Latest News - Page 2727

We can expect DirectX 12 games to look radically different in just a few years time, with PC gamers being able to expect that future titles will look as good as the CG in the latest movies. The news is coming from an interview with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell with Inner Circle Podcast, teasing the future of PC gaming and DirectX 12.

Wardell said that if game developers get down and dirty with DirectX 12, games with thousands of on-screen characters, or any large number of objects on screen are usually bound by the CPU when it comes to lighting. Ubisoft has even admitted this for its mess that was Assassin's Creed: Unity. The first generation of DX12 games will see a 10-20% boost, as they are written for DirectX 11 and running DirectX 12. But when there are new graphics engines that are built from the ground up for DX12, the real benefits are going to be very, very clear according to Wardell.

The Stardock CEO claimed that future games would look like The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King by the end of the current console generation. He cites the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as resource heavy consoles, as they feature 8-core processors with 8GB of RAM and 64-bit operating systems and games that can access any and all of those resources easily. As time goes by, developers will squeeze much more out of the consoles.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has taken the Chinese smartphone market by storm, quickly punting Samsung out the door - and putting global pressure on Apple, Samsung, and others. The company sold 61 million devices worldwide in 2014, tripling its overall sales figure year-over-year - and provides a high quality phone at an affordable price.

"The trend over the last couple of years has been for local vendors, plus Samsung, to dominate the market and make it hard for others," said Chris Jones, principal mobile analyst of the Canalys research firm, in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. "They've been driving down the prices of smartphones and driving up the screen sizes and quality."

Xiaomi remains focused on its home market of China, in addition to India and several other select markets, and isn't focused on trying to expand into the United States just yet. The Chinese company wants to build a stronghold in China, India, Brazil, and select other regions before trying to migrate into the United States and select western markets.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End will be an exclusive to the PlayStation 4, with developer Naughty Dog aiming for 1080p and 60FPS. But throughout the development of Uncharted 4, Naughty Dog has realized that it most likely won't be able to reach a solid 60FPS throughout the entire game.

Neil Druckmann is the Game Director in charge of Uncharted 4, where he said that reaching 60FPS is not an easy task and that Naughty Dog is continuing to opimize the game (water it down) but he hasn't said whether 60FPS is the aim for the company. When asked how hard it was to reach 60FPS in Uncharted 4 during an interview with Game Informer, Druckmann said that it's "Really f**king hard".

He continued: "That's true for any game. It was really hard on The Last of Us Remastered, and that's a game we had finished and we knew exactly what the end result needs to look like. And here [with Uncharted 4] we're trying to push the boundaries of what this game can look like; and do realistic, real-time cutscenes; and trying to do 60fps is really hard". When he was asked directly if Naughty Dog was aiming for 60FPS, he said that Uncharted 4 is still a work-in-progress, and that nothing is solid right now.

Techland has announced that it will be releasing modding tools for Dying Light, as there seems to have been a situation within the Dying Light community over mods, which seemed to have been erased from the game in a patch.

The developer then released a statement, saying: "Modders were a massive part of our gaming community since Call of Juarez 2 and Dead Island - and we wish to continue that with Dying Light. This invitation is only the first stage of our cooperation with the gaming community. After the modding tools are released, we plan to actively support the coolest mods created by players". Techland has not provided an ETA for the modding tools, so don't hold your breath for the short term.

We don't normally see a behind the scenes look at the hardware powering a gigantic event like the Super Bowl, but we now know what powered the show. This year's Super Bowl half-time show was powered by MAINGEAR, with a system that packed quite a punch in the performance department.

According to 'Bulwerk' on the Octane forums, they needed to render animation at a huge 3780x3024, which requires a serious amount of number crunching power. So they asked MAINGEAR to construct an insane PC that featured four NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z GPUs, which were all liquid cooled using EK Water Block products.

On top of that, we have an ASUS X-99E WS motherboard, Intel Core i7-5930K processor, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM, a Samsung 850 PRO 256GB SSD, and two Corsair AX 1200i PSUs.

