Latest News - Page 2633

If you're looking for something tiny yet mighty, ASUS' Republic of Gamers (ROG) division has just released a beastly compact desktop, naming it the G20CB. This "Mayan-inspired" small form factor system features 8 million color LED options for the exterior plus ASUS ROG's own Aegis II app in order to help you control everything within.

With plenty of different component choices available depending on your budget, ASUS ROG allows users to spec their mini-machine up to an Intel Skylake i7 processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 video card, 32GB of dual-channel DDR4 RAM at 2133 MHz and a 256GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD.

Complete with Microsoft Windows 10, ASUS' poster-child small form factor system received a CES 2015 Best Innnovation Award, a 2015 iF design award plus the 2015 Taiwan Excellence Gold Award. Designed to support up to three HD displays through the power the the GTX 980, this 9.5-liter desktop doesn't currently have a price tag attached.

The Xbox One's new November update is pretty significant and isn't just about a faster UI. A huge library of backward compatible Xbox 360 games will be supported, and every single one of them will have the full range of functions afforded to Xbox One games.

Backward compatibility is one of the most-requested features in the current generation of consoles, and Microsoft has one-upped Sony by adding the feature to Xbox One consoles. Come November, all Xbox One owners will be able to play 100 different Xbox 360 games on their consoles, with "hundreds more" coming in the months ahead.

Rather than just adding the feature and calling it quits, Microsoft has gone lengths to make the transition from curent-gen to last-gen as smooth as possible. Users will be able to upload their saved Xbox 360 game data to the cloud and download it to the Xbox One to pick up where they left off. But the most impressive feature is that all 100 backward-compatible games will be treated just like Xbox One games with integrated DVR recording and customization via Upload Studio, screenshot snapping and sharing, and cross-platform streaming to Windows 10 PCs.

Microsoft has released new details on the major changes that are coming to the Xbox One, starting with backward compatibility and planting the seeds for Windows 10 integration.

When the update launches in November it will unlock backward compatibility for approximately 100 Xbox 360 games, and Xbox exec Mike Ybarra affirms that support will expand with "hundreds more in the months to come". The Xbox One's awkward Kinect-centric tile UI will be overhauled as well, bringing a new dashboard and quick-launch scheme that's entirely focused on speed. The framework for full Windows 10 support will likely be laid out, leading to Windows 10 apps and Cortana support, but so far Microsoft has been vague on the details, saying that the UI is "powered by Windows 10" and that it "integrating the speed of Windows 10" to make loading times up to 50% faster.

There's speculation that Windows 10 could give the console access to "thousands of apps" that will bridge PC and Xbox One. But Xbox division head Phil Spencer has said in the past that gamers "won't see Excel on the Xbox One", and that Microsoft will implement Windows 10 apps "where they make the most sense".

After reports of Gaming Paradise in Slovenia seeing participant Passports confiscated, players ill and hotels unpaid, news has come to light of issues at the next-held global CS:GO tournament - ESL ESEA Dubai.

ESL is well-known for hosting not only the largest CS:GO tournaments around, but always presenting them professionally, gathering the full support of the CS:GO community and Valve alike. Set to offer a respectable prize pool of $250,000, the fans expected this event to be no different.

The first issue was raised when the pricey spectator tickets ended up with fans being unable to watch most of the tournament in person. Charging approximately $68 for a one day pass (and up to $272 for a 3-day VIP), spectators were told that the originally-planned outdoors venue would only be used after 7pm - with players located inside due to extreme heat (In excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit). As the spectators were told that they were unable to watch any games until after 7pm local time, this means they were only able to see, at most, three group games plus the finals series.

While we've been hearing about other game engines being powered by DirectX 12, we haven't heard much from the developer of the Battlefield series and Star Wars Battlefront.

The news is coming directly from Technial Director Stefan Boberg on Twitter, where '@CentroXer' asked "when is DX12 going to be part of frosbite?" with Boberg replying that "it already is, no word on which game will be first though :)". With DICE working very closely with AMD on Mantle, which was used in Battlefield 4, it's only a few steps away from Battlefield 5 being announced on the latest Frostbite engine with DirectX 12 capabilities.

