all said content as soon as we are made aware of it". They added that non-consensual content includes "revenge porn, deepfakes, or anything published without a person's consent or permission".

Think of deepfakes as porno photoshops, where the faces of porn actors and actresses can be replaced. These videos, as The Verge points out, can get close to copyright infringement or defamation, so this is where lawyers step in and go after big sites like Pornhub to stop deepfakes.

AMD had a huge year in 2017 with the successful announcements and launches of both Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper, quickly stealing sales from Intel and causing Chipzilla to react in ways we've never seen before.

But the tide is turning and now we're seeing that as of November 2017, Intel sales are totally dominating, and that two CPUs in particular are doing major damage to AMD. Intel's Core i5-8600K and Core i7-8700K are both demolishing AMD thanks to new data from Minefactory.de.

These numbers show CPU sales from February last year, right through to January this year. You can see that for the first 9-10 months of 2017 that Intel's flagship Core i7-7700K was the CPU of choice for most enthusiasts, and that the only time that changed was in December 2017 and January 2018, when everything flicked over to the new Coffee Lake-based Core i7-8700K.

There might be $500 billion wiped away from the total cryptocurrency market cap, but now news is breaking that Ledger hardware wallets aren't very safe at all.

Ledger has posted on their Twitter account reminding users that they should "always verify [their] receiv[ing] address" by checking the "monitor screen" at the bottom of the transaction request form.

DocDroid posted a vulnerability report a few days ago, stating that Ledger hardware wallets have a major flat that lets attackers infect your crypto wallet with malware, and then trick users to send crypto to the hackers. The report stated: "Ledger wallets generate the displayed receive address using JavaScript code running on the host machine. This means that a malware can simply replace the code responsible for generating the receive address with its own address, causing all future deposits to be sent to the attacker".

Haven't gotten your hands-on a NES or SNES mini? Nintendo might have some good news for you (and scalpers too, unfortunately).

Following a short stint to gauge demand--which ultimately backfired on consumers the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1980s--Nintendo originally cancelled production of its ultra-rare NES Classic Edition. Then a year later it announced the SNES Classic Edition, which followed in its near-extinct predecessor's footsteps. But there's good news: the House of Mario isn't giving up just yet.

Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima has confirmed that the company will continue producing and selling both the NES and SNES Classic Editions throughout 2018. What was once a seasonal product will carry over throughout the entire year...but there's no word on stock or availability.

AMD released their updated GPU roadmap not too long ago, and for the last month or so I've been thinking long and hard about it, as well as talking to sources of mine within the industry to find out WTF is going on over at AMD in regards to their Radeon products.

Back in October I exclusively reported that AMD would be launching Navi during SIGGRAPH 2018, in July/August this year. At the time everyone else called me crazy and that it wasn't going to launch that early, but now I've got other sources that are backing up my claims and saying that I was right. The first Navi reveal will be a professional card and not a consumer-focused Radeon RX Navi at all, that card will launch in 2019.

Then a story on WCCFTech popped up which said that "Navi will be the last GCN-based architecture" and that it will be "succeeded by brand new micro-architecture in 2020/2021 timeframe, execution of GCN successor being led by new RTG leadership". This is interesting, so I reached out to some sources to clarify a few things.

The Nintendo Switch continues its strong upward trajectory, and the Japanese games-maker plans to continue its fledgling DLC plan to extend the life of games and incentivize purchases.

Selling consoles and games is extremely important to companies like Nintendo. But what about those who already own both the console and the game? It's also important to keep existing players engaged in such a way that not only extends the experience over time, which organically bleeds over into other facets of the business--ie the more a person plays a game, the more likely they are to take it on the go, play it with a friend or stranger, and inadvertently advertise the system. One other thing, though: it's also important people pay to extend their games further.

Nintendo's DLC strategy is somewhat new insofar as major season passes, but this model isn't going anywhere any time soon. According to Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima, the company will double down on downloadable content for key games.

Nintendo's latest handheld-console hybrid keeps breaking records, and the games-maker highlights these impressive feats with a few visual aids.

In its latest earnings filings Nintendo predictably announced some big trends for the Switch, namely in hardware sales, software attach rates, and that the console has out-stripped the Wii in its first ten months of sales. "Nintendo Switch is establishing itself at a record pace, with the first 10 months of sales in North America exceeding even those for Wii, which had been our previous fastest-selling home console," Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said in the earnings report.

But it's not enough just to say it: sometimes seeing is believing. Despite having supply issues at the chip level, the Switch has managed to closely follow the Wii's initial sales momentum throughout North America, and even rose above the Wii.

Sony delivers another strong holiday quarter thanks in no small part to the PlayStation brand.

Sony Corp's Games and Network Services segment, which includes games and movies sold on the PlayStation Network, PS4 hardware and physical software, as well as subscription services, has pushed the company's quarterly earnings once again. As far as Fiscal Q3'17 numbers the G&NS segment raked in 718 billion yen ($6.35 billion) in sales, up 100 billion yen and 16.3% year-over-year. Operating income sits at 85 billion yen ($752.21 billion), up 35 billion yen and 70% year-over-year.

But what's most impressive is that Sony's Network segment (digital game sales, subscriptions, streaming, etc) broke 300 billion yen in a single quarter for the first time ever.

Hot off the heels of Call of Duty WWII's monumental success, Activision is keen on keeping the staggering earnings going with a new entry in the series' most popular sequels: Black Ops.