The last couple of weeks have been filled with, well I guess you'd call it "controversy" over the VRAM on the GeForce GTX 970. If you haven't read up on it just yet, you can play catch up here.

But how are the return rates on them? Well, according to analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, not many. Jon Peddie from JPR has said: "I have heard as many as 5 per cent of the buyers are demanding a refund from the AIB suppliers". Retailers are reporting just 1-2%, with two of the UK's biggest retailers offering refunds for the GPU, where they have until the end of this month to box up their GTX 970 and return it.

So why are people up in arms over this? Well, the GTX 970 technically features 4GB of VRAM, with the final 512MB part of this running at a far slower rate than the first 3.5GB. So when a game fills up the first 3.5GB and spills into the remaining 0.5GB, it can cause slowdowns and stuttering in games. But it's not just the VRAM, as the ROPs (Raster Operating Pipelines) have been cut from the previous official specification of 64 ROPs, to 56, as well as the L2 cache being dropped from 2048KB to 1792KB.

It looks like Google Glass will soon be getting a major revamp under its new leadership, with Tony Fadell taking over the project. Various people familiar with the matter told The New York Times that Google Glass will be completely redesigned.

One of the sources has said that Fadell is a product person, so he won't be releasing the new version of Glass until it is near perfect. Fadell said in a statement to the Times that the early version of Glass broke ground, allowing the company to learn what is important for consumers and enterprise users when it came to their revolutionary wearable device.

Fadell added that he is excited to be working with fashion guru Ivy Ross, who will be providing direction and support for the new version of Glass, and other devices that will be rolled out in the future. This means that we most likely won't hear about a new version of Google Glass for a while yet, until the company is much closer to a final, consumer version.

Setting up your ideal gaming room is a mighty task because of all the details needed to make it perfect. The ESRB reports that 67 percent of households play video games; however, the average gamer plays about 8 hours a day. Therefore, it's only natural that some people need more than just the living room floor to sit on when gaming. If you are looking to turn your living room into your gaming room, follow these tips to set up the ideal console gaming room.

Regardless of your choice in console, you need to consider a few technical items when building up your perfect gaming chamber. Naturally, you want to play on an HD television with a 16:9 display ratio. While any television with those specs will do nicely, those with some extra cash to burn might consider upgrading to something like the Philips 42PF9630A, which is a 42-inch HD television capable of projecting ambient light around itself based on what colors are being displayed on the screen. This will create an even more immersive experience.

However, the display on your TV won't matter if the lights in your room are too bright. Good dimmable LED lights, like those made by Earth LED, allow you to capture a movie theater mood in your gaming room. Also, prevent sunlight from shining through your windows with solar shades to help reduce screen glare and add a greater sense of privacy. Creating the right lighting is critical to really appreciate many games because who really wants to play a survival horror game in a brightly lit room?

We've covered plenty of GGF LANs projects across the board, including Stuart Tonks' massive Cooler Master HAF stacker build and more.

In recent news, he's been given a Thermaltake Core X9 case to play with. Gigantic in size and with plenty of room to play around inside, we're very interested to see what he can produce.

The images you can see are only the preliminary design, involving custom orange paint and rigid-tubed watercooling filled with orange coolant. This build has been painted orange to match the 'Tt Dude' mascot located within, being Thermaltake's official toy and looking something like Kenny from South Park - Fun fact: Thermaltake's CEO is also called Kenny, however he doesn't wear orange hooded jackets.

China is going to have the most robots working in production plants by 2017 when compared to other countries, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). The production facility is the main focus, but robots are finding their way into restaurants, hotels, offices, and retail stores as hardware and software develops.

South Korea has the most robots per 10,000 workers in the manufacturing industries, with 437, ahead of 323 in Japan, 282 in Germany and 152 in the United States. China currently tallies only 30 robots per 10,000 employees, but has been forced to rapidly adopt robots - and foreign automakers are building manufacturing plants in the country - helping drive adoption.

