Latest News - Page 3115

NVIDIA are set to unleash their latest graphics card, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores on the 29th of November. It has been talked about for a little while now, but the official specifications are now available for us to drool over, so let's get into it.

The original GeForce GTX 560 Ti launched back in January of this year and featured the GF114 silicon, 384 CUDA cores, a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, 1GB of memory, high clock speed and some great overclocking potential. This caused AMD to go red with anger, as NVIDIA liked to say that their GTX 560 Ti "pwned" the Radeon HD 6870. AMD came back swinging with the HD 6950 and was able to lay some smack down on the 560 Ti.

NVIDIA doesn't want its crown taken away from the $250-ish price point, which is why they've gone back to the drawing board on the 560 Ti and introduced a redesigned version. The new GeForce GTX 560 Ti will sport the "448 cores" brand extension, which will of course include 448 CUDA cores compared to the 384 on the original 560 Ti. The new SKU will feature the same silicon that is on the GTX 570, 580 and GTX590 cards are based on: GF110.

British research firm Ovum has forecasted that digital game revenues worldwide are sit to break $24 billion for 2011, an increase of 16-percent from 2010. Ovum predict that overall revenues will continue to climb, reaching $53 billion in 2016 as more casual, social and mobile games flood the market, as well as the increasing popularity of the free-to-play (F2P) business model.

Telecommunications companies are going to have to play catch-up with bandwidth demands set to skyrocket with the increasing use of constant connections and data streaming with services such as OnLive. Games will only get bigger as time goes on, which is another factor.

Ovum has noted certain trends that contribute to their forecast such as the "casualization" of hardcore games. Their example uses Kinect, which they feel helped make games such as Forza 4 more accessible to casual games and helped Xbox Live revenues grow 19-percent from last year. Ovum also credits casual games for fueling the growth of mobile games, and they expect mobile gaming revenues to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26-percent between 2011 and 2016.

A few days ago I reported about the Steam forums being down for "maintenance", but today Valve have confirmed that a recent Steam hack is the result of this. The recent Steam hack may have compromised users' credit card details and other personal information according to a message sent to Steam users from Valve God, Gabe Newell.

Valve is certain hackers gained access to a database that contained encrypted information, but don't know if they took it or will be able to crack its encryption. The database that was hacked contained information such as user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, e-mail addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information.

Gabe says that Valve don't have evidence that the encrypted credit card numbers or personal info were taken by the intruders, and the company is "still investigating." He adds that there is also no evidence of credit card misuse, but implores Steam users to "watch your credit card activity and statements closely."

Earlier this week we visited the BitFenix office here in Taipei and got a look at its brand new Raider computer case which is being released today.

David from BitFenix in the video below introduces us to the Raider. He explains that the Raider is 100% focused on airflow with a mesh finish from the top all the way to the front of the case. The case features the nice and smooth BitFenix SofTouch finish - even the power button and fan controller switch on the top front right of the case features the SofTouch treatment. Gone are USB 2.0 ports as the Raider supports four USB 3.0 ports. There is also support for users with older motherboards without USB 3.0 by way of standard USB 2.0 adapters on the same internal cable.

Moving on to the inside of the case, the drive bays are all tool-free and there are five optical drive bays and room for six hard drives. At the bottom of the case is room for an additional 2.5-inch drive, meaning the case can support up to seven SSDs or 2.5-inch hard drives, if you can get your hands on one. Cable management is also taken care of well with lots of room behind the motherboard tray for large cables and rubber cable management holes should mean a neat and tidy case.

Xigmatek have a new weapon ready for battle in the highly competitive mid tower chassis market; the MIDGARD II. The new case gets the all-black treatment inside and out and gives support for mini-ITX, micro-ATX and full sized ATX motherboards.

