Latest News - Page 608

Microsoft confirms that its gaming hardware revenues are down significantly as consumers are buying fewer Xbox consoles.

Microsoft's latest Q3 results delivered both good and bad news for Xbox. The good news is that revenues are up +50% to $5.451 billion, driven by content & services, and that Xbox has now made more than it ever has before. The bad news? Hardware earnings are down, this time dropping by 31%.

Xbox consoles generated $429 million in revenue for the Q3 period, representing just 8% of the total quarterly amount. "Xbox hardware revenue decreased 31% driven by lower volume of consoles sold," reads Microsoft's new 10-Q SEC filing. While Microsoft may be getting outpaced on the hardware front, it's doing very well when it comes to gaming software and services.

Lenovo has just unveiled its latest ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 ultraportable high-performance AI mobile workstation, which is the first laptop with an Intel Core Ultra vPro "Meteor Lake" CPU and new LPCAMM2 memory. Check it out:

The new Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 laptops feature up to the Intel Core Ultra 9 processor with 16 cores and 22 threads clocking in at up to 5.1GHz, with 24MB of smart cache. There's an integrated Intel Arc "Xe-LPG" GPU with up to 8 Xe-Cores, but being an AI-ready mobile workstation, Lenovo bakes in up to an NVIDIA RTX 3000 workstation GPU with 4608 CUDA core and 8GB of GDDR6 memory.

Lenovo uses a 16-inch screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 92% screen-to-body ratio, which looks great as the panel takes up most of the display area (which is what you want, huge bezels SUCK). The top cover itself is made from recycled aluminum which doesn't just make the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 roll out with an eco-friendly design, but also makes the laptop lighter and inside of a very durable body.

Xbox gaming revenues are being supercharged by Activision Blizzard King.

Microsoft just reported its Q3 FY24 results, and it's great news for Xbox. The games division generated $5.45 billion in the period from January - March 2024, up 50% year-over-year and driven almost entirely by software and services. Q3 earnings have been significantly elevated due to Microsoft recognizing Activision's revenues as part of its own--ABK made up 61 points of the 62% growth in content & services earnings.

Things get even more interesting when we tally up Xbox's 9-month results. Thanks to Activision's mighty multi-billion dollar influx, Xbox has now made more revenue in 3 quarters than it has for all previous full year periods. Xbox is currently at $16.481 billion for the Fiscal Year 2024 period, beating out the original $16.22 billion record set in Fiscal Year 2022.

HP has just unveiled its latest OMEN 17 gaming laptop, a new member of the ever-growing AI PC family of laptops on the market. It features AMD's new Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" APU, which features an NPU for AI workloads.

The new HP OMEN 17 gaming laptop AMD Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" APUs in three different SKUs: Ryzen 9 8945HS, Ryzen 7 8845HS, and the Ryzen 5 8645HS APUs. Each of the Ryzen 8040 APUs has a dedicated Ryzen AI-based NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for AI workloads.

HP includes a trio of GPU options for its new OMEN 17 gaming laptop, all from NVIDIA's family of GeForce RTX 40 series Laptop GPUs. We've got the option of the flagship OMEN 17 rolling out with the GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU, the GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU, and finally, the GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU.

New data released by Bethesda and Microsoft may indicate that Fallout 76's userbase primarily plays on consoles.

Thanks to the Amazon Prime show, everyone is playing Fallout games, including Bethesda's infamous comeback kid Fallout 76. The studio recently confirmed that Fallout games had nearly 5 million people all playing at the same time. The live game Fallout 76 had over 1 million players all raiding and surviving in irradiated West Virginia, making up about 20% of all Fallout players.

It's likely that the majority of Fallout 76's users are playing on consoles. This is based on the admittedly limited data from SteamDB that shows Fallout 76 hit an all-time peak of 73,368 users on Steam. That means Steam PC players accounted for 7.3% of total Fallout 76 players during this timeframe at a maximum. So where are the other 926,000 players?

In a 3-2 vote, the FCC has just restored Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality is officially back. Under the reinstated rule, internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T are now prohibited from "blocking traffic, slowing down content, or creating pay-to-play internet fast lanes."

Broadband internet has been deemed an essential service, and has been reclassified as a telecommunications service, making internet subject to Title II standards of the Communications Act (essentially, now that the internet is an essential telecommunications service, the FCC can impose specific rules on ISPs).

