Latest News - Page 2454

Every single day seems to bring something new to the table when it comes to next-gen GPUs, with today being no exception - in the last 14 hours or so, we've gotten our first look at the GP104.

NVIDIA's GP104 GPU is the Pascal-based consumer GeForce GPU, which will power the upcoming GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 video cards. The GP104 is made on the 16nm FinFET process, but it looks like the GP104 will power two very different video cards.

The GeForce GTX 1080 is expected to arrive with 8GB of GDDR5X, while its sibling in the GTX 1070 will reportedly sport 8GB of GDDR5 - both with 256-bit memory buses. The GTX 1080 with its 8GB of GDDR5X will have it clocked at 2GHz (8GHz effective), an increase from the 7GHz effective speeds on the current GDDR5-based offerings.

The PC version of DOOM wasn't exactly the shining example of graphics tech that it should have been, and that we expect from id Software. They're usually the paragon of PC gaming, advancing graphics tech above and beyond the norm. Recently it seems they've fallen to the wayside and been surpassed by the likes of Crytek and others. id Software hasn't forgotten us PC gamers it seems, they just didn't design the beta to be a showcase of the final graphical specs.

A new blog post by id Software tells us to not fret, because they're just as much PC gamers as they once were, and as we are. "PC gaming is in our DNA here at id. Just like so many of you, we also love to tinker with settings to get the exact experience we want - and every ounce of performance our systems can handle." Robert Duffy, the chief technology officer, said in the post. That being said, the final build will be full of the options that we tend to want and enjoy. And the framerate will be uncapped. They detailed the advanced settings that we'll get to play with, and it's quite extensive.

We're told to expect much more information about the underpinnings of idTech 6. This stuff is really fascinating, and it'll be great to see how the rendering pipeline works and see how, or why, the streaming texture issue happened and how they plan on fixing it for the PC. And to reiterate for everyone (myself included): the framerate won't be locked on PC at launch.

Tekken 7 might not quite be released just yet, but Bandai Namco has already announced that they'll be hosting a competitive season when Tekken 7: Fated Retribution does make its way to consoles near us. And if you're brave enough to enter, they're offering up a $30,000 prize pool.

The tournament is entitled King of the Iron Fist and is an event that'll be physically held across North America. They plan on stopping at 16 different cities to set up physical arenas to play in. It'll be absolutely free for anyone who wants to enter and is being conducted in partnership with the Wizard World Con.

The winner at each of those 16 stops will more on to the next round, against each of those 16 winners. Those 16 will then compete to be the overall winner and take home part of that $30,000 prize pool, which will eventually be divvied up amongst those 16.

AMD's Wraith Cooler has been an unbridled success for them, and a way to show that the stock cooling system that comes with a boxed CPU doesn't have to be an afterthought. The Wraith cooler, however, was only available for certain processors despite it being a very good cooler. They've listened to the feedback from reviewers and gamers alike and have thoroughly expanded their in-house stock coolers to encompass more of their processor line.

The Wraith cooler itself is now included with the FX 8350 and the FX 6350 processors. Those aren't exactly the hottest processors at stock, though they do overclock well if they have the right solution connected to them. The Wraith cooler, though not the ultimate device, can still allow for raising the multiplier and the voltage by a bit for a modest overclock without melting your system or the CPU. Actually, it's pretty silent and does a great job of controlling thermals at stock and slightly beyond.

They've also developed other cooling solutions to include with their lower-end CPU and APU's as well. Those solutions aren't quite as spiffy as the Wraith, though they're far more efficient than what was included before. More fins and a better-designed fan mean lower temperatures at far more acceptable sound levels.

Microsoft Office is already, arguably, the global standard for office suites, but that clearly isn't enough and even more functionality into its core. The latest insider preview build is letting you access AutoCAD files inside Visio and adding much better collaboration tools into the mix.

Build 16.0.6868.2048 for Office 2016 has been seeded to those in the preview program and seems to let you share and work on files while also chatting with them at the same time. You can make comments, talk about those comments, make changes, chat about those changes, highlight poor logic, chat about that poor logic, and review the entire project with someone from within Office itself. While chatting. The collaborative features are actually quite fascinating and make it easier to address changes that need to be made in real-time, from different parts of the world. Despite the sarcastic comments, it's actually quite nifty and very useful.

