Latest News - Page 2387

GIGABYTE has made its new gaming laptops powered by the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 series graphics card official, with the new P55 and P57 series as well as the thinner and lighter ULTRAFORCE Series P35 and P37 units.

GIGABYTE's new gaming laptops can be configured with Intel's new Skylake-based Core i7 processor, as well as the usual high-end tech like M.2 PCIe SSDs, DDR4 RAM, USB 3.1 with Type-C, and HDMI 2.0 connectivity. The P35 and P37 models come with the GeForce GTX 1070, while the P55 uses a GTX 1060 and the P57 knocks it back up to a GTX 1070. All of the models are actually quite thin, and not as thick and large as some of ASUS and MSI's current-gen models.

The GIGABYTE P57 comes with a 17-inch 1080p IPS-based display and can be configured with either the GTX 1070 or GTX 1060, while GIGABYTE has included a backlit keyboard with anti-ghost and 30-key rollover.

Remember paying $60 or more for Battlefield 4? Yeah, well EA has just dropped the price of Battlefield 4 to just $4.99, down from its listed $19.99 price. Battlefield 4: Digital Deluxe edition has dropped from $39.99 to just $9.99.

EA has also dropped the price of Battlefield 3 to just $4.99, down from its original $19.99 pricing. Everything Battlefield related has discount as well, with the DLC packs heavily discounted - like Battlefield 4: Ultimate Shortcut Bundle slashed from $39.99 to $9.99. The bundle includes all of the weapons, vehicles, and gadgets in the Battlefield 4 base game - saving you the time of playing countless hours to unlock all of those weapons.

If you weren't punished enough from Battlefield: Hardline already and wanted to see what all the fuss was about, it has been discounted from $29.99 to $7.49, while the Battlefield: Hardline Ultimate Shortcut Unlock has bottomed out from its $59.99 price to just $14.99. Get in on the Battlefield 4 discounted goodness right here!

ASUS has just unveiled its new gaming laptops powered by NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards, led by the huge 18-inch GX800 laptop that packs a 4K display and GeForce GTX 1080s in SLI. Yeah, GTX 1080s in SLI, in a laptop.

Starting with the new ASUS ROG GX800, we have an 18-inch 4K display with GeForce GTX 1080s in SLI, providing some truly crazy performance. The new ROG GX800 includes the ROG-exclusive Hydro Overclocking System that pushes the CPU, GPU and RAM to their limits for additional performance.

The new ASUS ROG GX800 and its 18-inch 4K display includes NVIDIA's G-Sync technology, the MechTAG (Mechanical Tactile Advanced Gaming) keyboard with mechanical switches and customizable RGB LED backlighting for each key. The new ASUS ROG GX800 requires 2 x 330W power adapters, but when you're getting the performance of GTX 1080 SLI, would you care? It's pretty insane, whatever the scenario is.

Origin PC has just announced their upgraded range of gaming laptops, with the EON15-X, EON17-X, and EON17-SLX now available with higher-end NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards and higher refresh displays, right up to 120Hz. You can check out, and order Origin PC's new gaming laptops right here.

The new EON gaming laptops from Origin PC can be configured with a GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 - and your choice of a 1080p 120Hz display for the EON17-X and EON17-SLX laptops, and if the 120Hz refresh rate isn't your thing, Origin offers a 4K display as well. Origin PC CEO and co-founder Kevin Wasielewski said: "ORIGIN PC's EON laptops now offer a ridiculous 3X higher performance over our previous generation of award-winning laptops. Now is truly the best time to own a high-performance laptop. Every single ORIGIN PC EON laptop now offers desktop class graphics, VR Readiness, 4K NVIDIA G-SYNC screens, ORIGIN PC professional GPU and CPU overclocking, and free lifetime 24/7 support based in the US".

Now, what about specs?

IDF 2016 - Intel has just unveiled its new Project Alloy headset, a wireless merged reality headset, that is the company's VR headset design - without the need for any other components.

Intel's headset will include everything you need to render the merged reality, with an internal battery for power, 3D cameras and sensors powered by Intel's own RealSense motion tracking technology, and more. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that the headset is capable of "merged reality" which blends elements of the real-world, into the virtual one. During the Intel Developer Forum, the company demonstrated someone wearing a Project Alloy headset user who was holding a dollar bill in his physical hand, where he was shaving down a virtual block of gold in the VR world.