The Apple Vision Pro went on sale in February and now the man who led the marketing for the spatial computer, Frank Casanova, has reportedly left the company. Casanova had worked at Apple for 36 years across a number of different roles including leading the expansion of the iPhone to new carriers.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Casanova left the company last week to retire. He was named Apple's first head of marketing for augmented reality in 2019 before taking the lead on the headset, Gurman says. His role involved attending the release of Apple's new spatial computer at the Grove shopping mall in Los Angeles alongside Apple's services head Eddy Cue. Dan Riccio, currently the executive who oversees Apple Vision Pro development, is also nearing retirement.

The Apple Vision Pro was heavily rumored for years before it was finally announced in June of last year and then we had to wait until February for it to finally go on sale. However, the Apple Vision Pro is only currently available to buy in the United States although a global launch is expected to happen before the end of the year. Apple hasn't yet confirmed which countries will receive the Apple Vision Pro this year, however, nor has it offered any hard release timeframes, either.

Apple has shared the first trailer for the fourth season of the critically acclaimed comedy series Trying, starring BAFTA Award nominee Esther Smith and SAG Award nominee Rafe Spall. The show has been one of the hits of the Apple TV+ stable and is getting ready to premiere that fourth season.

Apple says that season four of Trying will premiere on Wednesday, May 22 with the first two episodes available on day one. Then, a new episode will be made available to stream online every Wednesday through to the season's conclusion on July 3.

In this new season, Apple says that the story will fast-forward six years to discover that Nikki (Smith) and Jason (Spall) are experienced adopters. However, their teenage daughter causes the pair to find themselves struggling again, and their parenting skills are sure to be put to the test.

Apple TV+ has today released the first trailer for Hollywood Con Queen, a new documentary series that will run across three different episodes and premiere on May 8.

The new series tells the story of a figure dubbed the Con Queen who impersonates the most powerful women of Hollywood. That sees the impersonator lure unsuspecting victims to Indonesia, Apple's explainer says, offering them the promise of a life-changing career opportunity. The con sees them use their personal finances to try and make it big while being explored in the process.

The whole thing continues until investigative journalist Scott Johnson of The Hollywood Reporter and private investigator Nicole Kotsianas set out to get to the bottom of things - only to find that the story is stranger than they might have originally thought.

MSI is the latest motherboard maker to pop up with advice for those who are experiencing PC games crashing with their Core i9 14th-gen or 13th-gen processors - and it includes "some workarounds recommended by Intel."

This advice is delivered in a blog post from MSI on the topic of 'Improving Gaming Stability for Intel Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K' processors.

So, let's dive in: Suggested workaround number 1 is simply notching back the processor's power limit to Intel's default of 253W.

If you received a strange email earlier today saying that your Apple Store trade-in has been canceled, panic not - you can safely ignore it. The whole thing seems to have been an unfortunate glitch.

When buying a new iPhone, via the iPhone Upgrade Program or any other way, trading in your old device is a good way to save money. Buyers mail off their old handset and get a credit for the correct amount and everything normally goes well. But that hasn't been the case today, it seems, with Apple sending emails to people saying that their trade-ins have been canceled even if they haven't.

In some examples, the trade-ins took place months ago. One user took to the X social network to say that they traded in an old iPhone in September and have the receipt to prove it. But that didn't stop Apple from sending them an email today saying that their trade-in had been canceled because they didn't send their old iPhone in.

WhatsApp, the meta-owned instant messaging platform, has been testing support for passkeys for some time now and the feature is already available for Android users - in fact, it has been since October. Now though, WhatsApp has started to roll out passkey support for those who also happen to have an iPhone for the very first time.

The news was first reported by Engadget which reported that iPhone owners now have the option to use passkeys. It's rolling out to WhatsApp users right now, but it could take a few weeks for it to become available to everyone because of the way that WhatsApp tends to make these new features available.

In a statement provided to Engadget, Alice Newton-Rex, WhatsApp's head of product said that the support for passkey verification will make signing into WhatsApp easier and more secure. It's seen as an additional layer of security, she continued.

X is preparing to make the jump to your home TV, or any smart TV that is capable of downloading a new app, with the company preparing to release its own TV app dedicated for X video.

