Latest News - Page 583

Take-Two Interactive, the publisher behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise, is concentrating on over-delivering with the next installment in the series, Grand Theft Auto VI.

The CEO of the publisher, Strauss Zelnick, was asked during a recent earnings call about pricing for the publisher's catalog of games, particularly the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Zelnick responded by saying Take-Two aims at delivering "great value at any given time" and that its rubric for any new game it plans on releasing will provide more value to a gamer than the price tag on a game.

Zelnick said when Take-Two lands on a price for a new game, it makes sure it's "good news" for gamers, and the game's "experience vastly over-delivers". All of this alludes to the mystery surrounding the price tag for Grand Theft Auto VI, and unfortunately, Zelnick dodged direct questions regarding the highly anticipated title's price tag. However, we do know Take-Two is more than comfortable charging $70 for a new game, with Zelnick saying last year that players seem to be happy paying $70 for games.

Google has released a new white paper that outlines everything that is "wrong" with Microsoft security, particularly highlighting its recent failings.

The new white paper is titled "A more secure alternative," and Google explains across 14 pages all of the problems with Microsoft's approach to security while also recommending better alternatives, Gmail and Google Drive. The paper is mostly based on the recent discoveries by the US government's Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), which stated last month that Microsoft's approach to the June 2023 attack on its Exchange Online service was lackluster.

The CSRB reprimanded Microsoft for its lack of knowledge on when attackers were able to infiltrate its Exchange Online service that resulted in the hackers being able to sift through email inboxes. Additionally, the CSRB criticized the Windows owner for having a seven-year-old security key still be valid, which was used by the hackers to gain access to the Exchange email service.

Samsung has unveiled a variety of new products at Display Week 2024, one of which could be the next pixel technology that replaces the gorgeous OLED panels.

QD-OLED panels are making their way into gaming monitors of various sizes and some TVs, but what if OLED isn't necessarily the future of display technology? Introducing, QD-LED, or NanoLED, a new display technology currently being worked on by Samsung. According to the company the new display technology incoporates applying electricity directly to the quantum dots, removing the need for LED or OLED. The technology has several names, such as QD-LED, NanoLED, QDEL, QD-EL, or electroluminescent quantum dots.

Samsung displayed a QD-LED prototype at Display Week 2024, and according to reports its the largest display using the new panel technology, measuring 18 inches with a 3200 x 1800 resolution (202ppi) at 250 nits brightness. According to Samsung, QD-LED offers a wide color gamut and color accuracy, and doesn't require any organic material, meaning it won't be suffer from the same degrading fate as some OLED panels.

Microsoft has just wrapped up its Build conference where it gave many details on the company overall pushing into adopting artificial intelligence.

The company revealed its new AI-powered tool called Copilot+, and part of this new feature is a sub-feature called "Recall," which enables Windows users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. Microsoft writes in its blogpost that with Recall, users will be able to access "what you have seen or done on your PC in a way that feels like having photographic memory", which is certainly going to be the case as for Recall to work it needs to take a screenshot of what is displayed on your PC every few seconds.

Microsoft's blogpost explained that Recall leverages "your personal semantic index" that is built and stored "entirely on your device". Presumably, a users semantic index will consist of individual snapshots of what is displayed on their desktop at any given time. Users are able to access specific periods in time with these snapshots, with Copilot+ also being able to provide context for the event.

Scarlett Johansson has accused OpenAI of stealing her voice to its latest ChatGPT AI product called "Sky", with the actress saying she was "shocked, angered in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine."

The actress has spoken to publications regarding her concerns about OpenAI's ChatGPT AI voice called "Sky" following its launch last week. Johansson says that OpenAI has used a voice similar to hers for its artificial intelligence voice software despite saying no to Altman's request to use her voice. Notably, the response from Johansson comes after OpenAI said it was going to pull amid the controversy around the Johansson resemblance.

According to Johansson, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached her last September and again two days before the announcement of ChatGPT-4o on May 13. Notably, Johansson played the voice character in the film "Her" which is about a man who developers a relationship with an AI virtual assistant.

