Latest News - Page 731

The TT Show Episode 15 is another big one and the second last episode before the show returns in 2024. This week, Jak and Kosta go through a massive week of Grand Theft Auto 6 hype and news, covering the PC version delay and how it's shaping up to be the most popular game of all time.

The duo also talk about the recent The Game Awards 2023 presentation, which seemed to be more about showcasing new trailers and 'World Premieres' than it was handing out awards. And with that, they take a look at the stunning Hellblade 2 trailer running on Xbox Series X hardware, the ambitious follow-up to No Man's Sky from Hello Games, and SEGA dipping into the Dreamcast era to bring back some classics.

Plus, talk about how the developers behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III can't take a joke. This week's episode also looks at Microsoft ending support for Windows 10, though based on just how popular it still is, Kosta isn't convinced that the plug is actually being pulled.

Naughty Dog has ceased development on its Last of Us live service game, which had been in pre-production since The Last of Us II.

Sony's live service push isn't going according to plan. Inspired by billion-dollar GaaS titles like Fortnite, Warzone, Apex Legends, and even Minecraft, Sony's games division laid out an ambitious strategy to release 12 live service games by FY25 (April 2025 - March 2026). This ambition has been considerably scaled down due to the current landscape of the games market, which has triggered thousands of layoffs to counter rising costs.

In a Q2 earnings brief, Sony announced that it had reduced its FY25 live service slate from 12 to 6 games, citing that the other titles would be delayed. Rising costs has triggered layoffs at Bungie, who Sony acquired in 2022 for $3.6 billion to help lead its live service charge. Sony is currently relying on Bungie to help vet its live service games with a "rigorous review process." Naughty Dog's Last of Us GaaS title didn't exactly pass Bungie's live service litmus test and the project had been delayed as a result.

It has been two and a half months since NASA successfully retrieved samples from asteroid Bennu, and since then, the space agency has been attempting to conduct analysis, but there are a few things getting in its way.

NASA and almost everyone involved never thought having too many samples of asteroid Bennu would be a problem, but it has. The retrieval mission was a roaring success, and NASA hasn't even accessed the heart of the retrieval canister that is within OSIRIS-REx. The space agency is currently making a new screwdriver that will be used to remove the remaining screws and enable full access to the samples.

While researchers haven't fully dug around in the canister, they have conducted preliminary analysis on rocks caught outside of the canister. The largest so far has been a 3.5-centimeter rock. Scientists discovered that Bennu has an abundance of carbon and water. Additionally, the team found large quantities of magnesium, sodium, and phosphate within the skin of the chunks taken from Bennu.

Reports indicate that 2024 will be the year that Apple begins to make its transition from mini-LED technology to OLED, and it's also exploring the possibility of a foldable iPad.

According to the report, Apple's next step after OLED will be foldable devices, but, unfortunately, the company doesn't have a clear timeline for that launch as it is currently focussing on OLED panels. Notably, if Apple were to release a foldable device, it would be an iPad, and it would come a few generations after the iPad's integrated OLED panels. The report cites two people familiar with Apple's plans, who told Nikkei that foldable devices will only happen after Apple's two OLED variants are released next year.

The report doesn't just reveal purported plans for a new iPad, but also mentions Apple is scheduled to mass-produce a MacBook with an OLED panel in the second half of 2025. Apple's strategy of waiting until the technology is mature enough for adoption before integrating it into its stack of devices will eventually pay off, as by the time Apple decides to announce foldable devices, it will likely be years down the track where foldable screen technology doesn't come with all the pitfalls of current-day folding tech (each fold degrades the screen integrity).

"The Monsterverse continues." Warner Bros and Legendary Entertainment have revealed the first official trailer for their upcoming film Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire on December 4, with returning director Adam Wingard at the helm.

The sequel to 2021's Godzilla vs Kong premiered during the pandemic and was one of Warner Bros's biggest hits of the year. Set to hit the big screen everywhere in April of 2024, this next chapter in the cinematic Monsterverse promises to team up everyone's favorite titans against a common enemy in the form of a "colossal undiscovered threat" with the tagline "Rise together or fall alone."