As part of Elon Musk's intention to create the "Everything App" X is now making the jump to TV's with a new separate app that will bring X video content to your couch. X's likely hoping the impact of bringing X to TVs will at least slightly shift the brand into being recognized as a video app as well - something Musk and X have been working on since the Tesla CEO purchased the company.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino, took to her personal X account to announce the X TV App and what it will entail. According to the X CEO the new app will come with a "trending video algorithm" that will enable users to stay updated with popular video content, AI-powered topics that will create a personalized user experience, cross-device support that will let users start a video on their phone and continue you it on your TV through casting, and an advanced video search.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shared new insights into the number of users on Threads, the company's direct competitor to X, formerly Twitter.

Zuckerberg revealed during a recent earnings call that Threads has gained more than 28 million daily users in the US, beating Elon Musk's X, according to Apptopia's VP of Research Thomas Grant to Business Insider. Notably, reports indicate that Threads has gained 20 million users since December and is currently sitting in third place in the App Store for the most popular app, while Threads is in position 41.

X has definitely had a turbulent experience since being acquired by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, with the current battle being fought against the Australian government for refusing to remove a piece of video content the nation's online safety agency deemed a "terrorist attack". X responded by locking all Australian users out of that content, which the agency said wasn't enough, and demanded the video content be removed completely from the platform.

AMD has released a new GPU driver and it brings in support for a high-profile game - Manor Lords - plus it improves another big hitter, performance-wise.

So, the headline here is the mentioned support for Manor Lords in AMD's Adrenalin 24.4.1 driver, the much talked about city builder set in medieval times which became the most wish-listed game on Steam - and it's released tomorrow.

Two games are also getting expanded HYPR-Tune support, and those are Nightingale along with Skull and Bones.

Fallout is very much flavor of the month, thanks to the success of the hit Prime Video show (we just finished it last night - what a finale), and so what next? Fallout games, of course, and here's something out of left-field.

For those who don't want to rekindle Fallout 4 - which has a current-gen update landing later today - you might want to play a new Fallout-inspired post-apocalyptic outing in Excel.

Yes, Excel is the medium in which you run 'Mercer' which describes itself as a Fallout-inspired adventure game.

Windows 10 users can look forward to a small but nonetheless welcome change in that the monthly cumulative updates for the OS are set to get smaller in the future.

This more streamlined update size is being achieved by Microsoft leveraging a feature it has already developed and successfully used with Windows 11, namely reverse update data generation technology.

It sounds a bit of a mouthful, but as Windows Latest, which flagged this up, points out, this should decrease the size of Windows 10 updates substantially - shrinking upgrades by up to 40%. This move is going to be in place from next month, we're told, so the May cumulative update will benefit from being more compact.

For those who've binge-watched the Fallout series on Amazon Prime Video and are missing it, you might want to hop back into Fallout 4 to get your post-apocalyptic fix - as an update for the classic game is about to arrive.

The current-gen update is set to debut later today - it'll quite possibly be out by the time you read this - and it delivers a bunch of goodies to players on PlayStation and Xbox, as well as PC gamers.

So, what's new? PS5 and Xbox Series X and Series S consoles will get new 'performance' and 'quality' modes to allow for faster frame rates (up to 60 fps) or jacked-up resolutions respectively.

The saga of Microsoft jamming more nudging and prodding into Windows 11 continues, with a fresh rumor now indicating that future plans might just involve outright ads in the Start menu.

As regular Microsoft leaker Albacore highlighted on X (formerly Twitter), there's been a telling addition to the option to enable recommendations and tips (or app promotions) to include a specific mention of "ads."

Windows Latest, which spotted the above post, also noted that they've observed this change in testing in the Canary channel (build 26200 to be precise).

Although it's an update aimed at game developers, 3D artists, and other creators who use Unreal Engine, the latest Unreal Engine 5.4 update is chock full of good news for gamers across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, especially for games that will fully utilize Unreal Engine 5's ray tracing and Nanite rendering capabilities.

Many of the updates and improvements are based on developers targeting 60 FPS, and this performance level is becoming the new norm for gamers. "With many developers targeting 60 Hz experiences, we've invested significant effort into improving rendering performance in UE 5.4," Epic writes.

This includes software variable rate shading (VRS) via Nanite, which will bring "substantial performance gains" to rendering while improving hardware ray-tracing (GPU instance culling has been added) and path-tracing performance. The update notes that ray tracing performance is sometimes improved by a factor of 2X.