Latest News - Page 329

The Las Vegas Sphere may soon get little brother and sister spheres as the company behind the $2.3 billion project is looking to expand its offerings into smaller spherical venues.

Sphere Entertainment's Executive Chairman and CEO James Doland recently spoke to industry analysts and informed them the company is looking into smaller Sphere's that would seat approximately 5,000 people, which is considerably smaller than the Las Vegas Sphere, which on paper can seat about 17,600, but could probably fit as many as 20,000 people standing.

Notably, these smaller spheres would require less property and parking, would be cheaper to build, and would likely attract many more artists that can necessarily fill the Las Vegas Sphere but can comfortably sell out 5,000 seats. There is also another barrier to entry the public may not consider when an artist wants to book the Las Vegas Sphere, and that is the considerable investment in producing custom-made video content for the 160,000-square-foot LED screen.

Not been able to get Windows 11 24H2 due to having AutoCAD installed? There's some good news from Microsoft for you, then, as the compatibility hold put on some PCs due to having this software has now been lifted.

The bug with Windows 11 24H2 meant that Autodesk's AutoCAD 2022 application might fail to work - simply not launching - in some cases, and this could happen to any version. However, AutoCAD 2023, 2024, and 2025 all remained fine.

The fix has now arrived for the 2022 incarnation, thankfully, and Microsoft wrote in its support document on the matter:

In a recent discussion with 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland, Neil Druckmann provided more insight into the challenges of breaking through the prevailing conceptions about video games. He highlighted some of the inspirations, doubts, and successes that came along with it.

Garland pointed to BioShock and The Last of Us as examples of games that fully demonstrated the capability of narrative in gaming. Rightfully so - both titles delivered an experience that transcended gameplay mechanics, baking storytelling into every aspect of the game's DNA.

ASUS has produced some office new monitors with a clever and innovative trick up their sleeves - or perhaps a gimmick, depending on how you look at this development - namely an integrated air purification system.

Yes, we're betting you didn't see that one coming (we certainly didn't), and the claim from ASUS is that the VU Air Ionizer range of monitors is capable of filtering "up to 90% of airborne dust within three hours."

The air ionizer hardware is built into the rear of the monitor, on top of the protruding section of the back panel that houses the ports.

SpaceX has released footage of the recent Starship Flight 8, showcasing the monstrous power of the Super Heavy booster from an extremely interesting camera angle.

The above footage shows the 33 Raptor engines equipped to the Super Heavy booster ignite and carry the rocket, which is approximately the size of a 20-story building, up to orbit. The recent flight marked the eighth test flight of Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, and also marked a hat-trick for Mechazilla tower catches of the booster Super Heavy, which, after separating from the upper stage of the rocket, made its way back down to the launch pad to safely land in the arms of the launch tower - approximately two and half minutes after liftoff.

As for the recent footage released by SpaceX, I didn't think it was possible to capture the ignition of the 33 Raptor engines from beneath the booster, given the intense temperatures, especially at such a close distance. As I am not a rocket engineer, I decided to ask X's AI Grok what the temperature of the environment beneath Super Heavy during Flight 8, and the answer it provided can be found below. In short, each Raptor engine generates 8.75 GW (gigawatts) of thermal energy per second, which equates to 288 GW of thermal power during ignition and flight due to the presence of 33 Raptor engines.

Sony appears to be experimenting with feeding artificial intelligence systems assets from its staple franchises and asking it to recreate iconic characters from that franchise.

A new leak has revealed that Sony is, at the very least, looking into AI-generated characters from its staple franchises, with the leak being shared by The Verge that shows Horizon Forbidden West's Aloy being recreated with some kind of AI tool. The video, which has since been removed from YouTube due to copyright infringement, has been captured as the above GIF showed the iconic character responding to someone asking her questions, and the quality is clearly indicative of AI-generated content.

As you can probably imagine, the quality of the video is far below that of traditionally developed content, but according to reports, Sony celebrated what the AI produced in a behind-the-scenes presentation that has since gone public. Sharwin Raghoebardajal, the director of software engineering at Sony Interactive Entertainment, said the footage of Aloy is merely a prototype that has been developed alongside Guerrilla Games.

Kojima Products has released the pre-order trailer for Death Stranding 2: One the Beach, along with the prices for the different editions that will be available to purchase and the release date.

Death Stranding 2: One the Beach will be coming to the PlayStation 5 on June 26, and the new 10-minute trailer was debuted at SXSW by none other than legendary game director Hideo Kojima, who stated he edited the trailer himself. The game is the sequel to 2019's Death Stranding, which gained more than 19 million players since it launched. Pre-orders for On the Beach will open on March 17 at 10 AM local time. There are multiple editions players can purchase, all of which are listed below.