Measuring 221 (W) x 473 (H) x 488 (D) mm and weighing in at 7.18Kg, the case sports a soft and elegant "leather-coating" on both the top and front panels and provides three external 5.25" drive bays with tool-free holders along with an additional Slim-ODD bay. The I/O panel positioned on top of the MIDGARD II gives 1x USB 3.0 ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports and audio ports. Further to this is a built-in docking station on top that supports both 2.5 and 3.5-inch SATA based drives.

Internally there are six drive bays that will accommodate both 2.5 and 3.5-inch sized drives and provide anti-vibration rubber. Xigmatek has made sure to consider those using water cooling and includes four holes to route your tubing at the rear of the chassis.

Apple are now required to provide Samsung with contracts to Australian mobile phone carriers Telstra, Optus and Vodafone as ruled by Judge Annabel Bennet. The ruling is in relation to an assertion in Samsung's patent lawsuit against Apple carriers are obliged by the terms of the contract to subsidize iPhone sales.

Samsung are still waiting for the source code for the iPhone 4S firmware, which will support its case that Apple are infringing on their patents for wireless transmissions. Apple has handed in over 220 pages of documents in relation to the source code but Samsung have said that the source code disclosure wasn't enough because a single file was missing.

Samsung's lawyer Cynthia Cochrane has said that "someone out there is attempting to obfuscate," and I would agree. One page missing from 220 could be the key to the entire argument, and this would give Apple time to think of something else to throw in Samsung's face.

Ultrabooks are set to account for 43-percent of worldwide notebook shipments by 2015, just four short years away, despite the devices have only just started hitting the market. An Ultrabook is designed as being a notebook that is very light and thin, at under 0.8-inches.

Feature-wise, they sport more tablet-orientated hardware such as instant-on activation, always connected wireless links, SSDs and batteries capable of delivering more than eight hours usage from a single charge. IHS iSuppli research has led to these results and predictions for 2015, where they said in a press release:

Microsoft are set to roll some changes into their Xbox.com site over the next few days in anticipation for the upcoming Xbox 360 dashboard update. "My Xbox" will be replaced by a forward-thinking "Social" area, which will feature Metro UI styling. This new Social section will also give Xbox.com users the ability to be the first to try the new Beacons feature, which lets you mark games you want to play with others, making it easier to find friends who want to play the same game.

Microsoft have baked in a bunch of other extras such as the ability to search the Zune video catalog and buy movies and TV shows directly from your browser. At the top of the replacement of 'My Xbox', which is now "Social", will be the ability to be taken directly to the Social page when visiting Xbox.com.

At the top of the Social page, there will be a group of tiles that you might find familiar, this is the new Metro UI. This is where Microsoft will have Xbox LIVE events, preview articles with all of the latest details on the hottest new items on the Marketplace, new video and game releases, Gamer Spotlight, and more. To the left of these are quick links which display how many friends are online, and how many messages you currently have.

My readers will know I'm a lover of FPS titles, and I used to be the biggest fanboy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I loved it. I must have played hundreds and hundreds of hours of multiplayer and just never got sick of it. Today, my good friend Sean posts a link to a YouTube video on my Facebook wall titled "Infinity Ward recycles buildings on MW3 straight from COD4."

I wasn't surprised by the title, but thought I'd take a look. I thought it would just be a building that some eagle-eyed gamer has noticed... but no, it's a massive building, from my favourite COD4 map: Pipeline. The entire building is copy/pasted directly into the single-player campaign of Modern Warfare 3.

How ridiculous can this be? Is it laziness? Is this how Activision pumps out yearly releases of COD? Surely with hundreds of millions in production budgets across multiple studios with one of the biggest game-related companies in the world, could hire some extra peons to code up a map in a 1 - 2 year development cycle. Take a look for yourself, I think it's a joke, personally. Not a funny-ha-ha joke, but a slap-in-your-face, joke.

Adobe has just killed Flash for mobiles, which is sure to hit Android-based users. But, from the flames, other companies will benefit such as iSwifter, who makes a product for the iPad that allows Flash-based games and video to remotely run on a proxy server and then be sent down to the mobile device.

