Latest News - Page 785

Microsoft's offer to upgrade for free from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 (and from there to Windows 11, if you want, and your spec qualifies) has been one of the most long-standing freebies ever, surely - but not anymore.

The loophole has now been officially closed, as The Verge reports.

Free upgrades from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 came in when the latter OS launched mid-2015, and were only supposed to be available for the first year. However, when the middle of 2016 rolled around, while Microsoft stopped advertising the upgrade - to the relief of many - it remained in place.

It's still a few months before we expect that Samsung will announce the Galaxy S24 Ultra, but that hasn't stopped the phone from making its benchmarking debut. A phone that is thought to be the Galaxy S24 Ultra has now popped up in online Geekbench results, complete with the rumored Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.

That chip is now roundly expected to be the only one offered inside Samsung's next flagship model, while the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus will both only use that chip in some markets. In others, it's thought that Samsung's in-house Exynos 2400 will be used. We don't know how fast that chip will be just yet, but the signs are looking good for the Galaxy S24 Ultra and its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

That's after SamMobile spotted the phone's Geekbench scores online, complete with a number of interesting tidbits. The phone is listed as the SM-S928U and scores 2,234 points in the single-core CPU performance test and 6,807 points in the multi-core CPU performance test. To put that into perspective, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and its Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip managed a score of 1,895 points in the single-core CPU performance test and 5,062 points in the multi-core CPU performance test.

Ubisoft has taken to its social media channels to praise its developers behind Assassin's Creed Mirage on achieving the most successful launch on current-gen consoles for Ubisoft in terms of unit sales.

Assassin's Creed Mirage has been available for just six days, and the team has already released a statement congratulating the team behind the title and thanking gamers for their title's reception. Ubisoft thanked fans of the series for coming along for the 15-year legacy of the Assassin's Creed series and, in celebration, shared some statistics sourced from the first week of Assassin's Creed Mirage.

According to Ubisoft, players have already spent 479 collective years parkouring the rooftops of Baghdad; players have done the iconic leap of faith 60 million times; and last but not least, 1.2 million cats have been pet in-game.

The wealthiest Old School RuneScape player BTCs has been banned over allegations of real-world trading, which is the process of exchanging in-game currency for real-world money.

The Old School RuneScape player and stream is known as BTC, and has taken to his YouTube channel to declare himself innocent against Jagex's rollout of a string of bans against multiple of BTC's accounts, along with other accounts associated with his. Notably, BTC took to Twitter at the end of September to share a screenshot of the "first ever 1 trillion bank on OSRS," which equates to approximately $160,000 in real-world money.

BTC claims that he earned the astonishing amount of in-game currency through doing deathmatches, essentially a process where two players both bet a large stack of cash in either liquid in-game currency or gear and then fight to the death - winner takes all.

The next generation in the Counter-Strike series, Counter-Strike 2, was released on September 27, and over time, its reviews on Steam seem to be getting worse and worse.

New reports from Gaming Bible and Insider Gaming explore the current situation of Counter-Strike 2 and why overall, the title is now categorized as "mixed". There are many factors contributing to the poor reviews, one is the deletion of Counter-Strike: Global Offense, which was shut down upon the release of Counter-Strike 2, and all Steam listings for GO redirected to Counter-Strike 2. Other criticisms of the new title include the lack of specific multiplayer modes, maps, and numerous bugs.

Many fans of the series are accusing Valve of simply hijacking CS:GO's Steam listing to get more people to play Counter-Strike 2. Other fans are pointing toward many instances of sloppy hitboxes and hurt boxes. Reports indicate that out of all of Valve's games, Counter-Strike 2 is now the lowest-rated on Steam with its "mixed" review labeling.

WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging platform that is currently owned by Meta, is working on a new feature that will make it easier for people to plan events right from within their chat threads.

The new feature, which is currently in testing with those who are using the Google Android beta version of the app, lets people plan events including their date, time, and location. There is also an option to add a scheduled video call to the event for those which are being run remotely, too.

The change was first reported as part of the WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.21.12 update and was spotted by the WhatsApp watchers over at WABetaInfo.

