Latest News - Page 2209

AMD announced their next-gen Radeon RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 graphics cards last week, with EK Water Blocks quick to announce their new EK-FC Radeon Vega.

EKWB's new product is a full-coverage waterblock for the reference design Radeon RX Vega graphic cards, with a electrolytic copper baseplate that blends right into its reversible cooling engine design that can be run backwards if that's what you like.

Radeon RX Vega owners will be able to choose from the black acrylic or clear Acetal for the front of the block, while the baseplate comes in nickel-plated or bare copper.

Apple's iPhone SE was announced in March of last year, and the company still hasn't released its successor. Earlier this year we heard that the company is working on a new iPhone SE device, but some analysts believe that Apple has no intention of releasing an SE edition.

However, according to the latest rumors on the matter, Apple does plan to launch a new iPhone SE. Industry sources claim that the new device should be launched in the first quarter of next year, around the same time as the original iPhone SE.

The model is expected to keep the smaller screen and affordable price. It should be powered by A10 processor, the same SoC that powers the iPhone 7.

Apple has recently posted third quarter earnings, showing consistent revenue growth in key areas such as iPhone sales and services revenue.

In the three-month period ended July 1, technology juggernaut Apple generated a whopping $42.4 billion in total revenues, up 7.2% year-over-year, continuing its landmark Fiscal Year 2017 earnings trajectory. The Cupertino-based company earned $10.768 billion in operating income, up 6.56% year-over-year, and $8.717 billion in net income, up 11.81% over fiscal Q3'16. As Apple's earnings grow, so too does expenses: the company saw a mighty 12% increase of operating expenses to $6.720 billion in the quarter.

Apple CEO Tim Cook notes that third quarter growth was driven by record earnings from the company's services segment, which saw a big 22% spike in year-over-year revenues to $7.266 billion. Apple's services branch includes revenues from the App Store, iTunes, Apple Pay, and Apple Care. In fact, the services segment accounted for about 17% of total revenues for the quarter.

Back in June, Huawei introduced the Honor 9 smartphone, and customers' feedback has been mostly positive. It seems that the company wants to make another, improved version of this device - the Honor Note 9.

The latest leak claims that the device would be powered by Huawei's Kirin 965 processor paired with 6GB of RAM, and 64GB of internal storage.

The phone will reportedly come with a dual rear camera setup (12MP + 12MP), but there's no info about the front shooter.

As we've reported, Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't currently slated to release on PC when it launches in Spring 2018. That may not change and the massively anticipated Western sequel could be exclusive to consoles.

During a quarterly earnings call, Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive discussed how important PC is for its business, and the response may give little hope for a Red Dead Redemption 2 release on the platform. During the call Take-Two President Karl Slatoff was asked how important PC is to its major titles, in which he replied:

"The answer to that really depends on the title. Some titles are heavily weighted to PC, for example Civilization an XCOM, and some titles are less weighted to PC. So it's really on a title-by-title basis. The great news is that the PC market is vibrant to us, it's a great market for us and a big market, and a core market," Mr. Slatoff said.

The global interactive media market, which includes video games software, esports, streaming monetization, and virtual reality, is expected to peak at $104.6 billion in 2017, analyst firm SuperData predicts.

In its latest Trends and Insights on Games and Interactive Media report, analyst tracking firm SuperData forecasts the video games market to breach $100 billion in 2017. The report, which only includes digital media like PC, mobile, console and VR game software sales, microtransactions, and earnings from gaming video content such as Twitch, says that the global market revenues will grow by 12% year-over-year in 2017 to $104.6 billion. Contrarily, analyst firm Newzoo predicts the global games market will rake in $108.6 billion, up 7% year-over-year.

Mobile revenue is expected to jump by a mighty $6.7 billion in 2017, and 92.25% or $96.5 billion of total games industry revenues are from digital games, SuperData reports. Digital games are up 10.28% year-over-year, and are expected to make up 73% of revenues in 2020.

Today at 9AM EST, AMD officially lifted an embargo on unboxings of their new Ryzen Threadripper CPU. We had one kit on hand and did a Facebook Live video (embedded below) detailing everything from unboxing the CPU to an overview of ASUS's new X399 Zenith motherboard.

We unboxed both the Threadripper 1950X and 1920X. The 1950X features 16 CPU cores and 32 threads, while the 1920X features 12 cores and 24 threads. The 1950X is AMD's top dog when it comes to ripping up threads, and it's a behemoth of a CPU. AMD included a novelty dud CPU in the box so that we could get hands-on with the actual processor.

From its super thick PCB to heavy weight, the CPU looks and feels high performance. We can't disclose performance numbers at this time, but you can probably imagine what double the cores and threads of a Ryzen 7 1800X could deliver in a single package.

