Latest News - Page 828

With AMD partnered with Bethesda for the upcoming release of Starfield on PC, where in addition to the game launching with optimizations for Radeon and Ryzen hardware - there's also going to be a limited edition run of special Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards and Ryzen 7 7800X3D processors.

Apart from specialized packaging, there's very little visual customization to a CPU, whereas the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX - Starfield Limited Edition Graphics Card looks stunning. Sporting the white and primary color accents, it presents a new look for AMD's stylish and sturdy reference design - with several nods to Bethesda's sci-fi RPG.

The downside is that AMD and Bethesda only create a limited run of these stylish GPUs and CPUs - as in 500. As a limited production, expect these to be given away through competition and other promotions, as they won't be hitting retail. The Starfield Radeon and Ryzen combo was announced at QuakeCon 2023, so be sure to follow AMD and Bethesda's social channels to find out how you can go into the running to pick one up.

Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X has conducted her first interview and revealed some new features coming to the social media platform.

Yaccarino sat down with CNBC for her first interview after taking on the role as X's CEO, and according to Yaccarino, X users can expect to be able to call users without having to provide their personal phone numbers.

The confirmation from Yaccarino comes after a mysterious post by X designer Andrea Conway, who wrote on August 10, "Just called someone on X". Additionally, Yaccarino said that phone calls and video calls are coming to X are part of the company rebrand and the overall goal of turning the social media app into the "everything app."

Since Elon Musk purchased what was formerly known as Twitter and is currently known as now X, the company has been drowning in its own finances, but now according to the new company CEO, the social media platform is on track to breaking even.

Linda Yaccarino was named the new CEO of X on June 5, 2023, by company owner Elon Musk. Since Yaccarino entered into her new position, she has kept her head down, most likely making herself familiar with the inner workings of X and its current financial position. But now Yaccarino has stepped out of the shadows to conduct her first interview, saying that despite the widespread concern about X's financial position, the company is actually on track to break even.

X's current financial position can be attributed to advertisers pulling out of the social media platform following Musk's purchase of it for $44 billion back in October 2022. Advertisers left X due to the uncertainty of Musk's intentions with the platform and the concern that content moderation policies would be rolled back, enabling more diverse and, in some cases, inappropriate content to plague the platform.

Another high-end gaming monitor has been released in the US, and gamers need to make way for the glorious 45-inch Acer Predator X45.

The Predator X45 was originally unveiled at CES 2023, and now the gaming display has been released in US markets with a price tag of $1,599. The Predator X45 is a 45-inch OLED gaming monitor that features a 21:9 aspect ratio, a native resolution of 3440 x 1440, and a maximum refresh rate of 240Hz.

The juicy specs don't stop there as the Predator X45 features a 0.01ms GTG response time, a 10000-nit brightness, AMD FreeSync support, 1,500,000:1 native contrast ratio, 10-bit color depth, which covers 99% of the DCI-P3 color gamut.

Sony's operating profit for its PlayStation video games business drops again as the company continues paying towards the $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie, as well as costs of games development.

Sony Corp's latest fiscal year earnings report shows record growth in PlayStation's Q1 net sales, but operating profit has slid -7% in to 3.6 billion yen. Based on foreign exchange conversion rates provided by Sony, this represents a -35% decrease on a USD basis to $263 million and marks the lowest quarterly operating income since Fiscal Year 2017.

PlayStation's operating income has dropped significantly partly because of the Bungie acquisition. In 2022, Sony acquired Bungie for $3.6 billion, but instead of being paid all at once, the purchase price is being expensed over multiple quarters.

Sony expects the PlayStation games division to generate a record-breaking 4.170 trillion yen in net sales for the fiscal year 2023, a new all-time high for the video games industry's top platform-holder.

On the heels of new record earnings of $5.63 billion for its Games & Network Services segment, Sony has upwardly revised its total-year earnings for the PlayStation business. According to its Q1'FY23 earnings report, Sony now expects its gaming branch to generate 4.170 trillion yen in net sales, which equates to about $32 billion in today's yen to USD conversion rates.

While it's worth noting this value will likely fluctuate and change over time as foreign exchange rates ebb and flow on a quarterly basis, Sony does still expect Fiscal Year 2023 to handily beat previous record, which was set in Fiscal Year 2022 with 3.644 trillion yen, by some 526 billion yen. On a USD basis, Sony's PlayStation gaming division made about $26.917 billion in Fiscal Year 2022.

