Latest News - Page 474

NVIDIA's ramp into Blackwell appears to be "quite strong" with issues with initial Blackwell silicon are "totally behind us" says analyst firm Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley analysts posted a note recently, upbeat on Blackwell's potential impact on NVIDIA's top line heading into the final months of 2025. The firm explains: "According to our checks of the GPU-testing supply chain, Blackwell chip output should be around 250,000-300,000 in [the fourth quarter], contributing $5 billion to $10 billion in revenue, which is still tracking [Morgan Stanley lead analyst] Joe Moore's bullish forecast".

The investment firm said that Blackwell chip volume could reach 750,000 to 800,000 units -- which is a huge 3x increase -- from Q4 2024. The firm also expects Hopper volume (including H200 and H20) to be around 1.5M units in Q4 2024, gradually ramping down to 1M units in Q1 2025. The firm added that B200 chip prices are around 60-70% higher than H200, Blackwell revenue should surpass Hopper by Q1 2025.

PAX Australia returned to Melbourne this past weekend to celebrate everything from competitive esports and indie games to new tech, gear, tabletop gaming, and jumping on a Nintendo 64 to play some multiplayer Mario Kart with like-minded individuals.

Even though companies like SEGA and Ubisoft were on hand with titles like Star Wars Outlaws and Sonic X Shadow Generations running on console hardware, as seen in previous years, PC gaming was just about everywhere at PAX. From MSI and ASUS rekindling their Computex 2024 rivalry with big booths showcasing their latest hardware to local PC hardware gurus Aftershock showcasing some truly stunning one-of-a-kind builds.

Outside of the surprise appearance of Valve announcing that it was finally bringing the Steam Deck to Australia, the other big thing this weekend was the debut of Intel's new core Ultra 200 Series, with actual builds from companies like MSI running the latest games on brand-new Z890 rigs playing games like Black Myth: Wukong. Here's a list of the coolest tech we saw at the show, starting with Aftershock's incredible custom Alien PC.

Apple is reportedly set to release smart glasses with AirPods packing cameras, in a bid to compete with the runaway success of Meta and its Quest 3 headset.

In a new post on Bloomberg, analyst and insider Mark Gurman said: "Into 2027, the team is considering launching smart glasses on par with the Meta Ray-Bans, as well as AirPods with cameras. The idea is to salvage the billions of dollars spent on the Vision Pro's visual intelligence technology, which can scan the environment around a user and supply useful data".

He continued: "We'll get a taste of this with an upcoming visual intelligence feature on the iPhone 16, but the plan is to bring the Vision Pro's ability to understand its surroundings to more products".

Apple is rumored to be working on a cheaper version of its higher-end, expensive (and not-so-great selling) Vision Pro headset, which would cost around $2000 with a slower chip, and made from cheaper materials.

The news on the cheaper Apple Vision Pro headset is coming from industry insider Mark Gurman, in a new post on Bloomberg, where he said that he expects Apple to release a lower-end Vision Pro headset to arrive as "early as next year" with a second-generation Vision Pro (with a faster chip inside) following in 2026.

Apple's new lower-end Vision Pro headset will cost "about $2000" and probably use an "inferior processor" and made from "cheaper materials" says Gurman. The new Vision Pro could lack EyeSight, which he said is the "gee-whiz feature that shows a user's eyes on the outside of the headset". Gurman continues, adding that with the lower price, Apple is expecting sales of the device to "be at least double the level of the Vision Pro" with Gurman adding "but that's not saying much" and he's right... the Vision Pro isn't selling well, at all.

Tesla held its recent "We Robot" special event in California, unveiling its new Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot that will cost $20K to $30K and help you around your house, and so much more.

First, these robots weren't running autonomously like some people think... they were walking on their own, but being controlled by a human operator through a VR headset, microphone, and headset. This means you're virtually operating an Optimus robot, with the robot being the physical avatar in your virtual world.

