Latest News - Page 2125

AMD has released their new Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.11.2 beta drivers, which include day-one optimizations for the newly-released Star Wars: Battlefront II, and mo re.

There's also some bug fixes that help out with issues in regards to Radeon ReLive, where chroma artifacts would be displayed, and an issues that saw game recording failing when users switched between borderless fullscreen and fullscreen modes.

AMD's new Radeon Software 17.11.2 beta drivers also fix some WattMan problems that would see undervolted values not applying to some Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 series graphics cards. The underclocked GPU memory values would also not show correctly in the UI.

You may have noticed I'm a big fan of the be quiet! product range, so naturally I get a bit excited when they release a new product and this is no exception. Be quiet! have announced the release of the Dark Base 700 mid-tower case, the smaller sibling of the Dark Base 900 range. The Dark Base 700 targets enthusiasts and high-end systems thanks to the use of premium materials and a versatile, modular design.

There's nothing obvious that makes the Dark Base 700 stand out from the vast range of mid-tower cases on the market, but dive deeper and you will appreciate the high-quality finish, elegant design and subtle differences that people associate with be quiet! The Dark Base 700 features 4mm tempered glass panel and 1.2mm thick aluminium and steel frame that is somewhat expected with premium cases in this day and age. There is a sleek looking lighting strip embedded down each side of the front of the case that doesn't take attention away from the rest of the design and best of all, this strip can be controlled by supported motherboards and lighting controllers. The front fascia is finished with a brushed-aluminium covered plastic panel that provide a simple, yet beautiful design.

The modular design of the Dark Base 700 allows for extreme flexibility with your build that offers builders various build options. Cable management covers are provided to cover unused HDD slots, the back of the motherboard provides mounting brackets for up to three SSD's and two HDD cages can be positioned underneath the PSU shroud. The PSU shroud has four removable segments, this allows for a range of builds including longer front radiators and builds focusing on air flow efficiency. The Dark Base 700 even allows for vertically mounted graphics cards via an optional mounting slot. Finally, two pre-installed SilentWings 3 140 mm PWM fans offer unrivaled and uncompromising cooling performance with space to house up to nine 120mm fans.

In somewhat of a welcomed change, Kingmax have released the Zeus Dragon DDR4 memory series that features absolutely no RGB illumination, and it looks great!

The aluminium alloy heat sink not only acts to dissipate heat efficiently, but the blend of both Eastern and Western style dragon symbols creates an appealing and elegant finish. Kingmax claim that "the luxurious etchings present the superiority of the dragon and display the assertiveness and dignity of royalty".

Kingmax's Zeus Dragon DDR4 range blends high-performance and high-quality that is aimed at gamers and DIY enthusiasts that supports Intel XMP 2.0 and is compatible with a host of motherboards. The Zeus Dragon DDR4 range features top of the line power-saving capabilities and is available in dual-channel kits and range from 2400MHz to 3000MHz in black or red finish.

Futuremark has announced their new DirectX 12 benchmark for VR, with VRMark Cyan Room built to show how using an API with less overhead can provide improved VR experiences, even on systems that aren't beefed up with GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards.

VRMark's Experience Mode lets you walk through the awesomely-styled world that Futuremark has built for its Cyan Room, where you can adjust the rendering resolution and see the changes in VR. VR headsets are capable of using methods that compensate for the missed frames, which can ruin VR experiences in the worst times. This way, developers and hardware makers can do testing and run it through benchmarks like Cyan Room, especially in DX12.

Cyan Room is a pure DX12 benchmark that runs on an in-house DX12 VR engine, with the options to change you resolution and customize the settings, as well as run it on your desktop monitor or VR headset.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been one of the most-talked about games of the last decade, and sits at a peak of broken records in many different areas, one of which is the 2.5 million concurrent players on Steam alone. A mighty achievement.

Battlegrounds is still in Early Access but thast hasn't stopped it from being nominated for 'game of the year' in the upcoming The Game Awards event, but some people aren't happy about it. There are concerns that the game isn't technically finished so it shouldn't be eligible to win game of the year. Even PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene, doesn't think the game should win game of the year as better games have been released in 2017.

Greene said that Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon: Zero Dawn are game of the year worthy, saying: "While I would love to win it for the team, I think this year there have been far better games".

Intel is on a rampage of releasing new CPU architectures and motherboard chipsets to go with them, but if you thought we were another year away from a big release, you are wrong. Intel is ramping up for the next Z390 launch, something that should be revealed in early 2018.