Then we have to think about the amount of Frostbite-powered games in the next year or so, with Mass Effect 4 at the end of 2016, Need for Speed on November 3, and Star Wars Battlefront two weeks later on November 17. Let's not forget Mirror's Edge Catalyst on February 23, 2016. So we should expect a next-gen Battlefield game to be announced early next year, with a release date later next year, hopefully.

Alienware has just announced that it will be upgrading any of their customers who purchased a Haswell-powered gaming laptop with an upgrade to Intel's latest Skylake-based processors.

Dell/Alienware executive Frank Azor confirmed the news, taking to Twitter where he said: "Our new notebooks launched last week. If you buy one & a new CPU launches within the next 30 days, you get a frere upgrade ;) Badass". The new upgrade will be for consumers who have purchased a Haswell-powered Alienware laptop in the last 30 days, you'll receive an upgrade to a Skylake-powered machine. The upgrade applies to the Alienware 13, 15 and 17 models, with the option available to also upgrade to Windows 10.

Virtual reality is such a big thing that even Canon is getting into the mix. At a VR expo in New York, Canon showcased its new head-mounted VR display that reportedly features an incredible resolution of 2560 x 1440 per eye for a total 5600 x 2800 pixels.

According to attendees, Canon's new VR display has a 120-degree FOV (field of vision) with "very clear visuals" and a three-layer optical lens system per eye. The display is quite unconventional, sporting two legs that serve as handholds rather than a strap to fit upon your head. It looks a lot like a high-tech VR version of the older viewfinders you see near monuments in metropolitan cities. The device streamed a 5-minute loop of high-res footage shot by Canon cameras in 5600 x 2800 resolution, which basically transported viewers into a living virtual world.

Right now details are slim on Canon's VR prototype and we're not sure if it supports 360-degree head-tracking or what kind of specs are running under the hood, but it's still amazing to see the camera giant step into the ring. VR and photography naturally compliment one another and it'll be amazing to see what kinds of things the company cooks up in the next few years with this new magical tech.

Dell has just announced it is investing massively into China, pushing $125 billion worth into the country over the next five years. Dell CEO Michael Dell said in a statement: "the Internet is the new engine for China's future economic growth and has unlimited potential".

Back in 2010, Dell said that it had planned to spend $250 billion on procurement and other investment into China over 10 years, which is its second biggest market, with the US being their biggest. Michael Dell continued: "Dell will embrace the principle of 'In China, for China' and closely integrate Dell China strategies with national policies".

With Dell being the third in global PC shipments for Q2, the US-run company will be chasing behind Lenovo who sits in second place, and HP who sits at the top of the food chain. Things are going to change with this $125 billion investment, that's for sure.

As if there was ever any doubt, Bethesda has revealed that Fallout 4 will have its own season pass for future DLC...and even calls the pass a "reward for our most loyal fans". The real reward, though, is the full unrestricted set of modding tools that gamers will get across consoles and PC.

While just about every gamer feels that season passes are a terrible scheme on par with the pre-order gamble that sadly funds the industry, Bethsoft affirms that the pass will unlock access to "all DLC ever released for Fallout 4". There's no Evolve-style multi-passes going on here.

On the up-side Bethsoft plans to give players the very same construction software that the studio used to create the game. So the paid season pass DLC could end up being a non-issue. But there's a catch...the tools won't be up at launch. "Early next year we'll release for free the new Creation Kit for the PC. This is the same tool we use in the studio. You'll be able to create your own mods and share them with others. We're especially excited these same mods will then be coming to Xbox One, and then PlayStation 4."

The USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Imperial College London showed off a new technique for "synthesizing the effects of skin microstructure deformation by anisotropically convolving a high resolution displacement map to match normal distribution changes in measured skin samples" during SIGGRAPH 2015.

In a more simple way, it is a new technique that will hopefully one day find us with games with super-realistic dynamic skin, that will have characters in games that look ultra-real. The USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Imperial College London noted that the technique can be used in real-time, with the videos we have embedded including both real-time renders, that have used GPU shaders and offline renders.

