Latest News - Page 2632

Everyone seems to be having a blast with Hideo Kojima's swan song Metal Gear Solid V, but for the past three weeks Xbox One gamers have been plagued with crippling performance hitches and frame-rate drops that can ruin any session.

In a game as big as MGSV: The Phantom Pain it's natural to find glitches...but the consistent and game-breaking frame-rate drops is something that should have been noticed in QA testing. After AC: Unity these issues have left a bad taste in gamer's mouths, and for good reason. There have been dozens of separate incidents reported across Reddit, NeoGAF and even Giant Bomb's forums that articulate gamers' frustration.

The glitch effectively makes the game unplayable in certain situations, especially when players lose control of Snake's action and he walks right out into a searchlight instead of stealthily melting into the shadows. Metal Gear Solid V is all about making those perfect infiltration runs, and it's the kind of game where a single mistake can ruin the entire session. Precision and functionality are extremely important and the player has to be able to maintain control at every second or else the whole experience just falls apart.

Qualcomm has been mostly down and out with its current Snapdragon processor, with Samsung opting for its Exynos 7420 inside of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge handsets, but the company wants to see its Snapdragon processors inside of drones in the future.

Qualcomm has just announced its new Snapdragon Flight, which is their optimized platform for everything drones and robotics. Snapdragon Flight is a tiny 58 x 40cm circuit board, which will be used on drones and other robotics in the future. The new Snapdragon Flight features Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 processor, clocked at 2.5GHz.

Senior Vice President of Qualcomm, Raj Talluri, explains: "Today, drones are made from multiple component vendors providing separate solutions for photography, navigation and communications, adding to the cost and bulk of consumer drones. The Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight brings together the technologies that have defined the mobile industry onto a single board, enabling OEMs to build drones that are lighter, smaller, easy to use and affordable with long battery life and superior functionalities".

Nintendo is no longer a ship without a captain: the Japanese gaming titan has selected 65-year-old Nintendo veteran Tatsumi Kimishima to fill the late Satoru Iwata's position as President and Representative Director of the company.

While this is probably your first time hearing about Kimishima, he's been with Nintendo for 15 years after being appointed as Representative Director of the Pokemon Company back in 2000. The former Pokemon director will have his work cut out for him filling the shoes of beloved former Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, who's death in July sent a shockwave throughout the entire gaming sphere.

The announcement of Kimishima's new appointment is actually two-fold, as Nintendo reveals that a "large-scale revision of the organizational structure of the company" will take effect on September 16. In the new structure, Zelda alum Shigeru Miyamoto is set to become Nintendo's Creative Fellow, and Genyo Takeda, who helped develop the hugely successful Wii console, is now Nintendo's new Technology Fellow. Both Takeda and Miyamoto now cast a wide arc of influence over Nintendo's games and hardware and based on their respective achievements I'd say that this is a great move.

Now that the new iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus and iPad Pro have all been unveiled, we're hearing more details about the RAM that they will all come with. Because you know, Apple doesn't like to give out the details on the RAM inside of its smartphones and tablets at whim.

The new iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus will both feature 2GB of RAM, while the 12.9-inch iPad Pro will include 4GB of RAM. The news is coming from the Twitter account of iOS developer Hamza Sood, where he said: "Not much of a surprise but Xcode confirms 2GB of RAM for the 6s (and 6s plus), and 4GB for the iPad Pro".

With the iPad Pro being able to edit three 4K video streams at once, it would really need to have 4GB of RAM, which Apple seems to have crammed into the 12.9-inch slate. When it comes to the new iPhones, they have 2GB of RAM versus the 1GB of RAM in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. But, the new iPhones reportedly have two dual-core processors at different clock speeds, which will provide some much needed performance.

The Xbox Platform Team has fabricated a "highly customized" version of Windows 10 to bring some dramatic changes to the Xbox One's architecture, allowing for a 50% speed boost, backward compatibility and DirectX 12 integration.

The New Xbox One Experience "NXOE" isn't just a simple UI overhaul. It's a complete evolution of the console's speed and responsiveness, and it's made possible with a new customized Windows 10 kernel called OneCore. "This isn't a small change in the front-end of the console or the UI, this is a massive change to the architecture, to the under-pinnings of the system," Xbox spokesman Larry Hryb said in the latest Major Nelson Radio podcast.

