Latest News - Page 829

At Flash Memory Summit 2023, Silicon Motion was on hand to showcase several new products - one of which was the new SM2508 client PCIe Gen5 SSD controller on track to launch sometime next year. With power consumption as low as 3.5W, the new 8-Channel SM2508 controller (3600 MT/s per channel) can also deliver sequential read and write speeds of up to 14 GB/s with capacities of up to 8TB. Impressive stuff.

Some of the fastest 3D NAND devices available today feature a 2400 MT/s interface to use PCIe 5.0 x 4 fully - so the shift to 3600 MT/s will usher in a new range of next-gen SSDs. Throw in random read-and-write numbers in the 2.5 million IOPS range, with support for 3D TLC/QLC; it's proof that there's still more ground to break in the world of PCIe Gen5 storage.

With fast PCIe Gen5 SSDs in 2023 often requiring additional power and even active cooling solutions, the SM2508 platform should see more high-speed Gen5 options arrive in the desktop and notebook space with more efficient designs.

A new report from Jon Peddie Research highlights some good news for the client-based CPU market covering notebooks and desktops - Q2 2023 saw 53.6 million CPUs ship, up 17% from the previous quarter. But it's more of a recovery than a continued upward trend, as total CPU shipments have decreased by 23% year-on-year.

It's a similar trend for iGPUs, with shipments increasing by 14% to 49 million units for Q2 2023, but this also represents a year-on-year decline of -29%. Per the CPU shipment chart supplied by Jon Peddie Research, we see a market share split of 72% for notebook CPs and 28% for desktop CPUs as portable devices continue to dominate the space.

The most interesting news from the Q2 2023 data collected for this report is the overall CPU market share split between the two big players - Intel and AMD. According to the report, Intel's market share increased by 23% compared to the previous quarter, while AMD's overall CPU market share decreased by -5.3%.

The original Doom from id Software broke new ground in 1993 and helped usher in a new style of PC game, the first-person shooter. Back then, the 3D visuals (with 2D sprites), action, and music were all cutting-edge - but not so much in 2023. As one of the most iconic games of all time and most versatile in engine and optimization, it means that in recent years we've seen Doom running on household appliances alongside consoles like the Nintendo Switch.

The answer to the question, 'Can it run Doom?' is often a yes, and now we can add a keyboard keycap to the growing number of strange objects that can play id Software's classic. Of course, hardware is involved - it's not a magic keycap - with the keyboard component in question housing a tiny custom PCB and the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microprocessor sealed in resin.

This very cool mod was created by Bob from TheKeebProject, using an existing Doom port for the Raspberry Pi RP2040 created by Graham Sanderson with modifications to support the very tiny display. What's remarkable is that you can clearly make out all of the action, and it's fully playable.

TEAMGROUP has a pair of new high-speed and high-end memory cards as part of its T-CREATE line-up with the new T-CREATE EXPERT CFexpress Plus Type-B and T-CREATE EXPERT CFexpress Type-B. Designed for creators that take high-speed shots and record raw 4K and 8K videos, both cards offer impressive write speeds of up to 1,700 MB/s and read speeds of up to 1,800 MB/s.

Adopting pSLC technology to deliver SLC-like read and write speeds that match their rugged durability, TEAMGROUP notes that write speed can be maintained at 1,600 MB/s over long periods for continuous recording or file transfers.

And they're available in high capacities using a PCIe 3.0x2 interface, with the T-CREATE EXPERT CFexpress Plus featuring a maximum capacity of 1.3TB and the CFexpress Type-B featuring up to a whopping 2TB of storage space - which works out to be close to six hours of 8K video recorded with a raw 800Mbps bitrate.

Sony's PlayStation games division kicks off a new fiscal year by breaking a new sales milestone.

Sony just reported its Q1 FY23 earnings results, and PlayStation gaming has grown to new record levels. The company managed to set a new all-time Q1 sales record by delivering $5.634 billion in sales revenues for the period on a converted yen to USD basis. Q1'23 does not make an exceptionally high record, though, and only beats the previous high Q1 periods (Q1'20 and Q1'21) by about $6-10 million.

The Q1 growth was much more pronounced in yen, where Sony recorded a +28% increase in net sales (thanks partly to a +40.6 billion yen impact).

Activision's dev teams have outlined what Modern Warfare 2 content will carry forward to Modern Warfare 3.

MW3 will be an extension of MW2, indicating a potential cross-game future for the Call of Duty franchise. Reports indicate that MW3 was originally envisioned as a kind of expansion lacking a premium experience, but morphed into a fully-fledged $69.99 premium game as Treyarch and Infinity Ward were conscripted to assist Sledgehammer Games with MW3's development.

Although MW3 is technically it's own separate game, there will be a lot of carry-over. Well, carry-forward is more apt. This is a great win for gamers, who won't have to re-buy content or start from scratch in MW3.