NVIDIA has been putting more resources into its Shield line as time goes by, with news of the Shield Tablet 2 now manifesting in the distance. The successor to the Shield Tablet will be powered by the company's Tegra X1 processor.

The new Shield Tablet 2 will feature an 8-inch 1920x1200 display, with the Tegra X1 packing two quad-core processors for an 8-core tablet clocked at 2.2GHz. This is the same processor that powered the original Shield Tablet, which had the issues of overheating problems recently. The new NVIDIA Shield Tablet 2 would however run Android 5.1 Lollipop, offer around 10 hours of video playback and web browsing.

Just like its predecessor, the Shield Tablet 2 will offer 4K display output, where you can output to your 4K-capable display or TV and game at 3840x2160 from a tablet. We will have dual 5-megapixel rear-facing cameras, and two front-facing speakers. The rumors suggest Shield Tablet 2 will have a micro USB port, microSD slot, and mini-HDMI ports.

It looks like Intel is on a mission, where the chipmaker wants to see facial recognition or fingerprint scanners to replace the traditional, and easily penetrated passwords we all use for countless services, websites, bank accounts, and more.

Intel not only things it's a possibility, but that it's something it can get into motion very quickly. Kirk Skaugen, Senior VP and General Manager of Intel's Client Computer Group said at the Citi Global Technology Conference earlier this week: "We want to eliminate all passwords from computing. I can confidently say today, you can eliminate all your passwords today, if you buy a 6th Generation Core system".

So the company is saying that its Skylake architecture is capable of true facial recognition security thanks to Windows 10, where you can use the entire feature set of Windows Hello. This, mixed with Intel's RealSense 3D camera, we could see true facial recognition security that is much more secure than the traditional password. Skaugen added: "You can do everything from measure blood pressure, blink detection, all these kinds of things... In fact, in Berlin, one of my funniest demos in my 23 years at Intel is when I brought two identical twins out on stage and I mixed them up and only one could log in with the PC, and it actually worked". Now that, is some exciting stuff.

Hours before the launch of the Radeon R9 Nano, AMD announces that it is effectively spinning off its GPU division, after acquiring ATI back in 2006 for $5.6 billion.

The new unit will be called Radeon Technologies Group, which will concentrate on GPU development, as well as the "virtual and augmented reality" markets. The new Radeon Technologies Group is being overseen by current Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of AMD, Raja Koduri. Koduri will be reporting directly to AMD President and CEO Lisa Su, with Koduri taking care of "all aspects of graphics technologies used in AMD's APU, discrete GPU, semi-custom, and GPU compute products".

In a statement, the AMD CEO said: "With the creation of the Radeon Technologies Group we are putting in place a more agile, vertically integrated graphics organization focused on solidifying our position as the graphics industry leader, recapturing profitable share across traditional graphics markets, and staking leadership positions in new markets such as virtual and augmented reality".

The identity of the creator of Popcorn Time, until now, has eluded the world. The creator of the BitTorrent movie sharing software has only been known as "Sebastian", and since his creation was illegal, his identity was something he kept to himself obviously.

That is, until now. The creator of Popcorn Time is an Argentinian designer, Federico Abad. Abad said that he wanted to create an easy and fast for users to watch any movie they wanted. Other options took too long, were too confusing or not easy enough for someone like his own mom to use. If Abad's mom liked the idea, then it was a good idea.

But, Adad noted that Popcorn Time cost people both professionally and personally, as he lost his girlfriend in the process. Also the fact that copyright holders were waiting with all of their legal power behind them would've been scary enough. A lawyer from Warner Bros. had worked out the team's identities, visiting their LinkedIn pages. Abad says that he thinks this was a scare tactic, to show that the studio knew what was going on. He did add that he doesn't regret creating Popcorn Time, but he now thinks it's not worth the possibility of legal action in the future.

Gaming Paradise has turned into 'Gaming Hell' for the teams and commentators in attendance, with people taking to Twitter and Reddit in order to explain their frustration about what is going on. The event has not only been accused of failing to pay for its equipment hire, but has avoided paying for the venue and hotel expenses while providing food unfit for human consumption.

