Latest News - Page 5

First McDonald's, now Sony is teaming up with famed rapper Travis Scott for a new PS5 ad campaign.

Travis Scott is now a strategic creative partner on the PlayStation brand, and to celebrate, Sony released a new ad that spoofs the old Maxell hi-fidelity commercials from the 1980s. You know the one where the seated man is almost blown away by the awesome audio power blasted out by towering speakers.

Sony didn't elaborate what this partnership will entail, but we should expect some Cactus Jack-branded accessories and content for the PlayStation 5 console. Maybe even a few custom faceplates, controllers, themes, and more. Expect Sony to push a ton of advertisements as it ramps up for the big holiday season centered around the PS5.

Typhoon Studios creative director Alex Hutchinson made some extremely controversial statements regarding streamers. Now the internet has lambasted him, and Google moves away from the dev's words.

According to Alex Hutchinson, who heads up creative direction for Google's Stadia Games and Entertainment branch, content creators should have to pay to stream games. The idea is streamers should have to pay a license fee in order to monetize streams of copywritten games. It's worth noting Hutchinson was creative director of Typhoon Games (who made Journey to the Savage Planet) before the studio was acquired by Google. Here's what Hutchinson said:

"Streamers worried about getting their content pulled because they used music they didn't pay for should be more worried by the fact that they're streaming games they didn't pay for as well. It's all gone as soon as publishers decide to enforce it."

"The real truth is the streamers should be paying the developers and publishers of the games they stream. They should be buying a license like any real business and paying for the content they use."

You don't need to be an epidemiologist to be able to tell that the coronavirus situation in the United States is gradually getting worse.

Coronavirus infections in the US. over the last two weeks have increased by 32%, and now we are heading for the cooler months of the year, where it is expected to get a whole lot tougher. Public health experts are expecting surges as Americans begin to head indoors to escape the cold. As people head indoors, the transmission risk for the virus increases exponentially, hence experts expecting surges.

In a recent interview with NBC's Meet The Press, Dr. Osterholm, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota said that the next 6 - 12 weeks "are going to be the darkest of the entire pandemic." At the moment, the new daily coronavirus cases in the US are sitting at around 60,000, Dr. Osterholm believes this number could increase to a much larger 67,000 to 75,000 cases. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

The new PUBG update for consoles is here giving Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro owners a higher FPS gaming experience.

PUBG's new Console Update 9.1 has a nifty new 'Framerate Priority mode' that lifts the frame rate cap all the way up to 60FPS, and the resolution to 1080p. We could expect the new Framerate Priority mode pushing 1080p 60FPS on the base line consoles in the future, too.

"The Framerate Priority setting has some exciting changes this time around. The frame cap is now lifted to 60 FPS and the screen resolution will be set to 1920 x 1080 to increase framerates. The new Framerate Priority is available on Xbox One X and the PlayStation 4 Pro, and we are investigating ways to bring the lifted frame cap to other console devices as well. Stay tuned".

PNY is getting into the PCIe 4.0 SSD game. Today, the company revealed the XLR8 CS3040, a new line of high-speed M.2 NVMe Gen 4 x4 SSDs with up to 2TB of storage capacity and 5,600MB/s read speeds.

PNY's new XRL8 CS3040 SSDs support the latest NVMe Gen 4.0 protocol, enabling extreme data access speeds far faster than previously possible. PNY's new drives can deliver sequential reads up to 5,600MB/s and write data at up to 4,300MB/s. That's significantly faster than PCIe 3.0 drives are capable of.

PNY said the XLR8 CS3040 drives would be available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB variants. PNY is also offering each drive with or without a built-in heat sink. The heat sink version includes a 45-gram aluminum heat sink with eight fins for increased thermal dissipation.

Epic Games has just pushed out the new update for Fortnite introducing a bunch of Halloween-themed skins, and so much more. But the more important thing here is the file size on PC has been radically reduced.

Fortnite's new 14.40 patch weighs in at 27GB, but once PC gamers have installed the patch it will reduce the 90-100GB installation size down to a skimp 30GB in comparison. This is actually huge, which will also see PC gamers seeing Fortnite loading in much faster, too.

• Original install size: 100GB
• Removed: 60GB
• New install size: 30GB

Intel has announced that its new DG1 GPU is now shipping, and that it's (hopefully exciting) gaming-focused Intel Xe-HPG DG2 is currently being tested in Intel's own labs.

The new Intel DG1 -- or Iris Xe Max, is Intel's first discrete GPU in over 20 years. If you're an older geek like me you might remember the also much-hyped Intel i740 from the 1990s, well -- now DG1 is the first discrete GPU since then. Intel has also announced its next GPU will be called DG2.

The bigger news here is the new Intel DG2 discrete graphics, which is in alpha silicon form -- but Intel has said they've powered the new DG2 GPU up in their labs. Exciting times going into the end of the year.

• Read more: Intel Xe-HPG: gaming GPU with ray tracing tech and GDDR6 ships in 2021

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have just unveiled its next-gen LUMI supercomputer, which is powered by AMD's next-gen Zen 3-based EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct GPUs.

The new LUMI supercomputer will find its new home in Kajaani, Finland in 2021 -- and will be using the HPE Cray EX architecture to spin up 550 Petaflops of peak horsepower. The new LUMI supercomputer will be a part of EuroHPC's GPU-accelerated supercomputing platform powered by next-gen AMD CPUs and GPUs.

Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, data center and embedded systems group, AMD explains:

"AMD is proud to join with HPE to power the upcoming LUMI supercomputer to advance scientific research in artificial intelligence, weather forecasting, pharmaceutical discovery, and more. Our next-generation AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs, coupled with HPE's unique supercomputing technologies, are fueling new capabilities in high performance computing, and we are excited to strengthen the European research community through our support".

Facebook may be dealing with a design flaw in its Quest 2 Elite Strap design. Many people are reporting their upgraded head straps are already broken just a week after Facebook started shipping the product.

The new Oculus Quest 2 is getting a lot of attention right now. Tons of people have had their first experience with VR in the last week, game developers are setting incredible sales growth, and Quest 2 is moving faster than Facebook expected.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows surrounding the Quest 2 launch. It appears that some of the people who invested the most into the Quest 2 platform are getting a raw deal. Numerous reports of broken Elite Head Straps have popped up over the last few days. We counted no less than a dozen posts on Reddit in just the past 24 hours.

It looks like we're getting our first look at AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card and its PCB for a custom variant.

We can see this is a prototype board with its GDDR6 modules missing, and the VRMs covered with a ridiculously huge heat sink -- this is far from retail, far from a consumer-focused graphics card. We should expect this to be a custom Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card (powered by the Navi 21 XT GPU) or the lower-end Navi 21 XL-powered card.

We can see that it requires dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, with more details arriving in less than a week when AMD reveals its new Radeon RX 6000 series in detail on October 28.