"NXOE brings massive change to the Xbox One," Xbox Director of Program Management Mike Ybarra said in the podcast. "We're bringing in Windows 10 and the whole Xbox One architecture will change Windows 10 is allowing us to bring a new level of speed and responsiveness to the Xbox One. Windows 10 on Xbox One is a highly customized version of the OS. It's called OneCore, and you can think of it as a kernel. It's a higly customized build of Windows 10 specifically built to optimize the things players do on the console, including playing games and other features."

We all know that the new Mass Effect game is in development, with Mass Effect: Andromeda set to be the best one yet. BioWare's Creative Development Director, Alistair McNally, has taken to Twitter to tease his feelings on the game.

McNally said: "Spent today reviewing creative process on #MassEffectAndromeda. I believe it to be the best (and certainly largest) Mass Effect ever! #Hype". BioWare is tapping DICE's incredible Frostbite 3 engine for Mass Effect: Andromeda, which is coming out in holiday 2016.

We don't know much on Andromeda, but BioWare Canada's General Manager, Aaryn Flynn, said when the game was revealed: "When we wrapped up the original Mass Effect trilogy with Mass Effect 3: Citadel in early 2013, planning and design on Mass Effect: Andromeda was already well underway. We knew we wanted to start with a foundation composed of the best parts of any Mass Effect game: exciting new worlds to discover, great characters, and intense action. At the same time, we clearly wanted to expand the definition of what you should expect from a Mass Effect game".

StarCraft II's last expansion, Legacy of the Void, doesn't just wrap up the second game: it promises to wrap up the entire decades-spanning saga.

Blizzard today announced that Legacy of the Void, StarCraft II's final expansion, will release on November 10, 2015. The expansion is all about the Protoss' harrowed conflict against the menacing Zerg swarm that has overtaken their homeworld, and will wrap up the series as well as expose the fates of the Protoss culture as well as iconic characters like Kerrigan and Jim Raynor.

"Legacy of the Void provides an epic conclusion to a story more than 17 years in the making," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "It also brings tremendous enhancements to StarCraft II's definitive real-time strategy gameplay, with new units, automated tournaments, collaborative game modes and more. We can't wait for players to experience it all this November."

If you've ever watched a movie in an IMAX screen that was filmed with an IMAX camera, you'll know that there's nothing better. But the company doesn't see many movies hitting its screens, and it wants to see that change - even if it has to do so itself.

The Wrap is reporting that IMAX is in the process of making their own movies, and even the possibilities of allowing alternate programming to be blasted onto IMAX screens in the future. The company is talking with various potential partners, TV producers, and filmmakers to see what they can do to get IMAX into the limelight.

Why now? Well, during August there were hardly any blockbuster Hollywood movies on IMAX screens. IMAX Entertainment Chief Executive Officer Greg Foster explained: "There were no blockbuster movies released in August, there were none last week and none this coming weekend. That's three or four weeks of beachfront property. We want to provide the very best premium entertainment 52 weeks a year, and if creating it ourselves is the best way to do it, we're going to be excited about taking that step".

The release of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for the PC is getting closer, with it being one of the first DirectX 12 titles in development for the PC. The Coalition, the developer behind the game, has talked with Eurogamer recently with some interesting things to say.

Cam McRae, the Technical Director for the Windows 10 version of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition has said that the use of DX12 and Asynchronous Compute will help them provide a stellar PC release. McRae said: "We are still hard at work optimising the game. DirectX 12 allows us much better control over the CPU load with heavily reduced driver overhead. Some of the overhead has been moved to the game where we can have control over it. Our main effort is in parallelising the rendering system to take advantage of multiple CPU cores".

He continued: "Command list creation and D3D resource creation are the big focus here. We're also pulling in optimisations from UE4 where possible, such as pipeline state object caching. On the GPU side, we've converted SSAO to make use of async compute and are exploring the same for other features, like MSAA".

Riding on the marketing train of the new iPhones that Apple unveiled earlier this week in the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, we're beginning to hear more rumors on Samsung's latest Galaxy smartphone, the Galaxy S7.