The new Intel Z390 chipset has been spotted in SiSoftware's database, and should launch side-by-side with a new range of 4/6/8-core processors that will need to compete with the new threat of AMD's upcoming next-gen Ryzen CPUs in the first half of 2018. Intel is building the new Z390 chipset to handle the new 8-core CPUs they'll unveil, which should fill out the Coffee Lake-S family of processors.

SuperMicro is the board partner that the new Z390 chipset has been spotted on, with their SuperMicro Z7Z390-PGW motherboard spotted on SiSoftware's database. The CPU wasn't detected, which means that the motherboard is an early engineering sample that isn't capable of being detected by SiSoftware yet, or the board is so new SiSoftware is having problems with it.

NVIDIA is preparing for the impending release of Star Wars Battlefront II, which is right around the corner by the way, while providing Destiny 2 gamers with a massive performance increase courtesy of the just-released GeForce 388.31 WHQL drivers.

The new GeForce 388.31 drivers are also optimized for Injustice II, but NVIDIA is offering a freaking game-changing 53% performance boost in Destiny 2 with the new drivers. The second big deal here is the Game Ready drivers prepare GeForce gamers for Star Wars Battlefront II, with a GTX 1060 running the game on High detail at 1080p with an average of 72FPS. Not bad at all.

Destiny 2 sees a huge improvement in performance, even with GeForce GTX 1080s in SLI with 99FPS average at 4K on Max settings when coupled with an Intel Core i7-7820X. This is a huge improvement over the 70FPS from the previous 388.13 drivers. The GTX 1080 Ti sees the biggest improvement, increasing 53% from 48FPS to a huge 73.3FPS with the new drivers.

As one of the leaders in the digital gaming space, EA has successfully tapped a rich vein of earnings with its engagement-heavy model. But how does it work exactly? We've discussed these matters a number of times on TweakTown, but here's an explanation in EA's CFO's own words.

EA makes a ton of money each quarter from live services from games like Madden, FIFA, Battlefield and undoubtedly the new Battlefront II that launches this week. In fact, the publisher recently affirmed that unit sales were less meaningful than live services, and they're not wrong: these live games are now the major driver for digital growth and have been integrated in a smattering of 2017's games.

Engagement is the major driver for a live service game. Players won't continue playing the game for a long period of time unless you give them something to do--unless you engage them--and roll out new content. But how do you fund that new content? With optional in-game microtransactions, lootboxes, etc. The engagement is put there and strategically monetized with in-game rewards, crafting, RNG--you name it and that mechanic has probably been monetized in some way. Thus publishers have made a self-spinning wheel that churns many of today's most popular online games.

On the heels of big, spiraling-out-of-control controversy for Battlefront II, DICE developers recently jumped on a Reddit AmA to answer some of gamers' most burning questions. The results? Mostly PR-speak affirmations of things that most analysts, games press, and gamers already know: some of Battlefront II's mechanics aren't set in stone.

One of the best advantages of games-as-a-service is that the titles in question are much more flexible than singleplayer-only experiences. Armed with a live team, devs can issue out quick hotfixes and changes that can dramatically change the experience--on top of extra content that players consume to further said experience. This advantage will be tapped in full with Battlefront II. EA has a long history of service games and is one of the best in the business when it comes to not only monetizing players but also engaging them with practical, balanced content (well more-balanced anyway). There's no way this trend will just stop with Battlefront II...but there will be some compromises such as lootboxes being here to stay.

During the Reddit AmA session, DICE developers gave a number of answers that strongly reinforce that the team is listening to players, and they'll make adjustments and changes to Battlefront II over time. Here's some of the more choice tidbits:

EA recently acquired Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment for $315 million in mixed cash and stock options, and according to EA's CFO Blake Jorgensen, the devs were all too eager to jump into EA's pool.

EA and Respawn have been working together for a long while: EA financed both Titanfall and Titanfall 2, and are working closely on a brand new third-person action Star Wars game with emphasis on character development. So the acquisition really wasn't a surprise, but now we have an idea of Respawn's motivation to accept the deal.

According to EA's Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen, Respawn was eager to join EA for a number of reasons including better financing, being able to leverage EA's pooled team of devs, and access to the integrated Frostbite engine that powers the company's slate of games.

On the heels of its push into mobile gaming and theme park ventures, Nintendo will reportedly make good on its talks to bring its classic franchises to the big screen (again).

