Latest News - Page 2438

Despite finishing its nine movie run with 'The Deathly Hallows Part II' in 2011, the future is looking quite bright for 'Harry Potter' fans, with the prequel spin-off series 'Fantastic Beasts' on its way, and a sequel play 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' about to hit London's west end. But might we ever see 'Harry Potter' back on the big screen? Well, it seems that Warner Brothers have lodged trademarks for that possible eventuality.

First discovered by Intellectual Property Solicitor Brian Conroy, Warner Bros studio have filed extensive trademark protection for 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' which covers everything from films, toys, games and other merchandise such as, strangely, 'meat tenderizers for household purposes'. I guess, there's a market for that.. right?

Creator J.K. Rowling has repeatedly stated that 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' will remain a play (but also making the script available in book form) , but I'd be extremely surprised if we don't see a feature film sequel in the future.

Pre-release traction for Sony Pictures 'Ghostbusters' reboot hasn't been overwhelmingly positive and now the bad news keeps coming for the struggling studio.

According to SlashFilm, China's censorship board have denied the studio's application to release the film in the lucrative market due to the film's subject matter, with guidelines banning content that "promote cults or superstition". Sony apparently did attempt to curry favour by granting the film a title which translated as "Super Power Dare Die Team", but were apparently rebuffed. The Chinese market has grown to be incredibly important for big budget blockbusters, with releases such as 'Terminator Genisys' and 'Warcraft' outright tanking in the West, but grossing mega bucks in the East.

'Ghostbusters' opens in major international markets this week.

There was one thing that I addressed in my review of AMD's Radeon RX 480, is that the company had enough wiggle room with Polaris to release a dual-GPU card, and stay under the 300W TDP. Well, it appears we might see this card before the end of the year.

According to the latest reports, SAPPHIRE's website has teased the Radeon RX 490, which should arrive as a dual Polaris 10-based graphics card. We know from AMD's revised naming system for the Radeon series that that the RX 490 will feature a 256-bit memory bus and will be aimed at 4K and VR gaming.

Polaris 10 is the most powerful GPU in AMD's arsenal before it moves to Vega, so it won't be a faster Polaris GPU with more stream processors - but two P10 GPUs makes perfect sense. SAPPHIRE's website states it has 8GB of GDDR5, but that's the way dual-GPUs work - each GPU has the same framebuffer, with 16GB of GDDR5 in total - but 8GB per GPU.

Exclusive: NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 1060 is coming very soon, ready to fight AMD's mid-range Radeon RX 480, but with the rumors there'll be two versions - in 3GB and 6GB framebuffers - we're here to clear that up.

We have had an industry insider tell us that NVIDIA has decided against releasing the 3GB variant of the GeForce GTX 1060, and instead it is all steam ahead with the standard 6GB variant. This makes sense, as releasing a mid-range card with 3GB of VRAM that's meant to be a competitor against AMD's Radeon RX 480 which comes in 4GB and 8GB flavors doesn't make much sense.

Our source added that NVIDIA will instead release the GeForce GTX 1050 in December with 3GB of RAM, which makes much more sense. We should see these plans materialize very quickly, as soon as NVIDIA confirms the existence of its GeForce GTX 1050, which shouldn't be too far away now.

Sony has just confirmed it won't be holding a press conference at the upcoming European Gamescom tradeshow in Cologne, Germany, nixing any possibility of an official unveiling of its new 4K-ready PlayStation 4 Neo console.

Neither Microsoft nor Sony will be holding press conferences at Gamescom, but both gaming giants will attend to demo various games via booth venues, with Sony bringing its PlayStation VR in tow. While Microsoft announced their own abstinence from the show, Sony's no-show was confirmed by French site Jeux Video Live . "There will be no PlayStation conference at GamesCom," a Sony France rep told the website.

Analysts believe that Sony's PlayStation 4K console will be formally announced at Japan's annual Tokyo Game Show from September 19 - 20. Macquarie Securities analyst Damian Thong says we should expect more PS4 Neo news and a brand new PS4 Slim model at TGS 2016. These projections fit into Sony's typical presence at TGS--last year the company launched a salvo of announcements during the Tokyo-based show, and Sony is a confirmed exhibitor at the event.

Valve has officially responded to the CS:GO gambling and lottery-fixing controversy that's embroiled the PC gaming world.

