Latest News - Page 2355

Oculus had plenty to share at their annual Oculus Connect 3 developer conference, with the push of Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) allowing for lower-end GPUs to get in the VR game with $499 gaming PCs that are VR-ready powered by the AMD Radeon RX 470.

The more exciting news that Oculus had for the future was a tease that they're working on a new VR headset codenamed Santa Cruz, which is a completely untethered VR experience. Oculus CEO and co-founder Brendan Iribe said during the conference that wireless VR is something that Oculus is working on, and that Santa Cruz is the first step towards wireless VR.

The video does a really poor job of showing what Santa Cruz is all about, apart from the rear of the Rift having something inside hardware-wise, but we don't know what exactly just yet. The head movement wasn't matched with the game they were playing from what I saw, and an out-of-focus camera doesn't provide a professional feel from a company acquired for $2 billion.

One of the best VR experiences I've had was from Epic Games in the form of Bullet Train, but now it seems Epic has put all of that VR work into their "action-packed virtual first-person shooter" known as Robo Recall, which teases "gratifying gameplay and an in-depth scoring system".

Robo Recall is an exclusive to the Oculus platform, which will work on the Oculus Rift and the upcoming Oculus Touch controllers which have been announced with a price of $199, and will ship in quantity in December. As you can see from the trailer, Robo Recall has "immersive environments" where rogue robots are trying to kill you, with Epic Games teasing you can unlock a massive arsenal of weapons and challenges along the way.

One of the best bits I'm looking forward to is the ability of ripping robots limb from limb, and then using those limbs to bash other robots. Bring it on... a reason to take my Oculus Rift CV1 unit for a spin, finally.

Sharp has just made me drool all over my keyboard with the tease of its 27-inch 8K monitor with a 120Hz refresh rate and HDR-capable. The 8K display was teased at the IGZO booth of CEATEC Japan 2016.

The mammoth 8K resolution slams your graphics card with a huge 7680x4320 native res, while the even bigger 120Hz refresh rate will have your GPU under more pressure than ever before. 120Hz is a high refresh rate for lower resolution panels like 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, but 8K at 120Hz would require far more GPU horsepower than triple-monitor 4K 60Hz setups at resolutions like 11,520x2160 (which I personally use as the highest GPU load thanks to the insane native resolution). Throwing HDR onto the table makes the monitor look better, and require even more GPU power.

But rendering 120FPS minimum at 8K is absolutely impossible right now, no matter the GPU hardware - I would dare say that even the next-gen offerings in the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2080 Ti, or the future Volta-based graphics cards (or even the crazy Volta GPUs with 48GB of HBM2 or GDDR6) - nor AMD's next GPU architecture in Vega, or even their next Navi GPU will handle 8K 120FPS in games on a single card.

During the Oculus Connect 3 conference, CyberPowerPC and Oculus announced a new collaboration that really does change everything for VR: a new AMD Radeon-powered, VR-ready PC priced at just $499.

At the beginning of the year, the bare minimum cost to hit the right hardware specifications to run VR games on the Oculus Rift was $949 or so. So when the announcement of the new PC from Brendan Iribe, CEO and co-founder of Oculus, surprise hit. The new limited edition CyberPowerPC is just $499 when purchased with an Oculus Rift, and packs an AMD FX-4350 processor and Radeon RX 470 graphics card.

Included in its $499 price is the keyboard, mouse, DVD drive, and even Windows 10... a totally complete, VR-ready gaming PC that will also handle 1080p 60FPS gaming without a problem thanks to the Polaris-based Radeon RX 470 graphics card.

The latest patch for BioShock: The Collection is here, with 2K Games unleashing the new patch that will allow for field of view (FOV) adjustments from 75 to 130 degrees, as well as support for UltraWide monitors with their awesome 21:9 aspect ratio.

Not only that, but we have improved mouse functionality and general performance improvements. The patch is for both BioShock Remastered, and BioShock 2 Remastered, and will be auto downloaded from Steam. The changelog is below:

BioShock 1

It shouldn't be surprising - but it really is, that Yahoo secretly build a custom software program to search through all of its users' incoming emails for information - all on behalf of the US intelligence sector. Yeah... Yahoo spied on your emails, before you had even read them, for the NSA, according to sources of Reuters.

Yahoo complied with classified US government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts "at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events", reports Reuters. The site continues: "Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real-time".

Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer gave the order, which pissed some senior executives off to the point that in June 2015, Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, left the company, joining Facebook. Yahoo said to Reuters: "Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States". Yeah Yahoo, you sure are - a snitching little traitor (my words).