Godzilla x Kong will also probe deeper into the origins of our large friends and the mysteries surrounding Skull Island, while also spending more time exploring the Hollow Earth Realm.

NASA has taken to its website to confirm the Sun emitting a massive solar flare on December 12, 2023, and while it's not headed for Earth directly, it does have an Earth-directed component.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is constantly monitoring the Sun for events such as these, is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center, which confirmed the Sun released a powerful X2.8-class solar flare - the strongest solar flare of this current cycle (Solar Cycle 25) and the most powerful eruption the Sun has produced since September 2017.

Additionally, NOAA wrote on its website an update about the solar flare, saying, "This is likely one of the largest solar radio events ever recorded," with radio communication interference being "felt from one end of the nation to the other. Furthermore, NOAA adds that it is currently evaluating possible Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) that could be associated with the solar flare and will provide updates after the analysis has been conducted.

A US news station has announced its plans to release the very first AI-generated news anchors, which will be free and streamed on ad-supported services such as Crackle, Tubi, or Pluto.

The announcement comes from LA-based news station Channel 1, who said that they will be using AI-powered news anchors instead of real human people in what will likely be a world's first for a syndicated news station. A new report from the Daily Mail revealed that Channel 1's news segments will use a combination of AI-generated humans and digital avatars that were created through the use of real actors. Notably, Channel 1 will still be using real humans for its most important news stories.

The founder of Channel 1, Adam Mosam, spoke to The Daily Mail and said that the intention behind releasing AI-generated news anchors was to "get out in front and create a responsible use of technology." As for concerns regarding fake news and the potential impact on society for falsifying the news through the power of AI, Mosam says that Channel 1 intends to be extremely transparent with viewers about what footage is original and what has been generated by artificial intelligence.

Universal has announced the next sequel of one of Dreamwork's most beloved franchises with the release of its first official trailer, "Kung Fu Panda 4." Jack Black is returning to the role.

Nearly ten years since the last film, comedy icon Jack black is set to return to his iconic character Po in a brand new chapter of Kung Fu and adventure. The world's most unlikely kung fu master, Po the Panda, must prepare to take on his new role of spiritual leader and find someone else to take on his role as the new Dragon warrior.

He will have to train a new kung fu expert for the spot while fighting off villains new and old, courtesy of this film's big bad, the Chameleon. Among the characters returning are Li, Po's birth father, voiced by Bryan Cranston, Kung Fu master Shifu, voiced by Dustin Hoffman; and Tai Lung, Shifu's former student and present arch nemesis, voiced by Emmy Award nominee Ian McShane. Hot in the industry right now, Oscar-winning actor Ke Huy Quan also joins the cast as a new character for the movie Han, the leader of the Den of Thieves.

Twitch has announced that it is updating its policies on what content is allowed on its platform and what isn't, with the online streaming platform now widening the possibilities for content that contains sexual themes.

The new changes involve the acceptance of content that contains sexual themes if it is appropriately labeled. More specifically, the new rules accept content containing "artistic" depictions, meaning drawn, sculpted, or animated, of "fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks regardless of gender". Furthermore, this content needs to be labeled with a "Sexual Themes" label, while fictionalized sexual acts such as masturbation remain prohibited.

Additionally, Twitch's new rules allow content that "deliberately highlight[s] breasts, buttocks or pelvic region" as well as "body writing". Moreover, the new rules pass content such as dances like "twerking, grinding and pole dancing" and don't require any label. If you are wondering about nudity, Twitch has made no changes to its policy regarding that topic, along with its rules regarding nudity and games, sexual violence, or sex.

Netflix has taken to its YouTube channel to share the first official teaser trailer for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the return of Eddie Murphy to his iconic character, Axel Foley.

The new movie is expected to hit Netflix's streaming services in the summer of next year, and will feature quite a few big-name actors, such as Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who will team up with Murphy's character as his new partner, along with Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) reprising their characters from the franchise. According to reports from Deadline, Will Beall has penned the script for the movie and Mark Molloy has directed it.