I'm sure most of you have already heard about the CS:GO Lotto scandal, and how popular YouTuber's TmarTn and ProSyndicate have been caught promoting and encouraging gamers to throw money into the skin-gambling site while secretly owning it. The CS:GO skin trade is an incredibly lucrative industry, allowing everyday gamers to bet in-game weapon skins worth real money against other betters across the world. Now Valve has broken its long silence on the matter to deliver an official statement.

Valve begins by explaining how these lottery sites work, and explaining how they're not directly involved in the in-game economies. Valve goes on to note that the specific way that these sites use Steam's OpenID API to "run a gambling business isn't allowed by our API nor our user agreements." The Steam operators then promise to start shutting down these seedy gambling rings and "start sending notices to these sites requesting they cease operations through Steam" and also promise to "pursue the matter as necessary."

A Battlefield German community manager has indicated via livestream that the Battlefield 1 open beta will be launching shortly after Gamescom, which takes place the weekend of August 17-21. The beta date has been of significant curiosity given the closed nature of the currently ongoing alpha, so fans are no doubt relieved to have a better idea of when it begins.

It's also said that those signed up to Battlefield Insider will be able to play three days earlier than everyone else, so make sure to get on that if you're dying to get your hands-on it.

Lastly, Rush mode was strongly believed to be in the game following a file dump from the alpha, but now it's confirmed.

AMD and developer Firaxis are partnering again, this time to bring sweet graphics technology by way of DirectX 12 to Civilization VI. Not only will the game benefit from the low-level API and the added efficiency it brings, it will also enjoy asynchronous compute and explicit multi-adapter support.

Async compute is a DirectX 12 technique that allows parallel execution of compute and graphics tasks, drastically improving workload efficiency and thus, performance (as seen recently with Doom). The added boost should mean those late-turns shouldn't slow you down a bit. For now anyway, it's only really supported by Graphics Core Next (GCN) and Polaris GPUs; while NVIDIA says it is capable of supporting it, it's not fully enabled by its drivers yet, and user reports as is indicate overall inferior results.

Civ VI players can also look forward to explicit multi-adapter functionality, meaning if you run multiple GPUs, you benefit from official Microsoft support, which may result in more stable and powerful implementations. Explicit multi-adapter support also means you can use AMD and NVIDIA cards together.

Television provider companies are under threat in Canada, where approximately 200,000 customers cut the cord in 2015, according to a new Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) report.

The companies' response to the shift as well has an increased cost of business has been to increase prices to offset the losses, which for now at least, appears to have worked, with revenues declining just 0.1 percent to $8.9 billion after the adjustments. The average TV bill increased from $65.25 in 2014 to $66.08 in 2015.

The CRTC states the cost of business increased by 1.3 percent to $7.2 billion over the one year period. Meanwhile, the industry employed 6.3 less people during that time, down to 27,244 people.

Hideo Kojima says that his partnership with Sony will ultimately allow him to make Death Stranding his "best work yet."

Now that Hideo Kojima is working with Sony, the beloved Metal Gear Solid creator is enjoying a staggering amount of freedom he never experienced under Konami's restrictive reign. Thanks to Sony's hospitality, and Mark Cerny's openness with the secrets of the PlayStation 4 console, Kojima can now let his imagination roam free without being bogged down. The fruits of this union will culminate in Kojima's new unique and original PS4 game Death Stranding; in fact, Kojima said that he's "very confident this will be my best work," and Death Stranding could surpass his magnum opus MGS series.

"So far, when I've been making games, I've had to give up on something or at least compromise on something in order to get things done," Hideo Kojima said in a keynote speech at the Brighton Develop conference in the UK. "But this time, working with you [Mark Cerny and Sony] and you bringing the state of the art technologies, we will get around that. I'm very confident that we're working towards something completely new and that no-one has seen so far. This will be my best work so far, I'm very confident about that."

Gamescom 2016 kicks off next week, but Microsoft has confirmed it won't be holding an official press conference at the European event.

At its massive E3 2016 press briefing Microsoft revealed the full extent of its hand: a new 40% slimmer $299 Xbox One S console that plays 4K games and video, its enthusiast "monster" native 4K gaming Project Scorpio console, a slew of new first-party games, the new Xbox-and-PC Play Anywhere initiative, and a galaxy of new features, content, and accessories. Redmond won't be keeping up this momentum with Germany's Gamescom event--instead of a huge briefing, or even a smaller showcase with new announcements, it'll be hosting a bunch of booths that let gamers digest all the E3 reveals.

