Latest News - Page 2187

Intel is about to roll out its next reaction to Ryzen, with the upcoming Coffee Lake-S architecture and the 'new' Z370 chipset with a butt load of new Z370-based motherboards from the usual companies like ASRock, GIGABYTE, ASUS, MSI, and others.

But, one of the more interesting things to note here is that there will be some gates up when it comes to CPU compatibility between the sockets. If you have a Kaby Lake CPU right now and want to upgrade to a new Z370 board, for whatever reason, you simply can't - even though they are the same LGA 1151 socket.

Hardware.info has found that the new Z370 boards won't work with current-gen Kaby Lake CPUs, and it works the other way around yet, either. So if you run out and buy the upcoming Core i7-8700K, it won't work in your current-gen Z170/Z270 motherboard... but this should work after a BIOS update in the near future, hopefully.

Project CARS 2 will be sliding onto the market this week, with more details now out on the PS4 Pro version of the game, as it has more hardware at its disposal.

Slightly Mad Studios has said that Project CARS 2 will render at 2560x1440, and then upscale "beautifully" to 4K, which should be made possible through checkerboard rendering. Not just that, but the PS4 Pro will be capable of better-looking graphics quality on everything from cars, track objects, grass, and more.

The PS4 Pro has the additional power to provide improved track detail, increased detail and resolution with shadow rendering, as well as more detail and resolution with reflection rendering, too.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is apparently quite popular among RPG fans, and has amassed nearly 500,000 sales in total.

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Larian Studios owner Sven Vincke confirmed that Divinity: Original Sin 2, the developer's latest deep and sprawling cRPG sequel, has sold almost 500,000 copies.

"It is fantastic but it is also way beyond what we expected," Mr. Vincke told Eurogamer. "We're close to hitting 500K units sold which is a number I believe took us two or three months with Divinity: Original Sin 1."

Video games aren't cheap. Games like Grand Theft Auto V and Destiny command $100 million dollar budgets, with recurring franchises like NBA 2K, Madden, and Call of Duty all costing significant amounts to make. But how do publishers plan these numbers?

In his latest book Blood, Sweat and Pixels, Kotaku's Jason Schreier reveals an interesting rule of thumb that developers and publishers use to estimate the budget for a game project: $10,000 per person per month. Of course this is just a "ballpark figure" and the actual budgets are lost in the shadowy depths of NDA territory, but it does give gamers an idea of just how much these games cost to develop and bring to market.

"That's a good ballpark number," Obsidian Entertainment's Adam Brennecke told Mr. Schreier in the book. "Based on the average salary for a developer plus overhead, it costs about $10,000 per person at the studio. Some are more expensive. And that's how you usually do budgets with publishers too."

Atari, one of the most influential names in the entire world, today announced a partnership with crowdfunding platform Fig to develop and release two new games.

Atari is teaming up with Fig, a crowdsourcing program that treats funders as stakeholders and delivers a portion of a game's proceeds, to help develop and publish two new games: a reboot of a beloved Atari game, and a brand new IP from the once-mighty games-maker. Exact details of the two new games were undisclosed.

"Fig is providing a model where gamers not only help to get the titles they are most passionate about funded, but also have the opportunity to share in the financial returns with developers and publishers," Fred Chesnais, CEO of Atari, said in a press release announcement. "We're excited that Fig has opened up the vast potential of crowdfunding to IP holder and publisher alike by changing the narrative and allowing us to partner with our fans."

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson has joined Intel's board of directors, and will continue his role leading EA while advising the hardware giant.

Tech titan Intel has elected EA's Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson onto its board of directors to help guide the company's future, the Santa Clara-based corporation today announced. "Andrew understands first-hand how technology and data create opportunity with his transformation of EA from offline packaged goods to a leader in online digital services," said Intel Chairman Andy Bryant in an official press release. "In addition to his experience leading and growing a global, technology-driven company, Andrew possesses a combination of creativity and business acumen that will further strengthen Intel's board."

With billions in yearly revenues, Electronic Arts is one of the biggest games companies in the industry, and sits at the forefront of the gaming world in regards to next-gen gaming technologies and monetization strategies. In fact, the games titan earned more from live services than it did from full game sales in its fiscal Q1'17 earnings. Live services, which include extra content/DLC/microtransactions from Ultimate Team and all subscription earnings, were up 22% year-over-year raking in $420 million or a whopping 61.67% of EA's first quarter digital net sales earnings.

Japanese games-maker Square Enix, who's best known for titles like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, is apparently preparing the launch of a unified online digital storefront to sell its games.

Back in May I reported that Square Enix plans to launch a "Square Enix digital sales global website" that will "create a libraty of catalog titles and eliminate backward compatibility issues." Now the company appears to be laying the groundwork for such a service.