To go along with the launch of On the Beach, Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa have partnered with Hamilton to release the American Classic Boulton Death Stranding 2 Limited Edition watch, which is priced at $1,495. According to the watch listing on Hamilton's website the design is intended to capture the "futuristic spirit" of the game. Only 2,000 pieces of this watch have been made, making them already a very exclusive purchase. One of the watches was worn by Hideo Kojima himself on stage at SXSW.

In the latest creator-to-creator discussion released by Sony, Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann sat down with 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland to talk storytelling, providing our first real glimpse into the story and world behind Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

Naughty Dog has been working on the project for four years now, and the shift from the grounded settings of The Last of Us and Uncharted into full-fledged science fiction marks a bold departure for the studio. Druckmann offered insight into the game's setting, revealing when it takes place and its unique alternate timeline.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming to the PlayStation 5, according to a recent reliable leaker and an official rating by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

For those who don't know, the Entertainment Software Rating Board is a regulatory organization that provides an official rating for a game so parents/consumers can make an informed choice about a game before purchasing. Think of it like a rating for movies but for games. The ESRB published an official rating for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and according to the listing, it's a rating for a PlayStation 5 version of the game.

Now, that listing has been corroborated by renowned leaker Billbil-kun, who recently stated the title will be released on April 17 and pre-orders will open on March 25. Notably, a listing for the title has already appeared on the PlayStation Store, but the listing doesn't state any release dates.

It was only recently revealed that X, formerly Twitter, was experiencing a "massive cyberattack" that resulted in the social media platform being unstable for millions of users around the world.

X owner Elon Musk confirmed the disturbance was a result of a cyberattack in a recent X post where he stated that X faces cyberattacks every day, but this one was conducted with a lot of resources by a coordinated group, possibly even with the involvement of a country. It was shortly after Musk's X post that Fox posted a new interview with Musk where the SpaceX CEO touched on the recent outage of the social media platform, and provided some new information about the cause.

Musk said after some preliminary analysis of the IP addresses linked to the cyberattack it was discovered the majority of them were coming from Ukraine. Musk said during the interview that, at the moment, X isn't sure what happened exactly, but the goal of the attack was to bring down the social media platform. This attack is just one of many that have been launched against Musk's businesses recently, with Tesla dealerships and charging stations being hit by vandals that are presumably in disagreement with Musk's involvement and motivations within the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Remedy's Control was one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2019. Its blend of mind-bending sci-fi elements and action delivered a memorable experience. Coming from one of the most talented studios developing games, the PC version also ushered in a new era of visual fidelity thanks to ray-tracing and DLSS.

With Remedy working on Control 2, among other titles, Control Ultimate Edition just got a free content update on PC (available on Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG) that improves the game's visuals while introducing a new mission starring one of videogame's most beloved creators, Hideo Kojima.

The new mission 'Dr. Yoshimi Tokui's Guided Imagery Experience,' was previously exclusive to the PlayStation 4 Digital Deluxe version of the game, and is now free to all players. The surprise update to the game also adds a new Ultra ray tracing quality preset on PC for "more rays per pixel and higher temporal stability," HDR support, expanded ultrawide support, and several updates to its DLSS implementation.

With the launch of PlayStation 5 Pro, Sony's mid-generation refresh introduced a more powerful version of the popular console, and the addition of dedicated ML or AI hardware led to the arrival of PSSR. Sony's new upscaling technology, which stands for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, offers a massive improvement to image fidelity compared to previous solutions - including the console versions of AMD's FSR technology.

Since the debut of PSSR, we've learned that Sony worked closely with AMD to fine-tune the AI capabilities of the PS5 Pro specifically for ray-tracing and upscaling. Now, with the arrival of RDNA 4 and the new Radeon RX 9070 Series, PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny has confirmed that the impressive new FSR 4 was the result of a collaboration between AMD and Sony that already exceeds the quality you get with PSSR.

The good news for PlayStation gamers, especially those with a PS5 Pro, is that Sony is set to use the AI models and technology that serve as the foundation of FSR 4 and implement them into the next iteration of PSSR.

Specs for the upcoming mainstream GeForce RTX 5060 GPU have appeared online courtesy of known industry insider @kopite7kimi, which details the hardware configuration of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 replacement. As seen in the latest Steam Hardware survey results, the RTX 4060 is the most popular card among PC gamers, so this will most likely become the best-selling model in the RTX Blackwell line-up.

The GeForce RTX will be powered by a cut-down version of the GB206 chip that powers the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and will feature 3840 CUDA Cores. This is a 25% increase over the GeForce RTX 4060 and one of the most significant gen-on-gen spec increases for the GeForce RTX 50 Series. Although it's set to feature 8GB of VRAM on a 128-bit bus, the bump to fast GDDR7 should lead to a 50% increase in bandwidth. This should make the card faster than the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti in most workloads.

The leak also lists a 150W power rating, which makes the GeForce RTX 5060 30% more power-hungry than the GeForce RTX 4060. However, this is still lower than the GeForce RTX 3060's 170W power rating.