Samsung's Galaxy S7 will reportedly feature a 5.7-inch display, and will be using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 processor - seeing Samsung move away from using its own Exynos processor, something it did in the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge. The Galaxy S7 will also include an upgraded camera, with rumors pointing to it featuring an insane 27-megapixel camera or so. Comparing this to the 16-megapixel shooter on the current Galaxy handsets, and 12-megapixel shooter inside of the new iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus.

Qualcomm and reportedly been working closely with Samsung on the new Galaxy S7, so we could see Samsung's next flagship smartphone being quite the powerhouse, inside and out.

NVIDIA has come out with new recommendations for VR gaming on their GeForce video cards, with teh company recommending their Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 980 Ti for VR gaming at 1920x1080 (1080p) at 90FPS.

Not only is the company recommending the GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti for VR gaming at 1080p 90FPS, but for 4K gaming at 60FPS on the latest AAA titles. The GTX 980 is capable of playing games at 1440p at 60FPS while the GTX 950 and GTX 960 are more than capable of running games at 1080p 60FPS. But when it comes to VR gaming, the GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti are recommended for 1080p 90FPS.

The more we move into the new year, the more we're going to see VR headsets released with the HTC Vive due later this year, and the Oculus Rift released in the New Year. NVIDIA is right on top of it all, with a full product stack ready for VR gaming.

NVIDIA has been quick off the mark to trash talk the new Apple TV, which Apple says their latest TV device has gaming as a central part of their ecosystem. Well, NVIDIA is much stronger as a gaming-orientated company, so they've chimed in with their Shield TV, which is a 4K-capable device that does more than just 4K streaming or gaming.

NVIDIA created a post on the official Shield page, where it asked the question: "NVIDIA SHIELD or the New Apple TV?". NVIDIA has supported set-top gaming with Shield, which features 4K streaming, voice search, voice commands, and a massive gaming ecosystem that doesn't just include Android games, but PC games too.

And NVIDIA has a point; where the new Apple TV can play iOS games, it can't play anything outside of Apple's ecosystem. Where NVIDIA lets you live within the Android ecosystem, but it has the doors open to the PC too which expands Shield into hundreds of thousands, if not millions of games playable on its Shield TV device.

Ras Labs has created a unique synthetic material that mimics human muscles under an electric current, which could lead to a new generation of comfortable prosthesis solutions...and lifelike skin for robots.

"Luke Skywalker's prosthetic arm in Star Wars is somewhat the ultimate goal of prosthetics," Ras Labs CEO Eric Sandberg said to TechCrunch. "It provides that lifelike motion, control, and dexterity."

The material, dubbed as Syntethic Muscle, expands and contracts just like living muscle tissue under an electric current. The "electroactive" substance can directly convert energy into motion with a highly adaptable form factor; it can be hard and firm when it needs to be, or soft to conform to various curves and shapes of body parts. While Ras Labs wants to first revolutionize prosthetic limbs, the material has infinite potential: it could even be used to give lifelike flesh to robots and pave the way for synthetic androids straight out of the Alien canon.

Leaked slides show that Dell will release its own 2-in-1 tablet called the XPS 12 while simultaneously pushing Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 into the enterprise sector.

The XPS 12 is very much like the Surface Pro 3 in terms of form and functionality, but Dell's new convertible tablet is has a decidedly beefier 12-inch 3840x2160 4K infinity edge-to-edge touch display that supports Dell's Active Stylus. The XPS 12 sports a 10-hour battery, a Thunderbolt 3 port, a back-facing 8MP camera complemented by a 5MP front-facing camera, and the tablet runs Windows 10.

Dell's 4K tablet also comes with a magnetic keyboard dock that features illuminated keys for extra accenting and precision typing. The leaks haven't revealed any further specifications on the XPS 12 like processing power, RAM or memory.

"The Xbox One is literally a Windows device," says Microsoft's Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela, illustrating how Microsoft doesn't see a distinction between the Xbox One and other platforms like Windows-powered phones and PCs.

"A core power metric for us is Windows 10 devices. That's not PC statement.That will be phones, that will be tablets, that will be laptops, that will be desktops, that will be big surface hubs that will be Xboxes," Capossela said at this year's Citi Global Technology Conference. "Xboxes today run Windows and so every time we sell an Xbox we're actually creating a Windows active device that hopefully people love it; it's a gaming device in their living room. It is not a separate animal. It is literally a Windows device."

