Latest News - Page 2102

It wasn't too long ago that I exclusively reported that NVIDIA would release a new GeForce graphics card at GTC 2018, which is next week by the way, and now we might have a hint at confirmation according to NVIDIA.

The company has just announced its new RTX platform, a new "highly scalable" solution for raytracing technology that will "usher in a new era" of real-time raytracing. The problem is, RTX supports older graphics cards, with NVIDIA stating that RTX will be locked to "Volta and future generation GPU architectures".

Now that we've seen NVIDIA unveil their new RTX solution, Pascal GPU owners aren't going to be happy. This means to run any of the RTX-powered games released in the future you'll need a new graphics card, as there are no consumer graphics cards on the market that are capable of RTX.

Kingdome Come: Deliverance already being a somewhat difficult game has just had the option of making it even harder made available to those who are game enough to walk down that road.

The mod titled 'Ultimate Realism Overhaul' will make for the players character to be hindered in almost all forms of progression throughout the game. Examples of this would be boosting the stat requirements for all items, venderos pay you less money, blocking difficulty is increased and an overall slower leveling pace is added.

The results of this difficulty increase is that players will be forced to sleep in the street, this could cause a much more rewarding feeling or drive to completing the extremely challenging early game. Its suggested that this mod is for players that have already completed the game more than once, but if you are after the true 'rags to riches' feeling jump straight into it here.

The developers behind the upcoming God of War game have released a 15 minute gameplay video on the official PlayStation YouTube channel, from the seen gameplay the new title could be the best looking game on the PS4 Pro.

According to Digital Foundry, the team that "specialises in game technology and hardware reviews" has said that that the upcoming title from Santa Monica Studios "is shaping up to be one of the cleanest games on the platform."

Digital Foundrys analysis of the 15 minute video that was released by Sony seems to have found that God of War will be featuring "check-boarding rendering to reach a native 4K pixel count."

Nimbus Data has just announced the world's largest SSD that completely trumps the recent 30TB SSD from Samsung, with their new ExaDrive SSD that packs an insane 100TB.

The new ExaDrive 100TB SSD was made for data centers and edge servers for IoT services, with the 100TB of storage holding up to 20 million songs - or as TheNextWeb frames it "about half of Spotify's catalog of streaming music". Insanity.

Nimbus Data made the drive to consume 85% less power per TB of storage, so that enterprise users can use many more of them, use less power, and less physical space in their server racks. A standard rack with these new ExaDrive 100TB SSDs will hold an insane 100PB of storage, that's 1000TB folks.

GDC 2018 - Microsoft announced their new adventures into DXR at GDC 2018, with DirectX Raytracing being the DX12-based standard for Raytracing with AMD and NVIDIA both throwing their support behind DXR.

NVIDIA will have its own side of things with RTX, a collective of software and hardware algorithms to push raytracing on their Volta GPU architecture, which isn't in consumer form right now. Volta is a professional grade GPU architecture and from my various sources information, it won't be coming to the consumer GeForce side of things ever, so we should see some Volta-esque technology inside of their next-gen Turing GPU architecture.

For those of you that don't know what raytracing will deliver, or what it's even capable of, check out the embedded video above for a tease of what's to come. This demo comes from a collaboration between Quantum Break/Max Payne developer Remedy, along with Microsoft and NVIDIA.

Coca-Cola is swirling into a new direction in its stamp down on forced labor by adapting new friends in the technology space by teaming up with the US State Department, and a group of cryptocurrency organizations.

The soft drink giant has teamed with Bitfury Group, Blockchain Trust Accelerator, and Emercoin for a launch pilot project that will use blockchain technology to enforce worker rights. This would see Coca-Cola using blockchain's distributed ledger technology to form a secure, decentralized registry for workers and their contractors.

Coca-Cola is leading the initiative as they've promised 28 national studies on labor and land rights for its sugar supply chains by 2020. The US State Department will provide Coca-Cola with their expertise on labor protection, while both Bitfury Group and Emercoin will be making the blockchain platform.

TSMC is seeing their production facilities completely taken over for cryptocurrency chip production, with Q1 2018 demand currently at very high levels for 12/16nm GPUs and ASICs for cryptocurrency mining.

DigiTimes reports: "TSMC has obtained the majority of orders for custom ASICs for cryptocurrency mining, but tight supply at the foundry has prompted several ASIC developers, such as Baikal Miner, to shift their orders to Samsung Electronics", according to their sources.

Bitmain has continued to push cryptocurrency mining chip production, overflowing from their orders to request TSMC to make mining chips for them. Bitmain are the #1 Bitcoin mining solution in the world, and have been making chips at maximum capacity for months now.

Atari's new retro-meets-modern video games console is now known as the "Atari VCS" and the renowned games-maker promises the system is specifically designed for today's living room needs.

