Latest News - Page 2096

Windows 10 has been installed by over 700 million users across the world, with commercial usage of Windows 10 increasing 84% year-over-year, which is impressive.

Terry Myerson, the outgoing Windows boss, explained: "Today, we are now approaching 700 million active Windows 10 users, commercial usage is growing 84% year over year, Xbox One is running a Windows 10 core, Surface is leading PC innovation, HoloLens is bringing breakthroughs to computer vision, our universal Microsoft store enables Xbox GamePass, Azure reserved instances, and Office distribution, and the OEM ecosystem is revitalized with profitable growth. Last year, we finished the year with over $8B in operating income from our segment".

Take-Two Interactive has been planning its big NBA 2K eSports league for quite some time, and is finally ready to launch it with the help of partners like Intel.

Intel has signed up as the official technology partner of the NBA 2K League, the company today announced. The partnership will be a multi-year endeavor and sees league players using Alienware PCs outfitted with Intel's Core i7-8700K CPUs. This is particularly interesting given the game sells far and away more copies on Xbox One and PS4 than PC, which is true for most of Take-Two's games. Intel will also help deliver "cloud to client solutions for an unmatched esports experience" to ensure spectators around the globe can stay up to date with the action.

As per the announcement, the NBA 2K League is set to launch sometime in May with 17 teams that total up to 102 of the world's best NBA 2K players. I'm curious why Take-Two doesn't have any of this news on their website, but I do know that the games publisher has been carefully piecing this esports league together with the NBA.

In an extremely predictable move, Ubisoft will continue offering a slew of free content updates to engage Ghost Recon Wildlands' strong playerbase.

Like most big name games publishers, Ubisoft is a company that's banked strongly on live services--so much so that all of its games will incorporate them in some way (for instance look at Far Cry 5's optional convenience purchases). The games-maker has a found a way to balance the controversial pay-to-win schemes with cosmetics and other mitigating factors to both please gamers and make money, which has become a tightrope walk for companies like EA. Since Ubisoft makes hundreds of millions every year from player recurring investment, aka monetized engagement, it's critical for it to continue rolling out content to keep players playing--and spending.

Although Ghost Recon Wildlands has turned a year old, Ubisoft isn't ready to stop pushing out content. Considering the game has amassed 10 million users in its first year it's not surprising they don't want to throw the potential away--so the open-world tactical shooter is getting a second year of free content expansions and updates. There are four Special Operations updates in all and will offer a bunch of content like missions, items, rewards and even tweaks that players have requested.

The Vive VR headset will turn two years old on April 5, and HTC is celebrating with a batch of free VR games.

Having played VR quite a bit on my Vive headset I notice that there's a third cost barrier outside of the PC gaming hardware and headset cost: the cost of the games themselves. Most VR games are about $20-30 a pop and offer limited, smaller-slice interactive experiences. Which is actually fine in terms of content, but the content-price ratio doesn't exactly match up sometimes. So I try to snag up any free games I can when I can.

If you're like me, then you're in luck: the Vive team is giving out $50 in free games from April 5-8 on its Viveport platform, as per an official Vive blog post. The games themselves don't look amazing, but if done right any VR game can be fun.

HTC has bowed to tons of feedback and will offer an Vive Pro bundle that includes sensors and controllers for $1099.

In a recent blog post, Vive General Manager Dan O'Brien confirmed the Vive Pro was essentially meant to be an upgrade for existing Vive owners rather than an entry-level option for new buyers, and that's why the company initially offered the $799 headset-only SKU.

Following a big hubbub over the $800 headset's pricing without the extra peripherals needed to actually make it work, the company will sell a Vive Pro Starter Kit for $1099. For comparison's sake the original HTC Vive launched in 2016 for $799 but included two controllers and lighthouse sensors for room-scale VR. The main selling point of the Vive Pro is its upgraded 1440 x 1600 resolution alongside built-in audio, the latter of which is missing with the original headset.

The entire Ethereum mining bubble could pop with the arrival of Ethereum ASIC miners, so during the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) #958 on Github on March 30, Ethereum developer Piper Merriam talked about the idea of a hard fork in the Etheruem protocol, a move that would invalidate ETH ASICs.

This is a reaction to the news that Bitmain is working on the world's first Ethereum ASIC miner, with the Chinese ASIC manufacturer close to the release of its Ethereum ASIC miner. The Ethereum White Paper itself said that the ETH protocol itself features a two-fold resistance to mining centralization, something ETH ASICs would definitely usher in.

