Latest News - Page 744

Rockstar Games catches the interest of millions of consumers with its mega-popular GTA 6 announcement.

Yesterday, Rockstar Games announced that the first Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer would drop on Tuesday, December 5 at 9AM EST. In just a day's time, that simple announcement has become the most-liked gaming Tweet of all time, breaking a previous record that was also set by Rockstar.

The GTA 6 trailer announcement has racked up 1.7 million likes on Twitter, and has been viewed by 135 million people. This proves something that most gamers already know: When Rockstar talks about GTA, everyone listens, especially when its GTA 6. Considering the franchise has sold over 410 million copies with GTA V alone shipping 190 million of that total, these numbers are something we should probably expect.

Tesla has finally begun to deliver Cybertrucks after the highly anticipated electric vehicle was first unveiled back in 2019.

Tesla conducted its Cybertruck Delivery Event yesterday, and company CEO Elon Musk took to the stage to give the public more details on the design of the Cybertruck and what went into making it become a reality. Musk touched on how Tesla had to create a brand new alloy to accommodate the Cybertruck's ambitious design, and what the company finally landed on was a 1.8mm-thick stainless super alloy that is corrosion-resistant and bullet proof.

During the delivery event, a video was shown to the crowd of Tesla firing a variety of weapons at the side panel of a Cybertruck. The new electric vehicle from Tesla went up against a 9mm Glock, M4 shotgun, and a .45 caliber Tommy Gun. The Cybertruck's exterior was able to stop all of the bullets, with only a single pellet breaking through the steel and cracking the window. However, this pellet didn't go through the other side of the door, unlike "any other truck," which Tesla shows off later in the video.

The TT Show is back, and Episode 13 covers a big week of news and fun happenings in the tech, gaming, and science space. This week, Jak and Kosta dive into the YouTube channel JerryRigEverything's lawsuit against a billion-dollar company, how the final batch of GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs in China are being repurposed for AI, and how a new rigorous study into OLED panels is ultimately good news even if the results show that all OLED displays eventually show signs of burn-in.

Oh, and then there's the curious case of Ubisoft's 'technical error' where players saw in-game full-screen pop-up ads while playing Assassin's Creed! The duo also looks at the state of cloud gaming and services like GeForce NOW, which NVIDIA is increasingly pushing to gain a foothold. And with the shift to the cloud and all things digital, there's also a lengthy tangent all about the importance of physical media in an age where content can disappear.

On the fun side, you definitely want to listen or watch the full episode as the final story involves a Meta Quest 3 and "magical pooping." And, as always, a little bit of GrandTheft auto 6 talk. The latest episode of TweakTown's official podcast can be viewed above or listened to on your favorite podcast service around the globe.

Intel's next-gen Xeon, codenamed Clearwater Forest, will feature up to 288 cores with an updated CPU architecture, but those 288 cores will exclusively be E-Cores, not the higher-performance P-Cores that Intel has on its CPUs.

This is according to new leaks on the scene, which tease that Intel's 2nd Gen Xeon CPU family will be based on the E-Core CPU architecture, while the first E-Core-only CPUs are codenamed Sierra Forest, which Intel will release in the 2H of 2024. If Intel stays on track, that means we should expect to see Clearwater Forest CPUs sometime in 2025... but this could slip into 2026 easily.

Intel's new Clearwater Forest architecture will feature an updated version of the Skymont E-Core architecture, which it'll be the 5th Gen E-Core architecture, with Gracemont being the first. Intel's next-gen Gracemont architecture will be launching on the new Meteor Lake CPUs, which will be making their debut on December 14 at Intel's upcoming "AI Everywhere" event.

Xbox gaming CFO Tim Stuart shares how AI could make game development more efficient, but it could also lead to job eliminations in the $185 billion entertainment sector.

A bit ago, Microsoft announced that it was integrating generative AI into its Xbox gaming toolset in an effort to make games more efficient. At a time when the games industry has seen mass layoffs with thousands of people losing work, the news was seen as controversial, with Microsoft claiming that the AI could generate quests, stories and dialog.

Now Xbox gaming CFO Tim Stuart discusses how AI could handle processes like localization, scripting, and dialog sequences via tools that could lead to more game development roles being eliminated through this automation process. Stuart also touches upon how everyday people can become 'citizen creators' through AI, effectively allowing anyone to become a game developer.