Atari today announced that the Atari VCS (previously known as the Ataribox) will indeed be revealed in prototype stages at GDC 2018, and that official pre-order information will go live sometime in April. The $250 system, which is powered by Linux and AMD Radeon graphics technology, was originally supposed to go up for pre-orders last year and ship in Spring 2018 but was delayed due to specific ecosystem issues.

The Atari VCS aims to be both a throwback and "throwforward" so to speak: it can play both old-school Atari games and even has a classic joystick peripheral to emulate those golden days of gaming as well as newer games, but official details on what newer games will cross-over have been quite sparse. Atari has confirmed that indie games will cross over but it remains to be seen if the box is powerful enough to run, say, PS4 or Xbox One-level games (maybe Switch games?). The device is touted as being able to deliver the "full PC experience" to a TV, however for $250 it's a bit iffy that this is possible. Perhaps $250 is the starting version and Atari will offer a number of SKUs each with different specs...but all of this totally sounds like risky business to me.

Sony Santa Monica Studio's new God of War is shaping up to be 2018's must-have PS4 game.

Previews for the new God of War game are breaking across the internet and the results are resoundingly good: the game is being hailed as a triumphant return to the series that offers gamers tons of content to chew on it. The first three hours are described as "emotional and mature," strongly hinting we'll get hit with some serious feels at the beginning, but insofar as game length players can expect lots of activities that may even rival Horizon: Zero Dawn's huge playtime to keep them busy.

According to Geoff Keighley, who hosts the annual The Game Awards and E3 Coliseum showcases, Kratos' Nordic-centered escapades are going to be quite lengthy. "From what I was told we only played about 5% of the full game. If that's the case, this is going to be an epic on the scale of Horizon -- and with tons of weapon and skill tree upgrades, I can't wait to see how the game opens up in the other 95%," Keighley said on Twitter in regards to the three-hour preview.

Now that pre-orders are up for the $799 HTC Vive Pro, the original Vive headset has dropped by another $100.

As an owner of the 2016 Vive VR headset, I can say it's definitely worth picking up (assuming, of course, you have the pre-requisite PC hardware to power it and the proper space for full room-scale tracking). The headset itself is hilariously fun and is absolutely fantastic centerpiece for parties or friend gatherings, and now it's more affordable than ever at $499. I bought my Vive for the original sum of $799 (ugh...) so I'm quite jealous of the would-be Vive owners of today.

HTC also announced that every $499 Vive headset purchase comes with a free copy of Bethesda's full-on Fallout 4 VR port as well as a free two-month Viveport subscription (again...why didn't I wait a bit to buy my headset?!). And of course the headset comes bundled with everything you need for room-scale VR including two lighthouse sensors, two controller wands, and a plethora of cords. The $799 Vive Pro, on the other hand, just comes with an expensive new-and-improved headset--no controllers or sensors.

At $799, the Vive Pro isn't going to be cheap (and it doesn't come with lighthouse stations or controller wands).

HTC today announced the new-and-improved Vive Pro headset will launch on April 5 for $799, and pre-orders for the VR HMD are now live. The Vive Pro marks the successor to 2016's HTC Vive, and features upgraded 2880x1600 resolution in its dual OLED panels, built-in headphones, dual front-facing cameras, as well as DisplayPort 1.2 and USB Type-C connectivity.

The $799 Vive Pro purchase actually doesn't come with controllers or lighthouse sensors for room-scale VR or the new wireless adapter--only the headset. "Includes headset, cleaning cloth, link box, power adapter, DisplayPort™ cable, USB 3.0 cable, mounting pad, user guide, safety guide and warranty card," as per the HTC Vive website.

Microsoft continues laying the groundwork for a vast inter-connected web of devices to bring its games onto.

Rather than trying to beat Sony at its own game and push tons of Xbox hardware sales, Microsoft embraced its strengths and re-wrote the rules. Starting with unifying all Xbox One consoles with Windows 10 PCs, it transformed Xbox from a console into a cross-platform service that bridges multiple avenues. Xbox LIVE became the glue that holds the platforms together with tons of engagement and billions in monetization every year. And more recently Microsoft actually beat Sony at its own game with Game Pass, a $10 a month subscription service that includes a growing backlog of third-party games as well as every new future first-party Microsoft game (a value that absolutely smashes Sony's PlayStation Now game streaming service).

Microsoft isn't slowing down, either: it's plans are becoming more and more ambitious. At the end of 2017, the company actually started a cloud gaming division shortly before acquiring PlayFab, a "complete backend platform provider of services to build, launch and grow cloud-connected games". Before this Microsoft used Azure to accelerate games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on Xbox, and the upcoming Crackdown 3 to boot. Now the cloud gaming division will help foster these ideas and, eventually, likely build a games-streaming service that will beam Xbox games to all devices--from smart TVs to set-top boxes and mobile devices to boot.

Gamers have officially won the Battlefront II lootbox battle as EA makes massive changes to the game's progression and monetization strategy.

