Latest News - Page 2694

While the leak on NVIDIA's website last month that hinted at the possibilities of a 500GB version of the Shield Android TV, it looks like it was real. A new listing has appeared on Amazon, but was quickly pulled.

The listing had an image of the box, which said "500GB Android TV" and the image doesn't look like something that was thrown together for a laugh. The description says that the new NVIDIA Shield has "4K entertainment and apps, powered by Android TV" as well as "a new class of Android games-only on SHIELD". But it's the "500GB storage for all your media and games" that has us excited, and you will get a Shield controller and HDMI in the box, too.

It looks like there will be a normal Shield, and then the Shield Pro that we have here with a 500GB internal 2.5-inch HDD. As we mentioned above, Amazon has since pulled the listing, but we're sure we'll see a 500GB Shield from NVIDIA in the very, very near future.

Mortal Kombat X is getting fixed up, with a new patch being pushed out to the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC versions of the game. The patch fixes up different parts of the game, such as online matchmaking for ranked, and player matches. The full list of general gameplay fixes can be found below:

The list of character-specific fixes is also quite long, check it out:

Researchers from the University of Surrey in the UK have developed an interesting new, noninvasive drug test that can detect cocaine in your system through your fingerprints. The system looks for two common cocaine metabolites: benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine.

These two metabolites can be found in blood, sweat, and urine using a "mass spectrometry technique known as Desorption Electrospray Ionisation (DESI)", reports Engadget. Metabolites dissipate from our sweat much quicker than they do in blood and urine, so law enforcement will one day in the near future be able to know if a suspect is high right then and there, or was high a few nights ago.

The study's lead author, Melanie Bailey, told Motherboard: "We can distinguish between cocaine having been touched and cocaine having been ingested". With fingerprints being unique, it's hard to swap out a urine sample or test, which will make this type of technology fast-tracked beyond belief. The team has added that their research is still in its early stages, as they'll need to secure much more data on the effects of dosage and timing before they can move to more reliable testing. They still say that this technology will be made available to law enforcement within 10 years.

According to VideoCardz.com, we should expect rebranded AMD Radeon R9 200 series cards based on the Hawaii architecture to arrive next month with a disguise, as the Radeon R9 300 series.

While the HBM-based Radeon R9 390X will arrive in two flavors: 4GB and 8GB (and maybe one model with GDDR5 and another with HBM), there will be other Radeon R9 300 series cards based on the Hawaii architecture. These should arrive as the Radeon R9 385, and R9 380 - but those specifics could change. But these new cards will feature slightly higher Core Clocks, and a nice jump on Memory speeds.

The Radeon R9 290X has a Core Clock of 1GHz, but the new R9 300 series rebrand will have 2816 stream processors, while its Core set at 1050MHz, a 50MHz jump. The Memory Clock on the other hand, jumps from the 1250MHz found on the R9 290X, to 1500MHz on the new cards, according to VideoCardz.com. This will give that particular card based on the Hawaii XT GPU around 384GB/sec of memory bandwidth, up from the 320GB on the R9 290X.

With DICE rolling out future DLC for free to all Battlefield 4 gamers, the Spring Patch which drops later this month on all platforms will be something that gamers will be excited over.

The new Spring Patch will offer up five new guns, a revamped damage, fall off and suppression model for the guns, and the return of Gun Master. Gun Master is something that was a fan favorite back in Battlefield 3: Close Quarters, and is played like a Team Deathmatch game, except with a big twist. You don't get to choose the weapons you use, with weapons being swapped every time you get two kills in a row on an opponent, and whoever is the first player to get a kill with the final weapon, wins.

The PC version of Battlefield 4 is also getting an injection of stability, with the Battlefield 4 Community Test Environment, or CTE, being used to find the problems, and fix them. The Spring Patch focuses on the crashes and issues with both the game client and server. DICE is asking that all gamers update their graphics drivers to the latest stable versions, and to keep their overclocks at a minimum to ensure the best experience with Spring Patch.

