Latest News - Page 2200

It seems ASUS is working with AMD closely on the new Radeon RX Vega series of graphics cards, with ASUS being the first with a custom RX Vega 64 graphics card, and now again with RX Vega 56.

The new ASUS ROG Strix Vega 56 OC Edition 8GB features Aura Sync RGB technology, a triple-fan cooler and 2.5-slot design.

The card requires dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and rocks a DVI connector if you're still running an older LCD.

Intel's upcoming Coffee Lake CPU architecture could be exciting for the mid-range Core i3 processors, with leaked performance of the new Core i3-8350K showing very promising results.

The leaked Core i3-8350K performance teases the 4C/4T processor @ 4GHz will have multi-threaded performance that will battle against Intel's higher-end Core i7-7700K processor. In leaked benchmarks, we see that the Core i3-8350K scores 503.3 points in single-threaded performance, while the 7700K scores 492 points.

Even the multi-threaded performance is impressive, with the Core i3-8350K pushing 1982 points against the 7700K and its 2648... but remember the Core i7-7700K is a 4C/8T part, with double the CPU threads, but not double the multi-threaded CPU performance.

Samsung didn't forget about the disappointed customers who had to return their Galaxy Note7 after the faulty batteries issues.

During the unveiling of the Galaxy Note8, the company announced that they would be offering a significant discount on the Note8 to those who bought the Note7.

In the US, eligible customers will get a $425 discount, which is almost 50% off, if they trade in their current phone for the new Note8. The deal will be available through Samsung's own online store.

Skyrim is supposed to be one of virtual reality's killer apps, but it's actually tedious and clumsy to play on Sony's PlayStation VR.

After launching on all platforms known to man (only slightly joking here), Skyrim is coming to PlayStation VR--and not just a small slice as per the usual PSVR release, the full open-world game. But the experience is hindered by one critical aspect: teleportation. Like most Vive VR games, users will have to teleport from point-to-point to traverse Skryim's in-game world while using Move controllers. According to IGN's Alanah Pearce, Skyrim on PSVR is awkward and tedious when using these motion-tracked wands, and there's more than a few glitches.

The wands are there, of course, to track your hand movements and translate to in-game interactions, from pulling a bowstring to slicing and dicing with a sword and blocking with a shield. The Move controllers aim to add the critical point of immersion to the virtual reality experience, but at the cost of smooth movement. According to Ms. Pearce, teleporting makes for strange-feeling traversal throughout open-world areas as well as congested dungeons, and doesn't feel very smooth or natural.

Technology giant HP Inc has reported its fourth straight quarter of strong earnings growth driven by its Personal Systems segment.

HP's fiscal third quarter 2017 earnings mark the fourth consistent period the company has one-upped its total net revenues. The company earned $13.1 billion in net revenues in the three-month period ending July 31, 2017, up 10% year-over-year. HP's Personal Systems segment, which includes its lucrative commercial and consumer PCs as well as workstations, thin clients, and tablets, accounted for roughly 64% of fiscal Q3'17 net revenues, or $8.404 billion in net revenues and up 12% year-over-year. Commercial and Consumer segment net revenues increased by 11% and 14% respectively, and Notebook segment revenues were also up 12% with Desktop units down 3% year-over-year.

The tech titan's Printing segment earned $4.698 billion in net revenues in the period, up 6% year-over-year.

UPDATE: Square Enix has provided us with an official statement that specialization requirements for Final Fantasy XV's incoming Windows Edition on PC were published in error. "The recommended specs text that accompanied the Windows Edition trailer were posted in error and have since been removed," a Square Enix representative told us. "The specs listed were not final as the game is still in development. We will officially publish both minimum and recommended specs for the game once we finish development, so that they are fully accurate."

Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition should get mods at some point, opening up a massive wealth of pontential for PC gamers.

Just yesterday I wrote up an opinion piece that Final Fantasy XV is the new modern-day Skyrim. Now that game director Hajime Tabata says we should expect mod support for Final Fantasy XV's newly announced Windows Edition, that comparison is even stronger. Earlier this year Mr. Tabata said he'd love to include mod support in Final Fantasy XV's PC version, and at Gamescom 2017 he's sticking to his words.

Elon Musk has posted the first official photo of the SpaceX spacesuit on Instagram. Musk noted that the photo shows an actual working suit and not just a mockup.

According to Musk, the space suit was already tested to double vacuum pressure. The suit looks elegant, and Musk admitted that it was incredibly hard to balance aesthetics and function. However, you can see that the result is good.

SpaceX suits are meant to be worn by astronauts inside the company's Dragon capsule. The suits aren't meant for spacewalks but during the ride inside the capsule.

Ubisoft's Blue Byte studio is making Anno 1880, an RTS that takes place in the Industrial Revolution.

Back in April we reported that Ubisoft's newly formed Berlin studio was making a new AAA PC strategy game, and erroneously thought it'd be a Might and Magic sequel. Now Ubisoft has announced the game is Anno 1800, a new release in the landmark Anno series.