It's one of the most highly anticipated video game releases of all time, with Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto VI set to launch sometime in Fall 2025 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S - covering September, October, and November. Is there a chance the game's release will push beyond this window? Sure, nothing is set in stone this far out for a game - but Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says the publisher is 'highly confident' GTA 6 will arrive on time.

In a new interview with CNBC, Zelnick said, "There is slippage in the industry, and we're not immune from that. However, we narrowed the timing because we are highly confident in that timing." Take-Two only recently put a release window on Grand Theft Auto 6, so it sounds like development is progressing as planned.

Still, he adds that instead of bugs (which it can plan for), Rockstar is seeking 'perfection' in GTA 6. And with that, "there are extraordinary expectations, [so] it's not really about bugs."

With the release and success of Baldur's Gate 3, developer Larian Studios is now one of the world's most esteemed RPG creators. Although we won't be getting an expansion, and Larian is officially moving on from the Baldur's Gate franchise (Hasbro is looking to pick up the pieces), the studio is hard at work on "two very ambitious RPGs."

With that, Larian Studios is expanding, with Larian Studios Warsaw opening in Poland to help work on its upcoming games. Larian calls Warsaw "one of the greatest RPG development hubs in the world," and it's no secret why - the city is home to CD Projekt Red, who created The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077.

Interestingly, this isn't the only news surrounding a high-profile developer opening a Polish-based studio. Activision announced that its new Elsewhere Entertainment studio in the region is being set up to create a new "narrative-based, genre-defining AAA franchise."

Microsoft will integrate Copilot AI into Xbox and PC games like Minecraft. The company showcased how it will work with the latter at its big Surface and AI event earlier today, and the results are pretty wild. In a demonstration, Microsoft showed how Copilot can act as a digital assistant that you can verbally interact with to provide in-game information, help, and tips.

In Minecraft, it could be as simple as asking for a crafting recipe. Copilot can then step you through the process and even assess your inventory to provide answers on what you might need and where to find it. The whole presentation included a scenario where Copilot acted as an interactive guide for a player looking to craft a sword. It's filled with rich, naturalistic conversational delivery and is impressive, to say the least - watch a short clip of it above.

It's reminiscent of some AI tutors and educational tools that OpenAI has demonstrated - except this time, it's for gaming. This feature will undoubtedly make its way to Xbox consoles and hardware, but as it will require NPU hardware to run, it probably won't arrive for televisions until Microsoft launches its next-gen Xbox console.

Ubisoft has just unveiled its next instalment in the Assassin's Creed franchise in a new cinematic trailer, which appears to have caused quite a stir in the gaming community.

The new Assassin's Creed game is called Assassin's Creed Shadows and it takes place in 16th century feudal Japan, where players will take control of two main characters in an open-world setting that is similar in scope to previous Assassin's Creed titles Valhalla and Odyssey.

The new trailer hasn't been well received by viewers as at the time of writing it has 250,000 likes and 600,000 dislikes, along with countless negative comments. Why is this happening you ask? Without mentioning the character choices and the setting of the game, which many gamers seem to be upset with, I believe the main issues for Shadows are Ubisoft's decisions when it comes to pricing.

Microsoft has announced a new lineup of Windows laptops and portable devices called Copilot+ AI PCs. These new bits of hardware feature built-in NPUs that will power a suite of AI features in Windows 11, running natively on local hardware. With a long list of partners, including Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, and ASUS, Microsoft has also lifted the lid on its own Copilot+ AI PCs, the 11th edition Surface Pro and Surface Laptop.

These new devices are set to compete with Apple's new M4-powered iPad devices and current M3 Macbook offerings. The new Surface Copilot+ AI PCs sport the latest Qualcomm Arm-based Snapdragon X chips. The flagship Surface Pro ships with an OLED display, the Snapdragon X Elite processor, up to 32GB of LPDDR5x memory, and, in a very welcome move, a removable PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

With AI at the heart of Microsoft's vision for Windows, the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices include the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU with 45 TOPS of AI performance. Microsoft classifies an AI PC as featuring at least 40 TOPS of AI performance. This makes the new Snapdragon X-powered Copilot+ AI PCs and Surface devices some of the first single-chip Windows 11 devices to run Copilot locally.