Krzanich said: "We believe the capability of Alloy and what it introduces is significant. It gives the opportunity to merge the physical and virtual world together". The company says that a merged reality headset should solve some of the issues about VR blocking out the real-world, where you can't see anything happening around you when the VR headset is on. Intel's new Project Alloy headset doesn't have any of the advanced and precise tracking technology that HTC and Valve designed with Lighthouse for the HTC Vive system, so we're looking towards an improved GearVR, with higher-end technology inside.

Fans of TV's 'Mr. Robot', listen up - this isn't a hack. The future of your favourite series has been secured by USA Networks.

Currently broadcasting its second season, the hacker drama 'Mr. Robot' has been renewed for a third season according to Deadline Hollywood, which is due to air in 2017. Speaking on the announcement, Chris McCumber, the President of Entertainment Networks for NBCUniversal Cable said "We couldn't be more proud of Mr. Robot, a series that has pushed boundaries, captured the cultural zeitgeist, and been honored as one of the best dramas on television. Midway through its second season, Mr. Robot continues to break new ground and open up new opportunities for the network."

The main cast, including leads Rami Malek and Christian Slater are all expected to return - but will the full cast make it to the end of the season? We'll just have to keep watching!

Despite its issues, No Man's Sky has become the biggest launch on Steam of 2016. There were plenty of day one issues related to performance, and then negative reviews and even on my personal Facebook news feed, I had friends saying "is this it?" and "I'm already bored". Above it all, No Man's Sky still soared on Steam.

According to SteamDB, which collects data from Valve's official Steam Stats, there were 212,620 simultaneous gamers playing No Man's Sky on its launch day. Some of the biggest launches of 2016 couldn't keep up with No Man's Sky, with XCOM 2 only seeing 133,000 on its launch and Dark Souls III saw 130,000 while The Division had just 114,000 playing. This means that more people were playing No Man's Sky during launch, than any others at this point.

BioShock: The Collection requires a buttload of HDD space on the Xbox One, where you'll need a huge 70GB of HDD space in order to install all three BioShock games that are included in The Collection.

The new release is available for pre-order and pre-download right now, with BioShock: The Collection including the original BioShock, BioShock 2 and BioShock: Infinite. All three BioShock games have been remastered for the Xbox One, where they'll run at 1080p - and The Collection includes all of the DLC from the BioShock games, except for the multiplayer mode on BioShock 2.

BioShock: The Collection will be released on September 13 in the US, September 15 in Australia, and September 16 elsewhere in the world for the Xbox One. You can purchase and pre-download BioShock: The Collection right now, but be warned; you need 70GB of HDD space available.

Walt Disney are digging deep to exploit their catalogue of beloved animated classics such as 'Cinderella', 'Alice In Wonderland', Beauty and the Beast' and 'Dumbo', and today they've confirmed the development of another. God help them if they ruin it.

Deadline Hollywood have confirmed the studio is moving ahead with a live action feature based on the 1989 hit 'The Little Mermaid'. Broadway writer Lin-Manuel Miranda will join forces with songwriter Alan Menken who penned the original songs for the animated film. Miranda is said to be a big fan of the film, naming his child Sebastian after the film's main character.

It's still very early in development, with a script not yet written and no casting announcements yet made. On the latter, I'll give them so free advice - make sure she has red hair.

Know what's better than Gears of War 4 Gamescom footage? Gears of War 4 Gamescom footage in 4K, of course. NVIDIA teamed up with Microsoft to create just that, giving you an idea of what people are getting their hands-on at this year's event.

The footage is about 10 minutes long and features not previously revealed enemies and weapons. For Gears fans, especially those on PC, it's a treat and gives you a strong idea of what the game is all about.

Gears of War 4 launches October 11 on Xbox One and PC. To play it in 4K, NVIDIA recommends a GTX 980 Ti or 1080, an i7 4790, and 16GB RAM (2560x1440 asks an i5 4690, GTX 970/1060, and 8GB RAM; 1920x1080 asks an i5 3470, GTX 750 Ti, and 8GB RAM).

NVIDIA has released its 372.54 GeForce driver, and with it comes cool feature additions and key optimizations for new and upcoming games as well as GTX-10 Series laptops.

Games helped this time are No Man's Sky (which now supports SLI, and possibly gets some general performance love), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (general optimizations and SLI support), Obduction (which features NVIDIA VRWorks' Multi-Res Shading for better framerates), F1 2016, and Paragon (beta).