Murphy is also producing the movie along with Jerry Bruckheimer and Chad Oman of Jerry Bruckheimer Films, who said that Murphy "can do anything," referring to his ability to fall back into Axel Foley's character with ease. The story of the flick Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F involves Foley's daughter getting her life threatened, which turns into Foley and his new partner uncovering a conspiracy.

AMD has updated its FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) technology on GPUOpen to include the full source code for DirectX 12 and Unreal Engine 5 implementation for developers. FSR 3, which includes Frame Generation support for a wide range of AMD Radeon RX and even NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs, is the company's answer to the wildly successful and popular DLSS 3 that debuted with the GeForce RTX 40 Series.

FSR 3's rollout has been slow, with only a handful of titles supporting AMD's version of Frame Generation that, like its Super Resolution technology, doesn't require specialized AI hardware. But, FSR 3's most recent appearance - ion Ubisoft's Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - showcased the best version of the technology to date.

Not only with improvements to overall image quality but also support for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) displays - an omission that baffled reviewers and gamers when the tech launched in Square Enix's Forspoken and EA's Immortals of Aveum.

Intel Arc 'Game On' driver updates and releases over the past year have been a string of good news stories for the company's first foray into discrete graphics cards for PC gaming. From a massive boost in DirectX 11 performance that has seen double-digit improvements to smoothness and overall frame-rate performance, there has also been a gigantic 2.7X increase in AI performance.

With the launch of the new Meteor Lake-powered Core Ultra series of processors for laptops overnight - which are available with integrated Intel Arc graphics, many have wondered if Intel's steady stream of driver releases for day-one game support and performance increases for older titles will be available for those that pick up a new Core Ultra laptop.

The answer is yes, and this can be seen with the latest Intel Graphics Driver release for Intel Arc GPUs (31.0.101.5081 WHQL and 31.0.101.5122 WHQL), which includes support for the Intel Core Ultra processor family.

[UPDATE AMD has responded to the below with updated benchmark results and new optimizations of its own to show that the MI300X still has the performance advantage - read all about it here]. AMD, like all of the big players in the chip game, is going all in on AI hardware, and with the company's recent flagship MI300X GPU launch, it made some bold claims that compared performance between the MI300X and NVIDIA's powerful H100 GPU. Up to 20% faster than the H100 in a direct 1 to 1 comparison and up to 60% faster in an 8 to 8 server comparison.

Every slide in AMD's 'Advancing AI' presentation that covered the performance of the AMD Instinct MI300X to the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU shows the MI300X coming out on top or, at worse, performing on par. And with that, NVIDIA has taken the time to present its own results showing that the H100 GPU is 2X faster than the MI300X.

"At a recent launch event, AMD talked about the inference performance of the H100 GPU compared to that of its MI300X chip," NVIDIA's Dave Salvator and Ashraf Eassa write. "The results shared did not use optimized software, and the H100, if benchmarked properly, is 2X faster."

GeForce GTX is a brand that has been around for decades, signaling high-end performance for PC gaming that pushed technology and the visual fidelity of games to new heights. Although the company used 'GTX' a few times throughout its history, the first official GeForce GTX GPU to launch was the GeForce GTX 260 in 2008. Since then, the branding has powered mainline NVIDIA gaming hardware until the arrival of AI and hardware-accelerated ray-tracing in 2018.

NVIDIA's desktop and mobile graphics for PC gaming now carry the GeForce RTX branding, and even though it's taken a few years - it's now the go-to GeForce naming for PC gamers. Once again, it pushes technology and the visual fidelity of games to new ray-traced heights.

But, even though GeForce RTX is the new hotness for PC gaming, NVIDIA has still been producing affordable GeForce GTX products, including the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER, GTX 1650, and low-end GeForce GTX 1630. According to a new report, NVIDIA will stop producing GeForce GTX GPUs sometime in Q1 2024 - marking the end of an era.

