Latest News - Page 2194

Ubisoft have announced a free major update for The Division, entitled the Resistance update. This update, patch 1.8, focuses on PvE with the inclusion of a multi-zone map called the West Side Pier. However, it's more than just a map. Ubisoft have revealed that there will be frequent alerts for new events, short-term mini assignments and dynamic enemy spawning. To encourage players to play through the new PvE content, players will be rewarded with same Division Tech resources that you will earn in PvP Dark Zone.

The Resistance update also introduces horde mode Resistance mode. A four-player co-op mode taking on waves and waves of enemies. Finally, the addition of a four-on-four Skirmish mode that resembles a classic time-based multiplayer match, just with the requirement that you finish players off to earn the kill rounds off the update content.

Slated for a Fall release, Ubisoft will be hoping this new content will revive its player base.

I don't think it'll happen soon, but Xbox director Mike Ybarra has said that keyboard and mouse support is coming to the Xbox, where he said it's "definitely coming" and that he's aware about concerns gamers have about keyboard and mouse users DOMINATING controller users.

Ybarra said: "We have to be very smart in how we do that. We'll leave it a lot up to developer choice. A lot of people tweet me and say, 'You can't do this because of fairness,' and we understand that. We run two platforms; the Windows platform and the Xbox platform".

Once the company adds mouse and keyboard support to the Xbox, Microsoft will reportedly "coach" developers on the best practices. Ybarra said that developers could let gamers decide who they want to play against: the slower gamers on controllers, or the precise-aimers on keyboard and mice.

It looks like Ubisoft might provide Xbox One X gamers with the option for 1080p 60FPS in Assassin's Creed Origins, with YouTuber "DEE BATCH" nothing that Ubisoft said during the Fan Expo Canada event that the studio is working on a 1080p 60FPS option for Xbox One X.

Assassin's Creed Origin is the largest open world game ever created, so it'll be interesting to see how many dials and options Ubisoft has had to turn down in order to hit 60FPS @ 1080p. We should expect Assassin's Creed Origins to use dynamic resolution scaling to reach their designated 4K 30FPS, so we could expect the resolution to drop as low as 1080p in order to keep things from becoming a chug fest.

The PS4 Pro version of Assassin's Creed Origins might feature a 1080p 60FPS mode since Sony added more grunt into the PS4 Pro, but the Xbox One X has a much better GPU that could handle 1080p 60FPS a lot easier. Remember both consoles have that junk Jaguar CPU from something like 44 years ago or something, so the big difference between the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro comes down to the GPU grunt and bandwidth.

Wonder Woman has become the #5 superhero movie of ALL TIME, hitting $408 million in box office numbers in the US according to estimates from comScore.

These numbers are just for the US box office, where #4 is The Dark Knight Rises with $448 million, #3 is Avengers: Age of Ultron. Wonder Woman can't beat these numbers, but hitting #5 is an achievement in itself. Here's the top 5 superhero movies of all time in the US:

If you look at the numbers, DC now has 3 of the top 5 movies in the #5 superhero movies of all time in the US... a huge achievement considering the amount of movies in the MCU including Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the two Avengers movies - oh and Guardians of the Galaxy. Wonder Woman deserves its coveted spot, so let's hope this leads positively into Justice League which drops in November.

Huawei has just unveiled its next-gen system-on-a-chip at IFA Berlin, with the new Kirin 970 announcement teasing that the Chinese telco giant has a built-in nerual processing unit. Not bad.

The next-gen Kirin 970 is a 10nm design that sports 5.5 billion transistors, rocking an 8-core CPU and 12-core GPU combo. Huawei says that its new heterogeneous computing architecture, when compared against the Cortex-A73 (quad-core) has up to 25x more performance, and a huge 50x more efficiency. Kirin 970 is capable of processing 2000 images per second, something Huawei says is faster than all of its competitors.

CEO of Huawei's consumer business group, Richard Yu, said the new Kirin 970 is a first in a wave of new advances that will deliver AI features to our smartphones, and push them past the competition. Huawei is positioning its new Kirin 970 as an open platform for mobile AI, with the company letting developers use the neural processing capabilities of its new SoC to see where they can drive the user experience.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds continues its titanic growth in the video games industry by ending League of Legends' viewing streak on Twitch.