According to Microsoft's lawyers, mobile was the main impetus for the $68.7 billion Activision-Blizzard acquisition. Now Microsoft wants to make its own storefront to ensure it maximizes returns for that investment...but the company may not be able to do it alone.

Microsoft is seeking partners to help realize its ambitious vision for a Universal Store. This plan would see games being sold across consoles, PC, and mobile, the last being a critical part of the Activision-Blizzard buyout and a front where Microsoft has traditionally been weak in. In order to pull this off and ensure the mobile fork of the Universal Store doesn't just peter out, Microsoft wants to team up with other developers and publishers to challenge Google's and Apple's mobile stores.

"It's an important part of our strategy and something we are actively working on today not only alone, but talking to other partners who'd also like to see more choice for how they can monetize on the phone,'' Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer said at the CCXP23 event in Brazil.

Falling under the category of 'harebrained schemes' is a project that combined NVIDIA's frame generation (DLSS 3) with Team Red's own take on this tech, AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF).

Surprisingly, it is possible to stack up and use both these rival technologies together, and doing so can boost frame rates massively - up to tripling them, in fact - but the full story is a lot more than just frames per second.

QuasarZone (a Korean tech site) carried out this experiment (flagged up by VideoCardz), using a PC with two graphics cards inside, one NVIDIA and one AMD as you'd expect.

Sabrent is cooking right now, preparing its next-gen Rocket 5 Plus SSDs powered by Phison's newest E16 SSD controller that will unleash rocket-fueled transfer speeds of 14GB/sec and beyond.

According to some of my industry sources, Sabrent will be unleashing its next-gen Rocket 5 Plus SSDs "soon" (the Consumer Electronics Show is held in Las Vegas in the first week of January). The new Sabrent Rocket 5 Plus SSD will have read speeds of up to 14GB/sec on the right platform: you'll need the right CPU and the right motherboard, with a Gen5 M.2 SSD slot, and you'll be ready to rock and roll at those rocket-fueled speeds.

Phison has a few E26 SSD controllers powering Gen5 SSDs that are pushing 10GB/sec, then 12GB/sec and now the codenamed "Max14um" controller fully saturates the PCIe Gen5 x4 interface. Oh yeah.

Raspberry Pi can do a million things, but run a discrete graphics card it cannot... that is, until the new Raspberry Pi 5 and Jeff Gerling, who is running an AMD Radeon RX 460 and playing popular games like Minecraft and Portal through his Pi 5.

The newer Raspberry Pi 5 doesn't have any PCIe connectors, but it can be forced up to PCIe Gen3 specs (up to 10GT/s) compared to the Raspberry Pi 4, which was limited to PCIe Gen2 specs and simply didn't have enough bandwidth to accommodate an external GPU.

The previous versions of Raspberry Pi didn't only have limited bandwidth through its PCIe 2.0 interface, but also the Broadcom BCM2711 processor had multiple PCIe-related bugs that made running an external GPU almost impossible.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has announced it removed nearly 5,000 fake accounts that were attempting to influence US politics, and these accounts can be linked back to China.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced that it deleted 4,800 fake accounts that it says were part of a China-based influence campaign whose goal was to post polarizing content ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Meta writes that the influence operation was one of two campaigns detected by Meta during the third quarter of 2023 and that these accounts actively posted in English about US politics and US-China relations, criticizing both sides of the US political spectrum.

Meta explained that these accounts used what appears to be "copy-pasted partisan content from people on X" and that these accounts acquired their information from both liberal and conservative sources. Additionally, these accounts mixed in resharing into their posts by resharing genuine content from politicians and news outlets.

Amazon is the latest company to release a text-to-image generator, joining other big tech companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and numerous start-ups that are all jumping on the AI-powered train.

Amazon's AI-powered image generator is called Titan and was officially unveiled at the AWS re: Invent 2023 conference that was held on November 30. The new AI-powered tool is currently available to AWS customers on Bedrock, Amazon's AI development platform. So, what can it do? Amazon has equipped Titan with the capability to create images from text prompts while also giving it the power to customize existing images. An example would be swapping out the background of an image.