"Companies are forced to invest ever more in robots to be more productive and raise quality," said Gudrun Litzenberger, general secretary of the IFR, in a statement published by Reuters. "In the current phase it's the auto industry, but in the next two or three years it will be driven by the electronics industry."

Given the recent lifetime bans issued to American and Canadian CS:GO players due to their match-fixing and betting ring scandals, multiple professional players and community members have spoken up - stating that a lifetime without CS:GO tournaments is too harsh, requesting that the ban be shortened to one year at most.

One of the most notable people having their voice heard is that of Filip "NEO" Kubski. Widely regarded as one of the best Counter-Strike players of all time, NEO has won the 'player of the decade' award twice throughout his CS 1.6 history and has seen his fair share of global tournament attendances and wins throughout his CS 1.6 and CS:GO careers.

In a post to his public Facebook page, NEO states:

French CS:GO player Joey "fxy0" Schlosser has had a harsh few weeks. After being reported by former team member Robin "GMX" Stahmer for match-fixing, fxy0 came clean in a video confession, admitting he purposefully played badly during the match that was under investigation.

Given this news, two major things have happened. Firstly, Epsilon have officially released both fxy0 and another player, Kévin "Uzzziii" Vernel from their sponsorship, alongside Valve issuing both of these players with 1-year tournament bans across any Valve-supported event.

As seen on a post to his Facebook recently, fxy0 stated:

We recently reported a story on ex-Epsilon CS:GO squad member Robin "GMX" Stahmer reporting his old team for match-fixing, then later adding that their world-class player Adil "ScreaM" Benrlitom was not involved.

In a breaking news report by HLTV, Epsilon CS:GO squad member Joey "fxy0" Schlosser has admitted to match-fixing in his heartfelt video.

The video is uploaded to YouTube as unlisted and is already reaching over 64,000 views, with the outcome of Valve and ESEA's investigation not yet set in stone. We've seen previously that people found guilty of match-fixing have been handed life bans from almost all major tournament providers globally, alongside Valve themselves damning the players from any event they support.

We previously teased an EK Waterblocks release, toting it as one of the most simplistic and beautiful blocks we've ever seen - low and behold, here's something better.

Bitspower have come into the market with this 'VG-NGTX970ADIIS', a water block designed for ASUS' GTX 970 Strix. Shared by Kurpiewski Concept, this block will seemingly suit any kind of design or build - once again going for the simplistic route overall, as is most common in mods in this day and age.

We will let the images speak for themselves, take a look below.

Just months after the mess that was Assassin's Creed: Unity, Ubisoft has announced Assassin's Creed: Rogue for March 10. Assassin's Creed: Rogue launched back in November for the Xbox 360 and PS3, but will be launching next month on the PC.

Assassin's Creed: Rogue will have gamers playing as a Templar named Shay Patrick Cormack, who becomes an Assassin Hunter. Rogue takes place in North America during the Seven Years War, which will also see the return of naval-based combat, something we saw from Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. Ubisoft Kiev is the studio behind Assassin's Creed: Rogue, with the studio teaming up with eye-tracking company Tobii Tech.

Tobii Tech will see their technology baked into Assassin's Creed: Rogue, where you can use SteelSeries' Sentry eye-tracking hardware to pan the game's camera left and right through eye movement. Ubisoft teases that this creases "an 'infinite screen' experience". PC gamers are also in for a treat if they choose to allow themselves to purchase another Assassin's Creed title, with Ubisoft offering a free Assassin's Creed game through Uplay if they pre-order Assassin's Creed: Rogue.

NetherRealm Studios, the developer behind Mortal Kombat X, has revealed the PC specifications of its upcoming fighting title. In a world where 60GB installations seem normal, you'll only require 25GB to 40GB to get Mortal Kombat installed.