Gaming juggernaut League of Legends was the top-viewed game on Twitch from October 2016 to July 2017--that was, of course, until early access sensation PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds broke its 34-month streak and dominated Twitch live-streaming viewership for the month of August.

"For the 1st time since we started monitoring Twitch data in 2014, League didn't rank #1 across a full month, dethroned as it was by PUBG," Twitch viewership monitoring company Gameloco reports.

Experts believe European titan Vivendi will make a major move to take over Ubisoft sometime this year, and the French games-maker's co-founders are buying more stake in the company to prevent a hostile takeover.

Ubisoft's founding Guillemot family has today acquired another 1.75% of the company's share capital by purchasing 2 million shares at an undisclosed price; at the current worth of 56.25 Euros per share, the Guillemots likely spent about 112.5 million Euros on the acquisition. As of June 27 the Guillemot family owned 13.6% of Ubisoft's share capital, and following today's share acquisition that number rises 15.35%, with the family owning 20.02% of the company's voting rights. As of June, Vivendi owns 27% of Ubisoft's share capital and 24.5% of its voting rights.

"Ubisoft has been informed that Guillemot Brothers SE and a bank have entered today into an agreement related to the purchase by Guillemot Brothers SE of a maximum number of 2,000,016 shares of Ubisoft representing c. 1.75% of the share capital of Ubisoft," reads a press release sent out by Ubisoft.

Bethesda's new Creation Club storefront has been widely criticized and protested by gamers everywhere, and Bethesda says it's listening to all feedback--especially the game auto-downloading Creation Club content before users even buy it.

Besides the rather disappointing content offering and the pricing model of Creation Club's premium currency, one of the most hotly contested mechanics of the storefront is how it automatically downloads Creation Club content onto a user's hard-drive via game updates. Creation Club content is added to a user's hard drive regardless if they purchase the content or not, and upon purchase the content is simply unlocked for use. Gamers are worried that the Creation Club will eventually eat up tons of storage space--specially on consoles where HDD space is at a premium.

While Bethesda Game Studios as a whole has yet to deliver an official statement on Creation Club's many controversial features, a Bethesda.net Community Content Manager "Cartogriffi" says that the company is currently working on a solution to avoid auto-downloads. This strongly indicates that the feature was intentional and is working as intended.

If you're like me, you have fond memories of playing through Tomb Raider 2 on PC or the original PlayStation. Unfortunately, the graphics haven't aged too well over the last 20 years. True, you could get your Lara Croft fix from the latest Tomb Raider games, but that doesn't quite satisfy the urge to relive some of Lara's previous adventures.

Never fear, Nicobass and a small team of contributors have been busy over the 18 months working on Tomb Raider The Dagger of Xian, a Tomb Raider 2 fan remake. This is great news for all retro gamers (myself included), especially considering Tomb Raider The Dagger of Xian will be utilizing Unreal Engine 4, and it looks stunning.

Nicobass have recently released a playable demo of about an hour worth of content, featuring the first cave from The Great Wall level that allows us to preview the epic adventure to come. You can download the playable demo here.

Microsoft have announced a release for their 4th major update for Windows 10 since its inception back in July 2015, the Fall Creators Update. This release should see Microsoft begin to release their major Windows 10 updates on a bi-annual occurrence post the Fall Creators Update. Recently announced at IFA by Terry Myerson, Executive Vice President of the Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft, Terry revealed that not all features mentioned at Microsoft's previous Microsoft's developer conference, Build, would make it, with Timeline the biggest feature not make it this update.

Fluent Design, an interesting feature that will make the cut into the Fall Creators Update, is perhaps the biggest change and one that has already been making its subtle way into our operating systems. Aimed at making Windows more modern and sophisticated by adding effects with lighting and transparency, this is a welcomed feature and makes Windows a bit more appealing for the user.

Getting a bit of TLC, is Windows Ink. With 2-in-1 laptops providing a lot of functionality and creativity for the user, Windows Ink will enhance this experience. Windows Ink will now allow users the ability to drawing straight into PDF documents, a welcomed addition. If you're like me you'll love Windows Ink best feature, Find my Pen. This feature will display the last time your pen was connected, refreshing your memory to hopefully remember where you left your pen.