The first line of defense for the Ethereum algorithm is that it requires miners to return the hash for data that has been "randomly selected" from the transactions in the next block. Then you have to consider that "Ethereum contracts can include any kind of computation, an Ethereum ASIC would essentially be an ASIC for general computation - ie. a better CPU".

Back in late February Hunt: Showdown released on Steam and since then the games popularity has been substantial, players obviously still have some complaints but its mainly with titles performance, Crytek will soon be fixing that.

In a recent blog post, Crytek took to the Hunt: Showdown website and explained that they will be bringing out a performance optimization update next week that should add a nice buffer to players that are struggling to run the game.

The areas that the developers will be focus include: "CPU optimizations (Hunt was CPU bound, which was a major limiting factor in many cases)", "reducing the overall memory footprint of the game" and "addressing the stalls and stutters (during movement, ADS, and other in-game interactions)"

The already very successful Nintendo Switch has yet to feature a highly popular game genre, battle royale. Well now Nintendo Switch fans have an opportunity to join in on the action as Crazy Justice will be the first battle royale shooter coming to the handheld console.

Above we have a video of Crazy Justice running on the Nintendo Switch in handheld mode. The video only goes for two minutes but it does show a some cool features while also providing what seems like a very smooth experience.

Crazy Justice will seperate itself from other battle royale shooters such as Fortnite, by instead of building players will have a choice of 20 different heroes, each with customizable skill decks that vary from each hero.

As the excitement hits almost a pinnacle for the new God of War another gameplay video has been released, this time we have details on some puzzles, trolls and the world.

The gameplay video released on PlayStation Underground is comprised of some short and long clips of the upcoming title. Jumping right into the video it begins with Kratos battling a massive troll, a Sony representative comments on battle giving some information regarding the origins of the troll and what players can expect when encountering these beasts.

Here is what the Sony representative had to say: "Each one [of the trolls] is different. Each has a completely different backstory. As with Norse mythology, everything has a little bit of a story, a little bit of a narrative to it. Each of these guys, they're going to look a little different, they're going to fight a little different. When you go up against them you might want to think a little differently. [...] Part of their backstory is that they've been betrayed by the Gods, and that they've got all these different cities and villages."

In a recent report from Digital Foundry, it has been discovered that Far Cry 5 runs at a smooth 30FPS at a native 4K resolution on the Xbox One X, meaning Far Cry 5 is one of the most optimized console games of all time.

Digital Foundry ran Far Cry 5 through their tests which resulted in the title being able sustain a solid 30FPS at 4K even when in the most frame-intensive situations.

The PS4 Pro was compared to this during the testing and Sony's console could muster a resolution of 2880x1620 at a consistent 30FPS, not quite matching the Xbox One X but still coming quite close. Both vanilla versions of the consoles were able to get Far Cry 5 to run at 30FPS at 1080p, for a more detailed breakdown of how Far Cry 5 runs check out the above video from Digital Foundry.

Warner Bros. deciding to add micro-transactions to Shadow of War would of had to be one of the most controversial decisions a publisher has made, now the company had decided to back-peddle and remove the feature.

Community Manager 'MonolithMark' took to their official website to announce that after 6 months of "listening" to the community they have decided to "restore the core promise of the Nemesis System" by "permanently removing Gold, War Chests and the Market from Shadow of War."

The announcement continued on and explained that "This means the option to purchase Gold with real-world money and the ability to gain Orc Followers from War Chests will be removed. There will be a specific amount of time given for players to utilize their unused Gold. If players have unused Gold by the end of the time allotted to spend it, any remaining Gold will be converted to in-game items."

ASUS has just unveiled their new Radeon RX 570 Expedition graphics card, and as you might notice this is a mid-range offering and not in the ROG Strix family of products, that could slide into that GPP from NVIDIA.

The new ASUS RX 570 Expedition features a dual-slot cooler, with GPU clocks of up to 1256MHz and its 8GB of GDDR5 sitting at 7Gbps.

ASUS has used a custom-designed unit with aluminum fin-stack cooler with two 8mm thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes that are cooled by a pair of 80mm fans.

Star Citizen has reached Alpha 3.1 status, with the new update including character customization that lets gamers choose their own specific look for their in-game character.

Not only that, but there is a new Service Beacon function that lets you send out distress calls to other players, so thatg they can detect it on their side, and respond to you. Some of the features that were pushed in with the v3.0 update to Star Citizen have received much-needed polish, too.

This includes updates to Star Citizen's planetary technology, IFCS (flight control), in-game AI, ship damage physics, and overall optimizations to performance.

