God of War Ragnarok's PC launch is right around the corner. The highly anticipated sequel will arrive on September 19, 2024, on Steam and the Epic Games Store. PC development is being handled by the game's original developer, Santa Monica Studio, with assistance from the Vancouver-based Jetpack Interactive. We now have the full PC hardware specs and requirements for the game.

Covering 1080p, 1440p, and 4K with different visual quality settings, Santa Monica Studio confirms that its specs do not include or require upscaling technology to hit the targets. This is unlike Ubisoft's recent PC requirements for Star Wars Outlaws, where the publisher received some negative feedback for 'forcing' upscaling even at 1080p.

God of War Ragnarok will support NVIDIA DLSS 3.7, AMD FSR 3.1, Intel XeSS 1.3, and Frame Generation for all PC gamers, boosting performance and fidelity at higher resolutions when using the Ultra settings or those playing on Ultrawide displays.

Square Enix has confirmed that its latest RPG epic, Final Fantasy 16, was coming to PC; however, the development team was focused squarely (heh) on the PlayStation 5 launch ahead of the game's June 2023 release. As for a specific release date or window, PC fans have had to play 'wait-and-see' until the studio and producer Yoshi-P felt the PC version was ready to unleash.

The release could be right around the corner, thanks to some old-fashioned internet sleuthing. Fans on Reddit have found multiple mentions of the game in NVIDIA's latest Game Ready 560.81 WHQL driver for GeForce RTX graphics card owners.

And that's multiple because not only is "ffxvi.exe" listed under a game profile for Final Fantasy XVI, but also "ffxvi_demo.exe" - indicating that Square Enix is planning on releasing a playable slice of the RPG for all PC gamers to try out.

If you've ever bought a power supply (PSU) for your PC, you're probably familiar with the various 80 PLUS ratings with different tiers like Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Titanium. The whole' 80 PLUS' label refers to independent testing and certification that the power supply has at least 80% efficiency at different load levels. There's a lot more to it than that, but most PSUs on the market carry one of the many different 80 PLUs certification stickers.

Corsair has now stated that it's moving away from the 80 PLUS certification for the more detailed power supply certification that comes from Cybenetics. According to Corsair, modern power supplies require more detailed certification that expands beyond efficiency.

However, Corsair says that Cybenetics' efficiency profiles and testing better reflect real-world usage. "Cybenetics' testing methodology produces thousands of data points across all loads," Corsair writes. "Rather than the handful of measurements produced during 80 PLUS testing, ensuring more accurate results."

Intel has just launched the A760A, a discrete GPU made for cars, something the company announced today at its AI Cockpit Innovation Experience event.

The new A760A GPU isn't quite new, as it's a rebrand of a GPU already on the market, but now aimed at the automotive market. Intel says its new A760A GPU will deliver "next-level, high-fidelity experiences' for vehicles.

The A760A has higher performance compared to integrated graphics on other Intel processors that were made for vehicles, called SDV SoCs. Intel says its new A760A is an easy drop-in upgrade for car manufacturers that already have vehicles powered by SDV processors, allowing for performance upgrades without a platform change.

Update: I received an email from Intel PR saying that even with Innovation 2024 being postponed, that its next-gen Arrow Lake CPUs are still on track for a Q4 2024 release. You can read the updated version with the full comments here.

Intel has postponed its upcoming Innovation 2024 event from September, and not just by a few days or weeks, or even months, but "until 2025" the company explained in an email.

The company explained: "after careful consideration, we have made the decision to postpone our Intel-hosted event, Intel Innovation in September, until 2025. For the remainder of 2024, we will continue to host smaller, more targeted events, webinars, hackathons and meetups worldwide through Intel Connection and Intel AI Summit ev ents, as well as have a presence at other industry moments".

Intel and its partners have begun rolling out the microcode update that will fix stability and degradation issues with 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core desktop CPUs. The update arrived slightly ahead of the 'mid-August' window, with new BIOS updates with the 0x129 microcode available for several motherboards.

