Latest News - Page 2287

Nintendo Switch's left JoyCon desyncing issue is indeed a hardware fault, and instead of applying a makeshift Bluetooth antenna, Nintendo fixed the issue with something rather simple: a little square piece of foam.

CNET recently sent their defective left JoyCon to Nintendo to be fixed, but before sending it out, they took a picture of its internals. Once the repaired JoyCon came back the publication took a picture of its fresh innards to see what Nintendo actually did to fix the issue. You can see a before and after comparison below.

So what did Nintendo do to actually fix the device? The left JoyCon's desynching issues can be traced to the lacks of a Bluetooth antenna, so you'd think Nintendo would just pop an antenna in there to fix the fault. Not so! Nintendo simply put in a little piece of conductive foam to shield the device from radio frequency interference.

A few days ago we reported that multi-GPU support in Vulkan was exclusive to Windows 10, but Khonos Group has reiterated that this isn't true - and that multi-GPU support under Vulkan will work with Windows 7, Windows 10, and Linux.

Khronos Group explains: "Some of the Khronos GDC slideware mentioned that for Vulkan multi-GPU functionality, Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) must be in Linked Display Adapter (LDA) mode. That was not a very clear statement that has caused some confusion. And so it is worth clarifying that:"

They continued: "Khronos always strives to make its' specifications as cross platform as possible. Of course, what products ship on which OS is up to the implementers of each specification, but Khronos is already aware of vendor plans to ship multi-GPU functionality on platforms other than Windows 10, including Linux".

NVIDIA has just dropped their new GeForce 378.92 drivers, which are Game Ready for Mass Effect: Andromeda - but the new drivers also include SLI profiles for the game, and updated SLI profiles for two other games.

The new drivers also add Dolby Vision HDR support, with Mass Effect: Andromeda being one of the only games on the PC right now with Dolby Vision HDR support. Remember, you'll need a display that is Dolby Vision HDR compatible, and not just the usual HDR10 standard.

The official notes from NVIDIA on their GeForce 378.92 drivers:

I've pumped over 50 hours into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on my Nintendo Switch, and I'm beyond in love - it's one of the best games I've ever played, and I'm playing it entirely in portable mode - in my hands. So the news of Zelda: Breath of the Wild being on the PC is a head turner, and the latest footage of the Wii U emulator 'Cemu' running the game at what looks to be a solid 30FPS, is impressive. Check it out here.

The latest time we saw Zelda: Breath of the Wild running on the PC through the Wii U emulator, it was barely maintaining 15FPS - but two weeks in development, and large strides are being made in performance. Cemu v1.7.4 is behind the improvements, which will be released to Patreon subscribers on April 2, and to the general public on April 9.

Cemu's new emulator build is seeing large improvements in the background, and while it's far from perfect - the fixes and performance improvements made in two weeks are pretty damn good. Where will we be in another month?

Amazon is a leader in next-day and guaranteed 3-day delivery, but now eBay is joining in on the delivery market with their new "Guaranteed Delivery" service - where eBay will guarantee shoppers their products will be delivered within 3 days.

There will be over 20 million products offered under eBay's new Guaranteed Delivery program, and will roll out across the US starting in summer. With over 1.1 billion items on eBay on a good day, 67% of them ship for free while 63% of them are delivered within 3 days or less. The new "Guaranteed Delivery" items will see eBay offering refunds or a coupon if your delivery isn't on time.

eBay will soon let buyers filter their searches with 1-, 2-, and 3-day delivery items - while qualified sellers will enjoy new shipping tools that they can tweak to offer their customers more accurate delivery times. As Engadget points out, we're in a world where Amazon can offer 1-hour - not 1-day, deliveries - eBay needs to catch up, and offer the technological foundation for on-the-spot tracking for deliveries.

Ubisoft is hard at work on the new Assassin's Creed game, which is reportedly going to be called Assassin's Creed: Empire - and now we know that it will most likely be coming in October, and that the map will be much bigger than the previous game in the franchise.

According to the latest rumor from Polish website Gry-Online, which reports that Assassin's Creed Empire will be a prequel to the entire Assassin's Creed franchise. Altair's distant relative will be the protagonist, and is being developed by Ubisoft Montreal, the team that worked on Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. Empire, is meant to have a map size that is 3x that in Black Flag, so it's freakin' huge.