McAfee founder John McAfee has found something quite odd when browsing a Home Depot store: porn, available on a refrigerator.

McAfee found Pornhub running on a refrigerator at Home Depot... but at least you might need some cold water from the fridge after you've finished. McAfee said in the tweet that "in our current cybersecurity paradigm", that IOT "accounts for this"... yeah.

For 34 years, audiences have collectively feared the dystopian future portrayed in Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner', but Oculus have jumped at the rights to snap up the universe for an upcoming VR adventure.

According to Variety, the company announced at its Oculus Connect developer conference that they've signed up to develop a 'Blade Runner 2047' experience, with Oculus head of experiences Colum Slevin saying "'Blade Runner' has always pushed the boundaries of cinema, visionary art, design and story and bringing the sequel to this beloved sci-fi property to VR gives us an opportunity to push those boundaries further".

But in potential even more exciting news, the company also announced their intention to develop properties based on Disney franchises. Can anyone say a 'Tron' VR experience?

As expected, Oculus today announced the price and shipping date of its motion controllers for the Oculus Rift. Oculus Touch will be available on December 6th and will cost $199, with pre-orders starting on October 10th.

With the Oculus Rift priced at $599 and the Oculus Touch $199, the combined price of the Oculus experience comes to $798, a dollar less than the HTC Vive. PlayStation launches its VR device next week, which will be cheaper - $400, but the Move controllers and camera aren't included in the price. That brings the price of PSVR somewhere closer to $500.

The Oculus Touch comes with two sensors, and a third one will also be available for $79, which puts the price of the total package at $877 to deliver a roomscale VR experience. That means for Oculus to be comparable with HTC Vive in terms of capability it will cost you $77 more than HTC Vive.

Despite the release of previous 60 FPS footage, the newly launched Mafia III is currently locked to 30 FPS on PC, much to the chagrin of its player base. Fortunately, the situation is temporary.

"We know how important having options that best suit your PC's performance capabilities are," a statement on the game's official site reads. "The team has been hard at work ensuring that Mafia III's performance is consistent across all platforms, and right now the game runs at a solid 30 frames-per-second. We are currently working on an update for PC that will give players the option to play Mafia III at higher framerates. We'll share more details about the update, and when you can expect it to arrive, very soon."

If you haven't purchased the game on PC yet, we definitely recommend holding off if you care about high framerates. Be sure to check back for news on when the update hits.

Nintendo's unannounced NX hardware may feature a new "two parts of the same whole" kind of approach to games: smaller mobile-esque companion games for the handheld portion for on the go play, and full AAA games on the home console version--all on the same cartridge.

For a long time I was thinking how Nintendo NX's hybrid hardware would work in terms of games: how would Nintendo effectively make a single game playable on a handheld and a home console? Now I might've found my answer. Ubisoft has told popular YouTuber Boogie2988 about the NX:

"Let's say you could play Assassin's Creed once you have your handheld plugged into your console. And then, you could then detach the thing and take it with you and play the Assassin's Creed mobile game out of your pocket. And then when you get back home, plug it directly in and now it attaches back to the... That's brilliant. That's smart, right? Taking a form of the game with you as you go. So he says it's a dream to code for," Boogie said at the Retropalooza convention.

The most popular photo-sharing app celebrates its 6th birthday. In its six years of existence, Instagram has grown into an independent social network.

Instagram was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and launched in October 2010 as a free mobile app. The service rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million active users as of April 2012 and over 300 million as of December 2014. The latest numbers show that Instagram has more than 400 million active users, more than Twitter.

Instagram's potential was recognized by Facebook so they bought it 2012 for $1 billion. At the time of the sale, Instagram counted only 13 employees. Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook was "committed to building and growing Instagram independently," in contrast to its past practices.

Today, the technology is affordable and accessible to almost everyone. But not so long ago things were different. Just a decade can make a huge difference in technology. In 2014, the number of active mobile phones was higher than the number of people on Earth.

The progress in the field of technology is evident and fascinating, so we decided to compare how the devices have changed over the past decades.

In 1979 Sony's Walkman was a big hit. Suddenly the music was portable. The average tapes contained 60 minutes of music. Compare that to today's gadgets like the iPod, which is transformed into a slim device that can contain thousands of songs. There are also streaming services, like Spotify, so you don't even have to use a special device to gain access to music.

Just like its competitors at Cupertino, Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL flagship duo carry a premium price tag.