After months of tweaking, Electronic Arts has announced Battlefront II's new and improved live service purchases and player progression system. The "chance for pay-to-win" element of randomized lootbox gear has been abolished and replaced with a cosmetic-only marketplace that clearly shows what gamers will get if they purchase content.

This marketplace will run on the premium in-game currency Crystals which are purchased with real money. Star Cards can't be purchased, and anything affecting gameplay isn't buyable with real money. Crates are still in, but are only doled out for actually playing the game and cannot be bought.

Kirby Star Allies released over the weekend and to celebrate the games debut Nintendo has released quite a long launch video of the new title, the video details much of Kirbys abilities that will available to play in the new game.

The video shows Kirbys ability called Friend Hearts which can turn Kirbys enemies into his allies. Kirby can acquire up to 4 allies at a time and will have a large selection of 20+ types of friends to have.

It wouldn't be a Kirby game if Kirby couldn't inhale enemies and steal their abilities so of course Kirby Star Allies will feature the classic ability, the above video details some of copies Kirby can do.

It looks like all of the big players in the tech industry are banning cryptocurrency ads as a collective, with Google and Facebook already slamming down the cryptocurrency ad ban hammer.

The latest company that should join the crypto ad ban fray is Twitter, with Sky News reporting that the social network will soon impose a worldwide ban against ads for ICOs (initial coin offerings), cryptocurrency wallets and token sales, all in the next two weeks.

Twitter will most likely use the same reason Google and Facebook used, in that there are a variety of risks surrounding cryptocurrency and they're trying to protect people from scams. I think it should be enforced across all industries, as there are plenty of penis enlarging ads that are obviously total BS (trust me, I've spend tens of thousands) and yet I see these everywhere. Facebook and Twitter are filled with bots and total crap news for the most part, but it seems the spotlight is being focused on cryptocurrency.

Half-Life is one of the best games ever made, but it looks a little dated now. Valve aren't talking anything Half-Life right now, as they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year taking a 30% slice of other developers' games. But now there's a new Unreal Engine 4-powered remake of Half-Life, and it looks freaking incredible.

SilverTM is behind the new Half-Life remake, with the developer to not be recreating the entire game, but a playable version of the first chapter of Half-Life so that gamers can enjoy it. SilverTM is celebrating this announcement with a video of the Half-Life remake and a slew of new screenshots.

Check them out!

Late last year Paramount Pictures and Saber Interactive announced the official tie-in game of World War Z, with the movie side of the zombie franchise starring Brad Pitt.

At the time, the company announced World War Z as a cooperative online focused shooter that would be released on the PC, Xbox One, and PS4 - but no other details were provided, until now. During an interview with Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch and Official PlayStation Magazine UK, he said that World War Z will be a third-person shooter with an over-the-shoulder perspective.

Karch had some exciting things to say about World War Z, with the zombie hoards set to go into a massive 1000 zombies that will chase you down for blood. The zombies will also feature procedural behavior that will see each time you play completely different to the last.

Activision's major cash cow franchise will be receiving another remastered treatment, with Amazon Italy teasing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered.

A screenshot was taken before Amazon Italy could take it down, with the tease of COD: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered to hit the PS4 and Xbox One, and I'm sure the PC as well. Modern Warfare 2's remastered treatment is listed for $40, which represents a chunky 50% discount over the full release price.

This is just a rumor for now, but I'm sure it will materialize into another release for Activision, and while you and I might not like the idea of yet another Call of Duty cash grab, there are plenty of gamers that will throw $40 at Modern Warfare 2 Remastered.

To celebrate the release of 'Paddington 2' on home video, we have 15 Blu-ray copies of the film to give away thanks to our friends at Universal Sony Home Entertainment.

The much-anticipated sequel finds Paddington happily settled with the Brown family in Windsor Gardens. While searching for the perfect present for his beloved Aunt Lucy's 100th birthday, Paddington spots a unique pop-up book in Mr. Gruber's antique shop, and embarks upon a series of odd jobs to buy it. But when the book is stolen, it's up to Paddington and the Browns to unmask the theif.

Paddington's biggest adventure yet sees Hugh Grant and Brendan Gleeson joining the all-star returning cast of Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw as the voice of the beloved bear.

To celebrate the release of 'Murder on the Orient Express' on home video, we have five Blu-ray copies of the film to give away thanks to our friends at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

Everyone is a Suspect. Kenneth Branagh directs and leads an all-star cast, including Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench and Leslie Odom, Jr., in this stylish, suspenseful and thrilling mystery based on the classic best-selling novel. Everyone's a suspect when a murder is committed on a lavish train ride, and a brilliant detective must race against time to solve the puzzle before the killer strikes again.

To go into the running to win a prize, post this article to your social media profiles, correctly answer the following question and send your postal address to ben at TweakTown dot com before the competition closes on March 23.