NASA and SpaceX are expected to send a small spacecraft on its long journey to inspect a metal-rich, yet mysterious asteroid located in the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter.

Researchers believe that the Psyche asteroid could be an ancient core of a planet, or planet-like object, and that visiting it with a spacecraft, collecting data through observations while it orbits the body, will enable researchers to learn more about the evolution of the solar system, and by extension, Earth. The spacecraft is appropriately named after the asteroid itself, Psyche, and has already been placed a top of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, which is expected to launch sometime on 10:19 a.m. EDT Friday, Oct. 13 (depending on weather conditions).

It was only on October 12 when NASA and SpaceX both took to their official X accounts to announce the launch was called off due to unfavorable weather conditions. If you are worried that the launch will have be scrubbed until a much later date, don't be. NASA replied to one user that asking what the last possible day before a scrub has to occur, "There are additional opportunities identified each day through Oct. 25," wrote the space agency.

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist who is renowned as "The Godfather of AI" for his contributions toward what we call artificial intelligence today, has warned that humanity is at risk of being taken over by machines.

In a newly published interview with 60 Minutes, Hinton expresses real concern for the coming developments of artificial intelligence and suggests that even AI tools that we see today are likely more intelligent than we understand. During the interview, Hinton says that if AI continues to evolve at the exponential rate it's developing now, it will eventually be able to write its own code and circumvent human programming limitations.

This isn't the first time Hinton has expressed concern over the underlying technology he helped create taking over the planet, as he said back in March that AI poses a real risk of leading humanity to its extinction. Notably, Hinton quit his role at Google earlier this year to further pursue warning the public about the dangers of artificial intelligence and consult on its safety.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has taken to its official X account to announce that Ingenuity will be attempting to break a record that it set on flight 60.

The small rotorcraft, commonly called Ingenuity or the Mars Helicopter, will be attempting to break the groundspeed record that it set in Flight 60. Ingenuity will be attempting the new record on flight 62, which NASA writes is expected to occur to earlier than October 12. At the time of writing, NASA hasn't updated Ingenuity's Flight Log. However, it's still very early in the day.

NASA writes that Flight 62 will have a goal of traveling 879 feet (268 meters) horizontally, a flight time of 119.30 seconds, at a maximum altitude of 59 feet (18 meters), in a north-easterly direction. As for scientific goals, NASA writes Ingenuity will be "imaging science targets", and expanding the "flight envelope". If you are interested in checking out if Ingenuity hits its new record, visit the Flight Log here or NASA's Perseverance X account linked above.

NASA has revealed the contents of the capsule returned to Earth through its OSIRIS-REx mission, which aimed to collect a sample from the asteroid Bennu.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson took to the stage to announce that NASA has successfully returned its first-ever asteroid sample and conducted its first analysis. Nelson explains that results from the first analysis showed the samples contained an abundance of water in the form of hydrated clay minerals - that also contain carbon. More specifically, NASA writes on its blog the sample shows evidence of having "high-carbon content and water," which could indicate the "building blocks of life on Earth."

These samples will be studied for years to come, with researchers attempting to answer the question of how the building blocks arrived on Earth - did an asteroid rich with the necessary ingredients collide with Earth's surface millions of years ago, essentially dropping off the building blocks of life that have eventually evolved into what it is today? Studying samples from Bennu will allow researchers to understand the evolution of the solar system and, by extension, Earth, with NASA researchers even describing Bennu's samples as "unlocking a time capsule that offers us profound insights into the origins of our solar system."

We first looked at AVerMedia's new Live Gamer ULTRA 2.1 (GC553G2) HDMI 2.1 USB capture card back at Computex 2023 and were impressed with just how feature-packed and groundbreaking it is for content creation and streaming.

You're looking at a capture card that supports 4K 144 Hz passthrough with HDR and VRR enabled over USB 3.2 Gen 2 or above. Yeah, awesome stuff, as that means it supports modern GPUs like the GeForce RTX 40 Series, the new Radeon RX 7000 Series, and consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. As one of the first HDMI 2.1 Game Capture Cards it's no reason people have been waiting for this to release.