Intel teased its next-gen mobile-focused Lunar Lake CPUs today, but also confirmed its next-gen Arrow Lake-S, Arrow Lake-HX, and Arrow Lake-H processors for both desktop and laptops are coming in Q4 2024.

Intel's new high-performance Arrow Lake CPUs will hit the desktop later this year in Arrow Lake-S form, something that we should see confirmed (and detailed) at Computex 2024 in just a couple of weeks time. Intel has now provided a preview of its next-gen Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake-S" desktop CPUs, with a tease of the monolithic design that has multiple tiles inside.

Arrow Lake will feature a CPU, GPU, SoC, and I/O tiles, with the biggest of the tiles being the CPU and SoC which are the larger rectangular-shaped ones at the bottom, and the square one in the middle. There's also a dummy tile used, which is something Intel is also doing with its new Lunar Lake CPUs, too.

Intel has teased its next-generation Lunar Lake CPUs ahead of Computex 2024, teasing the new AI NPU and latest Battlemage "Xe2" integrated GPU.

The next-gen Lunar Lake CPUs will set the foundation for the next-generation AI PC platform, with Intel planning to have the new Lunar Lake CPUs out and in products in Q3 2024. Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake is something truly special: it features all-new architectures across the board with new CPU cores, new GPU cores, new NPU cores, and more thanks to advances in 3D packaging technology and power innovations.

Intel will be using next-gen Lion Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores for Lunar Lake, with some hopefully very delicious IPC improvements. Intel has teased that we'll have 3x the AI performance from Lunar Lake over Meteor Lake, with 45+ TOPS of NPU power for AI workloads. This is just from the NPU alone, while Lunar Lake offers 100+ TOPS of AI performance in total (NPU + CPU + GPU).

Lenovo has just unveiled its latest Yoga Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptops, both Copilot+ ready AI laptops with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X processors.

First up we've got Lenovo's new Yoga Slim 7x which features Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite processor with an on-board Hexagon NPU for AI workloads. There's a 14.5-inch 3K display (2944 x 1840) PureSight OLED display with up to 1000 nits of HDR brightness. There's up to 32GB of RAM, up to 1TB of SSD storage, 3 x USB-C ports with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 support.

Lenovo says its new Yoga Slim 7x laptop will have multiple days of battery life, which will be awesome to see in the flesh.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is happy to team up with long-term partner Dell on providing its new Blackwell AI GPUs for Dell's new AI factory. In a chat with Bloomberg today, Jensen covered it all:

Jensen says that Dell's AI factories will help drive the continued artificial intelligence (AI) wave, and that the AI factory will be filled with the very latest CPUs, GPUs, switches, and other high-end components.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said: "I'm here, I'm here to announce this Dell AI factory with NVIDIA going to market starting today. In order to do this, just think about what an AI factory is. It has CPUs and GPUs. It has networking switches. Incredible amounts of software in systems connected to storage and the miles of, the miles of cables alone necessary to build up one of these things. Well we. . . you know, Michael, turned it into an easy bit. And so that, just as Dell did in early days with PCs, they're now doing this with AI factories".

Acer has launched its first Copilot+ PC with the introduction of the new Swift 14 AI laptop, working with both Microsoft and Qualcomm on the new laptop.

The new Acer Swift 14 AI laptop features Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon X Plus processors, both featuring a built-in NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for AI workloads. Microsoft has some strict requirements on Copilot+ AI PCs, with 16GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD storage, and an NPU to get the stamp of Copilot+ AI approval.

Inside the new Swift 14 AI laptop we've got a Snapdragon X Elite with 12 high-performance CPU cores based on TSMC's 4nm process node, up to 32GB of LPDDR5X-8533 memory, and up to 1TB of NVMe PCIe Gen4 SSD goodness. We've got a 14.5-inch 2560 x 1600 IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate, and a 1440p QHD IR webcam that supports Acer's suite of AI-boosted conferencing tools in Acer PurifiedView 2.0 and Acer PurifiedVoice 2.0.

