Latest News - Page 2342

While Marvel continues to execute their carefully planned cinematic universe, DC keeps churning out expensive but forgettable flicks like 'Batman v Superman' and 'Suicide Squad', and today's news won't fill fans with much more confidence in we're their going next.

Despite the behind-the-scenes battles and extensive reshoots of 'Suicide Squad', Slash Film is reporting that the director has been entrusted with another DC film called 'Gotham City Sirens' which is set to revolve around the bad girls of the universe, including Harley Quinn, Catwoman and Poison Ivy. If that's not all, Will SMith's charmless Deadshot is getting a spin-off film, and a second 'Suicide Squad' film is in early development.

Meanwhile, the next feature in the DC Comics stable, 'Wonder Woman' is set to hit hit 2D, 3D and IMAX cinemas worldwide on June 2nd 2017.

Nintendo's new Switch handheld-and-console hybrid is a fresh new take that unifies multiple platforms together. It's original, unique, and bold--and it was designed by a younger generation of Nintendo employees, not the company's clandestine old guard.

Nintendo's old guard doesn't really understand the industry any more--we saw evidence of this with the Wii U's terrible failure, and the strange obsolete business models that the company is only starting to break today. The biggest way Nintendo is breaking these outdated shackles is with the Switch transforming console-and-handheld hybrid. But the Switch itself was actually designed and pushed by a new younger blossoming generation that will help Nintendo catch up with the times.

"We have these younger people in the company who are taking the lead on Switch development and it's really been them that have put this forward and designed this system," Nintendo alum Shigeru Miyamoto said in a recent interview with Glixel.

Apple's AirPods, the wireless ear buds that are somewhat of a replacement for the lack of a headphone jack on the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, are finally available for sale and shipping, the company announced.

The AirPods are available to order online and will be arriving at Apple stores next week.

The company had some unspecified problems with the AirPods, and they missed their initial deadline of October. Back then, Apple said that AirPods aren't ready for customers without further explanation.

AMD Tech Summit 2016 - AMD has made its next-gen CPU family official, dubbed Ryzen, and we're only scratching the surface of what it's capable of.

AMD flew a very select number of tech press to Sonoma, California for its annual Tech Summit - where we were quickly briefed on Ryzen, AMD's new CPU family based on the Zen architecture.

The enthusiast SKU of Zen will arrive in the form of "Summit Ridge", which will be an 8-core/16-thread CPU clocking in at 3.4GHz minimum. We also have 20MB of L2+L3 cache, and AMD's newly-touted "Sensing and Adaptive Technology".

Corsair today unveiled its fastest-ever Force MP500 M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD lineup that delivers speeds up to five times faster than traditional SATA III 6Gbps SSDs.

The Force MP500 rocks Phison PS5007-E7 NVMe controller and high-bandwidth PCIe Gen. 3 x4 M.2 2280 interface to deliver insanely fast transfers of up to 3,000 MB/s read speeds and write speeds of up 2,400 MB/s. Corsairs Force MP500 lineup comes in three different sizes: 120GB, 240GB and 480GB, all set in the sleek and minimalist M.2 form factor.

The drives have built-in SmartECC, SmartRefresh and SmartFlush tech designed to thwart corruption, and the Force MP500 is also fully compatible with Corsair's SSD Tool Box which allows for easy SSD health, maintenance and secure drive wiping.

Ubisoft's excellent-looking medieval game For Honor is an always-online experience, and can't be played offline--gamers have to stay online in order to play all modes, including the solo singleplayer campaign.

Despite having posted that For Honor's solo mode would be playable offline, Ubisoft has now confirmed the visceral fighter is online-only, confirming recent rumors.

"We can confirm that For Honor is an always online experience. Some elements of progression, which is hosted online, are shared across story and multiplayer modes. Players will need to be connected to the Internet at all times to play For Honor," an Ubisoft spokesperson confirmed.

ADATA today released its new Ultimate SU900 SSD lineup with 3D NAND memory, offering "superior stability, durability, and power efficiency" to both desktops and laptops.

The Ultimate SU900 Solid-State Drives come in 2.5-inch, 7mm height sizes and utilize performance-driven SLC Caching and DRAM Cache Buffers to hit blistering-fast read and write speeds of up to 560MB/s and 525 MB/s, respectively, over the SATA III 6b/s protocol. The line comes in four capacities--256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB--all of which utilize MLC 3D NAND flash memory.