Earlier we reported on a rumor from industry insider Marcus Sellars who said that Black Ops 4 is not only happening, but will be this year's annual Call of Duty game. Now sources close to the matter have confirmed to Eurogamer that Black Ops 4 is indeed 2018's CoD title, and that Treyarch will develop the shooter. This underlines the veracity of the original claims.

No exact details were given on the new Black Ops game, but it's worth mentioning that Eurogamer has been spot-on with source reports such as these, whether with last year's Call of Duty WWII or the Nintendo Switch's specs and feature set. Given the tremendous sales momentum of CoD: WWII due to the game's triumphant return to boots on the ground action, it's very likely that Activision will push Treyarch away from sci-fi and more towards visceral, old-school Call of Duty action.

Synology have launched the RackStation RS2818RP+, a 16-bay NAS that is able to provide up to 192TB of capacity that can be expanded to 336TB with a RX1217(RP). Basically, the RS2818RP+ is designed for large storage applications for expanding businesses that want to future-proof their technology.

"One of the common challenges for modern small and medium-sized businesses is finding a storage solution that can store large amounts of data while having the flexibility to scale when business grows," said Jason Fan, Product Manager at Synology Inc. "RS2818RP+ offers large storage capacity with affordable TCO. It is ideal to serve as a centralized backup target, a file server or a hub-and-spoke backup target for distributed businesses."

Synology's RS2818RP+ is the first 3U RackStation NAS to appear in the Plus Series range and features an Intel Atom C3538 quad-core CPU with 4GB DDR4 non-ECC UDIMM RAM, which can also be expanded up to 64GB with four 16GB ECC UDIMMs for heavy applications. The RS2818RP+ also is equipped with four 1GbE ports Ethernet LAN ports with the option to upgrade to four 10GbE NICs, providing an impressive 1,400 MBps sequential read throughput and 26,000 random write IOPS.

Qualcomm is close to the full push of its next-gen 5G mobile connectivity, and the launch of their next-gen Snapdragon 845 processor, a new SoC the company detailed during their Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii in December.

PCMag is now pondering what Qualcomm's successor to the Snapdragon 845 will be, with a purported Snapdragon 850 "probably coming this year, not next year, and that it'll probably appear first in Qualcomm's Windows always-connected PCs". PCMag's Sascha Segan is making a "bold guess" that the '50' in Snapdragon 850 will be something to do with Qualcomm's super-fast X50 modem, the first consumer 5G modem in the world.

Qualcomm recently teamed with Sprint to prepare US smartphone customers for 5G in the first half of 2019, which means we'll need to see X50-powered smartphones in the second half of 2018 or very early 2019 at the latest. Qualcomm is utterly leading the 5G race here, and I don't see this slowing down into the new year.

Samsung hasn't even confirmed their new Galaxy S9 smartphone and the rumors on the next-gen Galaxy S10 are already appearing, with something that should really steal the show: 5G connectivity.

Inside, we should expect Samsung's new-new-flagship will rock a high-performance SoC with a built-in Neural Processing Unit, or NPU. Samsung will also reportedly use LPDDR5, 5G connectivity, UFS 3.0 storage, 3D + AI tech, and over 93% of the front of the Galaxy S10 will be display goodness.

Samsung would also use a next generation OLED display, something that should ensure the Galaxy S10 has the best smartphone display, ever. We should expect to hear and see more on the Galaxy S10 later this year, with a launch in Q1 2019 at this rate.

Red Dead Redemption 2 could be one of the biggest games of all time, and now the latest rumor on RDR2 teases what could be an amazing feature: first-person view mode.

Not only would a first-person perspective be on offer, but Rockstar Games would be throwing in a big change to the multiplayer of RDR2 offering a Battle Royale mode. The rumors are coming directly from Trusted Reviews who received some "development documents" that tease that the Battle Royale game mode would be joined by 'Revive and Survive' and 'Money Grab' modes.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is said to drive the immersion factor much higher, with Trusted Reviews saying that "NPCs will decorate storefronts with amenities and pack things away once night comes". They continued that the towns in RDR2 are "populated with various NPCs including general store owners, gunsmiths and undertakers. You can also partake in gambling if you're hoping to risk it all for financial gain".

Shadow of Colossus will release tomorrow, we recently saw the trailer but now in celebration Sony has announced that there will be a livestream showcasing some of the gameplay.

In about 30 minutes or so Sony will be taking Shadow of Colossus live, showing off some gameplay of the new game and also a discussion reflecting on the first title.

The Shadow of Colossus livestream can be found here and while also what Sony said on Twitter "We're only a few hours away from the launch of Shadow of the Colossus on PS4! Watch live starting at 7 PM PT/10 PM ET for gameplay, reflections on the original, and much more"

It's not just the cryptocurrency market that is suffering with a huge $500 billion wiped away from the cryptocurrency market cap, but it's the entire stock market, including the largest technology companies in the world losing billions in the last few days.

We're talking about industry giants like NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Intel, Samsung, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and everyone in between.

Google is down to $1062, after skimming close to $1200 per share last week.

Starbreeze Studios has posted on their blog, announcing that they have picked up the new Soren Johnson strategy game title 10 Crowns.

Johnson is best known for his work on the classic turn-based strategy title Civilization 3 and Civilization 4 which was developed by Firaxis Studios.

On Starbreeze's blog post they describe 10 Crowns to be "an epic-scale turn-based strategy game that lets players create the greatest dynasty in world history." The upcoming title has also had its development described by Johnson, saying that his team are "going back to our game development roots to make a classic historical 4X strategy game with some important and radical innovations to the genre."