Latest News - Page 695

Some reported sales figures for NVIDIA's just-released RTX 4070 Ti Super paint a much more positive picture than other recent leaks around the RTX Super refreshes.

VideoCardz noticed the report from German site 3DCenter, which details the purported launch day figures from Mindfactory, a major retailer in that country.

Obviously use caution around any leaked figures, but we're told that the RTX 4070 Ti Super shifted 280 to 300 units on its first day (some approximation is involved with how some models sold).

The GPU launch train continues this week, bringing us NVIDIA's new 4K gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and AMD's mainstream Radeon RX 7600 XT. Both of which feature 16GB of VRAM. Kosta and Jak discuss how they fit into the current GPU landscape.

It's not all GPU talk, as Jak and Kosta touch on Mark Zuckerberg and Meta's big AI push that will see them spend over $10 billion on NVIDIA GPUs. Then there's the Apple Vision Pro, which sold out and is currently on backorder. It's an impressive showing, but who exactly is this super-expensive headset for?

It's also a big week for gaming news, with the duo discussing the incredible success and controversy surrounding the 'Pokemon with Gunz' hit Palworld and the impressive new Indiana Jones game coming from Wolfenstein studio Machine Games.

Current box office projections for the upcoming Marvel Superhero movie Madame Web, led by Dakota Johnson, hint at the worst opening weekend yet for a Sony Spider-Man Universe film.

According to long-range box office tracking, it appears that audiences are just not interested in Sony's latest Spider-Man spinoff film. According to Boxoffice Pro, Sony's upcoming spider superhero team-up movie is currently tracking to earn between $25 million and $35 million on its opening weekend, which, if true and the film does fall in between that range, would mark the lowest opening weekend yet for Sony's SSU (Sony's Spider-Man Universe).

Sony's vampire flick Morbius currently has the worst SSU opening weekend, sitting at a sad $39 million, followed by Venom at $80 million and the sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage at $90 million. Even if, by a miracle, Madame Web manages to sling its way to the higher-end of its tracking, its opening would still be lower than Disney's latest bomb, The Marvels, which premiered with an opening weekend of $46 million.

Surprise Box Office Rom-Com hit Anyone But You has breathed new life into the genre and broken a nearly decade-long record.

The success of the film is impressive considering the saturated market and dominance of streaming platforms; of course, the film's two extremely attractive leads, Sydney Sweeny and Glen Powell, may have also helped its success. The film may have also helped to re-ignite audiences' interest in the romantic comedy genre.

Anyone But You has had the vast majority of the world in a chokehold since its release on December 22, 2023, and although receiving mixed reviews from critics and audiences, the film has become the most profitable film of January 2024.

Although 2023's Barbie made history and has received eight Oscar nominations, some of the cast feel as though the film has been snubbed at this year's upcoming Oscars.

Ryan Gosling has spoken out about his disappointment that director Greta Gerwig and co-star Margot Robbie have not been nominated in their respective categories at the upcoming 96th Academy Awards. Gosling was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Ken in the film, as well as co-star America Ferrera, who received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but this has led many to criticize the nominations for seemingly snubbing the film's two biggest creatives.

Gosling, who said he was "extremely honored to be nominated," also shared his disappointment in the nominations, saying -

Tesla stock slid 13.2% on Thursday after the company released its 4th quarter earnings report, which revealed the company missed several of its internal estimates.

The massive loss in Musk's total value can be attributed to Tesla's stock price sliding to 180.38 on Thursday, and according to Forbes, the Tesla CEO lost $17 billion more than any other billionaire. For those that don't know, Musk owns 21% of Tesla, so when Tesla's stock price dips, so does Musk's total net worth, which is estimated to be around $203.6 billion - $20 billion more than LVMH's Bernard Arnault. Notably, Musk's net worth was a staggering $320 billion in November 2021, which made him the first person ever to obtain such a fortune.

Tesla's quarterly financial report revealed the company missed some targets, including total revenue. Tesla reported top-line revenue of $25.17 billion against the expected $25.87 billion. Furthermore, Tesla's revenue increased by 3% compared to a year ago, with the company also telling shareholders it expects its "vehicle volume growth rate may be notably lower than the growth rate achieved in 2023 as our teams work on the launch of the next-generation vehicle at Gigafactory Texas."