Thanks to the SU900 line's MLC 3D NAND flash memory and LDPC error correcting code, efficiency is at the forefront, with the drives rocking out up to 800TB Total Bytes Written and a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) rate of 2 million hours.

SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft made history back in 2012 when it became the first commercial spacecraft in history to deliver cargo to the International Space Station and safely return cargo to Earth, a feat previously achieved only by governments. Although Dragon currently carries cargo to space, it was designed to carry humans, and it should have a major role in getting to Mars.

The Dragon spacecraft has yet to welcome its first crew onboard, which was planned for December 2017. However, according to NASA's Commercial Crew Program Target Flight Dates list, the 14-day test flight has been rescheduled for May 2018.

This decision is most likely related to Falcon 9's explosion in September and the company's investigation of the incident. Elon Musk said that the cause of the accident was "a combination of liquid helium, advanced carbon fiber composites, and solid oxygen," but earlier this month they rescheduled the launch of satellites for Iridium Communications because they are "completing the final steps necessary to safely return to flight."

Earlier this year Nokia signed a strategic brand and intellectual property licensing agreement enabling HMD Global (a Nokia Corporation, the original Nokia, affiliate) to create a new generation of Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets. HMD announced that it has agreed to acquire from Microsoft the rights to use the Nokia brand on feature phones, and certain related design rights.

Next year will bring us the first Nokia-branded smartphone by HMD Global. There are reports the company should introduce the phone, currently known as the Nokia D1C, in February next year, at MWC.

The smartphone will be launched in two versions which will differ in display size and the amount of memory. The more expensive variant should come with 3GB of RAM and a 5.5-inch display. The expected price is $200.

Synaptics announced they are partnering up with OXi Technology, a Shanghai-based developer of unique and patented optical fingerprint technology.

The two will work on developing new proprietary optical sensing solutions for smartphones, tablets, and PCs.

Rick Bergman, President, and CEO of Synaptics, said in an official statement:

Sony really needs to pay more attention to its firmware patches. The company has just rolled out a new console firmware patch that killed one of the major benefits of the PlayStation 4 Pro, which is being able to play games at 4K 30FPS over HDMI 1.4 on older 4K HDTVs and monitor displays.

Before now, you didn't even need a newer 4K display with HDMI 2.0 to play games in 4K on the PS4 Pro. Having to buy a new $500-700 4K display on top of the PS4 Pro's $399 cost was a deal-breaker for some, so the console's ability to play games in 4K over the older HDMI 1.4 spec was a welcomed addition.

Until Sony literally broke that functionality.

Today, Synaptics announced their new optical fingerprint sensor - the FS9100, which is capable of high-resolution scanning through 1mm of full cover glass and enables clean button-free industrial designs.

The fingerprint sensor is designed to be placed under coverglass, meaning it doesn't require its own separate button. The FS9100 can be integrated into a single piece of glass on the front of the phone, so hopefully we can say 'goodbye' to separate buttons for fingerprint sensors and hello to even sleeker phone designs.

The FS9100 optical fingerprint sensors are designed for placement under the cover glass, including 2.5D glass, located in the front, bottom bezel of devices. The real innovation is being able to work through the existing device glass, up to 1mm thick, meaning that the fingerprint sensor is now as durable as your gorilla glass (or other glass) screen.

AMD Tech Summit 2016 - One of the things I've been wanting to tell the world is that I got to see AMD's next-generation graphics card in action at their Tech Summit in Sonoma, California a few days ago - and now, I can.

I was witness to seeing Vega 10 rocking 8GB of next generation HBM2 technology running DOOM at 4K (3840x2160) on Ultra settings, with an average of 70FPS. Impressive stuff, considering that NVIDIA's fastest GeForce GTX 1080 and Titan X are required to hit those performance numbers in DOOM.

I had my hand behind the card, which had its fans cranked up to 100% - and it was pushing out some serious heat - but this is a prototype board that is months from being finished. Still, a major technology turn on for me. We don't know much else about the Vega 10-based graphics card that was inside of the PC, either. There have been leaks all over the place about this, and a few of you have been wondering why I haven't written about it.

Sony might have its 4K-ready PS4 Pro out right now, but Microsoft has been enjoying success with the Xbox One S thanks to its 4K Blu-ray player (what's going on, Sony?) - and now we're hearing about Microsoft's confidence in its new "monster" Project Scorpio console due in 2017.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer was fielding questions on Twitter as always, where he teased: "Looking forward to E3. We build our Xbox plans for Xbox customers, not in response to others. I think 2017 will be a good year". Then @MasyerGaming asked Spencer "are you guys keeping the promise of 6 teraflop GPU on scorpio rumors are running its been dropped to 5 tell me its not true."

