Latest News - Page 691

AMD has some bragging rights with its new financial report for the quarter ending December 2023, where it spent a considerable amount of time talking about its venture into AI that it dominates on the CPU side of things.

The company reported Q4 2023 revenue of $6.1 billion during the three-month period, making a 6% and 10% growth sequentially and annually, respectively. AMD's client computing revenue dropped by 25% in 2023, but it's revenue leaped by 62% annually thanks to its fantastic sales on its new Ryzen 7000 series processors.

AMD took the time during its earnings presentation that its Ryzen CPUs are "now powering more than 90% of AI-enabled PCs currently in market".

Ever wondered if you could use your mouse as a webcam? Of course you haven't - probably not, anyway - but someone did, and went ahead to complete a project that made this a reality (to an extent, we should add as a caveat).

As depicted on YouTube, Doctor Volt took an optical mouse and turned its sensor into a camera with a bit of high-tech tinkering (as flagged up by Hackaday, via Tom's Hardware).

The sensor was augmented with a wide-angle lens (made for a Raspberry Pi camera), and Doctor Volt used a third-party microcontroller (ESP32-S3 chip) in conjunction with the mouse sensor. Some 3D printing was required to make parts to hold the lens in place, too.

Following numerous commercial sales misses, Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix will now practice Seneca's wisdom of quality over quantity.

In a recent Q&A with investors, Square Enix's new CEO Takashi Kiryu confirms that the company will produce fewer games with the aim of delivering higher quality titles.

In the report, Kiryu says that Square Enix's multi-faceted approach to content was too fragmented, and that he wants to better centralize and structure games development teams to focus more on quality experiences. Kiryu goes on to say that he feels that Square Enix's games have fallen "somewhere in the middle" between blockbuster AAA games and indies like Palworld, for instance.

Last week Apple released its first iOS 17.4 beta, an update that will bring with it support for third-party app stores in the EU and more. But alongside all the controversy related to that, the company also had another issue - the software update was causing problems. Now, a new re-released version of the same iOS 17.4 beta has been shared.

This updated version has now been made available to developers while also being released to the public beta channel for the first time. The update brings with it all of the same changes that were present in the initial release but with the addition of fixes. Those who downloaded the update last week reported that there were issues with the Shortcuts app, with many shortcuts no longer working.

It now appears that this new update has been released to address that issue, with some reporting on social media that the updated iOS 17.4 fixes the issues that they were previously experiencing.

Apple's Vision Pro spatial computing headset will finally go on sale at the end of this week with February 2 being the big day. Today saw a number of early reviews published after Apple's embargo dropped and that means that we're starting to learn more and more about a headset that was shrouded in mystery.

As it turns out, not all of the things that we are learning make for great news for those who have already splashed the $3,499+ required to get a Vision Pro on launch day. However, not all of it is disastrous although some of the tidbits make for strange reading.

At the top of the list of things that we learned is the fact that while the Vision Pro's battery can last up to three hours per charge depending on what you're doing, swapping it out is going to mean having to turn the headset off and then power it back on. That means that there is no hot-swapping available - those whose Vision Pro batteries are running dry will instead have to just plug it in and wait for it to charge before moving away from the AC outlet.

Apple's iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro models might have only been on sale for a few months but we're already wondering what will come next when Apple unveils the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro. They're likely to debut in or around September of this year, and expectations are growing that the hardware at least might not be all that exciting

While we've learned from various reports that Apple intends to add a new Capture button to this year's iPhones and that the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will sport increased display sizes, that might be all we have to look forward to.

That's according to a report by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo who said as much in a new report on his Medium blog. The analyst believes that iPhone shipments as a whole will be reduced by around 15% in 2024 as a direct response to the lack of upgrades offered by the new models.

WhatsApp is one of the world's biggest and best cross-platform messaging solutions and it appears that the Meta-owned company is hard at work on getting ready to add a new security feature for iPhone users.

The feature, as first reported by the WhatsApp watchers at WABetaInfo, will see iPhone owners gain support for signing into their accounts using a passkey for the first time. The move will give people a new option for signing into accounts that don't require that they remember any credentials.

Passkeys are seen by some as a replacement for usernames and passwords and they remove the need for people to remember those things - a change that is a huge one in terms of security. People often reuse passwords which puts their accounts at risk and that isn't a consideration when passkeys are used. Instead, passkeys use biometrics to handle the authentication mechanism which in the case of the iPhone means Touch ID or Face ID.

Apple's Vision Pro headset finally goes on sale on Friday, February 2 and we can expect big things based on the early reviews and hands-on experiences. The headset has been available for preorder for a couple of weeks now and we're told by some reports that Apple already sold up to 200,000 units. And as more early reviews start to appear online we're learning new things about what those buyers can expect when their headset arrives.