AutoCAD files can be imported into Visio and you can now add various elements to those files should you need to if you don't happen to have AutoCAD, giving you the opportunity to collaborate on those types of projects as well. These improvements, though slight, are only for the insider preview program and could be further refined, or even thrown out completely. The feedback they receive from the preview members should help, however. This is also only for Windows at the moment, Mac need not apply.

The multiplayer mode for Gears of War 4 makes a gore-filled appearance in the latest trailer. They're emphasizing just how ruthless you can be while competing against others in order to receive the best loot. Just as in the past, it's fast-paced and cover-based, but with better graphics.

The multiplayer beta test is going to officially kick-off on the 25th of April, so The Coalition is showing us but a small glimpse of what to expect once we're able to play. The violence is front and center, as might be expected, but there seems to be much more of it than usual. Enemies splatter across the screen in some truly grisly ways. The gore is expected, though, with plenty of new executions. The trailer is also a showcase of the different new maps and modes you can play. Everything should be very familiar to anyone who's played.

Experimental plane Solar Impulse 2 is again back in the skies following a nine-month delay for repairs. Its last trip was dampened by overheating batteries, but it still managed to set a record for longest duration of a nonstop solo flight when going from Japan to Hawaii.

The vehicle is of course powered by solar. As planes are a major contributor to pollution, the mission here is to encourage clean energy. And there's no better way to do that than fly Solar Impulse 2 around the entire world, which is what's happening as you read this. You can watch the launch here and the journey live via the stream above.

Amazon's Prime service, while a paid one, does have a number of really beneficial advantages if you happen to use Amazon frequently. Free two-day shipping, access to Prime-exclusive movies for free and even discounts on the pre-ordering of games, come to mind. It seems that they might be selling some games, direct, only to Prime members, and it's a little confusing.

A small selection of games can only be bought directly from Amazon if you have Prime. That is, if you're looking for FIFA 16, Dishonored: The Definitive Edition, Minecraft, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Battlefield Hardline, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor Game of the year, and Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes. Amazon says that being able to buy certain games is a benefit of being a Prime member, even though you can simply buy them from the Marketplace, or somewhere else completely.

Gamesaradar has stumbled across the issue, though I've yet to be able to recreate it through friends that don't have Prime. Even when not signed-in, the desktop site doesn't indicate that it's a "Prime Only" deal. At least the desktop site is devoid of any indication. It could also be region specific, being that the article was written from by someone in the UK. Regardless, if it is indeed a growing trend, then it's odd that they would do such a thing without having, at the very least, a suitable discount that makes it more lucrative to use Amazon instead.

Modder uLLeticaL noticed a change on the Steam Workshop page for his Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map Aim Botz, indicating a paid mods system may be returning to Valve's service. A new message on it reads, "You can subscribe to this item for free because you are the creator or listed as a contributor."

If you attempt to subscribe to it and aren't a creator or contributor, it simply subscribes you as normal, but the above message leads one to believe that could change before long. Other games such as Arma 3 are said to show this message as well.

While paid Workshop mods went down poorly before, uLLeticaL says modders would welcome a donation-based system. Time will tell if that's the case.

Rocket League was is one of the best surprises to come out of 2015. Its blend of racing and soccer (or football for those elsewhere) has been a treat for casual and competitive play. Psyonix is running a free promotion this weekend that lets anyone interesting in using automobiles to slam a ball into a net can do so. It started Yesterday, April 21st at 10AM PT and will run through Sunday, April 24th 10am PT.

They say that it's completely free to everyone, regardless of whether you've bought it or not. And after the free weekend, they're discounting it by 40% until 10am on the 25th of April. To sweeten the deal they've also discounted all the various bundles and DLC packs by 20% as well, just in case you'd like a specific skin pack or something else.

Psyonix has been very supportive of their hybrid sports game with several optional DLC packs and quite a few updates that have addressed many different issues. Coming soon, the next update will add a basketball-themed motif to it, letting you try your hand and driving a smaller ball into an even smaller net off the ground. Hoops is coming April 26th for free and for everyone. They've even officially partnered with the NBA to offer an NBA flag pack with 30 different flags. Everyone will get one, at least, for free with the update, however.