Anno 1800 will take place during the heyday of the 19th Century, and "combines features from 20 years of Anno history" with a rich story-based campaign and a city-building experience alongside a customizable sandbox and the traditional multiplayer experience.

Samsung has finally unveiled the most anticipated smartphone of the year - the Galaxy Note8. The expectations were high considering the last year's fiasco with the Note7. A year ago, there were even some rumors that the Korean giant might give up on the Note line, but the company worked hard and delivered another amazing device.

The Galaxy Note8 features a 6.3-inch Quad HD+ Super AMOLED Infinity Display with a minimal bezel design, similar to the one of the previously announced Galaxy S8 and S8+. The device runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat.

As expected, the Note8 is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 and Exynos 8895, depending on the market. The phone comes with 6GB of RAM and 64GB, 128GB, or 256GB of internal storage, expandable with a microSD card.

Microsoft aims to make the transition to Xbox One X as easy and painless as possible.

The new $499 Xbox One X is capable of running specific Xbox One games in native 4K resolution, but in order to do so, gamers must first download the required 4K texture packs and updates. Seeing as these textures are quite huge and can wreak havoc on monthly data caps, Microsoft is allowing existing Xbox One owners to pre-download 4K texture updates so they don't spend the whole Xbox One X launch day downloading content. Not every game on the list of 100+ Xbox One X enhanced games will have 4K texture packs available for pre-download, however, and Microsoft hasn't stipulated an exact list.

The company has come up with three different strategies to make the Xbox One to Xbox One X upgrade transition as seamless as possible including: backing up existing Xbox One settings to an external storage device; pre-downloading 4K texture updates and enhancement patches for specific games; allowing users to transfer games and content from one console to the Xbox One X over a home network. Users who already have their games on an external hard drive can simply plug the HDD into the Xbox One X and access their games library. Of course if the Xbox One X is the first Xbox you own, you'll have to download all the updates like normal.

Sony is already dominating the console game against Microsoft, but cross-platform play of some of the biggest games on the market would be nice, right? WRONG.

Sony has blocked cross-platform play between PS4 and PC gamers in ARK: Survival Evolved, with ARK's Lead Desginer, Jeremy Stieglitz, saying on Twitter the team have it "working internally", but "Sony won't allow it". This means cross-platform play between PC and PS4 gamers in ARK works, but Sony are stopping it. The reason? Sony is worried about children... no, seriously.

PlayStation marketing boss Jim Ryan said: "Exposing what in many cases are children to external influences we have no ability to manage or look after, it's something we have to think about very carefully". If Sony were that worried about external influences on children, they'd disable webcams on their own TVs, make their security stronger on all platforms, block voice chat and swear words in game chats, and a billion other things. Come on, Sony.

Microsoft has teased that it's working on AI technology, with the heart and soul of Redmond's artificial intelligence powered by Intel's new Stratix 10 field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip.

Microsoft calls its AI hardware platform "Project Brainwave", which is capable of a huge 39.5 teraflops of machine learning performance, with less than 1ms of latency. What makes Microsoft's ventures into AI better than their competitors? Well, the new chip handles complex AI tasks as they're received instead of batching the operations together and working on them after.

Thanks to Project Brainwave relying on a "soft" dynamic neural network processing engine using off-the-shelf FPGA-based processors, Microsoft's own AI framework (Cognitive Toolkit) also works with Google's own TensorFlor, and other systems. This means you can build a machine learning system, and run everything in real-time instead of being bottlenecked by hardware.

HP has just unveiled its new Omen X gaming laptop, which offers a decent upgrade path for those who want to make their gaming laptop a little faster, or add more storage over time.

HP's new Omen X won't let you upgrade the CPU or GPU, so there's nothing new there, but the RAM, HDD and SSD are all replaceable. HP says that you won't need to rip the Omen X open to replace out the components, but instead there's a back panel on the Omen X that needs a Philips head screwdriver, and that's all.

Inside, the new Omen X is a 15.6-inch 1080p 120Hz gaming laptop that rocks an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, and 8GB of DDR4 RAM - all for $1200. If you want to spend a little more, you can ramp up to the Core i7-7820K, GTX 1080, 32GB RAM, and NVMe-based SSD storage.

Final Fantasy XV is coming to the PC, where it will utilize up to NVIDIA's best GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, but the install size on PC had gamers worrying, and double checking if they had enough space on their HDD/SSDs.

Square Enix made a mistake on the press release for the install size of FF15, making people think that they needed 170GB of HDD space for the installation. That's not the case, and now Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata has come out saying that the HDD space requirement numbers were a "miscommunication".

Tabata said: "That was a mistake, actually. That was a communications mistake - something got put in a memo that really shouldn't have. What that is [the specifications that went out to press] based on the specs that we're running the demo on today. Again, the final specs for the release version haven't been fixed yet. There's a very good chance they can change. Someone put that in there and it got reported as the recommended specs, but that's not the final fixed version. The fact that it became that number is a communication error".

Bungie is weeks away from the release of Destiny 2, and even on the faster PS4 Pro and upcoming Xbox One X consoles, the developer couldn't maintain 60FPS and instead opted for 30FPS on consoles.

