Latest News - Page 2887

The AMD APU13 conference is continuing on, with some new details about AMD's Mantle API. DICE's front man for the Frostbite engine, Johan Andersson, took the stage at the APU13 conference to talk about Mantle, and how it is going to be used extensively in Frostbite.

Andersson said that there would be a Mantle-powered version of Battlefield 4 released soon, something I'm excited to start testing on, and that there will be a bunch more games released under the Frostbite engine, that would be powered by Mantle. The biggest benefit to take away here is that Mantle has a lot less of an overhead to it, when compared to DirectX.

Jorjen Katsman, from Nixxes, the developer who is working on porting Thief to the PC, said that DirectX 11 has an overhead of around 40%, while Mantle has an overhead of just 8%. Katsman said that it's "not unrealistic that you'd get 20% additional GPU performance" with a Mantle-powered GPU.

I admit it: I used to be a huge Facebook Messenger user, but I've converted over to Hangouts for most of my chat now. I still use Messenger for chatting with people I can't chat with on Hangouts, but Messenger has just received a new update, and it looks swish.

It was previously only made available for a limited number of users, but now it has rolled out to the public, with an all-new design and fresh new features. We have a nice white and light blue design, as well as improved performance, and new chat features. The new chat features include the ability to message people with just their phone number, which is a nice touch.

You can grab the latest version of Facebook Messenger from the Google Play Store, if your device hasn't auto-updated already.

Sony's PlayStation network has always been a free service to all PlayStation users. Sony's head of global marketing and vice president of Sony Network Entertainment, Eric Lempel explains to GamesIndustry.biz why they had to make the change and that it would be too difficult to keep the PlayStation Network free. Although the PlayStation Network's app services will still be free, Lempel says the PlayStation 4 will still have an edge over Xbox One due to Xbox Live's requirement to use many of its services. Lempel also explains that you get a good value and that it is worth paying for.

Eric Lempel mentioning it's difficult to keep PSN free: "There's a ton of value in the network. We've built up the network over the years and made a significant investment... and it's quite honestly hard to keep everything free"

Lempel continues: "The network's gotten so much better and it's completely redesigned on PS4. And the investment in Plus gives the user a ton of value, so putting multiplayer in there will continue to help us build the network up for our users. It's a massive infrastructure to run this thing, and now with some of these social features there's a lot going on."

We reported back in June that the once mooted two Independence Day sequels, once referred to as ID Forever Parts 1 and 2, but announced as Independence Day 2 was being released to theaters in July 2015.

Well fast forward just a few months later and the situation is a little different. Perhaps to move it away from a blockbuster year including Star Wars Episode VII, The Avengers 2, and Jurassic Park 4, but more likely to give the production, including the writing/directing team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin more time to set the project up, Twentieth Century Fox have delayed the project by a whole year - now blasting screens on July 1 2016.

Whilst there is still no confirmation on whether original star Will Smith will return in his role as fighter pilot Captain Steven Hiller, but the word is that two scripts have been written - one with and without the role. Talk about hedging your bets!

The next generation of consoles are just right around the corner. Ubisoft's CEO, Yves Guillemot comments that the PlayStation 4 is doing better in pre-orders than the Xbox One. Guillemot is not worried though, and says the Xbox One is improving in pre-orders. Guillemot was asked if he was worried about a lack in demand for The Xbox One's pre-orders.

Guillemot comments: "What we see is that there is a good pre-order list on that machine. Even if the PS4 is in front in terms of pre-orders, we see lots of improvement in the pre-orders that are coming on Xbox One. So no, we are not worried at all. We think it will be a big seller as well."

Guillemot is also not worried about the short term transition the consoles bring. Guillemot says, "The PS4 and Xbox One will be released in a few days' time and will be a new driving force for the industry,"

Its no secret that I am one of the biggest fans of Valves Steam platform in the world, and to back that claim up, I have almost 200 games in my Steam Library. One of my biggest gripes about Steam has always been that it will not allow users to download games while they are playing other games, but today Valve has changed that.

