As the games industry moves towards digital-based game sales, Japanese publisher Capcom has no plans to discontinue physical disc-based games any time soon.

While digital sales are taking over gaming, physical media remains an important part of the $180 billion interactive entertainment industry. Consumers still buy millions of discs a year at retailers like Walmart, Target, and Amazon, and publishers like Capcom, Electronic Arts, and even Sony Interactive Entertainment are still keen on producing disc-based games.

In a recent Q&A with shareholders, Japanese publisher Capcom was asked how the company plans to deal with the increasing digital-based needs of consumers. Capcom's answer was pretty clear-cut: The firm will continue delivering physical games as long as there is demand.

UPDATE from CrowdStrike 7/24/2024 at 5:22pm CDT: "That claim is false. CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients. We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates."

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company that was responsible for rolling out a faulty driver update to its software that caused 8.5 million Windows machines to enter endless blue screen of death boot loops is now offering customers partners $10 Uber Eats gift cards as a way of saying sorry for the inconvenience.

Reports indicate CrowdStrike is sending out emails to its partners offering a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology. Multiple sources have reported receiving these emails from the cybersecurity company, with one source speaking to Tech Crunch and saying CrowdStrike recognizes the "additional work that the July 19 incident has caused" and for that "your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!"

Google has announced that it will no longer continue with its plan to completely phase out third-party cookies on its Chrome browser and will instead take a more user-friendly approach.

Google's Privacy Sandbox VP Anthony Chavez wrote the announcement and explained Google has received concerns from developers, privacy advocates, regulators, publishers, and others about the removal of third-party cookies. Google has heard this feedback and has come up with a new plan that won't include the complete removal of third-party cookies, which allows companies to serve targeted advertisements to users based on the activity of the user around other parts of the internet.

Notably, Google said back in 2020 that it was working toward blocking all third-party cookies in 2024, and the company even tested the removal in January when 1% of Chrome users had all third-party cookies blocked. The concerns from regulators come from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which is likely concerned Google will favor its own profits in advertisements if third-party cookies are blocked.

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind one of, if not the biggest IT outage in history, has explained where it went wrong after pushing out an update to its malware software that nuked a staggering 8.5 million Windows machines.

The update was released last Friday, and approximately 8.5 million Windows machines were thrown into infinite boot loops with blue screens of death, impacting many aspects of everyday society, such as airlines, supermarkets, telecommunications, emergency services, and more. Since then, CrowdStrike has been quiet on how it missed the faults within the driver throughout internal testing, which it has now explained in a new update.

Here's how it works. CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor, the software that was updated and ultimately led to the global outage, uses what is called "Sensor Content," which is software that defines what Falcon Sensor is capable of. The software is updated with "Rapid Response Content" which is designed to enable the software to detect and collect information on any new threats.

Intel recently confirmed it has found the root cause of the instability problems reported by users of its 13th and 14th Gen CPUs, but, unfortunately, the chipmaker has made things quite confusing with a convoluted and seemingly contradictory response.

Intel officially published a statement about the instability reports for its Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs in the 13th and 14th Gen families. These instability reports have been stacking up for months now, and very little has been done on Intel's part to provide remedies for customers of the affected products or an explanation as to why the faults are occurring. Now, we have official confirmation from Intel that excessive voltage and oxidation are part of the problem.

The chipmaker posted a statement about the instability problems, citing an issue in the microcode algorithm that is causing incorrect voltage requests to the processor, resulting in elevated voltages. Intel said it was targeting mid-August for a microcode algorithm update. Notably, this statement didn't mention anything about oxidation, leading many to believe voltage was the root cause, and general instability problems will all be ironed out in an update in August.

A team of researchers discovered a new source of oxygen at the bottom of the ocean, and it's discovery has led to more questions being asked than answered.

The discovery was detailed in a new paper published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, which explains the new oxygen source is called "dark oxygen," which is likely a reference to dark matter in astronomy as it can be measured but not seen. Much like dark matter, researchers first discovered dark oxygen when they discovered oxygen levels at the seafloor were rising, which would be impossible at depths of 13,000 feet, particularly without any photosynthetic processes.

"When we first got this data, we thought the sensors were faulty because every study ever done in the deep sea has only seen oxygen being consumed rather than produced. We would come home and recalibrate the sensors but over the course of 10 years, these strange oxygen readings kept showing up," said Biogeochemist Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS)

Meta has announced its release of Llama 3.1 405B, which is what the company is describing as the "world's largest" open-source large language model.

Meta explains via a new blog post that Llama 3.1 405B is "in a class of its own" with "state-of-the-art capabilities" that rival the leading AI models currently on the market when it comes to general knowledge, steerability, math, multilingual translation, and tool use. Meta directly compares Llama 3.1 405B with competing AI models, such as OpenAI's various GPT models, showcasing the recently released model trained on 15 trillion tokens. A token can be considered a fragment of a question and an answer.

To achieve the training of this 405 billion parameter model, Meta used 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which cost $25,000 each. This means the AI model was trained by $400 million worth of NVIDIA GPUs, which required 30.84 million GPU hours and produced approximately 11,390 tons of CO2.

Support for AMD's FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling and Frame Generation technology is improving, thanks to the launch of FSR 3.1. The latest version of the technology brings notable improvements to FSR 2's image quality when upscaling alongside decoupling and improving Frame Generation. With FSR 3.1, GeForce RTX 20 and 30 Series owners can enable AMD's Frame Generation alongside NVIDIA DLSS upscaling, which is very cool to see.

FSR 3.1 support has arrived in a handful of PlayStation PC games, including Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Including games with FSR 3 and FSR 3.1 and those coming soon, over 60 titles support AMD's DLSS alternative. Hundreds if you count games with FSR 2 upscaling.

With that, we've compiled a handy list, accurate as of July 2024, of all known games with FSR support, available now and coming soon, broken down into each version. Let's get to it.

Spotify first announced it was working on implementing a new "HiFi" or lossless audio quality into its product offering stack, providing consumers with an option of listening to high-quality music for a $5 increase in their monthly subscription.

Spotify announced its development on HiFi three years ago, and since then, there hasn't really been much talk about the new service, but the company's CEO Daniel Ek, recently touched on it during an earnings call where he said HiFi will likely be bundled with other Premium-level features, such as AI-powered playlists, additional control of the application, and other unannounced features.

The bundling of these features with HiFi is likely to provide more value to a buyer who will have to pay $20/month to access this deluxe version of the music-streaming platform. Ek said despite HiFi being announced three years ago it's still "in early days" of development. Reports previously estimated the new subscription tier, which would be above the current Premium tier, would be priced around $20 as Ek said this deluxe tier would be approximately "$5 above the current premium tier".

One of the rarest Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games of all time is currently up for auction, with the current bid over at auction house Goldwin sitting on a whopping $130,000. The game in question is the 1990 Nintendo World Championships cartridge, created by Nintendo America and given out to 26 lucky readers of the Nintendo Power magazine.

Yeah, with only 26 produced, this gold-colored cartridge is legendary - and the one going up for auction comes from Patrick King of Cheyenne, who can be found in Nintendo Power #18 from 1990. The game and cartridge were created to commemorate the 1990 Nintendo World Championships and contain specialized time-limited versions of Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, Tetris, and other games. The visible dip switch on the front allows the time to be adjusted.

Nintendo created 350 gray-colored cartridges for the time-trial speedrunning competition. However, these limited gold versions are highly sought after - making this a rare piece of videogame history that rarely shows up in this form.