Mortal Kombat X requires a 64-bit version of Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8, as well as 3GB of RAM. 8GB of RAM is recommended, however. The minimum requiremetns have you needing an Intel Core i5-750 at 2.67GHz, or AMD's Phenom II X4 965 at 3.4GHz. The GPU required is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or an AMD Radeon HD 5850. As for the recommended specifications, Mortal Kombat X would run better on an Intel Core i7-3770, or AMD FX-8350. An NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon HD 7950 would also run the game better, so would an additional 15GB of HDD space for a total installation of 40GB.

Mortal Kombat X launches on April 14 for the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4 and PC.

Intel is expected to unveil its new 10nm processors sometime in early 2017, with the news coming from Intel's GM for the Middle East and North Africa region, Taha Khalifa.

Khalifa, when talking about the new Intel CPUs, said: "We have been consistently pursuing Moore's Law and this has been the core of our innovation for the last 40 years. The 10nm chips are expected to be launched early 2017". When it comes to this year though, we should expect Intel to unveil its new 14nm Skylake processors in the second half of the year.

Intel was originally meant to roll out its 14nm processors in late 2013, but there were various technical setbacks with the Broadwell architecture, which was eventually delayed into 2014. This has pushed back the rest of Intel's upcoming processors, with the 10nm-based Skylake being included. Intel will most likely unveil tablet and mobile parts under its 10nm umbrella, before moving it into the desktop family in the later parts of 2017.

NVIDIA announced its powerhouse mobile SoC, Tegra X1, at CES 2015 last month, but now it looks like we might see a new Shield Tablet emerge powered by this new processor.

The new Shield Tablet would reportedly be powered by the Tegra X1 chip, and announced during GTC 2015 next month. The current Shield Tablet is powered by the Tegra K1 processor, released back in July 2014 at $299 and $399 (Wi-Fi only, and LTE, respectively). The new Tegra X1 processor should arrive on a 20nm process, arrive as an 8-core processor with some serious power behind it.

We should expect it to feature around 500 GFlops of performance for 32-bit workloads, and 1 TFlops of compute power in 16-bit workloads. 2MB of L2 cache is found, while one of the quad-core CPU stacks (the Cortex-A57) includes 48KB of L1 instruction cache, and 32KB of L1 data cache. The GPU side of things should also be incredibly fast, as we have a Maxwell GPU inside of the Tegra X1 processor. It'll arrive with 256 Maxwell cores, thanks to the 2 SMMs from the Maxwell architecture.

We know it's coming, but AMD is beginning to acknowledge its forthcoming Radeon 300 series more and more. First, we had company CEO Lisa Su confirm the new GPUs for Q2 2015, but now the official AMD Facebook page has said they're coming.

In a response to someone asking about whether AMD would reveal its next-gen GPU shortly, they replaced with "We don't have an official date to share just yet but hte second we know, we will definitely announce it on Facebook". Another reply added "We're still putting the finishing touches on the 300 series to make sure they live up to expectation. Can't wait to reveal them though. We're pretty excited".

We should expect AMD to reveal the new GPUs in the near future, which should feature the exciting new High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) which should provide a huge memory bus. 4GB of RAM is expected, but I think we'll also see 8GB models coming thorugh, too.

Microsoft has reportedly acquire Sunrise, which is a calendar app maker for a swift $100 million. Both sides haven't confirmed the deal, but sources close to TechCrunch have said that the deal is wrapped up for over $100 million.

Sunrise was founded in 2012, where it has since raised $8.2 million from investors like Balderton Capital, SV Angel and BoxGroup. But what can make it an attractive acquisition target for Microsoft? Well, Sunrise consolidates calendars from various providers, making them available on different platforms like iOS, Android and the web.

The acquisition of Sunrise by Microsoft is an interesting one, as it shows that Microsoft is happy to support other, competing operating systems. If Microsoft does indeed acquire Sunrise and continues development of the application for iOS and Android like it does for Office, it could eventually lead to great things.