Earlier today, Valve began releasing an update to Steam that now enables background downloading. This means that Steam customers can now download and install games while they play other games. This feature can be turned off and back on at any time by the user too, which will be good for games that require high-bandwidth for online play. A full list of the new features and fixes that this latest update brings is listed below.

HP and Google's new Chromebook 11 was promised to be this holiday seasons biggest notebook seller, but things are not looking to good for the $279 Chrome OS laptop. Today The Verge received a tip from a Best Buy insider who says that Best Buy corporate offices have sent urgent memos to store managers to stop selling the Chromebook 11.

"Stores should stop selling the HP Chromebook 11 effective immediately," reads an internal memo to Best Buy managers. "Partner with Sales Support to pull the product off the sales floor to a secure location in the warehouse." Since the memo went out, Best Buy has removed the Chromebook 11 from its website. Amazon, HP, and Google have also all listed the device as being out of stock on their websites as well.

At the moment it is unclear as to why sales and shipments of the devices have been suspended, and other than speculation about lower than expected stock levels, no other explanation has been poised by analyst. Amazon does list the item as being unavailable because "customers have told us there may be something wrong with our inventory of the item, the way we are shipping it, or the way it's described here." I have reached out to Google, HP, and Best Buy for comments and will report back when they reply.

We have been seeing leaks, and teasers surfacing around Motorola's Moto G smartphone for well over a month now, and today the wait is finally over. This morning, Motorola launched the all new Moto G, an Android-based smartphone that is designed with high med-range hardware at a budget friendly price.

The Moto G features a 4.5-inch display with a resolution of 1280x720 which equates to a pixel density of 329 pixels per inch. A quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor is on-board and clocked at 1.2GHz, while 1GB of RAM is present to keep apps running nice and fast. Photography is handled by a 5-megapixel rear camera, and 1.3-megapixel front shooter that is more than adequate for every selfie you could ever take.

The entire phone is coated inside and out with a water-resistant coating, and the screen is protected by Gorilla Glass 3 which makes this one of the best protected budget friendly phones available. Android 4.4 KitKat is not present unfortunately, but users will only have to live with Android 4.3 for a few months as Motorola says the Moto G will get Android 4.4 KitKat in January. The 8GB version will cost you $179 while the 16GB model will lighten your wallet by $199. Both models run pure Android and are SIM unlocked so you can use it on any carrier.

Google is a gigantic company, a company that pretty much just prints its own money from advertising. Well, according to Business Insider's Henry Blodget, Google's yearly ad revenue has soared - and has overtaken both the magazine and newspaper industries.

If you look at the graph above, you can see that Google wasn't making that much money from ads in 2004... but each year sees a massive increase in profits made, and each year that Google makes more and more profits, the magazine and newspaper industries take an even bigger hit. Sure, back in 2004, the US newspaper industry was doing great business, but that has been knocked down, considerably.

If Google can keep at this pace, it will demolish the newspaper and magazine industries' profits in just a few years time.

For those who play Diablo 3 on PC, which is most Diablo 3 players, the mouse and keyboard combination is something that shouldn't be messed with - right? Well, Blizzard has considered building in gamepad support, to bring it in line with the consoles, but this won't be happening.

Senior Level Designer, Matthew Berger, has said: "The rhythm on PC is tactactactactactac - you're clicking the mouse, you're telling your character where to go. On console, the rhythm is very different. It flows more, because you're constantly repositioning your character with the thumbstick; you're really never stationary on console, whereas on PC you're a lot more stationary ... When you're playing on the PC, you're not really looking at your character as much, you're kind of focusing on the cursor. Whereas on console it's the exact opposite, you're drawn in."

Berger continued: "[I]f I let you use the controller on the PC, then I have to let you use the user interface that goes with it, and if I give you the roll and I haven't throttled the number of enemies attacking you because the mouse-and-keyboard players can handle all those enemies, but with a controller you have too many guys ... The games have really been structured to take advantage of their environment and their ecosystem, so in the same way it would not be a good fit to put a mouse and keyboard on the console."