Dune movie stars Austin Butler and Timothee Chalamet have taken the battle to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, where they battled it out in a Rust 1v1 battle with knives only. Check it out:

The two actors will next appear in Dune: Part Two in March 2024, with Activision getting the actors to play themselves in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 with some surprising results. You can get the Paul Atreides bundle in Call of Duty right now for 2400 COD points, which works out to around $20.

Chamalet, on the other hand, used to mod Xbox 360 controllers before he was a movie star, with his own YouTube channel called ModdedController360 when he was a teenager. Chamalet is the winner in the end, and both of the actors said "good game" at the end, which was wholesome to see.

NVIDIA is set to have quite the SUPER month in January 2024, with the impending release of its new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, and RTX 4070 SUPER cards... but now we've got some release dates for those new refreshed GPUs.

The folks over at ITHome have combined rumors from multiple sources to get some dates penciled in for next month, as NVIDIA will be revealing its new GeForce RTX 40 SUPER series graphics cards at CES 2024 during its "Special Address" event on January 8. The staggered release dates will ensure NVIDIA gets the most eyeballs on its cards instead of dumping them all out on the same day.

The reports suggest that we'll see NVIDIA release the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER first on January 17, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti second on January 24, and finally, the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER on January 31. We don't know anything about GPU clock speeds or exact configurations of the cards, but we do expect the RTX 4070 SUPER to feature 12GB of VRAM and the AD104 GPU with 7168 CUDA cores.

How many hours did you spend online this year, huh? According to data analyst group Domo, users spent an absolutely astonishing 1,300,000,000,000 -- or 1.3 trillion -- hours online in 2023 alone... and the year isn't even finished yet.

The statistics are eye-opening, users sent a massive 241 million emails per minute this year, up from 231.4 million in 2022, while people Google searched at 6.3 million queries per minute, which is a 6.7% increase year-over-year.

Domo founder and CEO Josh James explains: "This year's findings reflect the ever-changing and fast-paced digital landscape, which has only been heightened by the rapid popularity of AI models such as ChatGPT. Data drives everything we do, from a quick search online or sending an email to checking the latest headlines on our way to work".

Intel Evo laptops and the Evo branding were created to indicate that a piece of hardware delivers a certain level of quality in all areas. For a market as crowded as the laptop one, it can be confusing when you see two products with similar specs perform very differently - so the solution here is like a seal of quality.

With the arrival of Meteor Lake and the new Intel Core Ultra processors, Intel's most efficient mobile architecture to date, the new 'Intel Evo Edtion' sticker on a Core Ultra device now ensures that it meets Intel's high-end specs for battery life, noise level, AI performance, GPU performance, and an 'Instant On' feature that will turn the laptop on in under 1.5 seconds.

Intel is calling the new Evo branding 'no compromise mobile performance,' and it can already be found on new Intel Core Ultra products launching this week - including the new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and the MSI Prestige 16 AI Studio B1V.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has some fighting words to NVIDIA and its CUDA standard, where he said: "You know, the entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market".

Gelsinger claimed that inference technology will be more important than training for AI, just as it launches its new Intel Core Ultra and Intel 5th Gen Xeon "Emerald Rapids" CPUs at its "AI Everywhere" event in New York City. Gelsinger continued: "We think of the CUDA moat as shallow and small. Because the industry is motivated to bring a broader set of technologies for broad training, innovation, data science, et cetera".

Gelsinger used examples like MLIR, Google, and OpenAI, where he said they're moving towards a "Pythonic programming layer" that makes AI training more open.

Intel unveiled its new 5th Gen Xeon "Emerald Rapids" CPUs at its "AI Everywhere" event in New York City today, with the new Emerald Rapids processors built with AI acceleration in every core, bringing "leaps in AI and overall performance".

At the event, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger explained: "AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy's impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product. Intel is developing the technologies and solutions that empower customers to seamlessly integrate and effectively run AI in all their applications -- in the cloud and, increasingly, locally at the PC and edge, where data is generated and used".

Intel's new flagship Xeon Platinum 8592+ processor features 64 cores and 128 threads of CPU power with a base clock of 1.9GHz and boost clock of up to 3.9GHz along with 320MB of cache and a 350W TDP that will cost $11,600.