While the Redmond-based tech giant has a role for every Windows 10 device, the OS acts as a glue to connect and cement each platform to a unified scope. The seeds of Windows 10 kernal will be planted into the Xbox One in November as part of the console's major new update, opening up new functionality like extensive backward compatibility with Xbox 360 games, Cortana support, and up to "thousands" of Windows 10 apps in the future.

Indie devs already have it pretty hard, and getting the attention of the gaming community can be even harder. Some devs turn to YouTubers as a natural way to advertise their games...but when you're asked to pay $22,000 for a single sponsored video, it makes your jaw drop.

"On one of my normal PR rounds I received an email from a very popular YouTuber with a few million subscribers offering to have one of our games featured on their YouTube channel for a rate of either $17,600 for 2-3 talking points or $22,000 for 2-3 talking points AND a description link," Ben Tester, whose indie studio Wales Interactive is responsible for games like Soul Axiom and Master Reboot, said on Reddit.

This kind of huge payoff isn't anything new. YouTubers have done promos and sponsored videos all over the place, earning up to $15,000 to $30,000 for a single video. This kind of cash is enough to fund an indie game and it's as much as some people make in a year. It got to the point where advertisements and original content bled so closely together that no one could tell what content was promoted. Eventually the Federal Trade Commission had to step in and force regulations on YouTube's multi-million dollar system, ruling that YouTubers now have to make promoted videos explicitly clear to viewers.

With Yellow Cabs being combatant against the rise of Uber and other similar applications, a lawsuit was launched to have this method of transportation banned from use. However, Queens Supreme Court Justice Allan Weiss recently ruled that for-hire vehicles requested through an electronic medium may continue operate alongside Yellow Cabs - effectively ensuring Uber is safe to live another day.

Addressing the case at hand, the judge wrote that "any expectation that the medallion would function as a shield against the rapid technological advances of the modern world would not have been reasonable," adding "in this day and age, even with public utilities, investors must always be wary of new forms of competition arising from technological development."

The lawsuit was filed by four Queens credit unions who each have stakes in Taxi medallions. Their lawyer, Todd Higgins, told media that this ruling is "a stunning abdication of leadership and responsibility that will haunt New York City for years to come," adding "a catastrophe is unfolding, as an entire industry continues to be illegally destroyed, while elected officials allow it to happen on their watch."

Yep, this isn't a joke. Devolver Digital's Dropsy the Clown hit Steam not to long ago, allowing users to become a heavily misunderstood love-filled clown in this "non-traditional take on the classic point and click adventure formula."

Complete with a sing-along trailer (seen above), this title can be played in an open world adventure, puzzles and hugs or text free experience mode. Seeing each option set on a similar path, Dropsy's goal is to turn this community around through the power of pixelated love.

Including the ability to talk to animals, Dropsy will "help those in need, hug total strangers, and unravel dark and shameful secrets from his past on the way to redemption" as stated in a recent press release.

The rumors of Microsoft acquiring AMD are back again, with Microsoft reportedly interested in acquiring both the CPU and GPU divisions, days after AMD announced it was breaking its GPU division away into its own entity called Radeon Technology Group.

With AMD under its wing, Microsoft could truly begin to compete on a totally different level against companies like NVIDIA, Samsung and Apple. With Microsoft's big pockets, AMD could have a massive injection of R&D money and in a few years, we could be looking at a market with one of the strongest competitors being Microsoft.

This is without considering the console side of things, where Microsoft could have AMD exclusively making GPUs, CPUs or APUs for use in its next-generation Xbox consoles. The next step would be VR gaming, and with AMD cooking up Liquid VR we could see Microsoft having a huge win on its hand on the hardware side of things when it comes to VR thanks to it acquiring AMD.

Android Pay, an Apple Pay rival, has now been pushed live to over one million US locations. Utilizing NFC technology in order to transfer funds from your account to a merchant, Android Pay can be used by any NFC-ready device running KitKat 4.4 or higher.

Estimated by IDC to be worth $1 trillion by 2017, analysts believe that mobile payments are the payment option of the future. With companies such as GameStop, Macy's and Staples picking up this form of payment, we may very well see this become mainstream in the near future.

Google has further confirmed that Android Pay will be rolled out to more locations in coming days, with updates following in the near future. Supporting credit and debit cards such as American Express, MasterCard, Visa and more, Apple and Android pay is all about ease of use and accessibility.