We are hours away from the next-gen consoles launching, and an interesting statistic has hit my inbox from Amazon. An Amazon spokesperson has said that if you were to combine the pre-order sales of the PS4 and Xbox One consoles, "it would make up the largest product release in Amazon history for all categories worldwide".

This is a seriously strong statement, and goes to show the kind of money that is rolling around with these next-gen consoles launching right now. Amazon is one of the biggest retailers shipping and selling the PS4 and Xbox One, but those numbers above are just gigantic. The company with the biggest smile on their face? AMD. AMD have APUs in the PS4 and Xbox One, and they must be laughing all the way to the bank, or at least to the Kaveri APU.

For years Microsoft has used a employee ranking system. Which former employees at Microsoft say the ranking system was competitive. CEO Steve Ballmer is trying to make Microsoft a more team like environment ahead of his retirement. This new system is going to be a big change for employees at Microsoft.

Microsoft HR chief Lisa Brummel mentions in the memo-"This is a fundamentally new approach to performance and development designed to promote new levels of teamwork and agility for breakthrough business impact" Here is the full memo from The Verge-

Looks like the Oculus Rift won't be coming to consoles anytime soon. Palmer Luckey, inventor of Oculus Rift says the next-gen consoles won't be able to keep up. He mentions the Oculus Rift needs 60 frames per second in 3D and that he sees games are being pushed out at 720p at 60 frames a second.

Palmer Luckey told TechRadar: "Consoles are too limited for what we want to do. We're trying to make the best virtual reality device in the world and we want to continue to innovate and upgrade every year - continue making progress internally - and whenever we make big jumps we want to push that to the public".

He continued: "The problem with consoles in general is that once they come out they're locked to a certain spec for a long, long time. Look at the PCs that existed eight years ago. There have been so many huge advances since then. Now look at the VR hardware of today. I think the jump we're going to see in the next four or five years is going to be massive".

Today AMD confirmed that its upcoming Kaveri APU will support both Mantel and TrueAudio, which ties it in nicely with AMD's Radeon R9 290/290X and R7 260X GPUs. The company says that Kaveri will push an impressive 862 GFLOPs of processing power with its internal 512 GPU cores being clocked to 800MHz.

During its APU13 event today, AMD demoed Kaveri by pitting it against an Intel i7-4770K which was paired up with a GeForce GT 630 GPU. The Kaveri-based system managed to pull out a consistent frame rate of 28-40 frames per second while running through the Battlefield 4 single player campaign set to 1920x1080 with medium settings. The Intel-based system did not fair near as well with frame rates in the 12-14fps rage.

While some may feel that it is unfair to test with a low-end GPU, I disagree. I feel that AMD's target market is those who do not want to spend $1500-4000 on a high-end gaming machine, and are happy with mediocre performance with just an APU. There is a huge market out there that consist of casual gamers who would not buy a $500-900 GPU and will be more inclined to spend $200-$300 on an APU that can run Battlefield 4, CoD: Ghost, or even League of Legends on medium settings.

Sony mentioned a just a couple weeks in their FAQ that the PlayStation 4 will not play MP3 or CDs, which was a huge disappointment from fans. Most people where thinking it was a way to push out their Music Unlimited service. Sony says that was never their intention. So they have decided they will push out a update after the PlayStation 4 launches.

Sony's Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida comments on an episode of Giant Bomb's Interview Dumptruck: "The biggest surprise for us all internally at Sony was there are so many people who passionately reacted to our announcement that there's no MP3 support or CD support on day one," he says. "It's not like we actively decided 'let's not do this feature so people will have to subscribe to Music Unlimited."

Yoshida continues: "The focus has been more on the game features. Some of the features we wanted but we couldn't get in on day one. We didn't really think about MP3 or CD. We thought 'we're going to do that eventually.'... It caught us off-guard. People don't really talk about these features, right? Some people get really mad and [say] 'I'll cancel my pre-order!' So as we speak, people in Japan - the system guys - are discussing when we can put these features in."