The launch of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has been an interesting one, something that hasn't been filled with bugs and watered down graphics with hidden options in it like Watch Dogs experienced, but something entirely different.

CD Projekt Red, the developer behind The Witcher series of games, has been quite open during the development of its open-world title. Except, that is, when it comes to comparing The Witcher 3 between the PlayStation 4, and PC. Marcin Momot, who works for the studio, talked with German website PCGamesHardware, where he talked about the differences between the PS4 and PC versions of the game. The developer reached out to the website, asking them to remove their video.

Momot said that the main differences between the PC and PS4 versions of the game will be the draw distance, frame rate, resolution and exclusive features like NVIDIA's HairWorks technology. Momot also said that there will be many more NPCs in the PC versions versus the PS4 version, and that the now removed video of the game was "not representative" of the PC version, as it made the PC version look pretty bad. He said: "Regarding the comparison video, unfortunately we don't know how this video was created and what PC settings have been used. It compared an early PC version with a PS4 debug build without the day 1 patch".

TweakTown recently spent a few days playing the preview build of Rebel Galaxy, a single-player spaceship combat action game from Double Damage Games. Rebel Galaxy will be released for the PC first, though it will be available for Mac, Sony PlayStation 4 and the Microsoft Xbox One. Admittedly, I called upon my 16-year-old brother for his gaming knowledge - and I am not a game reviewer, so here is the meat and potatoes about Rebel Galaxy.

A mouse and keyboard or gamepad work, with fully re-mappable controls for gamers - though it's worth pointing out that Double Damage recommends using a gamepad. Many PC gamers are used to relying on just the mouse and keyboard, which proved to be adequate. The keyboard is used to steer the ship, while the mouse is used to aim accurately and move camera angles.

If you're a fan of a game like Sid Meier's Pirates!, you should feel right at home with Rebel Galaxy. It's a similar type of fighting style, with broadside fighting - and there are turrets so you can blow stuff things up - while you're traveling around completing missions.

With E3 2015 just over a month away, the hype train is building for various game franchises, but one of the most exciting ones is going to be shown off at E3 this year: Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

Naughty Dog, the developer behind the PlayStation 4 exclusive title, has said that it is in the last minute crunch time to get the game ready to show off at E3, where the developer has "all hands on deck" getting it ready. Community Manager for Naughty Dog, Eric Monacelli, said that the team is very capable when it comes to last minute crunch time, as the studio hit an achievement when making The Last of Us even work on the PS3.

Monacelli said: "Our team is just full of evil geniuses and wizards and they're just really good programmers. With a lot of dev teams - I worked in a few different places - it's the same sort of feel, but Naughty Dog has this sort of special magic that whenever we go into crunch it's just like, we all come together and we want the absolute best of everything. And it just somehow comes out and shines through, it's just incredible".

Up until this point, we know the villain in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will be Lex Luthor, which is exciting. We all think it's going to be a mega beat down between the two biggest superheroes of all time: Batman and Superman.

But, it looks like there will be a common enemy, someone who I think will be introduced in the second half of the movie. This villain will be someone who makes Batman and Superman wake up from their fight, to form the Justice League - which will be launching in 2017. We can see it all in the title: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. But which villain is big enough for this new Superman, who is the strongest and fastest we've seen yet, to fight? Doomsday, that's who.

According to Umberto Gonzalez aka El Mayimbe, he said that Doomsday in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is "official". Golzalez said that Doomsday appearing in Batman v Superman will be what Darth Vader was to Star Wars, which is saying an incredible amount. Doomsday will be the big bad of Batman v Superman, while the main villain of Dawn of Justice being Lex Luthor, played by Jesse Eisenberg.

TSMC has come out swinging lately, teasing that the shift into 16nm FinFET is going to be quite big for GPUs. The Taiwanese manufacturer said that the move from 28nm to 16nm, and in particular, the 16nm FinFET+ process, will deliver around 40% more performance.

This 40% improvement in performance will not consume any additional power, which should have both NVIDIA and AMD smiling from ear to ear. This means if they were to spin up an NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X on 16nm FinFET+ and have the same performance, it would consume 50% less power. Alternatively, for the same power, they would be able to cram in a huge 40% performance gain. Impressive stuff, shrinking down to 16nm.