Until now, iSwifter has focused their energies on the Apple iOS market, but it has had an Android-based app nearly ready for months now. iSwifter founder Rajat Gupta has said "our target market literally just doubled, we had actually predicted this day now for over a year."

Gupta has said that iSwifter's Android product should be in the market by December, initially for tablets such as Kindle Fire, Barnes & Nobile's Nook and more traditional tablets, such as Samsung's Galaxy Tab. He also said that his company has talked to Adobe for some time about the need to move to a solution more like iSwifter's. Gupta has said "they have a fundamentally flawed architecture for mobile, Steve Jobs pointed it out but they didn't listen."

Telstra are set to join Vodafone in the direct retail sales of Apple's tablet, the iPad 2. Telstra will directly retail Apple's iPad 2 from November 15, with monthly plans beginning from just $49. The iPad 2 will be available through Telstra Business Centres, Telstra Shops, online or over the phone at 132 200.

Telstra will offer the Wi-Fi + 3G model of the iPad 2, in 16, 32 and 64GB sizes, on two-year contracts and pre-paid data plans. Starting with the 16GB iPad 2, it will cost $0 upfront on $49, $59, $69 and $99 plans. Monthly data caps are 1, 4, 8 and 15GB, respectively.

The 32GB variant of the iPad 2 will also cost $0 upfront, with monthly costs of $54, $64, $74 and $104 with data allowances the same as the 16GB model. Finally, the 64GB model will come with an upfront cost of $24 and monthly pricing of $57, $67, $77 and $107 per month. Data allowances remain unchanged once again.

HTC Edge is set to be the world's first quad-core smartphone, powered by NVIDIA's Tegra 3 System-on-a-Chip (SoC). Edge is set to be a premium handset, incorporating the latest mobile technologies.

Edge will be a 4.7-inch smartphone that is just 10mm thick, and will sport a 1280x720 resolution. It will also contain 1GB of RAM, a backlit 8-megapixel rear-racing camera with a 28mm, f/2.2 lens. The biggest thing the Edge can brag about is that it sports an AP30 Tegra 3 CPU from NVIDIA which is set to pump out quad-core at 1.5GHz each.

Storage-wise, we should see it increased to 32GB and Bluetooth 4.0 is included, on top of this we have Beats Audio with the package. Edge is also rumored to include the rollout of the new or improved HTC content services, such as the HTC Listen music store, HTC Read bookstore and the HTC Play gaming hub, finally, the HTC Watch movie portal will reportedly begin to offer HD fare. Edge could also be one of the first to sport HTC's Sense 4.0.

This is something that isn't surprising, but EA president Frank Gibeau has been talking about Battlefield 4. Twitter user Brandon Winfrey posted that during a keynote at the University of Southern California, where Gibeau reportedly said "There is going to be a Battlefield 4."

This is pretty obvious considering the success the Battlefield franchise has had, and just how amazing Battlefield 3 has been. When Gibeau was asked about the statement, a rep for EA told IGN the following:

Ivy Bridge isn't even here yet, and we're seeing details on Intel's next-generation processor architecture, Haswell. Haswell will be a brand new architecture based on a 22nm fan process which will be matured by Sandy Bridge's successor, Ivy Bridge. This is Intel's "tick-tock" product development model, where we see a "tock" being a new x86 architecture, and a "tick" miniaturizes it to a newer silicon fabrication process.

If Intel's 22nm process all goes to plan, Haswell has an ETA of Q2 2013, with Ivy Bridge taking the lead from Q2 2012 until then. Haswell will feature an all-new socket, LGA1150, which means it will not be compatible with LGA1155 boards. The reason behind this is that Intel have implemented drastic changes in the pin map of the package.

There has been a major change with the component arrangement in the platform that is affecting Haswell's pin map, more specifically, it's Haswell's higher bandwidth chipset bus, rearranged PCIe pins (with FDI pins), rearranged power pins, and miscellaneous pins. It also throws away the separate power domain for the integrated graphics controller.