Microsoft's absence on the stage floor gives Sony a much-needed opportunity to reveal its anticipated new PlayStation Neo console, which supports upscaled 4K gaming and 4K video playback. Sony could steal the show with a PS4 Neo reveal, but then again, Nintendo could also shock the world by revealing its mysterious new NX console at Gamescom. Sony and Nintendo won't go at the same time, so if Sony reveals the PS4K at Gamescom, Nintendo will pick September's Tokyo Game Show for the NX.

The Federal Trade Commission has officially confirmed that Warner Bros. Interactive paid up to "tens of thousands of dollars" to bribe key YouTube personalities like PewDiePie for favorable coverage of Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor.

According to reports published by the FTC, Warner Bros. Interactive has now settled its charges pertaining to its deceptive marketing campaign with Shadow of Mordor. The publisher caused quite a row when YouTuber Total Biscuit revealed the shady early access deal, but the deception went much farther: Warner Bros. paid anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars to well-known YouTubers (including PewDiePie) for positive game videos. The FTC notes that the publisher "failed to require the paid influencers to adequately disclose [the sponsorship]," meaning everyday gamers thought the videos were genuine instead of paid ads. However PewDiePie made it explicitly clear on his original video that the content was sponsored by Warner Bros.

"Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Inc. has settled Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers during a marketing campaign for the video game Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, by failing to adequately disclose that it paid online 'influencers,' including the wildly popular 'PewDiePie,' thousands of dollars to post positive gameplay videos on YouTube and social media. Over the course of the campaign, the sponsored videos were viewed more than 5.5 million times," reads the FTC press release.

There's magic in old-school sci-fi book covers. Even if you didn't grow up in the '70s and '80s you can still appreciate the wonder and splendor that artists like John Berkey and Ralph McQuarrie unfolded before our eyes: the covers spoke of fanciful treks across exotic universes, of strange and exciting tales of derring-do, aliens, advanced tech, and infinite possibilities. In this respect, No Man's Sky--Hello Games' ambitious indie about exploring an infinitesimal universe--is a lot like like a sci-fi book cover, and it's only fitting that the game gets its own series of mock covers.

This artwork actually links to an interesting thing that the devs said about the game: Sean Murray told IGN that he wants gamers to "feel as if they've stepped into an old sci-fi book cover" every time they play No Man's Sky. So these mock-ups actually resonate quite strongly with the developer's own goals for the in-game experience.

"I've said it before, but No Man's Sky is the hardest thing I've ever worked on. It's even bigger than you can imagine. This is a type of game that hasn't been attempted before, by a smaller team than anyone would expect, under an intense amount of expectation,"Hello Games head Sean Murray said in a recent blog post.

In order to hit "true" 4K gaming with 6TFLOPs of performance with its new "monster" Project Scorpio console, Microsoft apparently won't use existing silicon that's currently on the market. Instead the new 4K Xbox will be built around its own custom graphics solution that will likely sit between AMD's mid-grade Polaris and enthusiast Vega families.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has pretty much confirmed that Project Scorpio won't use outdated hardware to enable native 4K gaming. "We had the ability to look at doing an interim console this year if we wanted to. We thought about that. But we didn't think we could deliver, with the silicon that's out there, a true 4K gaming six teraflop machine this year. So we decided to wait until we hit the real spec that people were asking for."

We've already speculated that the Scorpio's new custom AMD SoC would be made up of 14nm Polaris GPU alongside a Zen CPU, and Spencer seems to have confirmed our findings. But what if both Scorpio's GPU and CPU tech are 2017 hardware? This means that the Scorpio's graphics hardware might not be based on Polaris or AMD's new Vega GPU, but a new scaled custom GPU that sits in the middle between the two.

Google is reportedly working on two new smartwatches that will be branded as Google, which is a big difference to the Mountain View-based search giant relying on third-party manufacturers to make Android Wear-based smartwatches.

Android Police is reporting that the above image is a "recreated image" of the primary source material, as they want to keep their source anonymous. The site also adds that the smartwatches are still under development, and may differ to what we see above. As they stand, I think they look slick.