ASUS motherboard owners were the first to be informed of the microcode's availability, and a BIOS update (still listed as BETA - via the ROG Forum) is available for Z790 motherboards. This covers the company's enthusiast and high-end boards in the ROG MAXIMUS and ROG STRIX line-ups, with ASUS noting that the BIOS update also improves 'system performance.'

MSI has also announced the first batch of BIOS updates for a range of its Intel boards, covering Godlike, Ace, Carbon, and Tomahawk models, with the new 0x129 microcode available now. ASRock is also listing BIOS updates for some of its motherboards.

Gamescom is the largest gaming event and conference in the world. Each year, Germany hosts over 100,000 fans, enthusiasts, media, and industry people for a week of gaming-related announcements and celebrations. Last year, AMD was on hand to announce two brand-new GPUs: the Radeon RX 7800 XT and the Radeon RX 7700 XT.

Although AMD hasn't teased something similar for Gamecom 2024, a new post by ASUS announcing that it has created a new custom limited-edition Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2-themed graphics card that there's an 'AMD Gamescom Event on August 23.'

The announcement doesn't specify what Radeon GPU this new limited edition card will be, so we can only guess it will be a flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The teaser image does indicate that it will be based on the TUF Gaming design. As for AMD, hosting a 'Gamescom Event' does imply that the company has something to announce and that something could be new hardware from the Radeon team.

AMD has a new gaming bundle for those looking to pick up a new Ryzen CPU or Radeon GPU. Eligible customers will receive two new PC games to play - Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 and Unknown 9: Awakening. Both are visually impressive titles arriving later this year. However, the deal doesn't apply to AMD's new Zen 5 desktop Ryzen 9000 Series.

Eligible desktop products include any Ryzen 7000 Series CPU from the Ryzen 7 7700 and above or any Radeon RX 7000 Series GPU from the Radeon RX 7600 XT and above. The gaming bundle also applies to laptops, but these will need to include a Ryzen 7000 Series processor and a mobile Radeon RX 7600S or RX 7700S graphics card.

The deal is available to customers everywhere, including North American retailers such as Amazon and Newegg. For the games, hit the jump to check out trailers alongside the complete list of eligible products.

Hindsight is 20/20, and all that, but a new report at Reuters indicates that the Intel of 2024 could have been a very different company if it hadn't passed on the opportunity to invest in OpenAI. Citing "four people with direct knowledge," Intel discussed acquiring a 15% stake in OpenAI in 2017 and 2018.

Discussions and talks took place over several months, with the report stating that the then-CEO Bob Swan didn't see generative AI as becoming a significant thing in the market anytime soon, so it wouldn't be able to recoup its investment. That investment is rumored to have been worth $1 billion for 15% of the company.

Recent reports state that OpenAI is worth around $80 billion, so you can guess how this decision to turn down OpenAI is being viewed today.

Intel participated in a recent event in China with ASUS, where it discussed issues surrounding the current Raptor Lake generation of desktop CPUs and provided some new information on its next-gen Arrow Lake products, which will arrive later this year.

To get the current-gen stuff out of the way, Intel addressed the upcoming BIOS update for its 13th and 14th Gen Core CPUs, which will arrive in a matter of days. Designed to resolve stability issues and prevent damage to hardware, a representative from the company stated that the fix would not affect the K series' "turbo frequency" or overclocking capabilities.

For those who attribute Intel's recent CPU issues to models like the Cire i9 13900K being power-hungry and expecting the BIOS update to 'nerf' peak performance, this announcement does indicate that the problem isn't simply about the amount of power these CPUs draw. However, when discussing next-gen Arrow Lake, we learn these new CPUs will draw at least 100W less power when maintaining higher frequencies.

Regular PC users don't worry about RAID or data redundancy unless they are running a home server or NAS. However, its importance must be recognized in the enterprise space. Mitigating the risk of losing data - yeah, it's a must.