After what seems like an eternity of waiting, Atlus may finally reveal Persona 5's release date. Let's just hope it's not delayed again.

Persona 5's official Japanese website now has a mysterious countdown timer with the single cryptic phrase "take your heart", hinting that some big news is about to drop. The timer is counting down to May 5 (5/5) so we could finally see a concrete release date for the hotly anticipated JRPG.

Fans have been avidly looking forward to Persona 5's release date for nearly a year now, and the absence of any news or info from Atlus has been obsessively noted. As a result of the scarce updates, the major consensus of the gaming community is that Persona 5 won't drop on during its slated Q3 2016 window and will instead be delayed into 2017. Persona 5 was already delayed once--it was originally planned to launch in 2015, but Atlus pushed it back to Summer 2016. Now that summer is right around the corner, and we've yet to see Atlus blow the lid on the game, we'll likely see yet another delay.

Intel's next-gen CPUs are right around the corner, with NCIX listing the new Core i7-6950X with a pre-order price of a wallet-busting $2349.99. The Core i7-6900K has a pre-order price of $1495, while the Core i7-6850K is $889, and the Core i7-6800K at $629.

These prices are not official and are inflated for pre-orders, with the normal pricing set to be somewhere around $1609, $1024, $602, and $422 for the Core i7-6950X, Core i7-6900K, Core i7-6850K and Core i7-6800K respectively. Why should we be excited about these new CPUs from Intel? Well, the new Broadwell-E processors will feature four variants, with the flagship being the 10-core/20-thread Core i7-6950X. The one below it will be the 8-core CPU found in the Core i7-6900K, while the other two CPUs will be 6-core variants.

Intel is expected to launch its new Broadwell-E family of processors in the coming months, with a big show at Computex 2016 in June.

Just how big is the eSports industry right now? Well, it's on the path to making $463 million this year, according to a new report from PwC. This means the eSports industry has grown by a staggering 43% from 2015.

PwC's report also has some data on the eSports industry itself, with the most popular game by viewership being League of Legends. Around 63% of eSports viewers said they were turning in for first-person shooters, while 57% of those polled describe themselves as "hardcore" gamers.

Female gamers surveyed didn't exactly describe themselves as hardcore gamers, but instead they were "involved in eSports". This is exciting, as it means there are more and more women getting into gaming, which is awesome. The gaming world is filled with young (and old), media-consuming audience, which is why there are so many companies pumping time, effort and most of all, money into eSports.

The eagerly anticipated sequel to the 1996 mega-hit 'Independence Day' is almost upon us, and today 20th Century Fox have unleashed a trailer featuring brand new footage to get fans all whipped up.

Returning stars Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch and Vivica A. Fox are joined by newcomers Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe and Jessie Usher in welcoming the alien hoarde back to Earth, with the sci-fi epic promising mind-blowing visual effects sequences of destruction porn. Just before the film hits screens, the studio will also release a 20th anniversary edition Blu-ray and 4K release to catch up on what happened in the original.

'Independence Day: Resurgence' hits 2D, 3D and IMAX cinemas worldwide in June 2016.

AMD is days away from the official launch of its Radeon Pro Duo, the company's dual-GPU based on the Fiji architecture and HBM1 technology. HWBattle has received their sample, and have uploaded pictures for our viewing pleasure.

The Radeon Pro Duo features two Fiji XT GPUs with 4096 stream processors each, for a total of 8192 stream processors. Each GPU features 64 ROPs and 256 TMUs, with each GPU clocked at 1GHz. Each GPU also has 4GB of HBM1, for 8GB HBM1 total. We have 16 TFLOPs of 32-bit single precision compute performance, which makes the Radeon Pro Duo the fastest video card on the market.

The 4GB of HBM1 per GPU is clocked at 500MHz, resulting in 512GB/sec over the hugely wide 4096-bit memory bus. This means that applications designs for specific workloads on the Radeon Pro Duo can hit over 1TB/sec bandwidth - which is simply put, insane. The TDP of the Radeon Pro Duo is 350W, with 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors required. There's 3 x DP outputs and 1 x HDMI, too. Watercooling is standard, as the Fiji XT GPU runs quite hot, but AMD's engineering department took care of that with the Radeon Pro Duo.