Toshiba today revealed the world's thinnest NVMe SSD designed to power the next-generation of tablets, laptops, and mobile IoT devices.

Toshiba's new BG3 line of NVMe SSDs incorporates its high-end BiCS Flash 3D NAND memory into a miniature, sleek DRAM-less package with built-in HMB technology, combining power efficiency with the speed of PCIe Gen3 x2. Tapping the PCIe Gen3 x2 interface and NVMe architecture the new BG3 drives can deliver reads of up to 1520 MB/sec--up to 2.7 times SATA 6Gbit/sec speeds--and writes of up to 840 MB/sec, providing mighty performance in a small 1.3mm-high SSD.

The ultra-slim BG3 series of SSDs is available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities, and are all available in surface-mount BGA (M.2 1620) or removable M.2230 module form factors.

It looks like Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi is getting his hands dirty on GT Sport, with the assets for the game over-specced for the slightly faster PS4 Pro, right up to 8K.

During a studio tour through Polyphony Digital, Finder.com reports that Yamauchi said that they're creating assets for GT Sport for future releases of PlayStation consoles, our strongest hint of the PS5 yet. Remember that I had an exclusive source tell me that the PS5 will feature a discrete GPU, and not an APU - so this news makes sense.

Yamauchi told Finder.com: "It takes six months to create a single car. It's over-specced for PS4 Pro. So we are building for future versions of the console rather than the one we see today. I think it would be no problem to run it at 8K even".

After months of waiting, Arkane is finally fixing Prey's FPS issues on PS4.

Prey's new 1.05 update will address a the notable frame rate issues on PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro platforms by introducing "fixes to address screen-tearing/stuttering". Arkane's latest patch will roll out across all platforms--Xbox One, PS4, PC--and aims to squash a number of bugs and issues, including crashes, performance hiccups, and, of course, stamping out specific unintended player exploits.

Arkane hasn't delivered an ETA on the patch, but community forum manager Jurassica affirms it'll release sometime soon. Check below for full patch notes.

Illfonic and Gun Media have confirmed that Friday The 13th: The Game has sold almost 2 million copies since its late May release.

Friday The 13th: The Game is an interesting spectacle in the games industry. Developed by an indie team of only 30 people, many thought the game would be crushed under the insurmountable weight of the movie series, which cast a wide shadow. And at first it looked like Illfonic and Gun Media were in serious trouble: the game launched on PS4, Xbox One and PC with massive server congestion, as well as glitches and bugs on all platforms.

Despite these hurdles, the game went on to sell 1.8 million units in its first two months, Gun Media head and F13 co-creator Wes Keltner told GamesIndustry.biz in a recent interview.

Konami's first quarter earnings show the Japanese games-maker is doing quite well for itself, despite being near-universally disliked among gamers.

Controversial games publisher and developer Konami kicks off its fiscal year with strong overall growth in revenues driven by successful performance of its videogame branch. The company earned total revenues of 55.743 billion yen ($503.303 million) in the quarter ended in June, up 12.8% year-over-year. Total operating profit reported for the quarter was operating profit 12.2 billion yen ($110.129 million), up a strong 34.2% from fiscal Q1'17. Konami's total profits for the three-month period are also up 46.4%, with 8.5 billion yen ($76.729 million) being generated.

Out of Konami's four segments, its Digital Entertainments videogame segment was the biggest contributor to fiscal Q1'18 revenues. Catalyzed by sales of the popular Yu-Gi-Oh! card game series, a PES 2017 soccer mobile game, and Super Bomberman R on Nintendo Switch, Digital Entertainments pulled in 51.87% of total quarterly revenues, or 28.914 billion yen ($261.06 million), up a strong 35.53% year-over-year.

Massive sales of popular fighting game Injustice 2 contributed to Warner Bros. quarterly earnings.

Time Warner today announced its second quarter earnings, showing strong growth in key sectors including its videogame segment Warner Bros. Interactive thanks to massive game sales. In fact, the parent company said that Injustice 2 was the "highest-grossing console game in the second quarter of 2017," falling in line with projections from analyst firms like NPD Group and SuperData.

Injustice 2 topped the digital sales charts in NPD Group's tracking data when it released in May, becoming the best-selling game in America for the month, and dropped to number 2 in June. The massively popular DC fighting game sold 500,000 units in its first month of availability on PS4 and Xbox One's digital storefronts.

AMD announced their new Radeon RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 graphics cards, but didn't provide too many details about benchmark numbers in games - but I've got the solution to that.