A user has ordered AMD's new Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor from Amazon, but didn't get anything close: instead, they received a fake CPU in a sealed box that ended up being the AMD FX-4100 processor... a far cry from the 9800X3D, to say the least.

Aris from Hardware Busters purchased an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor from Amazon, but upon opening the box he saw the CPU had pins underneath. We all know AM5 processors don't have any pins as they've been moved to the motherboard, which would've had his heart sunk in an instant.

Aris explained: "I needed an extra 9800X3D processor for my CPU test-system. Since my other one is permanently installed in my GPU test system, I ordered one from Amazon (DE). The processor arrived on March 4th, and on March 9th, after I finished the benchmarks of the other processors, I finally opened the sealed box to install it on the test system".

X has been up and down for the last few hours and I've been wondering why... but wonder no more: Elon Musk has said that there is a "massive cyberattack" against X and Grok right now.

Elon posted: "There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved". X user Hassan Sajwani replied to Elon's post saying "they want to silence you and this platform" to which Elon replied with a simple: "Yes".

The news of the massive cyberattack comes after weeks of outrage against Elon and more specifically Tesla, with lunatics (calling a spade a spade) have been targeting Tesla vehicles across the US and the world, attacking them and at times, out outright destroying them. Not just vehicles like the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck, but Tesla dealerships have been damaged in this blind outrage, too.

NVIDIA is expected to unveil its new GB300 AI GPUs at GTC 2025 later this month, with the huge shift into fully liquid-cooled AI clusters on its way.

In a new report from UDN, we're learning that the energy consumption of NVIDIA's new GB300 AI GPU has "increased significantly" from GB200, and that the heat dissipation demand is greater, which has set off a "second cooling revolution". No longer will more water-cooling plates be introduced, but the use of water-cooling quick connectors will increase 4x with GB300 compared to GB200.

NVIDIA's new GB300 AI GPUs will be fully water-cooled, with Taiwan cooling giants Shuanghong and Qihong to make "huge profits" says UDN, but we'll also see water-cooling quick connector suppliers like Fushida and Shishuo will also be a large part of this purported "second cooling revolution".

Microsoft is preparing its next-gen Xbox console for 2027 but before then, we're reportedly going to see an Xbox gaming handheld that will run Windows, and compete with the growing number of handhelds on the market.

In a new report from Windows Central executive editor Jez Corden, we're hearing more news that Microsoft is working with a PC gaming OEM (ASUS, Lenovo, MSI, Razer, etc) on an Xbox-branded gaming handheld that we're going to be surprised with... later this year, as in 2025.

Microsoft's purported Xbox gaming handheld is codenamed "Keenan" with Corden saying it will look unmistakably "Xbox" with an official Xbox guide button, and Xbox design sensibilities, with Corden saying he expects the new Xbox handheld to "be more PC-oriented". He continues, saying that given that this is a partner device, he expects the PC-oriented Xbox handheld will most likely run Windows, "putting the Microsoft Store and PC Game Pass front and center, alongside the ability to install things like Steam".

Microsoft's next-generation Xbox console is reportedly a "TV-friendly shell" according to the latest rumors... ready to battle Sony's next-gen PlayStation 6 console.

In a recent interview on The Xbox Two Podcast, Windows Central executive editor Jez Corden corrected rumors that some Call of Duty developers have access to dev kits for "the next Xbox". He corrected this by saying "there is no Xbox dev kit" and that these rumors were "just not accurate".

Corden said that the "whole idea of the next Xbox" is that "it's going to be a PC in essence" and that it would arrive in a TV-friendly shell that also has a "specific set of specs in mind, so developers would be building for a Windows PC in a way... but, in such a way that they know exactly what the specs will be, so they can optimize exactly for it. So, when you're optimizing for PC it's like you've got to target as many specs as you can imagine, or at least what's popular in the Steam Hardware Survey. But if you know exactly what's in the Xbox you can optimize around that".

Sometimes, big tech companies move real fast, and sometimes, they move real slow, and Apple is guilty of moving at a particularly glacial speed with a fresh change that's debuted on the MacBook Air M4.

MacRumors noticed that the icon on the mute key of the MBA M4 is now a speaker symbol with a strikethrough line running over it, to indicate in a traditional fashion that it cuts the sound.

Previously, on Mac keyboards since the 1999 PowerBook G3, the symbol for mute has simply been a speaker icon - with no line through it.

If you were hoping for a way to fudge wider support for AMD's impressive new FSR 4 technology, there's now a tool capable of doing just that.

OptiScaler is a nifty utility that's been around for a while now, and as VideoCardz noticed, it just added support to force FSR 4 to be enabled - not in every PC game out there, though.

What OptiScaler does is allow games that already have an upscaling solution to have that switched for another option, so for example, a title that only has DLSS support can be modded to work with XeSS or FSR.