Latest News - Page 847

NVIDIA has pushed out a firmware fix for some of its older graphics cards that had a problem with DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4 connections, a glitch that caused some nasty issues.

Affected GPU owners could find their PC locking up while booting and failing to reach the desktop. Or a lesser problem, but still annoying, was the user getting a black screen through the whole boot-up process until the desktop appeared.

NVIDIA explains that the new firmware update enables the latest DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4 features, and without it, the mentioned problems could be encountered (although not necessarily).

It's the 45th anniversary of Space Invaders - which makes us feel impossibly old - and Google has launched an AR game to celebrate this milestone on Android and iOS.

Space Invaders: World Defense is basically Pokemon Go but with blocky 3D invaders turning up in your neighborhood.

The idea is to get out there and set high scores for your vicinity by spotting and blasting the invading ships. To shoot down a Space Invader, all you have to do is point your smartphone and fire at it.

Be afraid. In fact, be absolutely stone-cold petrified. Because Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, which is pretty much universally regarded as one of the lowest points of PC gaming ever, is getting a remaster.

The Definitive Edition of the game, remastered by Limited Run - the original was released way back in 1994 - has just been given a release date of September 2023 in a new YouTube trailer which PC Gamer spotted.

And to say we're excited would be, well, a lie. We're about as far from excited as you can get - indeed, so far from that emotion, there aren't suitable words to convey the distance involved.

Samsung is expected to announce the new Galaxy Watch 9 and Galaxy Watch 6 Classic during an event at the end of July, at the same time that the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Fold 5 will also be announced. As we get closer to that announcement on July 26 we continue to see more and more leaks ahead of time. And now we've been treated to official-looking renders, too.

While these images aren't shared by Samsung, they do appear to be marketing images that we will see used following July 26. They were shared by Twitter leaker SnoopyTech via an Imgur link that was made available via a cryptic tweet.

The leaks show a few things but the most interesting thing is the return of the rotating bezel on the Galaxy Watch 6. In terms of sizes, we're told to expect the Galaxy Watch 6 to come in 40mm and 44mm configurations while the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic is thought to become available in 43mm and 47mm sizes.

With Samsung expected to announce the Galaxy Z Flip 5 within the next couple of weeks, we can expect to finally put the rumors and leaks to bed. But before then we've time for one more with a new leak sharing details about what we can expect from the phone's biggest change.

That change is the addition of a new, much larger cover display with this new leak showing what that new display could be capable of offering in terms of features. The leak appears to be Samsung's marketing materials that highlight some of the ways the new cover display can be used to show information. Reports have the new display being around 3.4 inches in size, making it notably bigger than the current 1.9-inch display on the Galaxy Z Flip 4.

The leak came via Roland Quandt and was posted to Twitter before being taken down. The images were picked up by 9to5Google and preserved however, and they definitely appear to be produced by Samsung and show call screens, weather widgets, and more.

After announcing the ViewFinity S9 display during its CES 2023 events and then subsequently sharing details about when it would go on sale at home in South Korea, Samsung has now confirmed how much the display will cost when sold in the United States.

According to Samsung, the ViewFinity S9 will sell for $1.599 which makes it the same price as the Apple Studio Display - and the two displays are always going to be heavily compared. They both have 27-inch displays and they both have a 5K panel. The 5K displays are often favored by users of Macs so as to allow for a full Retina display experience.

Alongside the 5K panel, the ViewFinity S9 also comes with a built-in 4K webcam for use on video calls and whatnot. That's an upgrade over Apple's monitor with its notoriously poor 12-megapixel camera. That alone could make this a good option for people who want a 5K display with a solid webcam included without having to buy an external one.

If everything goes the way that we expect it to Apple will announce a new iPhone 15 lineup later this fall and if that's indeed the case we can expect it to come in a number of colors. Now, a new report appears to suggest that there's one particularly cool color on its way to that lineup.

Previous rumors had suggested that we could expect the iPhone 15 to come in a blue color, but that now seems unlikely following the arrival of a new report that points towards the return of a pink color.

Following previous reports that a blue iPhone 15 was coming to the lineup Twitter leaker ShrimpApplePro now claims that there will be a pink color instead. According to that leaker, the iPhone 15 will be offered in a handful of colors including Midnight, Starlight, Green, Yellow, Pink, and Product (RED).

A UFO expert has claimed that the US government is hiding a crashed alien spacecraft underneath a building.