Razer's latest mouse features state-of-the-art technology that will help gamers take their FPS gaming to the next level, introducing the new Razer Basilisk. Equipped with the same 16,000 DPI optical sensor that's used in the Razer DeathAdder Elite and Razer Lancehead Tournament Edition and complimented with mechanical mouse switches, the Razer Basilisk delivers precision accuracy that is demanded by hardcore FPS gamers.

"The customizability of the Razer Basilisk sets it apart from other FPS mice, and is something that we're incredibly proud of," says Min-Liang Tan, Razer co-founder and CEO. "This is a mouse designed for tweaking that last ounce of performance out of each gamer's specific FPS playstyle. For games like CS:GO, PUBG, Quake, and the likes, there's nothing better."

With a unique clutch featured on the side of the mouse, the removable clutch comes in two sizes to cater for different hand sizes with the default action acting as a precision aim. The precision aim macro gives the user the ability to temporarily reduce the DPI sensitivity on-the-fly to help deliver that epic headshot.

AMD is continuing to succeed in their CPU department (it'll be years before the GPU department can hit this success) with the latest e-tailer in Germany (Mindfactory.de) seeing AMD Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper sales overtake Intel. Mindfactory.de is considered the "Newegg of Germany" to give you some perspective.

AMD's new megatasking-capable Ryzen Threadripper CPUs have been selling incredibly well, with enthusiasts and content creators snapping the 16C/32T processors for their great $999 price. Rewinding back to March 2017, AMD had only 27.6% of the desktop CPU market... but the company reached a huge 49% in July, nearly doubling its dominance in the CPU market, and now has over 56% of the CPU market in August. Amazing numbers from AMD, and very well deserved.

The best-selling Ryzen CPU seems to be the Ryzen 5 1600, a 6C/12T processor that is actually a massive bang for buck champion at only $220. The Ryzen 7 1700, Ryzen 5 1600X, and Ryzen 7 1700X are all second, third, and fourth, respectively.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild was one of the best games of the year for the Nintendo Switch, but it would only be a far improved experience when played at 4K... and a 60FPS. Amazing stuff.

YouTuber 'Bradley' has shared footage of the CEMU-based Zelda: Breath of the Wild running at 4K 60FPS with an unreleased beta of Xalpheno's 60FPS patch. With this patch, even outdoor areas can be enjoyed how most games should be played at a minimum: 60FPS.

Let us know what you think of Zelda: Breath of the Wild running at 4K 60FPS in the comments below.

GIGABYTE has just revealed their new GeForce GTX 1080 Mini-ITX 8G, the smallest GTX 1080 ever made. It is even smaller than ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 1080 Mini, by nearly 50mm.

GIGABYTE's new GeForce GTX 1080 Mini-ITX 8G is a single-fan graphics card with a triple heat pipe cooling solution, and 5+2 phase card that has Gaming Mode GPU clock speeds of up to 1733MHz, or 1771MHz through OC Mode. The 8GB of GDDR5X memory is clocked at 10Gbps, the same as GTX 1080 Founders Edition. There's still a single 8-pin PCIe power connector to power the card, but no TDP numbers released just yet - although, we should expect 180W.

The super-small GTX 1080 is just 169mm in length (versus 211mm on ZOTAC's GTX 1080 Mini) and 131mm high (ZOTAC's card is shorter at 125mm).

Update: GIGABYTE has reached out to TweakTown over this story, which we're going to clarify now. GIGABYTE released the iffy BIOS on 25/8, but on 31/8 the company realized there were some problems with the F5 BIOS.

GIGABYTE quickly pulled the F5 BIOS from their website, and on the morning of 9/1 they had the announcements on their forums, with information on the updated BIOS. GIGABYTE is reaching out to affected customers now.

Original story: GIGABYTE X370 motherboard owners, listen up: GIGABYTE has posted a new BIOS for their Ryzen-capable X370 Gaming K7 and X370 Gaming K5 motherboards, with this F5 revision BIOS meant to provide optiomizations to GIGABYTE's boards... but, it did anything but what it promised.

AMD is experiencing at least $100 premium on top of their new Radeon RX Vega range of graphics cards, and now it seems like NVIDIA will be going through the same thing thanks to an industry-wide shortage of GDDR5 supply.