Assassin's Creed Empire details so far:

Don't believe the rumours that the 'Terminator' franchise has been terminated for good - the producer of 'Terminator Genisys' has promised a bright future that fans will actually enjoy.

Speaking to Collider, 'Genisys' producer David Ellison won't quite promise that Schwarzenegger will be back, but that the series will continue on a different path than the ill-recieved 2015 sequel. "I will say we have resolved the future of the franchise and believe me its an incredibly bright future. I think where it's going will be the continuation of what the fans really wanted since T2. We have something this year that we will be announcing for the franchise. It's something we're incredibly excited about and we think is the direction it needs to head."

Meanwhile, the enduring classic 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day' will return to cinemas in a remastered 3D version in the US, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand on August 25th 2017.

Well over a decade since the release of the last 'Star Wars' prequel, the role of young Obi-Wan Kenobi portrayed by actor Ewan McGregor remains a clear highlight. So the latest confirmation that he'd be prepared to take on the role in a future film should please many fans.

Speaking to Business Insider while on the publicity trail for 'Trainspotting 2' where he reprises another role for the first time in over two decades, the interviewer broached the subject. "Listen, I have been asked about it a lot, to the point where it looks a bit like I'm sort of touting for work. I've been very open to say I'd be happy to do it, if they want to do it. I think they are set going into the 2030s with their movies, but it would be fun to do, of course I'd be happy to do it."

The next 'Star Wars' sequel 'The Last Jedi' is set to hit cinemas in 3D, 2D and IMAX worldwide from December 15.

The latest rumors on AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega is that there will be 7 different SKUs on offer, something that was spotted by Phoronix, inside of the new Linux driver released by AMD.

In the first 100 patches released, the first Vega support was based on the GFX9 architecture, which is very different to GFX8 - or the Polaris architecture. The new architecture required around 40,000 new lines of code, something that included: "new video BIOS interface, new hardware intellectual property, support for video decode using UVD (UVD 7.0), support for video encode using VCE (VCE 4.0), support for 3D via RadeonSI, power management, full display support using DC, and support for SR-IOV virtualization".

The new patches include 7 new Vega IDs, which will include Radeon Instinct and Radeon PRO products based on the Vega architecture. As for the IDs, this is what we have:

I've been writing about Mass Effect: Andromeda for quite some time, chronicling its progress throughout the years. So it's a very strange and almost disappointing feeling playing it today, simply because it feels so...unfinished. This is a game BioWare should've delayed, and here are my first impressions.

Mass Effect: Andromeda should've been delayed. It absolutely feels unfinished. The environments are absolutely incredible and breathtaking in their visual fidelity and sci-fi feel--the Nexus' on-ship habitats are amazing, and deep-space exploration looks great.

But for every step taken forward by the game's graphics, it takes two steps back in terms of UI and basic features. As I predicted way back in my "Why I'm worried about ME: Andromeda" opinion piece, this is a heavily casualized Mass Effect meant to penetrate the mainstream market and be more accessible than the other games.

Apple has introduced a new color option for its iPhone 7 lineup - red.

For the past ten years, Apple has offered a line of RED products, including red phone cases, whose sales have contributed to the Global Fund to fight AIDS.

From March 24th, both iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will be available in red color, and every purchase will contribute to the Global Fund to support HIV/AIDS programs and help deliver an AIDS-free generation.

Tesla Motors has announced that they are discontinuing the Model S with 60 kWh battery pack.

The Moel S 60 kWh was introduced a year ago as a more affordable option to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. According to the company, most customers ended up buying an equivalent to the Model S 75 kWh.

The company stated that in order to simplify the ordering process for their customers, they will be removing the 60 kWh option from their lineup.

First of all, I think we can all agree that the Galaxy S8 and S8+ are the most leaked phones in a while. Now that that's been said, a new day brings a new leak, this time in the form of promotional photos that Samsung will use to market their latest devices.

The images don't show anything we haven't seen before, just confirm previous rumors. Both devices will have curved edges, minimal bezels, and additional button on the side for virtual assistant Bixby that the company officially announced and confirmed that it would be featured on the upcoming devices.

Read also: Samsung officially unveils virtual assistant Bixby

As most of you probably know, the iconic Nokia 3310 is coming back. HMD Global decided to launch a modern version of the popular devices. It will still be a pretty basic phone, but re-designed.

Of course, to keep the integrity of the device, the Nokia 3310 will come with the Snake game.