In addition to the Live Gamer ULTRA 2.1 (USD 299.99) bringing true HDMI 2.1 support with 4K 60 capture (plus 1080p 240 and 1440p 144), it's also a stylish little unit with RGB lighting that can sync up with all your hardware, and it arrives with the easy-to-use AVerMedia Gaming Utility tool software for capture, or you can use it with popular streaming and capture tools like OBS.

NASA has highlighted an image from Hubble's Classics collection of stunning shots of the cosmos with a new post on the official Hubble X account.

The image is of The Boomerang Nebula and was originally snapped by Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 instrument in 1998. However, the nebula was first discovered by astronomers Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrott in 1980, who gave the name "Boomerang Nebula" after they observed it from a ground-based telescope in Australia. Follow-up observations were then conducted by Hubble, revealing more details that weren't seen through ground-based telescopes.

Hubble's high-fidelity images revealed that the Boomerang Nebula should have been called "the Bowtie Nebula", as its shape is clearly that of a bowtie and not a boomerang. Hubble's image revealed faint arcs of ghostly filaments that contain gas that has seemingly been diffused. These long filaments make the shape of the bowtie, and according to NASA, these are created by an extremely powerful wind. The Boomerang Nebula is approximately 5,000 light years away from Earth.

AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.10.1 is available now for all Radeon RX GPU owners, bringing day-one support to this week's release of Lords of the Fallen, driver support, and optimizations for Assassin's Creed Mirage.

Both additions are great to see, and per an earlier report, Lords of the Fallen is getting FSR 3 support on day one. However, the most notable update surrounds the recent launch of Counter-Strike 2. The latest Radeon and Adrenalin software release adds AMD's low-latency Anti-Lag+ support to the game, which is great to see as it has supported NVIDIA's Reflex tech since day one. Low-latency tech is arguably more important for competitive titles than FSR or DLSS, so this is a win-win.

The Counter-Strike 2 updates don't stop there, as the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.10.1 also brings some much-needed fixes, like the game crashing when enabling things like MSAA or FSR on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Plus, improvements to stutter when playing the game - another important thing to get right on esports and competitive titles.

A new report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) covering Q3 2023 doesn't paint a very positive picture of the ongoing recovery of the PC market. However, PC shipments in previous quarters have slowed the annual decline rate. Per the report, PC shipments in Q3 2023 declined 7.6% year-over-year, which covers 68.2 million PCs for the three months.

On the plus side, PC inventory looks healthy in 2023; channels aren't overstocked with supply due to the lessened demand. The report highlights increased pressure from the consumer and business space to lower prices. The PC shipments outlined in the report cover desktops, notebooks, and workstations - excluding tablets and x86 servers.

The top five PC makers experienced significant negative growth outside of HP, which experienced 6.4% growth and an overall increase in market share. Apple saw the biggest hit to growth with -23.1% for the quarter, followed by Dell with -14.3% growth.

Although it took a few months to launch, the PlayStation 5's storage expansion is much more open and cost-effective than the closed proprietary storage card system of the Xbox Series X|S. As long as it features a low-profile heatsink (or one is attached), you can slap any PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD into a PS5 if it meets the minimum speed requirement of 5,500 MB/s.

Very few of these drives existed when the PS5 launched in 2020, but in 2023, there's a massive range to choose from. Of course, the quality of an SSD varies from storage maker to storage maker, so for those not looking to spend hours researching the best SSD storage solutions for PlayStation 5, there's the new Seagate Game Drive PS5 NVMe SSD line-up.

These new SSDs are officially licensed, and with sequential read speeds of up to 7300 MB/s and write speeds of up to 6,900 MB/s, they're more than equipped to handle the dramatically improved loading times you get from gaming on a PlayStation 5 console. As nice as it is to see the ray-traced visuals of Marvel's Spider-Man, the instantaneous loading times are the true 'next-gen feature I cannot live without' for the PS5.

Diablo IV had a blockbuster launch earlier this year. Still, with the arrival of its first Season of content and some players growing tired of the endgame grind and variety, the hype surrounding the latest action RPG in the long-running franchise has waned in recent months. The good news? That's all about to change.