An industry source of mine has provided me with some raw benchmark numbers on Radeon RX Vega 56, which looks to be the new $400 mainstream king, beating the GTX 1070 in some of the biggest games on the market. My source said that the RX Vega 56 card was running on an Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.2GHz, had 16GB of DDR4-3000MHz RAM, and was running Windows 10.

The benchmarks were run at 2560x1440 with the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 easily beating NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1070 in Battlefield 1, DOOM, Civilization 6, and even Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. My source said that Battlefield 1 was run on Ultra settings, Civ 6 was on Ultra with 4x MSAA, DOOM was at Ultra with 8x TSAA enabled, and COD:IW was running on its High preset.

Nintendo has officially confirmed that pre-orders for its massively sought-after SNES Classic Edition microconsole will begin later this year.

After Walmart cancelled SNES Classic Edition pre-orders due to accidentally opening them online, many frustrated consumers anxiously waited for an official response from Nintendo. Now the Japanese console-maker has confirmed that SNES mini pre-orders will go live sometime later this month across all retailers, including Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart and Target, and that a substantial amount of additional consoles will be shipped to ensure adequate supply.

"We appreciate the incredible anticipation that exists for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System: Super NES Classic Edition system, and can confirm that it will be made available for pre-order by various retailers late this month," Nintendo wrote in a recent Facebook post.

Atlus today confirmed a new mysterious Persona game is coming to the Nintendo 3DS.

Persona Q2 has been officially announced, but we don't know anything about the game other than it's coming to the Nintendo 3DS and is likely a sequel to 2014's Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth. The new game may also be connected to Persona 5, as the announcement website has the tagline "take your heart", which was used in Atlus' hit Persona 5 release.

These announcements fall in line with SEGA's promise to continue expanding its IPs across all platforms. SEGA publishes Persona games, and Atlus is a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings, the parent company.

About a month ago we first heard that Apple might ditch the Touch ID in favor of facial recognition. It seems that the company is struggling with embedding the fingerprint scanner under the screen.

A new report has emerged now confirming that the iPhone 8 will have the facial recognition feature. The HomePod's latest firmware shows support for infrared face unlocks in BiometricKit. The phone also comes with an iris scanner, according to the report.

Read also: New iPhone 8 leaked renders allegedly show final design

Another photo leak of the upcoming Galaxy Note8 has emerged, confirming the design of the phone.

The photo was posted by the well-known leaker Evan Blass, and it shows the press renders. It seems that there is no doubt anymore and that the fingerprint sensor will indeed be at the back of the phone next to the camera sensor.

We know that Samsung has planned to embed the fingerprint sensor under the glass on the front of the Galaxy S8, but due to certain problems, they had to give up on the idea. It was expected that the company would resolve the problem and embed the biometric fingerprint reader under the phone's display on the upcoming Galaxy Note8, but it seems that the company still didn't find the right solution.

Microsoft's new high-end Xbox One X carries with it a hefty $499 price tag, but thanks to Taco Bell you could grab one for the low, low cost of FREE.

Microsoft and Taco Bell are teaming up to give away a bunch of Xbox One X consoles to lucky taco aficionados. The promotion starts at the end of August, and you'll have to shell out $5 for a box of Taco Bell goodies to participate. Winners will get an Xbox One X console, a copy of Forza 7, and 3 months of Xbox Game Pass--all for free. If this promo sounds familiar, it should--it's the exact same taco-gobbling giveaway from 2015 only this time you can win an Xbox One X instead of a PS4.

And of course Taco Bell doesn't spoil the fun by telling you how many Xbox One X consoles are available.

Destiny 2 releases next month, yet Bungie nor the game's publisher Activision have discussed or revealed microtransaction plans for the game. However, the recent Destiny 2 beta gives us some clues.

The games industry is transforming; with the advent of online digital distribution, games are no longer fully-finished titles, but are instead constantly evolving over time with a litany of updates and content. Gamers continue to spend money long after the initial purchase and invest more time--and revenue--into experiences that evolve over time. This is a boon to major industry movers like Activision, EA, Ubisoft and Take-Two who have all made billions from their respective live-service-based games, and gamers in return are fed with a constant stream of content to consume as they see fit. This games-as-a-service (GaaS) initiative has provided many boons for gamers and developers, as players get wave after wave of free content and developers and publishers have continual revenue streams to fund updates, expansions, and future sequels.

Nowadays full AAA games are infused with optional paid cosmetics to fund free updates and content such as map packs, new missions, etc. Destiny, Bungie's shared-worlds shooter, embraced this monetization scheme in late 2015 and has been collecting untold millions since. I've found it quite interesting that Bungie nor Activision have discussed Destiny 2's microtransaction plan despite the game releasing next month.