Humble Bundle's latest Decades of Horror bundle packs in some must-have Resident Evil games for a low price.

Humble is bringing the savings on legacy catalog titles from Capcom, packing some great action-packed Resident Evil games. The deal offers 12 games total, split into four different pricing tiers. Depending on how much Resident Evil you want, the best deal seems to be the $20 bundle that packs in greats like Resident Evil 2 REmake alongside Resident Evil 7.

There's also a the $35 bundle which includes everything in the $20 bundle with the addition of the excellent and super entertaining Resident Evil Village, a game that stands as one of the best Halloween games you could possibly play.

AMD's Zen 5 processors will be a bigger leap forward than Zen 3 chips were over Zen 2, we're told by a YouTube leaker.

This nugget and a bunch of other rumors on what'll likely be AMD's Ryzen 8000 CPUs were provided by RedGamingTech (RGT).

The theory is that the leakage comes from a source who has been pretty accurate in the past, and we even get some benchmarks spilled here.

Rockstar's best-selling Grand Theft Auto franchise has now generated over $8.4 billion in revenues since GTA V's release.

Take-Two Interactive's latest Q1'24 financials give key updates on the company's performance, including refreshed figures for the Grand Theft Auto series. According to the data, the GTA franchise has made over $8.4 billion in total revenues since Grand Theft Auto V's launch in September 2013, driven primarily by GTA V game sales and in-game spending on GTA Online microtransactions.

In Q1 Fiscal Year 2024, the GTA series made $175 million, primarily driven by GTA V and GTA Online. While this is on the lower side of earnings and represents the lowest GTA revenues for a Q1 period in the last 4 years, Take-Two executives still believe the earnings beat their expectations.

Microsoft has halved its Xbox Game Pass promotion to just 14 days, the newly updated subscription website has confirmed.

Shortly before the FTC lost its federal case against the Microsoft-Activision merger, Microsoft increased the price of its Game Pass subscription; Game Pass Ultimate was raised $2 to $16.99/month, whereas Game Pass on console was raised to $10.99. The price hike skewed the Xbox LIVE Gold conversion ratios, and also brought back the popular $1 trial of Game Pass Ultimate.

Now a few weeks after the introduction of the promo, Microsoft has quietly changed the promotional period for the $1 trial. Users can now only get 14 days of Xbox Game Pass for $1 instead of the full 30 days that was previously offered.

Fancy an Assassin's Creed marathon later this week? There'll be more than enough to keep you busy this coming weekend as Ubisoft is offering free access to five games from the franchise.

They are as follows: Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, and Assassin's Creed Revelations (available in The Ezio Collection on consoles).

Those games will be free to play from August 10 to August 14, on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, although the exact availability will vary depending on what platform you're using.

Amazon's Prime Day sale has been and gone this year, but there'll be another crack at getting deals for Prime subscribers in October (just like last year).

This comes from Doug Herrington, CEO Worldwide Amazon Stores, who shared the revelation of 'Prime Big Deal Days' that'll happen in October (as CNET spotted), although the chief exec didn't tell us exactly when.

Herrington stated: "This October, we're bringing an exclusive shopping event to Prime members - Prime Big Deal Days! I'm really excited for Prime members to discover some of Amazon's best deals of the season across 19 countries."

With the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti available in two flavors, 8GB and 16GB of VRAM, a lot of coverage around the latter's SKU launch has pointed to there not being much difference in in-game performance. This makes sense for titles where additional VRAM isn't a big issue because both RTX 4060 Ti models share the same Ada Lovelace GPU and architecture - the only difference being memory capacity.

A new deep dive by YouTube tech reviewer Daniel Owen offers a closer look at the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB to showcase relative performance in some of the latest memory-hungry titles. Kicking things off with Ratchet & Clank: Rift apart, we see a pretty sizable difference between the two RTX 4060 Ti models.

With the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB version delivering 44 fps at 1080p using Very High RT settings, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB delivers 59 fps - a 34% improvement. This applies to the 1% lows too, so in this specific example, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB gives you a generational improvement in performance. Bumping up the resolution to 1440p and the performance bump increases to a massive 43%.

At SIGGRAPH 2023, NVIDIA announced that a suite of powerful new NVIDIA RTX workstations are coming from global manufacturers like BOXX, Dell Technologies, HP, and Lenovo. Featuring NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, and NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise software, the company also announced that it was expanding its workstation GPU line-up with three new models.

With the current demand for all things AI and real-time graphics, it's a move that makes a lot of sense - and similar to the desktop gaming space in that there are now multiple NVIDIA RTX workstation GPUs to suit users' needs. The three models are the NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada Generation Graphics Card, the NVIDIA RTX 4500 Ada Generation Graphics Card, and the single-slot NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Graphics Card.