One of those reviews comes via Brian Tong on YouTube in which he takes us through a few of the apps and interactions that Vision Pro owners will be using. We learn that Siri is perhaps the best way to launch apps and that the on-screen keyboard isn't great, but the biggest news for some will be how the battery behaves in terms of how long it lasts per charge and how quickly it charges when required.

Apple says that the Vision Pro's battery lasts for up to two hours per charge and that watching video alone will extend that to 2.5 hours. But it's difficult to know how well that actually works in real life without testing, and that's what Tong did so that we don't have to.

Microsoft Graveyard is a new website which is one of those that does what it says on the tin - namely, it offers up an array of headstones of products and services which Microsoft has killed off.

Actually, there's a slight twist in that there are also products which are still around, but on the chopping block - these are represented by a coffin.

Everything is in chronological order - coffins, followed by gravestones, with the most recently killed off products coming first. And that most recent headstone is Odyssey, the survival game from Blizzard which just got axed and became a casualty of the post-buyout reorganization.

NVIDIA has a new graphics driver in beta which seems to provide a substantial boost to frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077, especially in a test build of Windows 11.

We're talking about the game running 23% faster, in fact, although there's a noteworthy caveat here.

Wccftech spotted that Compusemble on YouTube ran some tests with Cyberpunk 2077 and NVIDIA's beta driver, with DLSS 3 on, and also with frame generation turned off, across different Windows 11 builds (stable and Canary).

An ocean exploration company from South Carolina announced on Saturday that it has sonar images that may be evidence of famed aviator Amelia Earhart's plane wreckage.

According to reports from NPR and the Wall Street Journal, the team behind the sonar images is Deep Sea Vision, an ocean exploration company that says it made the discovery using an unmanned underwater drone paired with a 16-person crew that both scoured more than 5,200 square miles of ocean floor between Australia and Hawaii.

Notably, the team detected an airplane-shaped object on the seafloor approximately 100 miles off Howland Island, which is where Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were scheduled to refuel but never arrived. Reports indicate that the images do resemble Earhart's aircraft, a Lockheed Electra, in not only shape but also size and tail. The famed disappearance of the aviator happened in 1937 while she was attempting to circumnavigate the globe, which would have made her the first female pilot to have flown around the world.

NASA has released an incredible new Hubble Space Telescope image that showcases a cosmic bridge linking two galaxies.

The galaxy seen above is part of a galactic group called Arp 295, and what can be seen in the image is an incredible 250,000 light-year-long bridge of stars and gas that stretches between two galaxies, Arp 295a to Arp 295b. The galactic cluster imaged above is located 210 million light years from Earth and gives astronomers a peak into the future of our own Milky Way galaxy as it is anticipated that it will collide with the closest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, in approximately 4 billion years.

So, how did this cosmic bridge form? Reports indicate that following the collision of the two Arp galaxies, they began to circle each other, with each's gravitational pull eventually drawing in the other and removing gas, dust, and stars. This process can take billions of years, and eventually, the galaxies merge, which forms an overall new shape for the now singular galaxy.

NASA has released a collection of images snapped by the incredibly impressive James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the world's most powerful space telescope that cost more than $10 billion.

From its distant vantage point in space, NASA's Webb has honed its extremely sensitive instruments on a selection of spiral galaxies, revealing them in unprecedented detail for the world to see. The above image is a mosaic of all of the spiral galaxies Webb has imaged, and while many of these galaxies, if not all of them, have been previously studied by astronomers, many are still enthralled by the level of detail Webb can achieve as the observatory's images show parts of the spiral galaxies that have never been seen before.

One of the sought-after aspects of these images is the capture of millions of newborn stars, which populate the spiral arms of these galaxies.

The newly announced underwater horror game Deep Dark Sea, powered by Unreal Engine 5, takes inspiration from Dead Space and Subnautica to deliver a truly unsettling experience while exploring the ocean floor.

CEO and Founder at Corncrow Games AB, Patrik Hansson, has recently shared a teaser trailer for a new underwater horror experience. Deep Dark Sea is a scarily atmospheric deep sea game that rivals the fear of the ocean players have burnt into them thanks to the likes of games like Subnautica by Unknown Worlds. The teaser puts the player into the shoes of an underwater explorer as/ they walk the ocean floor.

The unnerving atmosphere and darkness surrounding the player build tension and fear, but the darkness is not all that is here to scare players into never swimming again. The trailer shows a giant crustacean rush the player as they fire some kind of weapon to dispatch the monstrous creature as well as stumbling across gigantic skeletons of long-dead deep sea creatures, begging the question, what else is out there in the darkness?