Blizzard looks to be in it for the long haul regarding Diablo IV. With the game's second season, dubbed 'Season of Blood' around the corner, the game is not only getting its first major content drop but a massive patch (bringing the game to version 1.2) that features over 40 pages of new features, items, balance changes, overhauls, and more so much so that there's no real way to cover it all in a single news post.

As a fan of the game, the new vampiric theme, bosses, events, and story-driven questlines for Season of Blood sound like a lot of fun - enough to get me to fire the game up. And with that, here are some of the main highlights from Diablo IV's massive 1.2.0 Patch Notes.

HWINFO has been updated with some support for AMD's upcoming Ryzen Threadripper 7000WX series of HEDT processors, which are set for release on October 19. You can download the new HWINFO v7.64 here.

The updated HWINFO v7.64 includes support for Storm Peak CPUs from AMD, which will be known as the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000WX series, led by the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX processor packing a hefty 96 cores and 192 threads of Zen 4 processor power, with a whopping 384MB of L3 cache.

HWINFO's latest update also includes fixes to problems that the utility had with CPUs that featured 64 cores, and you're kinda gonna need that support with the flagship Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX processor featuring 96 cores and all. HWINFO has support for Storm Peak, meaning even the beast of beasts with 96 cores and 192 threads will show up and detect in the software properly.

The Meta Quest 3 has just launched, and early word on the latest generation of the popular VR headset has been positive. The Verge review is positive, with the key takeaway being that it's "better than its predecessors in almost every way." Tom's Guide shares similar sentiments in its review, praising the "improved graphics and superior performance [compared to] the Meta Quest 2."

Per the specs and hardware, which adds mixed reality features via color cameras that sound very promising, the Meta Quest 3 not only improves the display and touch controllers but delivers double the performance of the Quest 2. However, like the Quest 2, the new Meta Quest 3 can be hooked to a PC to take advantage of superior discrete hardware and play VR games like Half-Life: Alyx.

Most achieve this via a single long Meta Quest Link cable that offers play-and-charge functionality over USB-C. Thanks to the Meta Quest range being an affordable VR option with simple-to-set-up inside-out tracking and motion controls, it's no wonder the headset is currently the most popular VR PC gaming solution on Steam (as seen in the latest Steam Hardware Survey results). But what about wireless VR, wire-free PC VR gaming with the Meta Quest 3? It's possible thanks to devices like D-Link's DWA-F18 VR Air Bridge.

Sony has upgraded its new PlayStation "slim" models with a meaningful boost to storage, but gamers shouldn't expect all of the capacity to be usable for games and apps.

Sony's new PlayStation 5 consoles now feature a 1TB SSD, offering a noteworthy increase over the 825GB SSD included in existing PS5s. On paper, that's a 175GB difference.

Gamers won't get to enjoy the full 1TB, though. Advertised storage and actual storage are different things, and there's always some capacity eaten up by formatting (the Series X, for example, is billed as a 1TB device but it only has 802GB of usable storage). Consoles also need extra space for the operating system and other tools/tasks, so oftentimes there is a sizable amount of storage being reserved for these functions.

Lords of the Fallen is a highly anticipated Souls-like that is set to launch this weekend - with the game garnering plenty of attention due to its incredible Unreal Engine 5 visuals. It's a title set to push high-end PC hardware to its limit, with the god-tier GeForce RTX 4090 delivering an average frame rate of 69.2 FPS at 4K with max settings.

That performance figure comes via NVIDIA, with the company announcing a few days ago that Lords of the Fallen will ship with DLSS 3 support - pushing that 62.9 FPS figure up to an impressive 159.4 FPS. This figure includes DLSS Super Resolution using the 'Performance' mode with Frame Generation.

Until recently, NVIDIA DLSS 3's Frame Generation was the only, err, frame generation in town. That has changed in recent weeks thanks to AMD finally delivering the long-awaited FSR 3, including its brand-new frame-gen tech called AMD Fluid Motion Frame. Based on an early look at Lords of the Fallen, it will be the next game (after Immortals of Aveum) where DLSS 3 and FSR 3 will go head-to-head.