Illumination Entertainment, the Universal-owned studio responsible for Minions, Despicable Me, and The Secret Life of Pets, has been in talks with Nintendo for more than a year on a new animated Mario film, sources tell The Wall Street Journal. It's believed that this venture is a result of Nintendo's theme park deal to host Super Mario attractions at Universal parks (aka Nintendo World).

Nintendo's trepidation with a new Super Mario movie stems from the company's desire to control nearly all aspects of the film. The source says the project has yet to be greenlit, but if it were, it'd take years before release. Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima recently affirmed the company is looking towards theme park and movie deals in a bid to organically weave its lucrative IPs into a cross-promotion business model--ie people will see the Super Mario Bros. film and then go and buy a Switch or 3DS handheld.

Who doesn't love fast memory? CORSAIR definitely do and have you just unveiled their fastest dual-channel 32GB DDR4 memory kit ever, running at a world-first 4,333MHz. The new CORSAIR VENGEANCE LPX CMK32GX4M4K4333C19 kit is built with hand-sorted and extensively binned Samsung B-die ICs, runs CL19-26-26-46 timings at 1.5V and to put it simply, this kit is a BEAST.

As you can see above, the CORSAIR VENGEANCE LPX CMK32GX4M4K4333C19 32GB kit is paired up with an ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X Hero motherboard and Intel Core i5-8600K processor and completed a MemTest stress test at 4,333MHz, a record for this configuration.

Unfortunately, CORSAIR only plans to make this kit available to select elite-overclockers and enthusiasts for the purpose of "helping them chase world records in today's most demanding PC performance benchmarks". If you're lucky to be in that selected group, the VENGEANCE LPX DDR4 4x8GB 4,333MHz is set to be available in December 2017. The rest of us, will have to settle for the rest of the CORSAIR VENGENANCE DD4 memory range.

This is one for all you Overwatch fans out there, trust me I know there's plenty out there, including myself. Razer have announced the officially licensed D.Va peripheral suite for Overwatch fans, the suite includes the D.Va Razer MEKA gaming headset, the Abyssus Elite optical mouse and the D.Va Razer Goliathus mouse pad and is perfect for hardcore Overwatch gamers.

"Since launching over a year ago, Overwatch has become a worldwide phenomenon and so has the love and affection for Blizzard's beloved character, D.Va," says Min-Liang Tan, Razer co-founder and CEO. "She's a gamer through and through and plays to win. When the idea to have a character-specific suite of products came up, the decision was 'easy mode.'"

Details on the D.Va Razer MEKA gaming headset are rather limited at the moment, with Razer only stating that it will feature an omni-directional mic and in-line controls. The Abyssus Elite gaming mouse is tournament-ready and features a 7200 DPI optical sensor, 220 inches per second (IPS) tracking and up to 30 G acceleration that is also supported by Razer Synapse 3 (beta) software. What mouse isn't complete without a mouse pad? Razer have complimented the Abyssus Elite mouse with the D.Va Razer Goliathus mouse pad, a vibrant design that is optimized for all types of sensitivity settings and sensors types on any mouse.

After weeks of rumors, Amazon has confirmed it is going to make a Lord of the Rings TV show, as they've acquired the global TV rights to LotR property. Amazon has signed a multi-season commitment of the series, which will be set in Middle Earth and explore new storylines in timelines that happen before 'The Fellowship of the Ring'.

The deal includes the possibility of a spin-off series, with the new Amazon Prime Original series to be produced by Amazon Studios in cooperation with the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins and New Line Cinema. Tolkein Estate and Trust and HarperCollins rep Matt Galsor said: "The team at Amazon Studios have exceptional ideas to bring to the screen previously unexplored stories based on J.R.R. Tolkien's original writings".

The upcoming Lord of the Rings TV show will be available as an Amazon Prime Original for Amazon Prime members, where they'll be able to stream the TV series through the Amazon Prime Video app for TVs, including Amazon Fire TV, mobile devices, and the web.

If there weren't enough flavors of Hitman in the gaming and movie world, there's a new Hitman TV series in the works from the creator and writer of the legendary John Wick movies, starring Keanu Reeves.

Deadline is reporting that FOX and Hulu have asked John Wick series creator and writer Derek Kolstad to pen a pilot episode of Hitman, in the hopes that it will be a big attraction for the subscription service. Deadline reports that the project will be "overseen at Fox 21 by Bert Salke, Jane Francis, Gloria Fan and Kira Innes, and at Hulu by Jordan Helman. The hope is for Hitman to become a flagship series".