A few days ago, an asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere and exploded over Berlin, Germany, shocking many onlookers who were lucky enough to see the fiery entry.

Small asteroids enter Earth's atmosphere and explode every day, but due to Earth's surface mostly being covered by water, humans don't typically get to witness these awesome cosmic events. Researchers dedicated to tracking these space rocks are quite good at predicting when they will enter Earth's atmosphere, but every now and again, one small asteroid sneaks past detection or is only detected just hours before impact.

The asteroid that exploded over Berlin is officially called 2024 BXI and was first discovered by Krisztián Sárneczky, an astronomer at the Piszkéstető Mountain Station, part of Konkoly Observatory in Hungary. 2024 BXI was only discovered hours before it entered Earth's atmosphere, but before it arrived, NASA issued a warning for residents in West Berlin. "Heads Up: A tiny asteroid will disintegrate as a harmless fireball west of Berlin near Nennhausen shortly at 1:32 am CET. Overseers will see it if it's clear!" wrote NASA Asteroid Watch

It's a sad day in the science community as researchers and engineers worldwide salute NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity as the space agency has announced the helicopter's mission has ended.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson has announced that Ingenuity's efforts on the surface of the Red Planet have come to an end after the small helicopter sustained damage to at least one or more of its rotor blades during the landing of its last flight. Ingenuity landed in the Jezero Crater on the Red Planet in February 2018 with NASA's Perseverance rover.

The primary mission of the helicopter was to demonstrate that flight was capable on another planet, and once that was achieved, Ingenuity essentially turned into a reconnaissance device for NASA as it would fly ahead of Perseverance, capturing the terrain and surrounding area with its onboard cameras.

NASA has finally released some high-resolution images of the space agency's first asteroid sample collection, which arrived back on Earth as part of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission.

NASA collected the OSIRIS-REx capsule more than 3 months ago after it safely landed back on Earth on September 24, but due to the sampler's lid being tightly fastened onto the capsule, researchers were unable to open it. The mission was overall a massive success as NASA captured many more samples than it anticipated, even to the point where there were asteroid samples located on the top of the capsule lid.

The delay was specifically attributed to the two fasteners located on the top of the capsule, and since researchers are only able to interact with the capsule within its dedicated air-tight container through the use of gloves, engineers had to design special tools to unfasten the screws holding the lid in place. That was achieved, and now NASA has 2.48 ounces or 70 grams of asteroid dust.

Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has announced that he is leaving the company. The news comes shortly after Microsoft told employees that it will cut 1,900 jobs (about 8.6% of workers affected) across its entire Xbox gaming division.

Following the disruptive layoff announcement, Microsoft's gaming division appears to be in chaos right now. Today, Xbox lost some top leadership at Blizzard as both president Mike Ybarra and founder/chief design officer Allen Adham are leaving the billion-dollar company.

According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, today's cost-cutting measures also affected projects. Blizzard's upcoming survival game set in a new IP has been cancelled--it was codenamed Odyssey.

Microsoft is cutting 1,900 jobs from its Xbox gaming division just months after it closed the $68.7 billion merger with Activision-Blizzard.

Today, Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer informed employees that approximately 8.6% of them, or 1,900 workers, would be laid off.

Layoffs were expected as a result of the Xbox - Activision Blizzard King merger, but the current economic landscape has made companies extremely cost averse. Layoffs are happening everywhere in the tech sector, with the games industry having lost several thousands of jobs in 2024 alone.

Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition has been confirmed to be launching on PC in just a couple of months.

The port of the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn lands on March 21 as announced by Sony on the PlayStation blog.

Naturally, the PC version is embellished with a bunch of goodies, and that includes NVIDIA DLSS 3 and DLAA (plus AMD FSR and Intel XeSS). Speedy loading on your SSD will also be facilitated thanks to DirectStorage support, which is good to hear.

Until Dawn came out in 2015 for the PlayStation 4, and nearly a decade later, the horror game is apparently inbound for the PC (and PS5 console).

That's according to leaker billbil-kun of Dealabs, as Neowin flagged up, who asserts that an announcement regarding the PC port will be made soon. This comes hot on the heels of news that Until Dawn is also being made into a film, which makes sense, as the game has a highly cinematic feel to it already.

We've played the PS4 version and thought it was excellent in terms of the atmosphere, story, twists, and of course the scares and deaths.