Headphone and earbud maker, Skullcandy has just released a new bluetooth wireless speaker called the Air Raid. The people from Skullcandy claim that it is louder than the competition. They are also saying it is "it is built like a tank and loud as hell." The Air Raid can hold a charge of 14 hours has two 50mm drivers. The Air Raid is a nice portable size and perfect for occasions like parties, camping, tailgating etc. You won't have to worry about breaking it either, they claim it is life proof and is water resistant. Air Raid will be available for $150.

From Skullcandy,

"Bring the loud. Draw crowds, combat bad audio, and stay connected with Air Raid. It's the only portable Bluetooth speaker both loud and rugged enough for those who don't tread lightly.

Earlier this morning, Western Digital announced the expansion of its My Cloud line of personal storage solutions with the release of the all new My Cloud EX4 NAS. This new offering features a 4-bay design that can support up to four 4TB drives for a total storage capacity of 16TB.

The new My Cloud EX4 NAS is available as an empty unit, or can be purchased with 8TB, 12TB and 16TB of Western Digital Red hard drives pre-installed. The device also features two USB 3.0 expansion ports that allow users to connect two additional external hard drives to expand their networked storage past 16TB. The unit is hot-swap ready and features Western Digital's Easy-Slide-Drive technology.

"The reception for our recently introduced My Cloud personal cloud platform was extremely positive," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD's branded products and consumer electronics groups. "Our single drive My Cloud system is the perfect solution for users that want an easy and private way to store all of their data at home and then share, save and manage it from anywhere in the world, on any device. Expanding our My Cloud platform to a four-bay system delivers the advanced features, customization capability and capacity that many of our customers are looking for."

If I was to look around my desks where I'm typing this news, I have a Nexus 5, LG G2, and both Nexus 7 tablets - last years model, and this years - I'm a tech addict like most of you out there. But just how many smartphones are out in the wild right now? Around 1.9 billion, which is expected to blow out to a huge 5.6 billion devices in 2019.

5.6 billion smartphones is a mammoth number, with the estimation coming from communications technology company, Ericsson. According to Ericsson's latest quarterly report, 55% of all handsets sold worldwide were smartphones, even though smartphones represent just 25-30% of all active mobile phone subscriptions.

But, over the next 6 years, we should see smartphone adoption hitting 60% of all mobile phone subscriptions. This means that of the 9.3 billion phones in use by 2019, 5.6 billion (or over half) of them will be smartphones. The biggest reason for this is going to be the emerging markets like China and India, and I personally think another big push is going to be Android 4.4 KitKat, which has much lower minimum requirements - which will push smartphone technology into cheaper smartphones, and help drive sales in emerging markets, in droves.

The PlayStation 4 is pushing all controller-based gameplay, as you'd expect from a console, but there will be one mouse and keyboard driven title. War Thunder is currently on the PC, with over 5 million gamers in the open beta.

The PS4 version of War Thunder will let you play like you do on the PC, as it supports mouse and keyboard gameplay. Oh, and flight sticks. Better yet, War Thunder will also pit PS4 gamers against PC gamers, which is something we should see more of. War Thunder will also support the PlayStation Eye camera, which will feature head-tracking, letting you change the viewpoint in the game by just turning your face.

War Thunder is coming, soon, with the game launching across Europe on the 29th of this month.

SteelSeries has just unveiled its latest H Wireless Headset, which is a new multi-platform wireless headset. The H Wireless Headset provides "robust sound, lag-free wireless and versatile functionality bring superior audio to a wide range of platforms, including PC, Mac, mobile devices, consoles, home entertainment, streaming devices and more." The new SteelSeries wireless headset boats some impressive Dolby technologies, including:

What about gaming? Well, SteelSeries has your back with two innovative gaming features. The first, is ChatMix, which lets the user tune the right balance between game and chat audio, which comes in handy, as you can increase another gamers voice, but keep your game volume tuned to your specific liking.

The second gaming feature is LiveMix, which automates that process. LiveMix will reduce game audio on-the-fly to the users' choice, but get this - only when chat audio is detected. This is a great feature, thanks to its automation.