As for the laptops, you get improvements to BatteryBoost and a DPC fix for single-GPU systems.

Overwatch's next map has been revealed at Gamescom, and it's a beauty. Set in the quaint German village of Eichenwalde, it features a town area that leads to a castle.

Interestingly, it appears Blizzard has put a twist on the usual Hybrid map formula here, requiring you to escort the payload first and then capture a point. Even better, the "payload" is actually a battering RAM that you're going to use to bust down the door of said castle.

"The site of one of the most famous battles during the Omnic Crisis, it was here that the leader of the Crusaders, Balderich von Alder, and a handful of his best soldiers made a last stand against an advancing automaton army," reads the map description. "Outnumbered and outgunned, they were ultimately slain during the resulting combat. However, thanks to their valiant efforts, the German military was able to push back the omnic offensive and win the fight."

ZOTAC has just announced its new ZBOX Magnus Mini PC variants powered by NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 10 series, which will see ZOTAC's small gaming PCs being quiet, powerful and even more power efficient and faster, too.

According to ZOTAC CEO Tony Wong, the new Magnus Mini PC will "inherit the small but powerful spirit of our ZBOX. With lower power output and higher performance, we can deliver a new level of gaming and VR for enthusiasts without expanding the footprint". ZOTAC has designed its Magnus gaming PCs for both gaming and entertainment, and they also act as smaller gaming PCs that are ready for VR gaming, too.

ZOTAC's Magnus series have always been "small, powerful and whisper quiet," and this continues with the new GeForce GTX 10-powered versions, pushing the limits of what is possible with a small gaming PC.

Intel's current Extreme Rig Challenge is still going, with the biggest custom PC makers in the US competing to make the most extreme gaming PC around Intel's new Core i7-6950X processor and Intel SSD 750 Series drive. All you have to do is tweet towards whoever you think has the best PC, but now you can win a graphics card for just voting for one of the PCs.

AVADirect is sitting in fourth position under NXIC PC, Origin PC and Digital Storm - and are now giving away a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card in order to say thanks for the support during the Intel Extreme Rig Challenge. AVADirect is letting you enter the competition to win the GeForce GTX 1060 daily, so you can vote 20 more times before it ends.

Which gaming PC will you be voting for? If you want to win the GeForce GTX 1060, just visit AVADirect's website and vote!

Gamescom 2016 - A Half-Life 3 banner has been spotted at Gamescom 2016 in Cologne, Germany alongside concrete AAA games like Titanfall 2 and Watch Dogs 2.

Gamescom attendees' hearts no-doubt caught in their throats while gazing upon the worlds Half-Life 3 upon a massive orange banner. The canvas poster entices a fleeting thought--is the decade-long wait finally over? Is Gordon Freeman's journey going to continue? Is Valve a games developer again?

Alas, all of our hope is in vain. The banner is just a taunting trick--a real-life orange Rick Roll, if you will--from the teasers at GIGA Games. The poster is in German, and translates to "Half-Life: 3 editors who played it back then," not "Half-Life 3: your dreams have been answered."

Fnatic is one of the largest professional CS:GO teams in the world, and have just had a major announcement that has seemingly come out of nowhere. The team has taken to its website, announcing that it has had four of its players leave for GODSENT, and in return has two GODSENT players join the Fnatic line up.

Jesper "JW" Wecksell, Freddy "KRIMZ" Johansson, and Robin "flusha" Rönnquist have left Fnatic to join GODSENT, a new Swedish clan that has some massive players on its roster. GODSENT is already home to a former Fnatic player, with Markus "pronax" Wallsten, which means GODSENT now has four of the fix Fnatic players that won back-to-back majors in the spring and summer of 2015.

Fnatic's press release says that there were issues within the team, and that these issues can "then weed their way into fundamental team dynamics, affecting the chemistry needed for success". The clan even talked about similar issues that happened before, saying: "For those that may remember a similar thing has happened before in another era of Fnatic Counterstrike. Back in 2010, the epic era of cArn dsn f0rest and getright came to an end over similar concerns, and led to the eventual reformation of NiP".

Splinter Cell was such a great game at the time, so the tease of a next-gen Splinter Cell game featuring Sam Fisher sounds exciting. Michael Ironside, the voice behind Fisher, is rumored to be returning to the game.