The Sticky Notes app in Windows 11 (and Windows 10) is quite possibly a piece of software you've forgotten about - we certainly had - but this dusty application is set to get some attention from Microsoft.

The word from the devs on X (formerly Twitter) is that "we're back and better than ever" with new updates for Sticky Notes coming in 2024, apparently.

This won't be minor tweaking to the app, either, as we are promised that there will be some of the "biggest announcements yet." Prepare yourself for a major overhaul, then, perhaps.

Palworld has become a storming hit very quickly - it was released less than a week ago and has sold 8 million copies - but that explosion in popularity has come with its own problems.

The developer has freely admitted being taken by surprise by the success story of the 'Pokemon with guns' game and the sheer number of players flocking to servers has caused trouble, as well as the bugs that need to be ironed out.

In the latter case, we've just had a patch delivered on PC which fixes some issues, and that includes dealing with cheaters.

Palworld is going great guns, hitting yet another huge sales milestone, although this has been accompanied by what could be looked at as a tentative legal 'shot across the bows' from The Pokemon Company.

The latest sales news is that Palworld has now sold over 8 million copies, a pretty staggering feat considering it was released less than a week ago.

At the time of writing, Palworld is the most played Steam game, hitting 1.77 million concurrent players, which is nearly double the current tally of Counter-Strike 2 in second place (with 915,000).

Last week, the smash hit that is Palworld added DLSS support for its Early Access PC launch to boost performance for GeForce RTX owners, and considering the insane popularity of that game in the span of a few short days - it's worth reiterating this before diving into this week's list of game adding DLSS 2 or DLSS 3 support.

The headline title is Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the latest mainline release in SEGA's Yakuza series and the follow-up to the brilliant Like a Dragon that mixed turn-based RPG combat with a sprawling epic story set in modern-day Japan. The follow-up is even bigger, with a big chunk taking place in Hawaii while ramping up the enjoyable and fantastic mechanics that made the original a hit. It launches on January 26, with DLSS 3 support.

Next up is Enshrouded, which is available now on PC with DLSS 2 Super Resolution. Described as a "co-op survival action RPG for up to 16 players," it's launching into Early Access, and with DLSS 3, performance frame rates are increased by "93% on average at 4K" with max settings. Check out the DLSS video for Enshrouded below.

Our first GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER review, which you can read in full, covers the premium ROG Strix OC model from ASUS. Usually, the first reviews we publish for a GeForce RTX launch cover reference-spec cards that launch with prices that match the MSRP set by NVIDIA. And that was the plan, with our review of the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3X ready to drop.

But, a day or so before the review was set to go live, we got word that it was underperforming by around 5%, so we postponed the review because it wouldn't make sense for it to include incorrect benchmark data and conclusions.

Today, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER launches, bringing 16GB of VRAM and a boost to 4K gaming performance for the same $799 MSRP; MSI has released a statement about the performance discrepancy alongside an apology and a way for all those who pick up an MSI branded GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER to update the card's BIOS to reclaim some performance.

NIVIDA RTX Remix has entered Open Beta, allowing modders to easel remaster classic PC games with full ray tracing, AI-enhanced textures, DLSS and Reflex support, and modern physically-based rendering (PBR). To say it's a game-changer is an understatement, as it gives the tools to talented modders to essentially remaster and remake games into cutting-edge 2024 releases.

Look at the RTX Remix trailer above and this recent look at Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project from Orbifold Studios. The results are incredible when developers are given an easy way to replace in-game assets and add modern lighting effects, including real-time ray tracing.

RTX Remix is built on NVIDIA Omniverse and allows modders to inject any DirectX 8 or 9 title (a list that includes classics like Call of Duty 2, Hitman 2, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines) and begin the modding and remaster/remix process.

Apple is shifting into the warm arms of AI, making a series of acquisitions of AI companies, hiring staff, and hardware updates that will bake AI into the next generation of iPhones.

Apple is reportedly using on-device AI capabilities inside of its next-gen iPhones rather than relying on the cloud. Apple has been buying AI startups left and right, acquiring 21 companies since 2017. The most recent AI acquisition had Apple purchasing California-based start-up WaveOne, which works on AI-powered video compression, acquiring the company back in early 2023.

The company has been careful with generative AI chatbots and image creators like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe have been doing so far. Apple has reportedly been spending millions per day on multiple AI projects, including AI-powered text, voice, and image tools.