The larger smartwatch is based on the 43.5mm "Angelfish", which will reportedly feature a heart rate monitor, GPS, and LTE connectivity so it doesn't rely on your smartphone. It has three buttons, compared to third-party Android Wear smartwatches that usually have one. We should see Google Assistant integration with contextual alerts, thanks to the additional buttons.

We all know Pokemon GO has absolutely exploded into the world, in a way that I've never seen before - it is the first game that I've seen that has people of all ages going out into the world, and playing a game.

Deadline is reporting that Pokemon GO's runaway success has "all Hollywood has renewed the chase for a deal to turn Pokémon into a feature film". Rumbles of a live-action Pokemon movie have been around for a while, but now things have been amplified after Pokemon GO became oxygen to gamers, with Deadline saying Legendary pictures "is moving toward a deal".

The report adds that there is a "scenario" where Max Landis, who directed Chronicle, could write the Pokemon movie, while Legendary made the film. The report adds that "everything went silent" a few months ago, but now that Pokemon GO has exploded in popularity, "it's come back around".

ZOTAC is a company that never ceases to impress me, as I've just reviewed their GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme, which is the fastest GTX 1080 yet. But something more impressive has just appeared; ZOTAC's unannounced GeForce GTX 1060 Mini.

ZOTAC will be utilizing the smaller PCB of the GeForce GTX 1060 to their advantage, with the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1060 Mini set to arrive in 3GB and 6GB variants, with both cards arriving with reference GPU clocks of 1506/1708MHz for base/boost, respectively.

The company will be using their own custom PCB for the GeForce GTX 1060 Mini, with a slick-looking, but not over-the-top cooler on board. We should expect the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1060 Mini to be officially revealed in the coming weeks, and I hope ZOTAC has a sample on its way to me.

Last year we reported that the Fox network was planning an 'X-Men' TV show and while a show is still being developed, it looks like the network has gone back to the drawing board with the project.

According to Dark Horizons, Fox has dumped plans for proposed spin-off series 'Hellfire', and will instead develop a project focussing on two parents who discover their children are mutants. FOX president David Madden said "Developing a Marvel property has been a top priority for the network-and we are so pleased with how Matt Nix has led us into this thrilling universe. There's comic book adventure, emotional and complicated relationships, and a rich, existing mythology from which to draw. With the brilliant production crew behind this project, it has all the makings of a big, fun and exciting new series."

This summer's 'X-Men Apocalypse' was a financial disappointment for Twentieth Century Fox, grossing just $535 million worldwide on a $178 million budget, which pales in comparison to the $781 million 'Deadpool' haul.

AMD has been pushing Polaris for the last 6 months or so, leading up to the launch of the Polaris 10-based Radeon RX 480, but that doesn't mean the company is shying away from its next architecture; Vega.

AMD's next-gen Vega architecture is due in 2017, and during the Radeon RX series launch in Australia, the company showed off the same GPU roadmap we've seen at previous events - but also said something interesting. AMD said that the next-gen Vega architecture is a "high-end architecture for high-end gamers".

Remember that Vega will be using HBM2 technology, so we should expect a rather large leap over the Polaris architecture when it comes to specs, speeds, and technology. Vega will continue its rampage into the 14nm FinFET process, while the architecture to succeed Vega, 'Navi', is due in 2018. We don't know much about Navi just yet, but AMD teases that it will feature 'next-gen memory' - which is something I really need to know about. What is 'next-gen memory' when HBM2 is already incredible with 1TB/sec+ bandwidth?

NVIDIA announced its GeForce GTX 1060 not long ago, but with prices ranging between $249 and $299 - it won't directly compete against AMD's Radeon RX 480 which is priced at $199 to $239 and beyond, depending on whether you want the reference 4GB/8GB model ($199/$239, respectively) or a partner card with a custom PCB and improved cooling.

Well, NVIDIA could hit a lower price point with the 3GB variant of its GeForce GTX 1060, as the company has only unveiled the 6GB version thus far. NVIDIA is reported to hit a $149 price on the partner cards, while the GTX 1060 3GB Founders Edition could be priced at $199.

This means NVIDIA would be competing against the Radeon RX 470, which is priced at $149, and is a cut down variant of the Polaris 10 with 4GB of GDDR5. But what will NVIDIA cull from the 3GB variant of the GeForce GTX 1060 to get the price down? The GTX 1060 6GB features GPU clocks of 1506/1708 for base/boost, respectively - while it has a 192-bit memory bus for its 6GB of GDDR5 RAM.