Intel's Lunar Lake processors are again in the spotlight, this time with a leak about the architecture that'll be employed in the performance and efficiency cores.

Wccftech picked up on a tweet from InstLatX64 that shows Intel has added support for Lunar Lake CPUs in its latest Perfmon update.

We can see that as previously rumored, Lunar Lake will run with Lion Cove for its performance cores and Skymont with the efficiency cores.

Windows 11 has a 'system components' panel inside the Settings app hidden in a new test build that's just been released by Microsoft.

This is in build 25926 of Windows 11 which has just arrived in the Canary channel, and ever-present Twitter leakers PhantomOfEarth and XenoPanther both stumbled across this. It was uncovered via the usual process of digging around with ViVeTool (a Windows configuration utility).

The page lists all the system apps present in Windows 11, and according to the blurb in the UI, it facilitates managing and removing those system components.

YouTube has changed the way it works so the video service no longer shows recommended videos to those who have their watch history turned off.

Instead, users who have it switched off - or hardly have any watch history to speak of yet - will not get content recommendations on YouTube's home page.

Those folks will get a streamlined version of the home page instead, allowing them to focus on just searching for the content they want, rather than getting nudges from Google as to what they might like.

Google Chrome will get security fixes piped through more regularly in a move to help shore up the defenses of the browser.

Up until now, Google delivered security updates to Chrome every fortnight, but the cadence of that patching has now been upped to every week.

Those weekly security fixes take effect from version 116 of Google Chrome which has just been released, as Bleeping Computer spotted.

Windows 10's latest cumulative update released earlier this week and now rolling out to PCs comes with an important fix for gamers.

This is KB5029244 for Windows 10 version 22H2, and as ever with Microsoft's regular cumulative updates, it applies a load of smoothing over for a bunch of security issues.

As Windows Latest pointed out, the patch also fixes a Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) error that was plaguing gamers, causing the system to bomb out and crash.

AOC has entered into the gaming monitor market with a brand new offering, introducing the Agon Pro AG276QZD, a 26.5-inch OLED panel with a refresh rate of up to 240Hz

This is the latest addition to the Agon Pro Series, and according to a press release from the company, it features a state-of-the-art OLED panel that delivers QHD resolution (2560 x 1440) at a buttery smooth 240Hz. As for other specifications, AOC states in the press release that the AG276QZD has a 0.03 ms GtG response time, a 10-bit color depth, and a 98.5 DCI-P3 coverage, enabling much deeper black and more impressive colors.

Additionally, AOC has equipped the AG276QZD with an anti-glare coating, instead of the typical gloss finish that is present on many other OLED panels. As for connectivity, Aoc has equipped its new monitor with two HDMI 2.0 ports and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports. Furthermore, the AG276QZD features two USB 3.2 ports, a 3.5mm headphone hack, and two built-in 5-watt speakers for those that don't have headphones.

Elon Musk has implemented a new strategy with the goal of attracting advertisers back to the social media platform X, formerly called Twitter.

When Elon Musk purchased what was Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, the platform saw a dramatic drop in advertising expenditure as companies were concerned about the changes Musk planned on implementing when it came to content moderation.

The Tesla CEOs changes expanded what content could be posted on Twitter, under the guise of freedom of speech. Advertisers were concerned that their ads would appear alongside content that doesn't necessarily represent their brand or was just entirely inappropriate.

The world's most powerful space telescope has spotted a question mark-shaped object lurking out in deep space.

That telescope is none other than the European Space Agency's and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which Has been conducting rampant observations of the universe since it began scientific operations on July 11, 2022. The question mark was spotted when the European Space Agency released an image on Wednesday of two actively forming young stars located 1,470 light years from Earth within the Vela constellation.

In the background of this image, The space agency pointed out the question mark-shaped object, which at the time, researchers were unable to explain. However, some clues have presented themselves, and it has to do with the object's color. Researchers now suspect that the object is actually a pair of galaxies merging together that just happened to be in the shape of a question mark. The interactions between these two galaxies have resulted in the strange shape, according to representatives from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

A member of the International Space Station team has become the first person to catch a ride on the end of a newly installed robotic arm.

That individual is Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, who conducted a spacewalk at the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, August 9. The goal of the spacewalk was to test the durability and performance of the European Robotic Arm, which was installed in July 2021 but wasn't used on the Russian segment of the ISS until April 2022. Its previous tests included relocating a large radiator and an experiment airlock, but this was the first time that the arm carried a human during a spacewalk.