And for those with a RAID setup, the downside for enterprise isn't merely sacrificing capacity for storing data - the compute costs and DRAM bandwidth requirements are very real. With the rise of NVMe SSDs and increased read and write performance, RAID configuration and compute requirements can be the bottleneck in slowing down an entire system.

KIOXIA's RAID Offload data protection technology ensures that performance scales as the number of SSDs increases and more advanced storage solutions are added. Described as a "standards-based, host-orchestrated scale out and sustainable solution to offload RAID parity compute," it frees up CPU, memory, and cache resources.

At the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) event this week, the storage experts at Phison showcased their latest cutting-edge technologies. Alongside winning a Best of Show award for its innovative aiDAPTIV+ AI hardware and software solution, there were some exciting SSD advances for controllers, storage, and enterprise.

One was the Phison E31T controller, described as the world's first mainstream Gen5 SSD. It can reach impressive read and write speeds of 10,000 MB/s in a heatsink-free design fully optimized for notebooks. Other impressive performance specs include 1,500K IOPS for both read and write and a capacity of up to 8TB.

Thanks to Phison, we'll finally see PCIe Gen5 storage come to laptops and mobile devices in a big way - with E31T supporting the M.2 2280 and M.2 2230 form factors. And in case you were wondering, Phison isn't entirely done with PCIe Gen4 technology, either.

Microsoft is working on a next-generation mixed reality (MR) headset, signing a contract with Samsung Display to develop and supply OLED on silicon (OLEDoS) panels for the new mixed reality headset.

The news is coming from Korean outlet The Elec, which reports that Samsung is expected to provide hundreds of thousands of OLEDoS panels to Microsoft, according to their sources. The Elec's sources said that Microsoft was developing its new MR headset for gaming and multimedia consumption, versus being used for the Metaverse.

Microsoft's new MR headset is expected to launch only after the specifications of the new OLEDoS panels have been finalized, and then supplied from Samsung Display to Microsoft, with The Elec's sources adding that the commercial launch will happen in 2026 "at the earliest".

Sabrent has been enjoying FMS 2024 so far, teasing its array of Rocket SSDs -- in both Gen4 and Gen5 -- and its upcoming Thunderbolt 5-based Rocket XTRM5 external SSD.

The company showed off all of its leading SSDs at FMS 2024 this week, including the Rocket 4 in both 1TB and 2TB capacities (and the larger Rocket 4 4TB teased, which is coming soon) and the Gen5-ready Rocket 5 in 1TB, 2TB, and the larger 4TB capacity. Sabrent also had its Rocket Nano 2242 in 1TB, and the Rocket Q4 (it's so cute) in 2TB on the show floor at FMS 2024.

Our SSD review Jon Coulter said in his review of Sabrent's new Rocket 5 4TB SSD: "Sabrent is back to doing Sabrent things. We love it and can't help but admire their strategic move to wait for a final form E26 14,000 MB/s SSD before jumping into the PCIe Gen5 fray and then being the first among storage retailers with it. Additionally, making their first Rocket 5 offering to be fully reviewed its highest capacity, most over the top 4TB model, is exactly what Sabrent has done historically".

Recently, we spotted the existence of a PlayStation VR2 app on Steam, hinting that official PC support for the VR headset designed for the PlayStation 5 console was coming soon. Well, that day has arrived, and PC gamers can now use the PlayStation VR2 or PSVR2 headset to play the thousands of games available in the SteamVR library - including the iconic Half-Life: Alyx.

However, there's a catch. Because the PSVR2 headset was never intended for PC use, support requires the purchase of a special PlayStation VR2 PC Adapter, which is available now for $59.99 USD at select retailers or directly from Sony when you add this to the $549.99 cost of the PlayStation VR2 headset, it might not be as attractive an option as initially thought.

Also, key PSVR2 features like HDR, headset feedback, eye-tracking, adaptive triggers, and haptic feedback are unavailable on PC - a shame. Sony hasn't confirmed or stated if these features will become available. On the plus side, foveated rendering is supported alongside 3D audio.