Google's new Pixel phones carry some hefty specs, with 4GB of onboard LPDDR4 RAM, a snappy quad-core 2.15GHz Snapdragon 821 processor, and roomy storage. Google is clearly taking a jab at Apple with a powerful handset duo, but like the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the new Pixel phones carry a hefty price tag: the Pixel XL with 128GB of storage costs a staggering $869, with the base 32GB option starting at $769.

Now if you're used to upgrading to flagships every year or two, you won't really be deterred by this cost, and Apple's probably conditioned your wallet. This is new territory for Google, however. As a quick price comparison, Google's previous premium handset, the Nexus 6P, cost $649 for the 128GB variant.

Following Sony's original extremely unpopular decision to cut Fallout 4's mod support on PS4, the company has had a change of heart: mods are now coming to Fallout 4 on PS4...but there's a catch.

Bethesda today announced that Fallout 4's PS4 mods are no longer cancelled, but the mods themselves will be significantly gimped on PS4. For example, Fallout 4's PS4 mods won't be able to use new assets that aren't available in the base game itself, so that means no new weapons, armor sets, and items (aka the most popular mods). Given the limited nature of console mods in general, this is a pretty big deal and cuts out a chunk of the already-limited capability of console mods.

If that wasn't enough, there's another catch: we'll have to wait until Skyrim: Special Edition's mods are up and running smoothly on PS4 before Fallout 4 gets mod support.

The Washington State Gambling Commission has formally told Valve to stop "allowing the transfer of virtual skins for gambling activities" on Steam.

The commission recently issued a press release prompting Valve to take "whatever actions necessary" to end the unregulated "black market" Counter-Strike: GO skin trade in its entirety. The agency says that a single site in the CS:GO skin trade, CS:GO Lounge, has earned an estimated $1 billion in unregulated revenue streams--revenue that's been earned "contrary to state gambling laws."

Valve has until October 14 to comply with this order, and if they fail, the commission will take criminal actions.

The latest iPhone looks almost identical to the previous two, and it is understandable that many users expected a bigger change in design.

One YouTuber decided to take the matter into his own hands. In the description of the video he posted on YouTube he wrote: "I couldn't bear another iPhone with the same, slippery design...I just couldn't. It was time to take matters into my own hands."

And that's exactly what he did. He had dismantled the iPhone 7 and then smoothed the edges with a circular saw. You can check out the process and the final result in the video posted below.

Skyrim: Special Edition will be playable in native 4K resolution on Sony's new PlayStation 4 Pro console, and it'll also launch with mod support on PS4.

Since Sony pretty much killed Fallout 4 mods on PS4, gamers were worried that the new Skyrim remaster wouldn't have mods either. As any PC gamer will tell you, Skyrim with mods is a complete game-changer, and is one of the many reasons the studio chose to remaster the game on current-gen systems. Bethesda today allayed those fears by confirming Skyrim: Special Edition will launch with mod support on PS4, but there's a few concessions.

First of all, Sony still hasn't greenlit the use of new assets for Fallout 4's or Skyrim: Special Edition's PS4 mods. That means all the mods can only use existing in-game assets, and we won't be seeing any new armors, weapons, or outfits. Skyrim: Special Edition will see PS4 mod support ahead of Fallout 4, so rest assured that Bethesda is more focused on getting Skyrim up and running first.

I wasn't going to write up anything on the purported GeForce GTX 20 series from NVIDIA expected to be unveiled sometime in 2017, but 3DCenter has posted up some speculation on what we could expect from NVIDIA's hopefully generation leaping GTX 20 series of cards.

The new GeForce GTX 20 series would the 14nm FinFET refresh of the Pascal architecture, led by the GeForce GTX 2080 Ti which would use the refreshed GP102 core with 3384 CUDA cores, and GDDR5X on a 384-bit memory bus. Under that, we'll find the GTX 2080 which would replace the current GTX 1080, and then the GTX 2070 that could be the new price/performance champion.

NVIDIA could use the faster GDDR5X standard on the GeForce GTX 2070, with the faster VRAM exclusive to the current-gen GTX 1080 and Titan X. The use of GDDR5X on the more mid-range GeForce GTX 2070 could be a big win for the price/performance market once again.

Apple has been slowly losing its lead of battery life champion with the iPhone, and it looks like this streak continues with the new iPhone 7, which gets smashed by flagship competitors from Samsung, HTC and LG.

Tests performed by Which? used custom battery tests on the Apple iPhone 7, Samsung Galaxy S7, HTC 10, and LG G5 smartphones. The battery test involved normal tasks that everyday users would do, like phone calls, browsing the web, and watching videos. All smartphones were using the latest version of their respective OS, so we have the iPhone 7 with iOS 10 and the three Android smartphones with Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

In the tests, we have the following results: