Latest News - Page 2436

AMD is ramping up for quite a large Computex 2016, with the big reveal of the next-gen Polaris-based video cards, and then the exciting new Zen architecture on the CPU side of things. Well, it looks like the new Zen APUs will be exciting, with a purported 50% increase in performance than the previous Kaveri-based APUs.

AMD's new processors will arrive on the AM4 socket, with the flagship SKU offering 12 compute cores, with 4 of them Compute-based, while the rest will reside on the GPU side. The flagship APU will have 4 x CPU cores at 3.7GHz, with Turbo boosting it to 4.2GHz, with 2MB of L2 cache. On the GPU side, we'll have 8 x GCN 3.0-based compute units, with 512 streaming processors and a TDP of 65W. According to the latest leaks, AMD will have a low-power version that consumes 35W with a default clock of 2.9GHz and Turbo boost of up to 3.8GHz.

The performance tier SKU will be kicked down to 10 compute cores, with 4 dedicated to the compute side, and 6 to the graphics side. These chips will arrive in two different variants, with the highest APU hitting 3.5GHz and 3.8GHz on boost, while the 35W version will have a clock speed of 2.8GHz and boost of 3.5GHz. The budget ones will have 6 compute cores, at up to 3.5GHz and 3.8GHz on turbo, with 1MB of L2 cache. The graphics side has 4 compute units, and 256 GCN 3.0-based stream processors.

To celebrate this week's release of 'The Hateful Eight' on Blu-ray HD and DVD, we have ten Blu-ray copies to give away thanks to our friends at Roadshow Home Entertainment.

The 8th film by Quentin Tarantino. Six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War, a stagecoach hurtles through the wintry Wyoming landscape. The passengers, bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), race towards the town of Red Rock where Ruth, known in these parts as 'The Hangman', will bring Domergue to justice. Along the road, they encounter two strangers: Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a black former union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a southern renegade who claims to be the town's new Sheriff. Losing their lead on the blizzard, Ruth, Domergue, Warren and Mannix seek refuge at Minnie's Haberdashery, a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass. When they arrive at Minnie's, they are greeted not by the proprietor but by four unfamiliar faces. Bob (Demian Bichir), who's taking care of Minnie's while she's visiting her mother, is holed up with Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), the hangman of Red Rock, cow-puncher Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). As the storm overtakes the mountainside stopover, our eight travelers come to learn they may not make it to Red Rock after all...

To go into the running to win a prize, simply answer the following question in 50 words or less:

With Computex 2016 a little over a week away, GIGABYTE is getting out and ahead of the competitors with a much bigger tease of its beautiful new X99 motherboards, with its new X99 motherboards that will be compatible with Intel's next-gen Broadwell-E processors.

GIGABYTE X99 Designare EX, X99 Ultra Gaming and X99 SLI Phoenix motherboards will have various features and abilities - with the biggest feature of them all being that they'll work with the upcoming Broadwell-E processors from Intel. We'll also have updated I/O connectivity, with the X99 Designare EX motherboard taking the new flagship X99 motherboard spot.

GIGABYTE's new X99 Designare EX motherboard is a larger E-ATX form factor, with 8+1 phase PWM power, that will help power the Broadwell-E processor and its socket through a required 8-pin power connector. There are 8 x DDR4 DIMMs, with the entire motherboard being covered with a large heat sink that will keep those temps low during those all-night gaming or benchmarking/overclocking sessions. GIGABYTE has adopted an awesome-looking blue/white theme on the X99 Designare EX motherboard, with some RGB LEDs and a new feature called Ambient Surround LED that will let users customize colors on specific parts of the motherboard.

NVIDIA has just unveiled their latest Tesla M10 video card, which crams a huge 4 x Maxwell-based GPUs onto the single PCB. The new Tegra M10 card isn't for normal, or even enthusiast gamers, but it's aimed at virtual PCs and virtual application workloads.

NVIDIA's new Tegra M10 has 4 x GM107 GPUs, with each core featuring 640 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR5 for a total of 2560 CUDA cores and 32GB of GDDR5. The four GPUs would normally suck up a considerable amount of power, but the Tesla M10 has a TDP of 225W, which is pretty amazing considering how much technology is crammed onto this card.

The card can support up to 64 x virtual GPU instances, and 28 x H.264 1080p 30FPS streams at once. Each user will have 512MB of VRAM, with the entire GPU filled with vGPU instances. If you've got 2 x Tesla M10 cards in your machine, then you can support 124 separate vGPU instances.

Unlike the release of the initial teaser trailer which was derided by its fanbase and casuals alike, the latest trailer for this summer's 'Star Trek Beyond' has just been released, and it's a massive improvement which serves to reignite interest in the upcoming sci-fi film.

Starring Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, along with Zachary Quinto as Commander Spock, Simon Pegg as Scotty and Karl Urban as Bones, and Idris Elba as the big bad Krall, 'Beyond' is the third film in the J.J. Abrams multiverse and directed by Justin Lin.

'Star Trek Beyond" hits cinemas in 2D, 3D and IMAX from July 21.

Fallout 4's new Far Harbor DLC is causing major frame rate drops on PS4 thanks to dense environment lighting effects, and PS4 owners aren't happy.

Fallout 4's new $25 DLC Far Harbor is putting a lot of console owners through hell. The DLC's intense volumetric fog and atmospheric lighting effects are the main source of the FPS drops, and PS4 owners have taken to Reddit to share their woes. Bethesda promised that Fallout 4 would hit 30 FPS on consoles, but PS4 owners are swearing that the fog triggers massive frame rate drops that "feel like 10-15 FPS", pretty much making the game feel quite torturous.

Far Harbor's fog isn't a cakewalk for PC, either. The fog can drop my frame rates down from smooth 60 FPS to ~41 FPS at 1080p Ultra with a Radeon R9 390. At 1440p, I hit about ~30FPS while in the fog.

GALAX has started its big push for its upcoming GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080 cards, where it has used an interesting style of four strange figures as its marketing push.

The red guy in the hat is the new face of the GALAX GTX 1070 line, while the blue clown looking guy is going to be the face of the GTX 1080 series. We haven't heard what the other two guys will be used for, but we're sure it's going to be the GTX 1060. Earlier today, we reported on Inno3D's upcoming GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards, while we also reported on the mid-range GTX 1060 being a price/performance champion when it comes to VR gaming.

The official GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition is a beast of a video card, but the AIB partners are cooking up some delicious alternatives, like the iChill GTX 1080 from Inno3D. This is on top of the news that the mobile GTX 1080M will be a beast, beating out the Titan X, and the mid-range GTX 1060 being a mainstream VR champion.

Inno3D's upcoming products based on the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 will feature a triple-fan cooling solution, with two LED stripes on either side of the fans. We could even see the two LED strips acting as GPU load or temperature indicators, and not just there 'just cos'.

Inno3D's iChill GTX 1080 will sport a custom board with a 6+8-pin PCIe setup, which will fly past that 120% TDP limit and really begin seeing the legs on the GP104 stretch. We should hopefully see Inno3D unveil its new video cards at Computex 2016.

We've just reported on the exciting promise of the GeForce GTX 1080M, offering Titan X level performance in a notebook, but what about the mid-range market? That's what the GTX 1060 will be for, as well as doubling as a price/performance VR monster.

Well, the GeForce GTX 1060 is expected to be unveiled in the near future, with the GP106-based card set to feature a 256-bit memory bus. The 256-bit memory bus will find itself with either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, which will handle most games thrown at it, including VR headsets. We could also expect NVIDIA to fill the bigger gap between the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 with the GTX 1060 Ti, which would allow the company to possibly offer the GTX 1060 with 4GB of RAM, while the GTX 1060 Ti could have its framebuffer bumped to 8GB.

We should expect around 1280 CUDA cores on the GTX 1060, knocked down from the 1920 CUDA cores on the GTX 1070 and 2560 CUDA cores on the GTX 1080. The GTX 1060 will fight off the slew of mid-range Polaris cards that AMD is preparing for launch, so expect a huge battle in the mid-range graphics market from both NVIDIA and AMD in the coming months.

NVIDIA has been ramping up towards a big Computex 2016, but the news just got much more exciting, with rumors that the company will unleash its next-gen GeForce GTX 1080M graphics solution at the show. We already know that the GeForce GTX 1080 is the new king, but it looks like the GTX 1080M will be the new mobile king.

The GeForce GTX 1080M will reportedly be faster than the GTX Titan X, which sells for $999 and is a desktop video card, not a notebook solution. The new GTX 1080M has been spotted on the ASUS website, with the company teasing benchmarks for a gaming notebook that beats everything else on the market.

NVIDIA had a fantastic mobile solution with the desktop GTX 980 being unleashed into notebooks last year, but this new GTX 1080M is demolishing everything else in its path. It's faster than AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X, R9 295X2, and NVIDIA's own GeForce GTX 980 Ti and Titan X - oh, and I have mentioned already, it's a notebook part - not a desktop part, which makes it even more incredible. The GTX 1080M pushes a huge 20,811 in 3DMark 11, while the Titan X and R9 295X2 trail behind.

Fallout 4's new Far Harbor DLC pretty much requires the use of Nick Valentine, the game's synth companion. But what happens if you can't find Nick? Before you start scouring the Wasteland looking for the gumshoe schweetheart, try these easy steps. NOTE: these steps are for PC players, as console players will still have to manually look around.

I was one of the many players who lost Nick Valentine. I did all the steps I'm about to show you, but they didn't work. Then I tried something different, and lo and behold, the synth was back in my digital life. It turns out at some point I had accidentally deleted Nick using the console commands, putting me in a pretty hairy situation. Thankfully it's an easy fix!

The first thing you want to do is pop up the console by pressing tilde (~) and then enter the following commands:

Homefront: The Revolution launched this week to reports of performance issues on all platforms (although PC is said to suffer the least). Developer Dambuster Studios has acknowledged as such on its forums and noted patches to address the situation are forthcoming.

"Performance - particularly frame rate - is not currently where we want it to be, and we are working on additional patches to help address these issues and more," they write. "Patch notes per platform will be available on the community forums and on Steam when they go live."

Easing the sting some is the release of some free DLC today (new outfits and boosters), with some Resistance Mode mission DLC coming down the pipe next month, and even more over the next year or so.

Support for the much-celebrated Vulkan API is on its way to DOTA 2, according to AMD software developer Fletcher Dunn. You shouldn't have to wait long either: he says it will arrive "probably sometime next week." Hopefully, Dunn doesn't mean next week in Valve Time.

Don't know about Vulkan? It's a low-level programming API that effectively replaces OpenGL and Mantle, and allows programmers to squeeze quite a lot of extra performance out of their games, resulting in smoother gameplay for you. So there's that to look forward to. Unlike Mantle and DirectX 12, Vulkan is cross-platform, so it can be used industry-wide.

We should have an article up when the update goes live, so keep an eye out.

Until the recent rise of low-level programming APIs Mantle, DirectX 12, and Vulkan, visual and performance advancements and innovations in the gaming space were slow and scarce. Now, says Crytek technical director Rok Erjavec, it's a whole new ballgame again.

"I have no doubt we will see a lot more novel approaches and deviations from established rendering pipelines [as a result of DirectX 12], something that has already been happening to an extent," he explains in an interview with DSOGaming.

"There's a wealth of academic research that was ill-suited to practical application through a combination of hardware and software abstraction limitations. With the latter getting out of the way, and hardware flexibility continually improving - more than things just getting iteratively "prettier" - we're looking at a rise in experimentation again. In a way, the industry has circled back to a place similar to where we were in the early-mid 90s, when software rasterization didn't really impose any restraints on creativity beyond the 17ms barrier."

The Xbox One isn't useful for much, as it's only capable of playing games at resolutions we used to play at back in the 90s, but hey - you can install Windows 95 to your Xbox One now.

YouTuber 'vcfan' had 'Dosbox', a virtual DOS machine app running on his Xbox, where you can run Windows 95 and other software. Not everyone can do this, as you'll need an Xbox One developer unit, but Microsoft is allowing the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) later this year, where more fun might begin.

Wake me up when I can install Windows 10 on an Xbox One, and I be excited - would you want to install a desktop OS with a working mouse and keyboard as a media machine, or something similar?

Most people would think that Apple has a decent handle on Mac sales in the US, but this quarter the company was beaten by Chromebook sales.

Market research firm IDC has said that Apple sold 1.76 million Macs in the US in the last quarter, and while it was up from the 1.56 million units in the same quarter as 2015, it didn't beat out Chromebook shipments. IDC only breaks down PC shipments by manufacturer, so it's hard to know how many more Chromebooks were sold, we just know it was 'more'.

Chromebooks have been especially popular for education purposes and those on lighter budgets, as Apple Macs can range from thin-and-light notebooks, all the way through to workstation-class desktops. Chromebooks are mostly low-cost laptops from various companies, with Apple's closest competitor being the iPad. This quarter, Apple sold 10.3 million iPads in the US, not bad at all.

Just over a week before Computex, IN WIN has announced their latest 303 chassis. IN WIN's new 303 chassis is a "simple, yet elegant computer chassis crafted from steel and tempered glass", says IN WIN, continuing that the 303's "distinctively clean front panel is complimented with a bright LED design to balance the overall appearance".

At the front of the 303 and to the right we have the power buttons, IN WIN branding, and I/O panel. The IN WIN logo is highlighted with a beautiful neon, with the LEDs acting as a power-on indicator. There are 2 x USB 3.0 ports, 2 x 3.5mm audio jacks, and 2 x USB 2.0 ports on the front of the 303. IN WIN is known for their innovative cases, with the 303 being another in their tool-less design range, where the 3mm tempered glass can be pulled away from the 303 by pressing the handle at the top of the case.

When purchasing the IN WIN 303 chassis, you can choose between the closed panel with affixed thumbscrews, or the beautiful tempered glass front panel if you want to peek into your system from time to time, or show off that ridiculously good looking PC you've just built. There's also a user-friendly dust filter which has an embedded design for quick removal, with it being found at the bottom of the 303, and is easy to remove to clean.

AMD has just announced its press conference during Computex 2016, with AMD set to unveil their new Polaris GPUs and Zen APUs on June 1. There'll be plenty of top shelf AMD staff there, with AMD's CEO Lisa Su and Radeon Technologies Group boss Raja Koduri, with both of them being joined by AMD's CPU and APU boss, Jim Anderson.

The company said in its press release: "The event is slated to feature presentations from AMD executives including AMD President and CEO Lisa Su; Senior Vice President and General Manager, Computing and Graphics Business Group, Jim Anderson; and Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri. A real-time video webcast of the event will be accessible on AMD's Computex page (www.amd.com/computex) and on AMD's Investor Relations home page (ir.amd.com). A replay of the webcast can be accessed a few hours after the conclusion of the live event on both pages and will be available there for one year after the event".

While we are super pumped for the Polaris-based video card side of things, I think I'm equally as psyched about seeing just how good Zen turns out to be. AMD has quite a lot riding on the new Zen-based side of its CPU/APU business, as they're being shrinked down to thet 14/16nm node like the new Polaris-based GPUs. We're expecting a decent amount of improvement over the current Vishera- and Kaveri-based APUs, with Zen said to really ramp things up for AMD and have them competing against Intel on a much firmer ground.

Creative Assembly, the developers behind Total War: WARHAMMER, have released more details on the PC side of the game. The team says that WARHAMMER has been optimized to better utilize all of the CPU cores in your PC, where the game won't lose performance on single-threaded limitations or problems.

In a new post that Creative Assembly wrote, they said: "Total War has traditionally been quite CPU-bound, with the game-draw and graphics render processes both running on the same CPU thread. Over time, as the engine has evolved and become more demanding, this has become an increasingly important bottleneck for us. During the course of TWWH's development, we've spent time separating these so they now run independently on their own threads. We've also optimized our task-system to have better multi-threading performance across the board".

The team has spend time on the particle simulation pipeline, from the pixel shader to the compute shader, making better use of the GPUs time. The team added: "In fact we've done this with several parts of the rendering pipeline, further utilizing the GPU and letting the CPU focus on everything else it has to do". Thanks to these changes that CA made to Total War: WARHAMMER, the game will make great use of multi-core CPUs. CA elaborated: "Long story short: all of this means we're using the CPU and the GPU more efficiently. TW: Warhammer takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, balancing the load across the cores so that no single core is maxed out and limiting framerates while others sit idle".

Destiny's new expansion will be called Rise of Iron, and it'll feature a dedicated raid activity along with expansive content.

A promo pic for Destiny's new Rise of Iron DLC was leaked onto Reddit just hours ago, and sources confirmed to Kotaku that the promotional image is indeed genuine. The outlet reports that Rise of Iron will have its own raid activity that's "loosely based" on the scrapped House of Wolves raid, and the expansion will be bigger than The Dark Below and House of Wolves--but likely not as big as The Taken King.

Rise of Iron shows the Iron Banner's Lord Saladin brandishing a fearsome fiery axe, and the expansion will obviously be based on the game's legendary nine Lords of Iron Titans. We could even see old Ironlords like Timur, Felwinter, Perun and Radegast appear once again in some form.