EA DICE must be in some serious meetings right now, delaying the release of Mirror's Edge Catalyst from late next month into June 7 - the third delay in total now. Well, the closed beta has been started by some, with 'xjumper' posting some images from the Xbox One version of Mirror's Edge Catalyst.

The user notes that the game could possibly running at just 1280x720 at 60FPS on the Xbox One, which isn't unusual as most Frostbite-powered games like Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline and even Star Wars Battlefront all ran at 720p on the Xbox One. The PS4 on the other hand, is more capable with Frostbite and its more powerful internals, pumping out Frostbite-powered games at 900p @ 60FPS.

The PC version won't suffer from these potato resolutions, as it'll scale up to 4K and beyond - with multi-monitor users set in for a treat. EA DICE shared the official PC system requirements a few days ago, which we reported on here. After checking out the screenshots, it's apparent that the PC version of Mirror's Edge Catalyst looks beautiful while the console versions are very, very watered down. But, this is a game where 60FPS is needed, which is probably the reason for baked down graphics and what looks like, 720p.

Following the agreement struck last year between Disney and Sony Pictures which sees Spider-Man join the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time in 'Captain America: Civil War', the studios have announced that a surprise star will repay the favor and join the cast of next year's 'Spider-Man: Homecoming'.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Robert Downey Jr. is set to reprise his role as Iron Man for a seventh time in the upcoming Spider-Man reboot which stars Tom Holland as a younger Peter Parker. Marisa Tomei has also signed on to play Aunt May.

'Spider-Man: Homecoming' hits 2D, 3D and IMAX cinemas worldwide next July.

AMD has just talked about its recent earnings with investors, where the chipmaker teased the existence of the next-gen Xbox, as well as the upcoming beefier PlayStation 'Neo' console from Sony - oh, and the next-gen Nintendo NX console. AMD is everywhere when it comes to custom chips powering next-gen consoles.

Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, said during the earnings call that the semi-custom contract wins were in the gaming sector. Su continued, saying that "semi-custom business and gaming" will be the "larger driver" of Q2's revenue growth. She told reporters: "If you think about the semi-custom business in the past few years, the third quarter is always the peak. It will be the peak this year, as well, but we're starting some of the ramping in the second quarter as we build to the stronger third quarter".

Now, ramping up in Q2 for a stronger Q3 could mean that we see next-gen consoles revealed at E3 2016 (which takes place in late Q2) while the release of these consoles would happen in the holidays - closer to Q3. Su was asked who was purchasing the semi-custom designs, to which she said: "I don't believe we've gone through any detail about what those wins are. I'd prefer to let that come out as our customers are ready to launch".

Here we go again... EA DICE have just announced they've delayed Mirror's Edge Catalyst, again. This is the third delay, with the original launch of February 23 being pushed back to May 24, and now again to June 7.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst will now be released in the US on June 7 and throughout Europe two days later on June 9. The developer is about to kick off the closed beta for Mirror's Edge Catalyst, where the company will test out the game's new online-connected "social play" features. The new social play features include time trials and leaderboards, with EA DICE adding that it has developed "brand new online technology" in order to support them. Maybe it's so new, it explains why the game has been delayed.

Design Director on Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, Erik Odelhaul, explained on the game's website: "We also want to make sure we have the opportunity and time to address player feedback from the Closed Beta. We're confident that these extra two weeks will make sure the game is as amazing as possible for you the players".

It looks like AMD's next-gen Polaris flagship GPU has been spotted again, with the mysterious 'C99' receiving its RRA certification. This certification puts it on a path towards being consumer ready, which is exciting. These numbers might not look like much, but the nomenclature is used for test boards. All of the boards start with the letter C, with the number proceeding the letter C being the generation of video card. For example:

This means that Polaris-based boards, alongside other GCN 4.0-based, should have the C9XXXX nomenclature. The Baffin XT-based GPU that was on Zauba recently had the C98101 codename, which tells us it's a Polaris-based product. But now the C99305, C99304, C99303, and C99302 have been spotted getting their RRA certification, back on April 8.

The RRA certification is South Korea's National Radio Research Agency, with any silicon-based electronic needing this certification before it can be a consumer product. The certification doubles as a final stage of design of the GPU, as no more changes can be made after the RRA certification has been approved.