TSMC will begin volume production of its 16nm FinFET in Q3 2015, which means we could expect the first GPUs based on the smaller node towards the end of the year, or early 2016. We are predicting that flagship GPUs released from this new 16nm process will be, at an absolute minimum 30-40% faster, all while using the same power draw of around 200-250W. Along with HBM, we could see some serious improvements of 80-100% over the flagship cards we see today. HBM2 (something we saw at NVIDIA's GTC 2015) is due next year, with 1.2TB/sec of memory bandwidth, up from the 640GB/sec that we should see on the AMD Radeon R9 390X, and a big gain from the $999 Titan X and its 336GB/sec.

Sony expected big things from Bloodborne, an action role-playing video game that is a Sony PlayStation 4 exclusive, and the title has delivered.

Bloodborne topped 1 million units sold last month, reaching that point after being available for less than two weeks - with Sony thinking the exclusive title also launched at "just the right time."

"It did surprise us," said Fergal Gara, Managing Director of Sony UK, in a statement to MCV. "We had expectations to do well. We looked at the Souls series as a frame of reference, and we thought we could do better than that. We did - and then some. Relative to some of our sister territories, we were being quite ambitious, but even that proved to be conservative."

Microsoft's upcoming launch of Windows 10 is a major effort to win back consumers left disappointed with Windows 8/8.1, including mobile users. The company's Windows 10 Mobile updates will occur under Microsoft's supervision, with wireless carriers left out in the cold.

The company sent an email update to ZDNET and discussed how the Microsoft Denim update, which was announced in September 2014, still isn't available for the T-Mobile Lumia 635, AT&T Lumia 830, and several other phones. Instead, users are running "badly outdated versions," and Microsoft doesn't want that to happen to customers later this year.

"Here at Microsoft, we take our responsibility to keep Windows secure seriously," Microsoft said in an Ignite blog post. "We follow up on all reported security issues, continuously probe our software with leading edge techniques, and proactively update supported devices with necessary updates to address issues. And today, we're announcing this continuous update process applies to all Windows 10 devices, including phones."

Drone technology is advancing rapidly, and it may not be too much longer when humans will no longer need to directly control them, according to Intel.

During the Intel Future Showcase in the UK, Intel and Ascending Technologies showed off a drone that uses six Intel RealSense Cameras - that power the drone so it can fly by itself. Using the onboard cameras, a drone can create a real-time 360-degree map of the world, supporting depth and distance analyzing functionality. The idea of a self-navigating drone might be frightening to some, but appears to be a small glimpse of the future.

"Ultimately it will make for a safer and more useful robot... it can avoid people for example, so we can be less likely the drone will run into someone and cause harm," said Scott Dwyer, product and marketing manager at Intel, in a statement published by BT.

Oculus VR has released the recommended requirements for the Oculus Rift, which will launch in the first quarter of 2016. You'll need an Intel Core i5-4590 or equivalent, along with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 to get an optimal experience out of the VR headset.

The Facebook-owned VR giant has said: "The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration. Ultimately, we believe this will be fundamental to VR's success, as developers can optimize and tune their game for a known specification, consistently achieving presence and simplifying development". The full specs you'll need:

According to British philosopher Nick Bostrom, the reality that surrounds us is thanks to a highly-advanced computer program, similar to the events of The Matrix.

Dr Bostrom proposed his theory in a paper that he wrote, saying that an evolved race of aliens have "imprisoned the human race" in what Bostrom refers to as "digital imprisonment". You might think he is crazy, but NASA scientist Rich Terrile agrees with Bostrom in a way. Terrile is the director of the Centre for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Terrile spoke with VICE, where he said: "Right now the fastest NASA supercomputers are cranking away at about double the speed of the human brain. If you make a simple calculation using Moore's Law [which roughly claims computers double in power every two years], you'll find that these supercomputers, inside of a decade, will have the ability to compute an entire human lifetime of 80 years - including every thought ever conceived during that lifetime - in the span of a month".