When it comes to AI training and dealing with large data sets and increasingly complex large language models (LLMs) like Llama 70b, it's not simply a matter of being able to throw GPU horsepower at the problem until you find a solution. At least, it shouldn't be.

Phison's aiDAPTIV+ is a hybrid software and hardware solution for LLM training. It integrates Phison's Pascari A100 M.2 SSDs into a complete solution with linear scaling. Impressive! According to Phison, it unlocks access to run workloads previously reserved for data centers on a single workstation or server - supporting up to Llama-3 70B and Falcon 180B.

Phison's chart showcases the capabilities of aiDAPTIV+. Above, you can see a single system with the same configuration: four RTX 6000 Ada GPUs, 192GB of GDDR6 memory, and an additional 512GB of RAM. Phison's aiDAPTIVLink middleware extends this GPU memory capacity with two 2TB SSDs, paving the way for massive model support with low latency. This is impressive stuff, and it won the "Best of Show, Most Innovative AI Application" award at FMS: the Future of Memory and Storage.

KIOXIA is attending the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) conference in Santa Clara, California. The creator of flash memory and the innovative BiCS FLASH 3D technology is showcasing a new prototype broadband SSD with an optical interface designed for the next generation of data centers.

Replacing electrical wiring with an optical interface allows KIOXIA to create a greater distance between the compute and storage devices, paving the way for more flexible designs without sacrificing efficiency or signal quality.

In fact, an optical interface makes it possible to aggregate components like an SSD and CPU that can "efficiently utilize resources according to a specific workload" by placing them in different rooms or locations separated by up to 40 meters of optical fiber (up to 100 meters in the future). In a data center, optical SSD storage could be located in one room with fewer cooling requirements, lowering the energy footprint.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is officially coming to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, according to a new announcement from publisher Electronic Arts.

Survivor originally released on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series consoles, and the PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the EA App on April 28, 2023, and more than a year later, it's now coming to consoles that are more than 11 years old. While the PS4 and Xbox One are considered to be very old, there are still millions of gamers on both of those platforms, hence EA's push for Survivor to be available on the platforms.

The PS4 and Xbox One versions of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will come with a variety of optimizations that are designed to maximize the capabilities of the hardware within both of the previous-gen consoles. Both versions of the game will retail for $49.99. Additionally, Respawn Entertainment confirmed via its press release that the PC version of the game will be getting an update in the "coming weeks" that will improve performance and controls while also introducing a bunch of quality-of-life improvements.

Hardware developers, which includes consoles, typically apply codenames to any prototypes they are working on. Nintendo is known for having some of the friendliest codenames for its prototypes, and one of them has re-emerged online in a new picture.

The console under the spotlight here is the GameCube, which the social media account Console Variants explains was called the "Nintendo Dolphin" when it was in its early prototype phase. The social media account explains that this version of the GameCube is so rare that it wasn't allowed to share the photos to the internet "until now" and that more pictures of it will be released "soon."

Notably, this version of the GameCube has been spoken about before, and imaged. But, the photographs snapped of it aren't clear enough to clearly see the "Nintendo Dolphin" branding. The Console Variations image is extremely clear, showing the "Nintendo Dolphin" branding and the disc tray. At the moment it remains unclear if Console Variations own the device, or is being sent the images from another source.

If you had a live feed of Activision headquarters right now you would likely see the a red alarm siren continuously blasting and employees running around like headless chickens, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 gameplay has leaked ahead of the official release scheduled in just a couple weeks time.

The leaked content has already spread to numerous social media platforms, and Activision has responded by moving into high gear the number of issued DMCA takedown notices. Unfortunately for Activision, it appears its too late as the videos/images have already been saved and duplicated numerous times, which means the most the publisher can do is minimize the impact of the leaks.

So, what got leaked and how? It appears from reports the leak can be primarily traced back to an anonymous user who used a jailbroken PlayStation 4 to access the multiplayer beta of Black Ops 6 that was uploaded to COD HQ, the launcher that the last three Call of Duty games used.