The new God of War title is just around the corner and to increase the excitement for fans Cory Barlog, God of War director has confirmed on Twitter that the new title will have a performance mode for the PS4 Pro.

Martin Milz, a fan of the upcoming God of War game asked a question to Barlog, he said: "i was wondering if you need to upgrade to a ps4 pro to fully enjoy the new god of war or will the ps4 have the same experince (i only have a reguler ps4)"

Barlog later responded to the question saying that the new God of War title will have a "performance mode" for optimization purposes, this will in-turn increase overall performance. Here is what Barlog had to say: "Nope, you don't have to, but if you do 4K is AMAZING, if you have a 4K TV, of course. If you don't, we have a performance mode that puts the extra power to good use and makes the game run so so smooth!"

Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson took to reddit yesterday to perform a AMA with the /r/movies subreddit, the AMA was cut-short by The Rock announcing he was just casted for a live-action adaptation of Mario's Time Machine.

The actor began talking on the /r/movies subreddit answering a variety of questions about his roles in movies and experiences he has had while playing certain characters. Some questions that were answered by The Rock were replied with quite a heavy dose of sarcasm, making the AMA a very enjoyable to read.

The Rock had to sadly edit his initial AMA post to announce that he just got off the phone to his agent "Aw ****, just got a call from my agent. Just got cast in the upcoming live action Mario's Time Machine adaptation. I'm afraid I don't have time to wait for your questions anymore, but I'll give you all the answers anyway, just make sure to reply to them with your questions."

Warhorse Studios has debuted their 4K texture pack to Kingdom Come: Deliverance for PC gamers wanting to up that resolution from vanilla.

Thanks to John from DSOgaming we have some screenshots with the texture pack enabled, and from the above and below images we can see a slight increase in graphical quality.

Even though the official texture pack might not be the most impressive upgrade, a positive that can be taken from this is that now modders have official 4K textures to work with. This may result in future custom mods being released for the title which will greatly improve graphical quality.

The Last Of Us and Red Dead Redemption have been spotted running on PC via an emulator, videos have been released showcasing both of the titles.

From the above video we can see The Last Of Us running on the RPCS3 emulator, unfortunately the performance doesn't seem the greatest as there is quite a few graphical glitches and bugs.

Below we have Red Dead Redemption running on the same emulator but with much better performance, it seems there are barely any graphical glitches at all. Regardless of the performance, both of the titles running on the emulator is still quite impressive. John GodGames Emus managed to get these titles working, props to him for his efforts and hopefully an increase in performance can be eventually worked out.

This year will be a much quieter one for new graphics card releases, with NVIDIA leading the charge and continuing to dominate with the GTX 11 series that will usher in GDDR6, but what about AMD?

According to industry sources of mine, AMD will be releasing a new Radeon RX 500X series family, which should be around 5-6% faster than the RX 500 series. A new 'X' series makes more sense than a full push into the RX 600 series, as the RX 500X series won't be offering anything new.

AMD will reportedly be releasing the Radeon RX 500X series sometime in June-July, which should be able to counter the lower/mid-range graphics card market once NVIDIA stamps down again on the higher-end GTX 1170/1180 markets.

NVIDIA is expected to launch the GeForce GTX 11 series later this year, with GDDR6 to go into mass production in the coming months, and will be used in future GeForce GTX graphics cards.

According to Gamers Nexus, SK Hynix will be pushing their GDDR6 into mass production in the coming months with a "timeline of July-July for GDDR6 from SK Hynix". But remember that I reported back November 2017 that Samsung was teasing GDDR6 at up to 16Gbps, something that went into production in January 2018.

We should expect NVIDIA to use the fastest GDDR6 that I'm sure will come from Samsung, for their next-gen GTX 1180 graphics cards at up to 18Gbps on offer. SK Hynix has up to 16Gbps of bandwidth with their GDDR6 chips, the same as Samsung from late last year, and this could go into the GTX 1170.

NHK is paving the way for the future of 8K content, with the Japanese TV broadcaster set to unveil their new 8K inventions at the annual NAB trade show next week, which we'll be attending.

What will be new from NHK is the first look at 8K in slow motion, with freaking 8K 240FPS video to be teased at NAB 2018. Why would we need 240FPS at 7680 x 4320? Well, think about super-slow motion sports footage, or reduced motion blur at full speed - both freaking incredible at 8K.

NHK is also poised to unveil a new 8K VR displa ythat would completely ditch the screen door effect of current-gen VR headsets. But what do you need on the 8K broadcasting side when it comes to hardware? Well, a new transmitter is capable of pushing 8K video from 40Gbps down to 8Gbps, which is a huge drop.