Spencer replied: "Nothing has changed since our announce," so we're safe - Project Scorpio still has 6 TFLOPs of GPU performance, and Microsoft asserts it will enable native 4K console gaming, which the PS4 Pro has trouble sustaining.

We all know that high-end gaming displays are expensive, but holy hell are they beautiful to game on - especially in games like Overwatch, CS:GO, Battlefield 1, and more - when you're hitting that 144Hz+ mark, it's amazing.

ASUS has been running the gaming monitor market for a while now, but things will be changing in a big way in 2017. Right now, ASUS is the largest vendor of gaming monitors with 35% of the market, while BenQ has around 22-24%, and Acer with 17-19%. Worldwide LCD shipments hit 120 million units in 2015, and are expected to reach the same point in 2016 - but in 2015, the 144Hz gaming monitor shipments reached 550,000 - 600,000 units.

144Hz gaming monitors are expected to shift from the 600K units shipped in 2015 to a huge 1.2 million in 2016 - and while this represents just 1% of the total 120 million LCD monitor shipments, the average selling price (ASP) of gaming displays is much higher, so there are lots of profits in this market. DigiTimes is reporting that according to vendors current orders, worldwide gaming monitor shipments are expected to reach 2.5 million units in 2017, and a massive 3.5 million in 2018.

Renowned for producing some of the best Blu-ray players ever made, oppo has finally launched their first 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player - and it includes all the features that aficionados have been waiting for.

From the product breakdown published by the company this week, the UDP-203 is a behemoth, including the following features:

While the company is promising an even higher-end unit in the coming year, on paper their first player looks to be the one to beat. If you're in the US you can order a unit from here, while other locales will launch in the coming months. We can't wait to get our hands-on one!

Valve has pushed out a new Steam client update, with a bunch of tweaks, optimizations, and new features - including higher bandwidth options for those wanting to blast around 4K in-house streaming.

There's also new controller options, as well as a Steam Configurator support for Sony's DualShock 4 controller, improved downloading and patching speeds when games are being downloaded/updated on a mechanical HDD (seriously, buy an SSD). The full update log is below:

General

How many devices do you have in your house that use Wi-Fi? I'm sure there's at least a few, and if you're like me and many others - you'll have over a dozen devices with Wi-Fi, so when engineers reach a breakthrough with Wi-Fi that uses 10,000x less power - it'll make you sit up and pay attention.

Engineers from the University of Washington have achieved speeds of 11Mbps on the new connection, so it's not breaking speed barriers - but they're working on getting the speeds faster, and faster. The new Wi-Fi transmissions use 10,000x less power than conventional methods, so battery life savings on smartphones and mobile devices will improve by a considerable margin in the future.

One of the engineers, Shyam Gollakota, explains: "We wanted to see if we could achieve Wi-Fi transmissions using almost no power at all. That's basically what Passive Wi-Fi delivers. We can get Wi-Fi for 10,000 times less power than the best thing that's out there".

Dying Light and Dead Island dev Techland is making a massive new open-world fantasy RPG with the help of Damien Monnier, a lead ex- CD Projekt RED dev who helped build The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Damien Monnier has joined Techland to work as lead designer of the studio's new IP, which was teased back in May. According to Eurogamer, Techland's new RPG is an open-world fantasy experience with online co-op multiplayer and singleplayer elements. Here's what Monnier had to say about the game in his own words: "Today I joined Techland as lead designer on a new exciting IP that got me all *___*," he said on Twitter.

If the IP has impressed Monnier, who worked on the masterpiece that is The Witcher 3, then we can only imagine what the studio is cooking up!

Intel's high-end next-generation enthusiast Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X CPUs are expected for a reveal in Q3 2017, with Digitimes reporting Intel will showcase the new chips at Gamescom 2017 in Germany.

Both Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X extreme CPUs will be a 14nm refresh of the current Broadwell-E series built on the new X299 chipset, with the new enthusiast line being called Basin Falls. Skylake-X is expected to come in 6, 8 and 10-core variants possibly with up to 4.3GHz and 20-threads, Turbo Boost 3.0 support, 140W TDP, and 13.75MB L3 cache.

Kaby Lake-X is expected to come in only 4-core variants with 8MB CPU L3 cache, 112W TDP, and only Turbo Boost 2.0 support.