Gamers on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac now have a new console-quality game to try after 505 Games made Death Stranding Director's Cut available for download in the App Store. The game has been available for preorder for a little while but it's now ready for everyone to download and play for the first time.

With this game being such a graphically intensive title there are some limitations on what hardware Death Stranding Director's Cut can be played on. Devices that support the game include the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max with their A17 Pro chips, while M-series iPads and Macs are also supported.

Right now the Death Stranding Director's Cut download will cost just $19.99 for the game across all three platforms, a price that is currently half off the usual $40 asking price. There is no current indication of when that price will change, so keep that in mind if you plan on picking this game up and be sure to order yours as soon as possible to avoid paying more than you have to.

Apple is currently testing the iOS 17.4 beta with developers ahead of a public release that is expected to happen within the next few weeks but no firm details have yet been released to the public. For now, though, the first beta is available and we can expect more beta updates to arrive as time progresses. We can also expect to see more information about what new features will arrive in iOS 17.4, too.

In the first beta, we learned that Apple is going to make a handful of new emojis available to iPhone owners, with six additions on the way. Those additions add more options for people who like to use emojis as a way to communicate or add context to their text. The same new emojis are also part of the macOS 14.4 beta on the Mac, iPadOS 17.4 on the iPad, and watchOS 10.4 on the Apple Watch.

In terms of the new emojis, 9to5Mac shared details about what users can look forward to. One of the emojis is a broken chain, while another is a red phoenix. In addition, a brown mushroom and a green slice of lime are also part of this update. Two more depict someone agreeing and disagreeing with faces moving in a vertical and horizontal motion, respectively.

Apple's reportedly hard at work on a new kind of operating system that could be used to power future smart home accessories with references to an unconfirmed homeOS software found in the first tvOS 17.4 beta.

This isn't the first time that we have heard that Apple has an interest in something called homeOS, but this is our clearest indication yet that it will be part of the company's future software roadmap and could potentially replace some of the software already in use. As an example, the tvOS beta software that included the references could potentially be replaced by a future homeOS software release. The same goes for the HomePod software that powers Apple's smart speakers.

The references found inside tvOS 17.4 were first reported by MacRumors, but details on what the software will do and which devices it could power are unclear right now. However, 2021 job listings by Apple previously mentioned that successful applicants would be working on homeOS software before references to the software were later removed. There has been no sign of the homeOS name since then and its appearance in the tvOS 17,4 beta software could suggest that Apple is now closer to making it a reality than ever.

AMD has released a new graphics driver specifically for a single game, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

The new Adrenalin Edition version 23.40.02.03 has an important fix for Suicide Squad, namely a cure for issues with graphics corruption when ray tracing is enabled.

Clearly, this must be an irksome enough glitch to warrant the deployment of a new graphics driver.

Duncan Jones, director of the sci-fi film Moon, has long planned a movie adaptation of the sci-fi war comic series Rogue Trooper and, according to reports, has completed principal photography.

Little was known about the adaptation since its first tease was posted to Jones' Twitter back in 2018. The only information we had was it was to be written and directed by Jones. Now, for the first time in years, we have fresh information; according to a report from Variety, the feature film will be entirely CGI-animation created with Unreal Engine 5. Announced cast members include Mission: Impossible's Aneurin Barnard, Agent Carters Hayley Atwell, and Slow Horses' Jack Lowden.

The film will be based on a strip of the same name from the British anthology comic book series 2000 AD. The Rogue Trooper tells the story of 19, a pale-blue-skinned super-soldier fighting a brutal and relentless future war. 19 is the sole survivor of a horrific attack and must continue to fight to uncover the truth of who sold out himself and his comrades. Not alone in his fight, he is joined by the three minds of his killed squad, whose personalities are digitally preserved within his gun, helmet, and rucksack.

The world is quickly becoming infused with artificial intelligence (AI), and while you may correctly think artists such as video game developers or logo designers would be affected by the rise in popularity of the new generative AI tools, so are comedians or at least their estates.

George Carlin, a widely regarded hall-of-fame member of the comedy world, was resurrected in the form of a new comedy special that its creators said was generated by AI. The new comedy special gained attention from the Carlin estate, which resulted in a lawsuit being filed against the podcast outlet Dudsey and its hosts Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, with the filing alleging the creators didn't have permission to use Carlin's likeness, nor have any license to use any of Carlin's copyrighted materials.

The special was originally posted on YouTube on January 9 and began with a voiceover that stated the special was created with an AI engine that listened to Carlin's entire library of comedy content. Additionally, the AI voiceover stated, "did my best to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today".