The possibilities of this and the future of employment are huge, as robots aren't replacing jobs -- yet -- but rather, human operators will "use" the robot and have it perform functions that they otherwise couldn't. Think of heavy lifting, dangerous environments, etc where humans can't do those jobs (or not as good as an infinitely strong, never-tired robot). This will eventually all be done over Starlink, connecting human operators to Optimus robots.

For hardcore gamers, putting over 1000 hours into a single game is not uncommon; it usually signals that you're not interested in playing every new blockbuster release and are perfectly happy to stick with one piece of interactive entertainment for years. Whether that's jumping into Counter-Strike, Apex Legends, or Overwatch every weekend or firing up World of Warcraft to play the latest expansion 20 years after the game debuted.

Regarding the gaming tastes of tech billionaires, we've heard stories of Bill Gates getting addicted to Minesweeper to the point where Microsoft employees had to intervene. More recently, Elon Musk has been sharing his impressive builds and high-level dungeon runs in Diablo 4 on X.

And now it's Mark Zuckerberg's turn. We now know the PC game he simply can't get enough of - Sid Meier's Civilization.

After waiting 14 years, PC gamers finally get to play Rockstar's Western epic, the original Red Dead Redemption, later this month. The long-awaited port and remastered release includes support for higher resolutions, ultrawide displays, uncapped frame rates, and DLSS, FSR, and Frame Generation technologies.

When Rockstar made the surprise announcement last week, it didn't include the price - instead, it informed those interested that pre-purchasing or pre-orders would be opening up soon on platforms like Steam and the Epic Games Store. It only took a day or so for these storefronts to list the price for Red Dead Redemption's long-awaited PC debut, upsetting many fans in the process.

The PC release includes the base game and the Undead Nightmare expansion but does not include the game's popular multiplayer modes. As for the price, get ready: Red Dead Redemption on PC is being sold for $49.99 USD.

Thanks to developers CD Projekt Red's ongoing support, the Phantom Liberty expansion, and tech like Path Tracing and DLSS, Cyberpunk 2077 is still one of the most visually impressive games you can play on a modern PC. Running on the company's internal Red Engine, it's a technical marvel open to modders to tweak and tune to their liking.

NextGen Dreams, the creators of the hyper-realistic DreamPunk mod that aims to give the game a photorealistic look, have dropped a new video showcasing the latest version of the impressive mod. Unfortunately, access to the mod sits behind a paywall, but DreamPunk 2.1 overhauls how it handles various graphics and lighting effects, from Indirect Lighting, Light Diffusion, LUT saturation, and more.

The mod and footage we see above look incredible, and yes, some of the shots are indeed photorealistic or movie-like in terms of how "real" they look. The mod sits on top of the game's impressive Path Traced lighting mode, RT Overdrive, with DLSS 3.7.10 enabled on a GeForce RTX 4090 - running in 8K.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is out October 25, and Corsair has collaborated with Activision to release new CoD-themed gaming gear across its various brands: Corsair, Drop, Elgato, ORIGIN PC, and SCUF Gaming.

On the PC gaming peripheral front, there's a Black Ops 6-themed CORSAIR K65 PLUS WIRELESS keyboard, a fantastic 75% mechanical offering that earned an Editor's Choice Award when we reviewed it earlier this year. There's also a Call of Duty-themed M75 WIRELESS mouse and HS80 RGB WIRELESS gaming headset.

For the content creators out there, you've got Black Ops 6-themed Elgato products - including the popular STREAM DECK MK.2 and WAVE:3 USB MICROPHONE. And for those looking for a new PC or gaming laptop, there are custom Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 rigs from Origin PC.

Phison is promising that $1 million to $1.5 million AI workstations are a thing of the past, promising a new $50,000 workstation that's perfect for AI training and AI tuning.

In a recent chat with CRN, Phison General Manager and President Michael Wu explained: "We've changed that $1 million or $1.5 million investment, the minimum requirement to have a fine-tuning machine to create ChatGPT, to $50,000. You no longer need three DGX GPUs anymore. You can do it with a single workstation with four workstation GPUs and with two of our aiDAPTIV+ SSDs that are treated as virtual memory for the GPU".