I wonder if you look under the latest Jet, Rocket Launcher or M16 if it would say "Made in China", because at the end of the day - a lot of the parts that go into the high-end military arms are built in China. A story has come about that the US Senate Armed Services Committee said its researchers had uncovered 1,800 cases in which the Pentagon had been sold electronics that may be counterfeit.

In total, the committee has said that they found more than a million fake parts that have made their way into warplanes such as the Boeing C-17 transport jet and the Lockheed Martin C-130J "Super Hercules." The problem with this is, it could be everywhere without the US military knowing, as they also found fake components in Boeing's CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter as well as the Theatre High-Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defence system.

Senator Carl Levin has said:

L.A. Noire has enjoyed high praise on the console, but now its time for the PC to get some of that 40s-themed goodness. L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition has either launched, or will launch within the next day or so (depending on region) and includes a bunch of additions and highlights over the console counterpart.

L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition includes all previously released DLC for the console versions (including additional outfits, weapons, and cases such as "Nicholson Electroplating", "Reefer Madness", "Naked City", "Slip of the Tongue", "Consul's Car" and more) and makes them available to players from the start.

New for the PC version is, support for NVIDIA's 3D Vision, enhanced resolutions and graphical performance, keyboard mapping and gamepad support. You can grab it from the Steam Store.

Patriot Memory have today announced their new Mac Series XT SSDs and SODIMM lines. Both are optimized for the latest and popular Mac-based products, with the new offerings from Patriot geared toward power users who demand the latest storage and memory technology to increase productivity and performance.

The Patriot Memory Mac Series XT SSDs sport the SandForce SF-2281 SSD processor and synchronous NAND which is quite popular in SSD technology and very, very fast. It's capable of delivering speeds of up to 520MB/sec read and 500MB/sec write, while also offering extended battery life and system responsiveness to MacBook owners. Patriot also ensure the best performance and stability available by testing all Mac Series SSDs at the Apple Developer Compatibility labs for both quality and reliability.

Patriot Memory's Signature Apple DDR3 Non-ECC Unbuffered SODIMMs deliver the quality, reliability, and performance expected for today's computing needs. These sticks are hand tested exclusively on Apple systems, with every module requiring a pass on strict standards to ensure compatibility, quality and reliability.

Steam's official forums are currently offline with a message reading "The Steam forums are temporarily offline for maintenance. Your patience is appreciated." Is maintenance the actual issue, though? It is believed that the site's vBulletin forum software may have been hacked, with Valve not yet to comment on the issue, with some gamers noticing a suspicious message on the forum last night that leads most to believe it was a security breach.

Eurogamer was contacted by a Steam user who said a group known as fkn0wned changed the text on the forum and spammed some user's e-mail addresses. Below is what was said:

Ah, RumorTT time, and today we have some news of the next-generation [gaming] console from Microsoft. Why did I put [gaming] in and not the actual word? Well, it might not be a hardcore gaming console after all. The Xbox 720 as its most commonly referred to, is reportedly codenamed "Loop".

Loop is said to be much smaller than the Xbox 360, will reportedly cost less to produce in the hopes of achieving higher Kinect adoption according to Microsoft leak blogger MS Nerd. The next-generation Xbox is also said to be based on a modified version of the yet-to-be-announced Windows 9.

Yep! Windows 9! MS Nerd also said that:

Looking at picking up a new set of headphones over the xssy break? - You might be interested in one of six new pairs of headphones Sennheiser has just announced today. The new models in Sennheiser's line include the HD 219, HD 229, HD 239, HD 429, HD 439 and HD 449, all promising to deliver 'defined sound' in style.

The HD 219 will set you back only $59.95 and feature closed ear cups with a padded head band for excellent comfort. For an extra $20 you can shift up to the HD 229 which include the use of powerful neodymium magnets that promise precise stereo sound output.