The company explained that the Titan Image Generator was trained on a "diverse set of datasets" that encompass a "broad range of domains". Engineers have implemented mitigation techniques for toxicity and bias, but it's currently unknown how effective those mitigation techniques are without public testing. Additionally, Amazon didn't reveal where it acquired its datasets or if it will be compensating creators of the images used to train Titan.

Elon Musk took to the stage at the 2023 DealBrook Summit in New York on Wednesday and was pressed about the relationship between his "antisemitic" tweets that led to big advertisers such as Apple and Disney to suspend advertising expenditure on the social media platform.

Musk responded to the question by saying he hoped that advertisers who paused expenditure with X over his tweets wouldn't return to the platform. The company CEO added that anyone who attempts to "blackmail" him with money should "go f*** yourself". Known companies that have paused ad spending on X are as follows: Disney, Apple, IBM, Comcast, Warner Bros Discovery, Paramount Global, and Lions Gate Entertainment.

Now, industry analysts are assessing whether or not advertisers will be returning to the platform following Musk's apology for the post and his harsh words to companies that tried to "blackmail" him. The New York Times and Reuters have reported that advertisers won't be returning to the social media platform, and Reuters mentions one executive at a major global ad-buying firm, who declined to be named, said only one major client was continuing to advertise on X.

The wait is finally over, with Tesla delivering its first Cybertrucks to customers starting on November 30. The company revealed more details about the highly anticipated electric vehicle during an event officially called the Cybertruck Delivery Event.

The event was helmed by none other than Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who took to the stage to showcase the impressive capabilities of the Cybertruck. The presentation consisted of displaying the previously undisclosed information about the Cybertruck - power, composition, payload capacity, pull strength, and, of course, speed. Now, tech analysts are predicting that the launch of the Cybertruck will skyrocket Tesla's value, with the product launch being described as a "big moment" for the company.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote that the launch of the Cybertruck is important for Tesla's "growth story over the coming years" and will be proof to doubters of Musk's capability to "expand the Tesla halo effect". Additionally, Ives wrote that the Cybertruck launch is unlikely to "move the financial needle" for the company throughout 2024, but show investors Tesla's determination toward innovation and separating itself from legacy automakers in the EV market.

It was only a few days ago that X owner Elon Musk told the social media platform's advertisers that attempted to "blackmail" him with money to "go f***" themselves.

The certainly interesting comments by Musk took place at the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York on Wednesday and came off the back of Andrew Ross Sorkin asking Musk about the reaction from big advertisers pausing ad expenditure on X following Musk's "antisemitic" tweets. Sorkin's question referred to advertisers such as Disney and Apple pausing or pulling ad spending on X, to which Musk replied, "I hope they stop. Don't advertise".

Now, company CEO Linda Yaccarino has addressed Musk's harsh comments in a series of X posts, writing that Musk's comments on the current advertising situation are an "explicit point of view about our position." Yaccarino added that X stands at a "unique and amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street", and "To our partners who believe in our meaningful work -- Thank You."

Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have warned the public of a solar burst that is expected to hit Earth on November 30.

The Sun has been quite active, with officials explaining that over the past few days, it has been having outbursts of super-hot plasma, officially known as Coronal Magnetic Ejections (CME). These CMEs are released into the surrounding space, and sometimes Earth gets smacked. These charged solar particles from the Sun collide with Earth's magnetic field, and the majority remain in the upper atmosphere of the planet, protecting life on the surface.

Additionally, Earth's magnetic field funnels the charged particles to its poles, and the interaction between the charged particles and the molecules in the upper atmosphere produces a phenomenon known as auroras or the Northern/Southern Lights. The collision of the CME into Earth's magnetic field creates what is known as a geomagnetic storm, and depending on the severity of the CME, the storm can be global, pushing the auroras closer to the equator.

Sony is cooking its beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console for 2024 and 2025, but the next-gen PlayStation 6 is definitely in development and will be a powerhouse next-gen console compared to the PS5.

We have some news from leaker RedGamingTech, who reports that the CPU and GPU -- well, the semi-custom APU design -- for the PlayStation 6 console haven't been decided on yet. Sony's upcoming APU for the PS6 is behind Microsoft's next-gen Xbox APU, as the PS6 will be launching after the next-gen Xbox.