Gaming Paradise kicked off as a sub-par tournament in the eyes of the players, offering 60Hz monitors, tournament computers without video cards, massive lag issues on the MLGtv live stream and a delay of up to 25 hours on most matches. If this wasn't bad enough, the computers weren't actually there to begin with - the tournament organizers ordered these new VGA-less PCs after the tournament was set to kick off.

Adding to the heartache, player passports were confiscated by local police due to hotel and food non-payment. However, they were given back to the players after it was determined as unnecessary.

Earlier today Apple confirmed the rumors that the new iPhone models would get an always-on Siri mode.

Apple's new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus will enable instant unrestricted access to the helpful AI assistant at a moment's notice. Previously Siri's wealth of knowledge and quirky persona was only usable when charging an iPhone as the AI was an enormous drain on power.

Now Apple has completely changed how we intreact with Siri. Gone are the days of pressing the home button to search the web for a particular recipe or find a flight. On the new phones, Siri is based on voice recognition and instantly responds to her namesake catchphrase "hey Siri", affording some serious potential for a million different hands-free applications. It might seem like a small change but an always-on hands-free Siri experience will undoubtedly change how many people use their phones--and what they use them for.

Apple's new flagship smartphone duo, the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, will release later this month with a host of new upgrades like shooting 4K video, new 3D Touch technology, beefier processing power and a new responsive Touch ID sensor.

Today Apple showcased the new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus variants and even went so far as jab competitors by saying the new models are the "most advanced smartphones in the world".

Both models can shoot and edit 4K video with 12MP iSight cameras as well as enable Live Photos, a new kind of active photography that animates shutter-speed photos into small gif-like animations. Sadly the models don't have 4K displays: the iPhone 6S has a 4.7" Retina HD display at 1334x750 resolution, whereas the iPhone 6S Plus packs a 5.5" inch 1920x1080 full HD resolution.

Apple's new iPhone 6S duo features a new evolution of multi-touch called 3D Touch technology.

Apple has changed the smartphone game with a new kind of display called 3D Touch. 3D Touch is made possible by pressure-sensitive haptic feedback, which responds to how hard you press on the phone. The harder you press the screen determines what actions are taken, and essentially the apps can pop-up and layer over one another.

Rather than working in and out and going back and forth between app screens, Apple's 3D Touch is all about going over and under. Pressing lightly on the screen lets you "peek" at content like email, and press hard to open the app itself. Users can also tether their favorite apps in an overlay for instant access, or get to the home screen by applying light pressure on the side of the screen. You can also zoom in and out with the single press of a finger.

Apple's newly announced iPad Pro is touted to deliver "PC-grade performance" with "console-like graphics".

Today Apple unveiled their new performance-driven iPad tablet, the iPad Pro. The tablet is powered by the new 3rd generation A9X processor chip that's 1.8x faster than A8X CPU, and iOS 9 brings multi-tasking capabilities to the tablet. Many of the apps on the device are run in full 60 frames-per-second. No performance specs like processor speeds were revealed but the company maintains that the tablet seamlessly blends performance and entertainment.

The iPad Pro's 12.9-inch retina display is the biggest Apple has ever made--half of its width is as tall as the iPad Air's height--and is meant to be used with two hands. The display has a resolution of with a variable refresh rate with 5.6 million more pixels than the MacBook Pro display. For the iPad Pro's audio, Apple takes a hint from ASUS's new Predator tablet and adds a quad-speaker 4 speaker audio system, which balances if you flip up upright or the side.

Lian Li's new PC-Q21 chassis provides a formidable case in a compact form factor that's ideal for Mini-ITX PC builds.

Although the PC-Q21 Mini Tower Chassis has a small size and footprint, it can fit everything needed to run a performance mini-ITX build. The case sports 2x PCIe slots and has extra room to accommodate thicker GPUs while affording flexible placement and improved air flow. As far as storage solutions, the case can fit two 2.5'' or 3.5'' drives and the slot-load slim ODD bay doubles as an SSD tray. For even more cooling a 120mm fan can be attached to the floor of the chassis.sis.

On the outside, Lian Li's Mini-ITX shell has a stylish and sleek metallic flair that comes in silver and black. The PC-Q21 Mini Tower Chassis will be available early this month for a price point of $74.99.