Bitcoin continues its path towards $10,000 USD and while it might not have reached it yet, it has been edging into the mid $8000s for a while now. Most people don't realize that Bitcoin mining is a very big deal in China, as too with Russia.

China has put their foot down with Bitcoin miners, with the country set to cut your electricity supply if you're draining power mining Bitcoin, since miners would be using the lions share of electricity in the area. It's being reported in the country that China is noticing massive power consumption in some areas, and if they find out it's because someone is mining Bitcoin, they will limit electricity supply to some users in some areas during peak times.

The Chinese government have issued warnings to people in Danba County, Sichuan, which is one county where Bitcoin miners are gathered in China. There's also Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and others which leverage hydroelectricity and wind power to generate electricity, making it an easy decision for massive Bitcoin miners.

I absolutely adore MachineGames' marketing direction with its Wolfenstein games: the Liesel video and the Terror Billy collector's edition were both amazing. Now the studio one-ups their nostalgic charm with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus' post-launch DLC roadmap.

Bethesda and MachineGames have revealed the Freedom Chronicles, a four-part post-launch campaign DLC series that takes players to the early alternate World War II timeline and introduces three absolutely awesome new characters: Joseph Stallion, Captain Wilkins, and the femme fatale Agent Silent Death. The Freedom Chronicles' marketing materials are straight out of an old pulp comic and tap that rich vein of peculiar Wolfenstein-y nostalgia we know and love.

The DLC promises nine hours of content to enjoy--and plenty of Nazis to annihilate in creative, unique ways (please let us throw a weaponized football at swastika-wearing malcontents!) as characters that only MachineGames could dream up.

With Call of Duty: WWII, Sledgehammer Games has put stability above microtransactions.

Activision's latest World War II-based Call of Duty game has roared out of the gate with over $500 million in launch sales, but despite these huge figures, the game is still suffering from disconnections and some other pretty gnarly online issues. In a typical world this means the dev team scatters to put out the fire as soon as possible while those who can actually play have the chance to buy into microtransactions and lootboxes. But Sledgehammer Games is taking a different tact.

In a bid to fix the game as soon as possible the team is suspending the rollout of Call of Duty: WWII's premium COD Points (CP) currency that's used to buy lootboxes until next week, November 21. This effectively means players can't spend real money on CP to buy lootboxes, cosmetics, weapon skins, etc. Sledgehammer explains this delay is "so the team can focus on our top priority items."

At the Vive Developer Conference in Beijing, China, HTC has formally revealed its new wireless standalone VR headset: the Vive Focus.

In terms of functionality, design, and internal specs, the HTC Vive Focus is quite similar to the recently announced Oculus Go VR headset (it also comes with a single controller for VR apps/movies/gaming). The Vive Focus features built-in six-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) positional tracking, alleviating the need for extra sensors, and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor. As such the Vive Focus is firmly cemented between mobile-powered VR and higher-end PC-powered headsets like its older sibling the HTC Vive VR.

Interestingly enough the Vive Focus can be linked to other Vive-branded headsets, including the bigger PC-powered brother as well as the smaller Focus. When linked users can interact in various ways like watching movies together in a virtual movie theater. Software-wise the new standalone headset is powered by the open Vive Wave VR platform that allows for easy integration across numerous partnered hardware peripherals as well as standardized software/applications. Online shopping should also be a big focus for the Focus, and it'll be interesting to see how it's integrated.

Electronic Arts has once again made good on its promise to consistently balance Battlefront II's features around gamers' preferences, and has now made the second major change to the game before release (the first change dealt with Star Cards).

Battlefront II originally caught lots of flak from its lootbox monetization scheme, which is something we predicted months before confirmation. Now just yesterday EA was hit with a fresh wave of backlash due to the high credit costs of in-game heroes like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. The previous costs were about 60,000 credits and ensured players had to grind quite a bit before unlocking their favorite characters for play in the game. EA has once again relented and has dropped the costs of heroes to better suit players' needs.

This new change sees hero unlock prices dropping by 75%. Popular characters like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are just 15,000 credits now, and other heroes have been dropped too. This adjustment highlights the versatility of service-based games as EA can simply roll out a quick hotfix and make a dramatic change to the game's progression path.