Back before the PlayStation 5 was even official, I had an exclusive report that stated AMD and Sony were working together on the Navi-powered GPU for the PS5... and with AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 GPU architecture around the corner, we should expect some newer Zen 5-powered CPU cores, and RDNA 4-powered GPU cores inside of the APU for the PlayStation 6. GDDR7 memory will be out in 2024, so we should also expect some huge improvements in memory bandwidth -- and, more importantly -- power efficiency over the GDDR6 memory inside of the PS5.

Tesla has finally delivered its first Cybertruck's to buyers of the highly anticipated electric vehicle, while company CEO Elon Musk has showcased its raw power against a Porsche 911.

Elon Musk took to the stage at the Cybertruck Delivery Event held today at noon P.T. (3 p.m. ET) at the Texas Gigafactory in Austin, Texas. Musk showcased the vehicle, revealing key details about its design, toughness, composition, and, most importantly, power. The entire event was live-streamed on X, and Musk revealed a video to the crowd that showcased the Cybertruck going against a Porsche 911 on a 1/4 mile sprint.

The video showcased the Cybertruck beating the Porsche 911 while towing a Porsche 911. The Cybertruck was able to complete the 1/4 mile sprint in under 11 seconds, while going from 0 to 60 mph in just 2.6 seconds. Musk said that the Cybertruck is able to "tow a Porsche 911 across a 1/4 mile faster than the Porsche 911 can go by itself". Musk finished off the event by saying, "and deliveries begin now!".

NVIDIA has recently been pushing its cloud-based GeForce NOW streaming service into the spotlight, and it's not hard to see why. Subscribing lets you play select games that you already have access to across platforms like PC, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect, and Xbox on a server-side GeForce RTX 4080 rig with access to cutting-edge tech like ray-tracing, DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and more.

Plus, with Microsoft's recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard, we're starting to see several Xbox and PC Game Pass titles being added to the GeForce NOW library - which is currently stacked. December 2023 sees the arrival of the first Activision game available on GeForce NOW - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, joined by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Call of Duty: Warzone.

All three games are accessed via a central Call of Duty location on GeForce NOW, with Ultimate members able to experience all three via a cloud-based GeForce RTX 4080 rig with DLSS 3 and NVIDIA Reflex to boost performance.

Tesla has officially delivered its very first Cybertruck to customers at its Cybertruck Delivery Event, where it also revealed key details about the highly anticipated electric vehicle.

The Cybertruck was first announced back in 2019 and was delayed until now due to production setbacks related to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the time has finally arrived as Tesla's CEO Elon Musk stood on stage to reveal the finalized design and capabilities of the electric vehicle that has amassed more than 1 million pre-orders. According to Musk, the Cybertruck is a "better truck than a truck and a better sports car than a sports car," with its design calling for a brand new Tesla-designed stainless steel "super alloy" that won't corrode, doesn't need paint and can be made at volume.

As for the glass, Musk explains that it's designed to repel rocks that flick up from the road, even going as far as to say that the Cybertruck's glass is "rock proof". Additionally, the glass "makes the car very quiet", while its steel panels are strong enough to stop an entire clip of .45 caliber bullets traveling 935 ft/s fired from a Tommy Gun. In another feat of "toughness," the Cybertruck will be able to pull 11,000 pounds, with a 2,500-pound payload capacity.

According to the U.S. government, the GeForce RTX 4090 was effectively banned in China because it's too powerful to sell in the region. With the export restriction in place, it's been a wild couple of weeks for the world's most powerful gaming GPU. Global prices are increasing, global shortages, and RTX 4090s are being repurposed with blower fans and upsold as AI GPUs.

This brings us to new reports indicating that NVIDIA is preparing a special edition of GeForce RTX 4090D for the region in 2024 that will comply with the new regulations and export restrictions. D as in the Year of the Dragon, but also D as in a lower tier and cut-down GeForce RTX 4090 that will reduce its overall Total Processing Performance (TPP) rating to fall within the new guidelines for GPUs sold to China.

According to new info from industry insider MEGAsizeGPU over on X, the China-exclusive GeForce RTX 4090D will make use of the AD102-250 GPU - a GPU chip that hasn't been seen across the GeForce RTX 40 Series line-up.