He continued: "Furthermore, when we demonstrated a 70-billion parameter machine at NVIDIA's GTC, people didn't know how to use it. Nobody has an AI engineer. So we created a software tool called aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite that lets you go from putting a PDF of your proprietary document to the system to fine tune the 70-billion parameter model to building a chatbot like ChatGPT. We are taking advantage of all the big investment that Meta has made on the open source Llama 3 to create a custom AI for you".

Intel has started its next-gen Xe3 "Celestial" GPU enablement in Linux, which will launch as integrated GPUs on the company's next-gen Panther Lake CPUs.

In some new information picked up by Phrononix, we're learning Intel has revealed the PCI Device IDs for Panther Lake Xe3 integrated GPUs, which include: 0xB080, 0xB081, 0xB082, 0xB091, 0xB092, 0xB0A0, 0xB0A1, and 0xB0A1. There are 9 new device IDs in total, but we shouldn't expect to see all 9 of these SKUs to hit the market.

The new Device IDs for the Xe3 GPUs are part of Intel's Xe Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates, which seems to focus on Panther Lake, instead of the discrete Xe3-HPG series GPUs.

NVIDIA's customers, which include Google, Meta, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, and others, have already bought every Blackwell GPU that NVIDIA (and TSMC) will produce to the point where Blackwell is effectively "sold out" for the next 12 months. This comes directly from NVIDIA management, including CEO Jensen Huang, who recently sat down with Morgan Stanley analysts.

Blackwell was recently delayed due to NVIDIA B100 and B200 GPU packaging issues that required a redesign, but production is now well underway. Recently, OpenAI received one of the first engineering builds of the NVIDIA DGX B200 AI server, which includes eight B200 AI GPUs with up to 1.4TB of high-speed HBM3 memory. With Blackwell delivering "massive performance leaps" regarding next-gen AI training and inference performance, it's at the top of the list for all large-scale AI projects.

And it's gotten to the point where the high demand for Blackwell means new customers ordering Blackwell GPUs will have to wait until late next year to receive their orders.

Back in 1999, the world of entertainment was a very different place. Instead of firing up an app on a smart TV to find a movie to watch, you had to jump into a car and head to a video store to rent a VHS tape - where you had one night to watch and then return it.

In PC gaming, shooters and strategy games reigned supreme with Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, and Age of Empires II. Modern 3D graphics, as we know them today, emerged with advanced 3D animation, texture effects, lighting, and more. It was only a few years earlier when rendering anything more than simple low-resolution polygons was extremely difficult.

The late 1990s was an impressive time for real-time 3D rendering, and it marked the arrival of the world's first GPU with the GeForce 256 - where the 256 refers to the '256-bit QuadPipe Rendering Engine' of the NV10 chip's four 64-bit pixel pipelines. The integration of the transform and lighting hardware into the GPU, as opposed to relying on the CPU to perform these calculations, led to the GeForce 256 becoming the world's first GPU.

Patriot Memory has launched its latest blisteringly fast storage solution for PC gamers and enthusiasts with the new Patriot Viper PV573 PCIe Gen5 x4 M.2 2280 SSD. With advanced 3D NAND vertical stacking technology that enhances storage density, speed, and efficiency, the Viper PV573 boasts impressive read speeds of up to 14,000 MB/s and write speeds of up to 12,000 MB/s.

Hardware-wise, it's built with the latest Innogrit IG5666 PCIe Gen 5 x4 controller and 232-layer TLC NAND. Other notable specs include 4K Aligned Random Read speeds of up to 2,000K IOPs and 4K Aligned Random Write speeds of up to 1,650K IOPs, fully compliant with the NVMe 2.0 specification.

It's a bit of a storage beast with a 16.5mm "extra thin heatshield" that includes an active cooling solution to accelerate heat dissipation. Yes, you'll need a tiny fan to maintain peak performance - speeds up to 2.8 times faster than the previous Gen 4 SSD standard.