NVIDIA describes the new NVIDIA RTX 4000 as "the most powerful single-slot GPU for professionals," with Single-Precision Performance of 26.7 TFLOPS, RT Core Performance of 61.8 TFLOPS, Tensor Performance of 427.6 TFLOPS, and 20GB of graphics memory. And with that, you've got a 1.7X increase in rendering performance compared to the NVIDIA RTX A4000, alongside a 1.2X increase in generative AI performance.

At Computex 2023, we learned that NVIDIA's new GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip had entered full production, an AI powerhouse that combines an Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPU and Hopper GPU architectures using NVIDIA NVLink-C2C interconnect technology.

Today as part of SIGGRAPH 2023, NVIDIA has announced that it's supercharging the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip with the world's first deployment of HBM3e memory for both higher capacity and bandwidth.

"Built for the era of accelerated computing and generative AI," the new GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip with HBMe delivers up to 3.5 times more memory capacity and 3 times more bandwidth than the current offering. Spec-wise, you're looking at 144 Arm Neoverse cores, eight petaflops of AI performance, and 282GB of the latest HBM3e memory.

AMD is all set to unveil its new mid-range and enthusiast RDNA 3 GPUs later this month, with the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT set to fill the gap between the mainstream Radeon RX 7600 and the flagship Radeon RX 7900 Series. Sources indicate that the reveal is expected at the upcoming Gamescom event in Germany, with the launch soon after that.

Although AMD has yet to confirm these GPUs' existence officially, we're now at the stage where product info and specs are popping up online. Last week PowerColor inadvertently posted the full product page for its newPowerColor Radeon RX 7800 XT Red Devil graphics card, and today we've got info on new Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT models coming from ASRock.

Not a leak per se, but a filing (via @momomo_us) for new products that confirm that the Radeon RX 7800 XT will indeed feature 16GB of VRAM while confirming that the Radeon RX 7700 XT will feature 12GB of VRAM. With the Radeon RX 7700 XT set to feature a cutdown 'Navi 32' GPU, 12GB of GDDR6 memory implies it will have a 192-bit memory bus.

The latest NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 536.99 release is here, adding DLSS 2 support to Baldur's Gate 3 to deliver impressive performance gains on GeForce GPUs. The worldwide RPG phenomenon from developer Larian Studios is one of the biggest PC releases 2023, hitting an all-time peak concurrent player count on Steam of over 800,000.

NVIDIA notes that GeForce driver support for the game has been there since the game first hit Early Access three years ago, with the latest GeForce Game Ready Driver featuring "additional optimizations and enhancements" to improve performance. Baldur's Gate supports NVIDIA DLAA and DLSS 2, with the latter delivering some impressive 4K results - up to a 93% boost on average for the GeForce RTX 40 Series.

To showcase Baldur's Gate 3 with DLSS 2 enabled, NVIDIA provided a 4K benchmark graph of the game running with max settings using the DLSS 'Performance' mode. And we see every GPU from the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and up getting a sizable boost, with the mid-range and lower-tier GeForce RTX 40 Series cards seeing the biggest benefit.

Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive reiterates that Fiscal Year 2025 will deliver a major upward curve with significantly high earnings results.

A bit ago, Take-Two Interactive gave us clues on when GTA 6 could release. The company potentially telegraphed Grand Theft AUto VI's launch in its earnings forecast for the upcoming fiscal year. Take-Two expects to make an incredible $8 billion in net bookings in Fiscal Year 2025, which is from April 1, 2024 through March 31, 2025.

This represents a massive $2.5 billion+ increase in net bookings over the current-year projections. Analysts speculate that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be the main driver for this spike in revenues, however it's worth noting that Take-Two currently has a 52-game pipeline of titles that it expects to release by the end of Fiscal Year 2026.

Take-Two Interactive management comments on the pros of adding catalog games to subscriptions like PlayStation Plus, saying that these services offer an economic advantage.

While Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick doesn't agree with the Xbox Game Pass day-and-date model, that doesn't mean that the publisher is anti-subscription. Quite the opposite is true: We've seen NBA 2K games regularly show up on PlayStation Plus, and Grand Theft Auto V was just included on Xbox Game Pass for the third time.

Now a recent Q1'24 earnings call, Take-Two Interactive President Karl Slatoff comments on the advantages of adding catalog games into subscription services, saying that the company wouldn't do this unless it offered a "significant economic advantage."

Despite big successes from Nintendo and Sony, Take-Two Interactive will continue to be very selective on adaptations of its hit franchises.

It may be a long time before we ever see a Grand Theft Auto movie. In a recent earnings call, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick expressed his thoughts on TV shows and films based on video games.

Zelnick is mostly wary about expanding games into new mediums because of the incredibly high risks involved, but that being said, Take-Two has still licensed two franchises to film, including Borderlands and BioShock.