The publisher recently sent an email informing users that the Square Enix Online Store will be merged with the Square Enix Members registration system, essentially combining both accounts with a single sign-in. This will allow users to browse the storefront--which should be updated to a new and improved digital store that's unified for global users, among other services--while signed into their main Square Enix Members account.

Western Digital has expanded their WD Gold range to include the new 3.5" 12TB WD Gold hard drive. Featuring 256MB cache, 7200RPM performance and a reliability rating of 2.5 million hours MTBF, the new high-capacity hard drive is the perfect solution for enterprise and cloud storage applications.

"As data growth continues unabated, retaining more of that data and generating meaningful insight from it becomes increasingly important," said Brendan Collins, vice president, Devices business unit, Western Digital. "Businesses that most effectively extract value from operational data are able to make smarter decisions, improve business outcomes and ultimately gain a competitive advantage."

Available in capacities of 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, 10tb and now 12TB, these drives utilize Western Digital's 4th generation HelioSeal technology, which seals helium in the drive to help provide exceptional capacity, reliability and power efficiency.

GIGABYTE expand the AORUS brand into their gaming headset by announcing the upcoming release of the GIGABYTE AORUS H5 Gaming Headset. GIGABYTE's AORUS H5 gaming is not only a premium PC gaming headset, but is compatible with consoles and mobiles to allow for extreme versatility.

The H5 features 50mm beryllium metal drivers instead of the more common neodymium-based drivers, this allows for improved acoustics by eliminating unnecessary vibration.

Weighing only 285g and featuring RGB 16.7M lighting that can be controlled via RGB Fusion software, the GIGABYTE AORUS H5 is the perfect gaming headset for long gaming sessions thanks for a focus on ergonomics as well as performance.

The world of mobile VR headsets is going to quickly expand later this year and into 2018, with HTC filing a trademark that teases a standalone VR headset called Vive Focus.

There has been two new filings from HTC for a "head mounted display" named Vive Focus, according to Lets Go Digital, with one of them from the European Union Intellectual Property Office while the other is with the USPTO.

HTC's purported Vive Focus headset would run Google's Daydream mobile VR platform, which has had a hand from Qualcomm in the hardware department. HTC's new Vive Focus headset should feature 6DoF (six degrees of freedom) positional tracking, with 3DoF motion controls, with compatibility with Daydream games and apps.

GoPro isn't the only action camera company on the market, with multiple competitors on the market with just as powerful - and sometimes better featured action cameras, with some of them being much cheaper.

How can GoPro compete with that? With their new GoPro Hero 6 Black, of course. There are some unofficial pictures of the new Hero 6 Black online, teasing that GoPro's new action camera shoots 4K video at 60FPS, as well as super slow motion 240FPS video at 1080p.

GoPro is saidti be pricing the new Hero 6 Black at $499, with an announce/release date of September 28 - not far away at all. One of the standout tidbits about Hero 6 Black is that GoPro is reportedly using their own custom processor, GP1. This is a big move for GoPro, because since some of the first Hero cameras used processors from Ambarella.

AMD might have just launched their new Vega GPU architecture with a slew of Vega-based products (Radeon Vega, Radeon RX Vega, Radeon Pro WX, and Radeon Instinct) but the real king is NVIDIA's now months-old Volta GPU architecture.

We don't hear much about NVIDIA's Volta GPU architecture because it's still a while out from finding its way into consumer GeForce graphics cards, but the supercomputer/AI/deep learning markets are now receiving their new Volta-based Tesla V100 accelerators which means... BENCHMARK TIME!

First off, let's look at the difference between the previous-gen Pascal-based Tesla P100 and the new Volta-based Tesla V100. Starting off with 12x more deep learning training performance, with 10 TFLOPs on P100 up to a freakin' is-it-real 120 TFLOPs of 'DL training' on V100.

I feel like we need to hire a dedicated news writer for all things PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, with the first-person Battle Royale game hitting headlines daily. Battlegrounds

The latest milestone that PUBG has hit is a new peak concurrent player number, with an absolutely flipping huge 1,348,374 gamers at once - completely demolishing any other game right now. This means that Battlegrounds has officially beaten Dota 2's all-time concurrent players record of 1,291,328.

Bluehole recently announced that there have been over 10 million copies of Battlegrounds sold so far, but I'm sure that we'll see the game hit 11 million sometime this week... with sales not slowing down at all, and if anything, they're speeding up.

Intel continues to react to AMD's feverish threat with Ryzen, with Chipzilla launching CPUs and new chipsets left, right, and center - and now... we're hearing more about Intel's next-next-gen Ice Lake CPU architecture.

Intel is preparing Ice Lake-based CPUs that will launch in the second half of 2018, with 8C/16T chips that will fight Ryzen 7 1800X, with a next-gen Z390 chipset that will sit side-by-side with the upcoming Z370 platform.