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, says that virtual reality is the next big computing platform. VR is something that Zuckerberg is most looking forward to, in that it will transform the world. Especially since Facebook owns Oculus VR, the makers of the Oculus Rift.

During a town hall hosted at Facebook's HQ in Menlo Park, California, Zuckerberg said: "What I think is going to be really cool is as the form factor keeps on getting smaller and smaller, [it] stops being big goggles or headset. But instead it just looks like normal glasses or sunglasses where you can use it without being tied to a computer".

Zuckerberg sees a world in the not-too-distant future where people won't need to use their phones to show photos to their friends, he added: "In the future you'll be able to snap your fingers and instantiate a photo album or a big photo, make it whatever size you want, and people will be able to see it through their glasses". This won't happen in the short term, but that's something the Facebook founder is very aware of, where he said: "It's going to take five, seven, 10, I don't know, maybe 12 years to build that out and have that be something that really works and is cheap enough for everyone in the world to use".

King, the developer behind mega smash hit Candy Crush Saga, has reported its fiscal first quarter earnings today, where we have found out that the company has a huge 550 million monthly active players. This is up from the 481 million during the first quarter of its fiscal 2014. The company should expect an injection of players in the near future, as Candy Crush Saga will be pre-installed with Windows 10.

The company has 158 million daily active players, with 364 million monthly unique players, respectively. With mobile gaming being a massive $30 billion business, King is one of the kings of it - pun intended. But, it's not all soda pops and candy bars, as player spending has dropped considerably over the last 12 months.

The amount of unique players that are spending money inside of King's games has dropped, from 11.86 million from this time last year, to 8.52 million. Paying gamers who continue to spend money, are spending an average of $23.64, compared to $18.02 during the same time of 2014, but it's not enough to make up for the amount of players not spending money.

It looks like Google is expanding its Google Glass team, which is now working on "smart eyewear and other related products". The Mountain View-based giant is hiring a slew of new people to expand its products and services.

With Google going on a hiring spree, we could expect Google Glass 2.0, or a totally new Glass to be unveiled at Google I/O at the end of the month. The company has been posting job listing ads for its Glass team, something that has included an Audio Hardware Manager, a Human Factors Designer, an RF Systems Engineer, and a Hardware Automation Engineer (Manufacturing).

Google has said that it is working on a new version of Glass for consumers, but we haven't heard much about it lately, until now. The new description for the Glass team teases: "The Google Glass division is a world-class team focused on the cutting edge of hardware, software and industrial design. It is charged with pioneering, developing, building and launching smart eyewear and other related products in line with Google's ambitious and visionary objectives".

Microsoft wants to push augmented reality to the next level, and hopes it can use its HoloLens headset to win over customers. A recent US patent application indicates Microsoft could try to use HoloLens to help read and respond to wearers' stress levels, based on heart rate, pulse oximetry, sweat production, and other biometric signals.

"A person may experience stress that is related to a situation or current context," according to the Microsoft patent application. "For example, a person may have difficulty performing a task and grow frustrated as the number of unsuccessful attempts at completing the task grows."

There is concern that the biometrics feature could be more trouble than it's worth, depending how Microsoft includes it in HoloLens. However, the idea that the AR headset can identify when a person is struggling to repair their kitchen sink, and then super impose step-by-step instructions, could prove to be helpful.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty believes artificial intelligence can be used by humans for our own benefit, despite some outcry that AI poses a threat to mankind. During the World of Watson event, aimed at promoting IBM Watson, Rometty promised a "bold prediction."

"In the future, every decision that mankind makes is going to be informed by a cognitive system like Watson... and our lives will be better for it," Rometty said.

IBM Watson is a custom cognitive system that the company promotes as a "new partnership between people and computers that enhances and scales human expertise." The supercomputer has already been used for cancer research - among other breakthrough scientific purposes - but IBM wants to push things even further. Watson was able to beat Jeopardy! king Ken Jennings in 2011, and has been used more recently to help chefs find new recipes.