DigiTimes reports that NVIDIA's entire stack of GeForce GTX 10 series cards, so the GTX 1050, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti (and I'm sure the GTX 1060 9Gbps, and GTX 1080 11Gbps, oh and the TITAN Xp) will all experience price increases in the next couple of weeks. The average price increase is expected to be somewhere in the vicinity of 10%, with SK Hynix and Samsung reportedly cutting their GDDR5 supply for the discrete GPU market.

Effective immediately, both SK Hynix and Samsung have reportedly increased GDDR5 memory by 30.8% which isn't going to be fun leading into the holiday season for PC gamers. NVIDIA won't hurt so much from this as they have the financial backing to take the 10% hit per card, but if AMD Radeon cards using GDDR5 go up (Radeon RX 500 series) then they're going to hurt even more.

Destiny 2's beta test gives clues on how the final game will perform when it's released on PC this October, and the results are quite good.

Destiny 2's PC version is the real deal, according to in-depth analyses from PC Gamer. The findings show that Bungie's shooter sequel actually has a frame rate cap of 200 FPS on PC, at least in the beta, which is a huge jump from the 30FPS that Destiny 2 is locked to on consoles.

"If you were hoping to hit 240+ fps, obviously you're out of luck, since there's a 200 fps framerate cap. Even 144 fps is going to be a bit of a stretch for most systems, with the 1070, 1080, and 1080 Ti being the only cards to hit that mark. Note that even with an i7-7700K, the 1080 Ti is hitting a CPU bottleneck, but faster DDR4-3200 memory from G.Skill allowed a different desktop to average over 170 fps," said PC Gamer's Jarred Walton.

While Nintendo's new Switch handheld-console hybrid is in hot demand, big-name publishers like Electronic Arts have their work cut out for them when bringing big franchises like FIFA to the platform's constricted specifications. FIFA 18's sales performance on the Switch will have a direct impact on EA's future plans on the system--especially since the company put so much effort packing their big sports juggernaut into such a small package.

Why aren't more publishers bringing third-party games to the Switch? Gamers frequently ask this query while requesting popular titles like Overwatch get ported to the device. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, EA Sports Bucharest's Andrei Lazarescu gives the answer: the hardware is "very difficult". The producer, who's helming FIFA 18's development at the Bucharest studio, says the team had to create a new engine from scratch to ensure FIFA 18 could run on the Switch. As EA has strongly pushed its teams to exclusively use Frostbite for its games, this compromise speaks volumes--and trade-offs like these are really what developing big games onto the Switch entails.

"The hardware is very difficult," Lazarescu said in the interview. When asked if FIFA 18 on Switch could even have close approximation of the features on PC and console versions of the game, which include modes like FUT Champions, Squad Battles, and The Journey campaign, the producer said: "it would take an army of people, if it was possible, to be done."

To celebrate the upcoming home video release of 'The Mummy', we have fifteen Blu-rays to give away thanks to our friends at Universal Sony Home Entertainment.

Ancient evil returns. Tom Cruise stars in this spectacular version of the legend that has fascinated cultures all over the world since the dawn of civilization: The Mummy. Thought safely entombed deep beneath the desert, an ancient princess (Sofia Boutella) whose destiny was unjustly taken from her is awakened in our current day. Her malevolence has grown over millennia and with it come terrors that defy human comprehension. From the sands of the Middle East through modern-day London, The Mummy balances wonder, thrills, and imagination.

To go into the running to win a prize, post this article to your social media profiles and send your correct answer to the following question ( along with your postal address), to ben at TweakTown dot com before the competition closes on August 18:

ARK: Survival Evolved's final $59.99 version hasn't been out for a week yet and Studio Wildcard is already planning to release a new expansion next month.

The new ARK expansion is called Aberration, and marks the second major expansion for the massively popular MMO after the controversial Scorched Earth, which was released while the game was still in early access. Aberration sees players entering a new derelict ARK with a unique subterranean biome full of exotic and vibrant color, bizarre creatures, new sci-fi weapons, wingsuits, and much more. The expansion even borrows from the Alien franchise as you'll be able to tame a new creature called the Nameless Queen and "impregnate your foes with a horrifying reproductive chest-burster."

The new Aberration expansion pack will release sometime on October on PS4, Xbox One and PC, and requires the full $59.99 version of ARK: Survival Evolved to play.