NeoGAF user Crossing Eden has had accurate leaks in the past, with an Ubisoft source telling him that a new Splinter Cell game was in development featuring Michael Ironside. The post added: "Regarding other games, I haven't been involved with Steep or Wildlands, but I was surprised Splinter Cell didn't appear at E3. I know Ironside is back. He was in the studio, I said Hi to him and his daughter. He was shooting a movie with Amy Jo Johnson, and I know someone who worked on that set and Ironside confirmed to him he was doing the new Splinter Cell. I know Toronto has the mocap studio for it.I'm hoping to hear or see something unofficial, if not official, this year, but its been hard to get anything beyond 'It's Happening'".

Crossing Eden added a more detailed update to his post, adding that Ironside himself said he was working on a new Splinter Cell game: "To throw a date on this: I did see Ironside and one his daughters at the TO studio last summer. This was just good timing, as I was there on other business. I have two sources who worked on the set of The Space Between (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4682922/), which was shooting in TO. Ironside mentioned he was working on a new Splinter Cell. One source is someone I trust, the other is an acquaintance by degrees. The movie shoot overlapped the same week as my encounter. As I understand it, he was here for the movie first and worked in the studio visit while in town".

AMD has now finished the launch of its entire desktop GPU stack of its Polaris-based graphics cards, with the new Radeon RX 480, RX 470 and RX 460 now released and in gamers' hands. The next thing for AMD is the next-gen Vega architecture, but before that - we'll see another release from AMD with the Polaris architecture.

Chris Hook, the Senior Director, Global Marketing and PR for Radeon Technologies Group has teased on his personal Facebook wall that the above image is from the "Vega launch venue", adding "Shh, don't tell the press...". AMD first teased the next-gen Vega architecture during the Capsaicin event at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year, and then again when RTG boss Raja Koduri celebrated a Vega development milestone in June.

Now, how close are we to the reveal of Vega? Well, I think we're a little further off than you might think. In the next couple of months, AMD will follow the release of its Radeon RX 480 with a faster version, and I don't think it'll be the Radeon RX 490 - but maybe the Radeon RX 480X. An improved graphics card after the power draw issues that plagued its launch, with a revamped PCB and cooler, alongside a more finely tuned Polaris 10 GPU. But Vega? AMD has said that Vega will use HBM2, and I can't see AMD diving into HBM2 head first anytime this year as their GPU roadmap has Vega coming in early 2017.

Apple might not be dominating the tablet game right now, but there looks to be some big changes on the way for the iPad according to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who is usually pretty spot on with rumors.

We are told to expect a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro next year, which will join the current 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch tablets, with Kuo saying: "We expect three new iPads (12.9" iPad Pro 2, new size 10.5" iPad Pro & low-cost 9.7" iPad) to be launched in 2017, though this may not drive shipment growth amid structural headwinds; 2017F shipments to fall 10-20% YoY".

Kuo continued: "If the iPad comes in a larger size, such as a 10.5" model, we believe it will be helpful to bid for tenders within the commercial and education markets. As a result, we expect Apple to launch a 10.5" iPad Pro in 2017. In addition, we estimate the 12.9" iPad Pro 2 and 10.5" iPad Pro will adopt the A10X processor, with TSMC (2330 TT, NT$177.5, N) being the sole supplier using 10nm process technology. The low-cost 9.7" model may adopt the A9X processor, which is also exclusively supplied by TSMC".

NVIDIA flew a bunch of tech press and YouTubers out to London for the announcement of its Pascal-based GeForce graphics cards making their way into gaming notebooks. During the event, NVIDIA announced that the GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 would be finding their way into various gaming notebooks in all different shapes and sizes.

First, the specs: the top of the line GeForce GTX 1080 will feature 2560 CUDA cores and a 1733MHz boost clock with 8GB of GDDR5X at 10GHz. This is the identical CUDA core count and VRAM on the desktop GTX 1080, while the GPU boost speeds are down from the ~2GHz or so on the desktop GTX 1080.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1070 has been slightly bumped up from its desktop counterpart, with 2048 CUDA cores, 1645MHz boost clock, and the same 8GB of GDDR5 at 8GHz that is found on the desktop part. The mid-range GTX 1060 has the same specs as its desktop version, with 1280 CUDA cores and 1670MHz boost, with 6GB of GDDR5 at 8GHz.