YEYIAN Gaming has just launched multiple new Gaming PCs powered by Intel's new Core Ultra 200S series "Arrow Lake" processors, check them out:

We have three new configurations that include Premium, Advanced, and Performance-Focused Gaming PCs that feature Intel's new Core Ultra 9, Core Ultra 7, and Core Ultra 5 processors. There are varying amounts of RAM, storage, GPUs, power supplies, and cooling inside of the new YEYIAN gaming PCs, with 12 different configurations to choose from.

YEYIAN's new premium Gaming PC features the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K processor, a higher-end GeForce RTX 4080 16GB graphics card, 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, and a 2TB Gen4 SSD. The company includes multiple RGB fans pre-installed into the system, with a meshed pane for increased airflow.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 5090 won't be much more expensive than the current-gen RTX 4090, says leaker "kopite7kimi" in response to rumors of $1999 to $2499 pricing on the RTX 5090.

In a reply post on X to -- well, actually me and the recent rumors from leaker Moore's Law is Dead that you can read more about in the links below -- of $1999 to $2499 pricing for the GeForce RTX 5090. Kopite7kimi said: "I don't believe there will be a significant price increase for RTX 5090".

NVIDIA launched its current-gen flagship GeForce RTX 4090 for $1599, so a bump up to $1699 - $1999 for a gigantic leap in performance isn't asking too much... especially when competitor AMD has absolutely nothing to challenge anything close to the RTX 5080 let alone the monster ultra-enthusiast RTX 5090.

NVIDIA is rumored to move towards a socketed design for its next-gen GB300 AI servers, based on the upcoming Blackwell Ultra AI chips coming in 2025.

In a new report by TrendForce, we're learning that in the second half of 2025 to expect the B300 series to "become the mainstream product for NVIDIA. The main attraction of the B300 series is said to be its adaption of FP4, which is well-suited in inference scenarios".

This change in design is also expected to boost the yield rates of the B300 AI GPUs, with TrendForce noting that it "might probably reduce performance". The Economic Daily News says that using the socketed design will help simplify after-sales service and server board maintenance, as well as optimize the yield of computing board manufacturing.

Pokemon developer Game Freak has officially confirmed it was hacked and apologized for the leaks in a recent statement.

Over the last few days, we've seen lots of leaks and reports of new Pokemon games run rampant across the internet. The information was apparently gleaned from unauthorized access to Game Freak's internal servers, and the billion-dollar Pokemon steward has now announced that it was hacked back in August 2024.

The firm says that it has taken steps to ensure that these kinds of hacks can't happen in the future: "We have already rebuilt and re-inspected the server, but we will work to prevent recurrence by further strengthening security measures," part of the statement reads.

Microsoft still wants to launch a cloud-only version of Xbox Game Pass, sources tell Windows Central's Jez Corden. This echoes reports that were also made in July 2024.

With unprofitable consoles on land, Xbox's future could be in the clouds. Microsoft is making big moves to accelerate its cloud expansion efforts and bring Xbox games to as many people as possible--especially those that don't own actual Xbox consoles.

Microsoft has big plans for cloud gaming. The company hopes to make $8 billion from Xbox Game Pass through 2030 via an astronomical 110 million subscriber base. Cloud is expected to make a significant proportion of these revenues, with 29% of subscribers, or about 32 million, being from cloud.

Starting next month in November, Xbox users will be able to stream select games from their purchased games library over the cloud, sources tell The Verge's Tom Warren.

Microsoft has big plans for cloud gaming. The company hopes to have 110 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers by 2030, and about 32 million of these users are expected to be playing on the cloud. That's a huge bet compared to the very slim numbers that currently use Xbox's cloud gaming service.

This could change dramatically, and soon. The landmark Epic v Google antitrust trial is now over, and Epic scored a huge win for itself and other gaming firms. Google must now allow third-party app stores and separate billing systems directly on Android's Google Play Store, a move that will jeopardize Google's $12.4 billion mobile economy. Microsoft plans to deploy its own digital storefront right into the Xbox app while simultaneously opening up game streaming to new levels.