Back in 2013, Sony made a big deal about the PS4 being able to play games as you download them--play as you download, or Play Now, as it was called. It sounded great on paper, but in practice, it was quite frustrating to early adopters, and now we might know why: Sony might have made publishers literally obfuscate the install progress of digital games.

Even four years later in 2017, digital downloads on consoles aren't where they need to be. Both PSN and Xbox LIVE are slow and clunky--but it was much worse back in the old days. At the PS4's hey-day, Sony apparently mandated that games publishers hide the actual download install rates of digital games and just show the "Play Now" progress. I can confirm this happened. I still remember downloading all 50GBs of Wolfenstein: The New Order on PS4 back in June 2014 and my PS4 literally lying to me and telling me the game was "installed". About 20 minutes in my gameplay was interrupted with a message telling me the install wasn't finished. You actually used to have to jump through a bunch of menus just to see how much progress your downloads had made.

Interestingly enough, Jim Sterling might've uncovered who's to blame for this: Sony themselves.

The future of batteries could be similar to what scientists from IBM and ETH Zurich university are showing off, with the scientists building a new "flow" battery that both powers, and cools a processor.

The new "redox flow" batteries use "liquid electrolytes are normally used on a large scale to store energy", reports Engadget - with Harvard researchers recently creating one that can last over 10 years with little degradation, making it perfect for storing solar/wind energies. ETH Zurich and IBM found two liquids that work with both "flow-battery electrolytes and cooling agents that can dissipate heat from chips in the same circuit", Engadget continues.

So, we're now at a point where scientists can scan our brain waves while we watch movie trailers - and are able to pretty accurately predict whether that movie will be a box office success... or whether it'll bomb.

Researchers from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management have been working on a method of scanning brain waves of moviegoers, scanning over 120 of them wearing EEG brain monitors while they watched movie trailers, scanning their brain wave patterns. The researchers used this data, to see how well the trailers were keeping the attention of the viewers, and how similar the viewers' brain waves were.

This provided them with something called "neural similarity", and was a great way of predicting whether the final movie would be a box office hit - as those with more neural similarity made more money at the box office, with better engagement. The team tested over a dozen movie trailers, with X-Men: Days of Future Past coming in at #1 on the brain scans, while Mr. Peabody and Sherman came in dead last. The researchers added that neural similarity ratings accurately predicted the box office performance of both of these movies, and that this technology is at least 20% more accurate at predicting box office success than "less scientific" survey options.

TSMC has teased that it will be shifting some of its manufacturing to the United States in the near future, but now the company has decided it won't make a decision on its shift to the US until next year.

TSMC boss Morris Chang said back in January that it was looking to the US as a new place for a manufacturing plant, but TSMC spokesperson Michael Kramer has now come out and said that the company will decide in the "first half of 2018" if it will invest over $16 billion in a new production facility in the United States.

Kramer told Reuters: "We won't make a decision until next year. We would sacrifice some benefits if we move to the States. But we have flexibility in Taiwan. If an earthquake happened for instance (in Taiwan), we could send thousands of people here as support, whereas it's harder in the States". Reuters points out that TSMC receives around 65% of its total revenue from the US, so building a manufacturing plant in the US makes a whole lot of sense.

Ubisoft released For Honor last month, with the melee combat focused action game receiving decent praise from critics and gamers - but the microtransactions that Ubisoft have implemented are... well... bad.

If you were to unlock everything in For Honor, including the Emotes, Executions, Effects, Outfits, and Ornaments - it would cost $732 in real money, or 2.5 years. Reddit user bystander007 worked it out, with the average hero requiring 91,500 steel (For Honor's in-game currency) to unlock everything - for one Hero. There are 12 heroes in total, so 12 x 91,500 = 1,098,000 of in-game currency - but you can buy Steel with real money, too.

For every $100 you pump into For Honor, you'll get 150,000 steel - but then you'd need $732 worth of real money converted into steel to hit 1,098,000 - a crazy amount of money.

Cooler Master's Case Mod World Series 2017 competition just kicked off this month, and it's already drawing in tons of participants with impressive builds.

"Project GOF" from H89

I've always been amazed by the creativity and skill that the maker community brings out, and PC modding is just as mesmerizing. Some of these builds are absolutely amazing, and Cooler Master's latest Case Mod World Series has attracted some of the world's best modders.