The arm was remotely controlled by fellow cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, who was stationed at a panel inside the ISS module Nauka. The arm measures 37 feet in length, and during the demonstration, which lasted just 40 minutes, the cosmonauts installed debris shields to protect areas on the Rassvet mini-research module, specifically in the places where the radiator and airlock had been. The entire spacewalk lasted for 6 hours and 35 minutes, beginning at 10:44 AM and ending at 5:19 PM EDT.

NASA has announced on its blog that its James Webb Space Telescope has focused its highly sensitive instruments on the most distant star known to astronomers.

That star is none other than Earendel, which is located in the Sunrise Arc Galaxy, and according to NASA, the observations of Webb were only possible thanks to the phenomena called gravitational lensing, which is the universe's own version of a magnifying glass created through gravity.

In the case of Earendel, the massive galaxy cluster WHL0137-08 created the right gravitational lens to allow astronomers to study the distant star, which researchers suspect came into existence less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang happened.

An author checked her Goodreads profile last Sunday and realized that multiple books had been unlawfully published under her name.

The author is Jane Friedman, who took to X a few days ago to announce that following checking her Goodreads profile, she realized there are a "cache of garbage" books that had been uploaded to Amazon, which she didn't write. Friedman took to her blog and explained that she believes that the books were AI generated and that they were created through an AI model that had been trained on her blogging, which has been constant since 2009.

Friedman writes that she read the first pages of the books and immediately noticed the text was similar to ChatGPT responses. The author posted an update on Tuesday this week saying that the books from a Goodreads profile and Amazon were removed but not before this story of hers went viral, insinuating that the removal only took place because of notoriety within the writing and publishing community.

AOC has unveiled a brand new IPS gaming monitor that comes in at 27 inches and a high refresh ray of 170Hz.

The new monitor, officially called Q27G2SD, is a 27-inch IPS panel that features a resolution of 2560x1440, with a maximum refresh rate of 170Hz. So, what can gamers expect from AOC's new panel? According to the product specifications, the Q27G2SD features two HDMI 2.0 connectors, which, when used, will enable a maximum refresh rate of 144Hz. The monitor also features a DisplayPort 1.4 connector that allows buyers to reach that glorious 170Hz refresh rate.

As for brightness, AOC's new monitor has a typical brightness of 350 nits and a maximum brightness of 400 nits when viewing HDR content. Additionally, AOC has equipped the Q27G2SD with a 1000:1 and 80 Million:1 dynamic contrast ratio. Furthermore, the Q27G2SD features a 1ms MPRT response time, or a 4ms GTG response time, which according to the company's press release, reduces motion blur, enabling a much more enjoyable gaming experience.

Some gamers just want to squeeze the absolute most out of their systems when it comes to performance, while maintaining a sleek aesthetic design, and one of the ways they can do that is to reduce the temperatures of components through liquid cooling solutions.

Alphacool is no stranger to the PC cooling industry, being one of the leading companies producing high-end cooling solutions for a variety of components. The very same goes for Allied Gaming, one of the world's leading manufacturers of high-performance gaming PCs, and now both of these companies have teamed up to combine their expertise into a new custom-loop liquid cooling solution called HARDLINE.

According to a new press release by Allied Gaming, HARDLINE is aimed at gamers that want the absolute peak performance while maintaining glorious aesthetics that can only be achieved through custom liquid cooling solutions. The press release states that HARDLINE is available in Allied Gaming's M.O.A.B Gaming PC model, the company's flagship desktop PC that can come equipped with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards, along with AMD Ryzen 5000 and 7000 series processors, as well as Intel Core 12th and 13th generation CPUs.

With Flash Memory Summit 2023 underway, storage technology companies are showcasing some of their latest and greatest advances - and in the case of Phison, the company was on hand to demonstrate and push its PCIe Gen5 E26 controller built for 2400MT/s NAND to new heights.

Paired with Frore Systems AirJet active cooling, Phison tuned E26 "to maximize the full bandwidth of PCIe Gen5" in the company's most power-efficient and high-performance model.

The result is a sequential read speed of up to 14 GB/s, a sequential write speed of up to 12 GB/s, and a 4K random read/write of up to 1,500K IOPs and 1,600K IOPs. And with a live demo showcasing a sequential read speed of 14,175.91 MB/s, it's impressive.