The reason? The old junk CPU inside of the consoles, powered by AMD's older Jaguar CPU architecture. Executive Producer Mark Noseworthy talked with EDGE in their upcoming October 2017, issue #310 release, where he said: "It's about the simulation of the Destiny world. Thirty AI at once, large open spaces, six players, sometimes with vehicles, and dropships coming in; that's where we're using the CPU".

He added: "Could we make a Destiny game that ran at 60 fps? Yes, but the space would be smaller, it would be less cooperative, and there'd be fewer monsters to shoot. That's not the game we want to make. First and foremost, we're trying to make an incredible action game. We don't feel we've been held back by the choices we've made about world simulation versus frame rate; in fact, we think we're offering a player experience you can't have elsewhere because of the choices we're making".

AMD might have launched Radeon RX Vega 56 at "$399" and the slightly faster Radeon RX Vega 64 at "$499" but those prices quickly changed for a reason that is, well... I don't even freakin' know. Remember our world exclusive piece on AMD having less than 16,000 units of Radeon RX Vega post-launch, and this continues to ring true as time goes on.

Both AMD and NVIDIA blame miners for global GPU shortages, and then gamers (for buying them so quickly with so much enthusiasm), and then there's reports of $100 rebates to partners and retailers that had exhausted them so quickly (from the lack of actual RX Vega cards) that the price shot up $100 overnight. Well, now it's even worse.

Having a quick look on Amazon and Newegg shows us that Radeon RX Vega 64 air-cooled is $719... far from the "$499" - and I keep using inverted commas because AMD launched RX Vega 64 at $499, but then it was $599 - and now it's $700+... I just don't know what to say anymore. But hey... you get Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Prey.

I remember AMD starting off their Ryzen Tech Day earlier this month in LA talking about how cryptocurrency miners are eating up all of the global GPU stock of Radeon RX series graphics cards. They were careful in launching their AMD Radeon RX Vega series of cards with miners waiting with bated breath on Vega performance.

Then came the #FakeNews that AMD Radeon RX Vega was pushing 100MH/s mining Ethereum, and anyone who mines Ethereum (like myself) knows that was pure "Hollywood magic", a spectacle. A performance; something that wasn't real, but perceived, as real. This turned out to be so completely unfounded, as I'm looking to my left and seeing the top of the line Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition and it is only pushing 33.6MH/s... This is only one-third of what the #FakeNews on RX Vega 64 mining performance.

But now Digital Trends has a story about AMD "Radeon" Studios, which is one of the better moves that AMD has done in the last couple of years - something you can read about here. One of the facts of Radeon Studios is Project 47, another one of the better things AMD has done in the last couple of years. Project 47 is a beast of a PC that has 1 petaflop of performance... perfect for Hollywood level operations.

Microsoft has made the Xbox One X Project Scorpio Edition console real, with an awesome trailer below to show it off.

What makes the Project Scorpio Edition console stand out? Well, the console itself comes in a beautifully textured black, graphite textured case - with a limited edition console that rocks "Project Scorpio Edition" in green text. It looks slick AF, but I wish we had the LCD display that the developer units featured. Oh well.

There's a massive 'X' on the Project Scorpio Edition box, a throwback to the original Xbox from all the way back in the day. This console is for the early adopters of Xbox One X, and it looks awesome... even as someone who is very anti-console.

Tesla's Gigafactory 1 in Nevada has expanded significantly over the last year. We recently saw a video how the factory has grown in a year.

A new video has appeared on YouTube showing that the factory is coming along great with lots of activity on site. Musk recently said that Tesla Motors plans to manufacture 100 Model 3 vehicles in August, and above 1,500 in September. By the end of the year, they should reach 20,000 cars per month. This is where the Gigafactory comes in.

The Gigafactory will be more than five million square feet (including several floors) once it's completed, and it will be capable of producing more battery cells than any other lithium ion battery factory in the world, Musk has said.

UPDATE: Square Enix has provided us with an official statement that specialization requirements for Final Fantasy XV's incoming Windows Edition on PC were published in error. "The recommended specs text that accompanied the Windows Edition trailer were posted in error and have since been removed," a Square Enix representative told us. "The specs listed were not final as the game is still in development. We will officially publish both minimum and recommended specs for the game once we finish development, so that they are fully accurate."

Final Fantasy XV is coming to PC in 2018, and Square Enix isn't holding anything back: the developer has ensured the game will hit insane high-end performance with 8K resolution support and optimizations on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 10 series video cards.

When I played Final Fantasy XV on my PS4 in 2016, I knew right away that the game had been watered down to run on outdated console hardware. Sure the game looked fine, and played fine, but it revved my PS4 to its limit, and I longed to jump in the dynamic open world of Eos without limitations. With the Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, enthusiast PC gamers will be able to experience the unfettered explosive power of Square Enix's behemoth Luminous Engine. The PC version, which has been built specifically to leverage today's most demanding hardware and graphics technologies, will support native 4K and even 8K resolution--provided you have the graphics horsepower to hit that perf.