Dell has just announced 5 new Copilot+ AI PC laptops powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X series SoC.

The new XPS 13 (9345), Inspiron 14, Inspiron 14 Plus, Latitude 7455, and Latitude 5455 laptops all feature Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X SoC with an on-board NPU for AI workloads, ready for Microsoft's new Copilot+ branded AI PC era.

Dell's new XPS 13 laptop has a mid-range 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processor with Dual Core Boost, with support for up to 64GB of RAM, up to 2TB of PCIe SSD storage (4TB in the future), and 3 x 13.4-inch display options: a 500-nit 1920 x 1200 non-touch IPS display at 120Hz refresh rate, a 500-nit 2560 x 1600 IPS display with HDR and 120Hz refresh rate, and a 400-nit 2880 x 1880 OLED display with HDR at the 60Hz refresh rate.

Microsoft has finally announced its huge AI PC push with its new Copilot+ AI PCs that are new Windows laptops that have built-in AI hardware -- NPUs -- that support AI features within Windows 11. Check it out:

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that all of Microsoft's major laptop partners will have Copilot+ AI PCs, including Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, and ASUS. Not only that, but Microsoft is also introducing two new Surface laptops that are ready for the world of AI.

The company announced the news during its Build conference, with Nadella reiterating that Microsoft is pushing big time into the world of Arm chips on Windows laptops, with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite SoC being the first Copilot+ AI PC in the wild. Intel and AMD-based CPUs and laptop designs will be coming out later this year.

Apple's brand-new M4 iPad Pro is now on sale after months of guesses and delays in terms of its launch date. The tablet brought with it all of the high-end specs that we'd been told to expect including a powerful new M4 chip and a stunning OLED display. But according to a new report not everyone has been happy with that display since picking up their new tablets.

The iPad Pro comes with a stunning new OLED display, the likes of which Apple has never put in a tablet before. However, a MacRumors report cites buyers across Reddit and its own forums as having issues with that new OLED display. Some say that the display is grainy, for example, and the issue seems to be most pronounced on darker backgrounds.

Some users describe the issue as if it was a photo taken in the dark with a large level of noise, but it isn't yet clear just how widespread it is. It's also unclear whether this is actually an issue as such or simply a feature of the way these new displays work. The issues don't appear to be affecting everyone to be sure, and none of the reviewers who got their hands on the iPad Pro early reported any similar issues.

The M2 Ultra Mac Studio and Mac Pro are among the best Macs you can buy if you need raw horsepower and lots of cores, but we now expect that Apple will ship the M3 family of chips for these computers entirely and move on to the M4. Apple announced the first M4 device earlier this month in the form of the iPad Pro, and while there are no Macs with the chip yet that will change later this year. But in terms of the M4 Ultra and the Macs that will use it, there is no suggestion that they will arrive before 2025.

In fact, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has now reiterated that in the paywalled version of the Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. Gurman says that Apple's current roadmap has the company set to launch the new M4-powered Mac Studio and Mac Pro in the middle fo 2025 which means that we shouldn't expect anything any time soon. Thankfully, the M2 Ultra Mac Studio and Mac Pros are still extremely fast devices.

Gurman also says that he doesn't expect that Apple will announce any new Macs at the WWDC event that will kick off on June 10, allowing the company to instead focus on software. Given the expected focus on big AI features coming to the iPhone that could be the best decision, giving Apple the time needed to show off its new software updates to the fullest. Alongside the iOS 18 update, we also expect Apple to preview new updates for the Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro.

Apple's AirTag is a pretty solid item tracker as it is, but it hasn't been updated since its release back in April 2021. That means that the tracker is now more than three years old and a new report suggests that Apple is finally getting ready to release an updated model. But that isn't going to happen any time soon, it would seem, and we might have to wait another whole year.

That's according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman who was writing in the weekly Power On newsletter when he suggested that mid-2025 might be the timeframe we should be looking at.

According to Gurman, the next-generation AirTag is being developed under the codename B589 within Apple. It's currently undergoing manufacturing tests with supply chain partners and the tracker is currently aiming for the middle of next year, although that could change before the updated AirTag is officially unveiled.