The big difference between Z370 and Z390 is that the latter will support higher CPU core counts, with Intel launching an offensive to compete against AMD's new Ryzen chips. This means that Intel will be waiting nearly an entire year before they can properly compete against the pure CPU thread count that AMD offers with Ryzen.

Samsung has already hit two smartphone home runs this year with the Galaxy S8 and recently released Galaxy Note 8, but 2018 is going to be an even bigger year with the next-gen Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 9 handsets.

The first real juicy rumors of Samsung's next-gen Galaxy S9 are surfacing, with the South Korean giant rumored to use a modular design on the Galaxy S9. This would be a huge shift for Samsung, as its local rival LG has been made a modular-like phone before, without that much success.

Apple's recent increased threat in making something a little less iPhone-y with iPhone X would have Samsung on the offensive to continue pressing its boot into Apple's neck, and a modular smartphone with a next-gen AMOLED display and Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 845 on 10nm would be a delicious combination.

Now that the Nintendo Switch's OS kernel has been cracked, hackers are finding interesting goodies hidden onto the system's files including a built-in NES emulator and a ROM file for NES Golf.

According to a homebrewers who have hacked the Nintendo Switch, every single console-handheld hybrid comes with a NES emulator baked in, presumably as a foundation for the console's paid subscription service. This Switch Online service, which costs $20 annually and is slated to release in 2018, will give users access to a pool of classic NES games with added online play.

Hackers have also found that every Switch features a copy of NES Golf that runs on the built-in emulator, complete with local two-player and JoyCon support. This game is undoubtedly a test run for the Switch Online's service and likely doesn't indicate traditional VirtualConsole support for the Switch, much to the dismay of many fans--including myself.

If Final Fantasy XV Hajime Tabata reprises his role for the next chapter in the series, the next Final Fantasy game could take big cues from Nintendo's mangum opus Breath of the Wild.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild has had a tremendous affect on the games industry. Gamers everywhere are in awe of the title's living, breathing open world, and developers have taken notice too: in fact, Final Fantasy XV's game director is quite impressed with the game. Mr. Tabata says that his next game will emulate Breath of the Wild's open world scope and experience--but it's not necessarily going to be the next mainline Final Fantasy game.

"It's hard to say at this point if the entire game is going to be based on an open world," Mr. Tabata said in a recent interview with Gamespot at PAX West. "But I would say that the overall experience that users get from playing in a massive area, that overall game experience is something that we're going make sure is in the next project as well."

Final Fantasy XV has now sold 6.5 million copies worldwide, game director Hajime Tabata revealed.

Square Enix's recent efforts to make Final Fantasy XV the center of a new universe-within-an-IP business model have apparently paid off. The game, which sits at the core of a galaxy of ports, re-releases, and transmedia products, has transformed significantly since its launch in 2016. The Japanese publisher has updated the action RPG with a smattering of free new content updates to expand the game that dramatically change it from its launch state, coupled with a stream of premium paid content to boot. The game is even getting its own MMO-like online mode.

This new business model has been quite fruitful for Square Enix, and the publisher hopes to reap even more success by bringing Final Fantasy XV to all platforms, including mobiles and PC. According to game director Hajime Tabata, the landmark RPG has sold 6.5 million units to date, up 500,000 units from the original figure announced in January.

After the upcoming fall update, Battleborn's development team will no longer add new content to the shooter and shift their focus to a brand new 2K Games project.

Although Battleborn's PVP has transitioned towards a free-to-play model and premium microtransactions following a disastrous flop for the 2K Games label, the game will no longer be updated with significant content updates and is essentially being put on hiatus similar to Mass Effect: Andromeda. The Battleborn team is shifting their focus on Gearbox's new "highly anticipated project" which is very likely to be Borderlands 3.

"As of this week, there will be no more Battleplans and there is currently no planned content after the Fall Update," Creative Director Randy Varnell said in a forum post. Mr. Varnell says the game will stay online, but it won't receive any major story or content updates, similar to Andromeda's fate.

AMD will later this year rock the notebook world just as much as it did the desktop PC world with its new Ryzen Mobile APUs, something the company has teased for the last few months.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen Mobile APUs will be the first Zen-based APUs released by the company, which will rock Vega-based GPU technology and much longer battery life than previous APUs from AMD. We're told to expect over 50% more CPU performance, 40% more GPU performance, with 50% less power... pretty damn good numbers.

Fast forward to now, and we have the first benchmark leaks of the upcoming Raven Ridge-based Ryzen 5 2500U which scores 9723 in Geekbench 4.1.1's multi-core test, and 3625 on the single-threaded side. If we compare that against the previous-gen A12-9800B and its multi-core score of just 5115, we can see just how much of an improvement Ryzen Mobile is going to be over AMD's previous-gen APUs.