Ross Coulthart, a multi-award-winning Australian investigative journalist, who has previously worked for 60 Minutes, and penned the book "In Plain Sight", has appeared on the Project Unity YouTube channel to discuss government agencies becoming interested in retrieving the remains of crashed UFOs. During the interview, Coulthart touched on a crashed UFO that he is aware of, saying that "What if some of that s**t is so big it can't be moved?"

The investigative journalist was pressed for more questions about the downed craft and said that it was "So big they had a building put over it in a country outside of the United States of America." Unfortunately, Coulthart didn't reveal any specific details about the craft or the location where it landed, but said, "I know that sounds preposterous and you can just hear them now, the bleeding debunkers."

Google Pixel fans will be glad to know that the upcoming Pixel 8 Pro is expected to come with all of the bells and whistles you would expect, according to leaker Yogesh Brar.

Google released the Pixel 7 last September, and since then, fans have been patiently waiting to hear what will be special about the Pixel 8. Now, we are starting to hear rumblings of what Google will be putting inside of the Pixel 8, and according to reportedly reliable leaker Yogesh Brar, who took to Twitter on July 17, the Google Pixel 8 will be announced by Google in October, which is hardly a surprise as it lines up with the company's previous Pixel announcements.

As for specifications, Brar provided a comprehensive list of what buyers can expect to be inside the Pixel 8, and according to the list, the Pixel 8 will feature a 6.7-inch QHD+ LTPO OLED display that will come with a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz.

Instagram's Threads might be getting support for direct messages sooner than we had expected following the leak of an internal Instagram document.

Instagram's top dog Adam Mosseri had previously said that Threads would not be getting a direct message feature any time soon, but a new document leaked from within the company and reported on by social network analyst Matt Navarra and Business Insider suggests that something might have changed.

While there is no indication of exactly when this new feature will come to the social network, but it's said to be "Coming Soon" according to the document. Direct messages aren't the only new feature that is on the way, though. The same document appears to have leaked the fact that trends and topics and improved search are also incoming.

"Are we alone?" is one of, if not the biggest question humans have ever posed to the universe, and according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, his new AI company will be focussed on answering just that.

Twitter owner, Tesla, and SpaceX CEO held a Twitter Spaces event where he discussed various topics such as the recently announced xAI, Musk's newest AI venture that he says will be focussing on understanding "the true nature of the universe". The problems Musk's AI will be facing are some of the biggest and most intriguing mysteries known to mankind, such as dark matter, dark energy, gravity, and the existence or lack of obvious alien life.

The latter is known as the Fermi paradox, originally proposed by Enrico Fermi, the creator of the first nuclear reactor, who proposed through statistics that the universe should already be teeming with alien life and that it was strange that humans have yet to encounter any.

While Apple has already had a big 2023 by announcing the Vision Pro headset, the first 15-inch MacBook Air, and a whole lot more, it isn't done. We're still waiting for it to announce the entire iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro lineups and there are likely to be new Macs and updated iPad Pros according to reports. Now, it seems that we can also expect there to be an updated iPad Air, too.

That's according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman writing in his weekly Power On newsletter - the same report where Gurman shared details on a planned October release of new Macs - a new iPad Air will also benefit from the same M3 chip that will also power those Macs and the 2023 iPad Pro.

Writing in the newsletter, Gurman said that an iPad Air that boosts the specifications of the previous model is also in development. However, Gurman stops short of saying exactly when that iPad Air will arrive. He points to an October time frame for the other products, so it's possible that we may also see the iPad Air arrive around the same time.

An investment management firm has dropped its valuation of the world's second-largest social media platform after Elon Musk took to its helm.

A new report from The Wall Street Journal has detailed a new marked-down valuation by Art Invest, an investment management firm based in Florida, that reduced its valuation of Twitter by 47%.

In an interview with Cathie Woods, Ark Invest CEO, the valuation has dropped from the figure that Musk purchased the company, $44 billion, to approximately $23 billion, and according to Woods, the investment firm takes its valuation "very seriously".

If you're wondering if malicious PC actors are using AI tools and language models like ChatGPT to improve and refine malware and phishing scripts to attack businesses and end-users while avoiding detection - the answer is (an expected) yes.

A new report by the company SlashNext, which ironically uses AI to stop phishing and human-targeting threats in cyberspace, outlines how a new tool called WormGPT is being used to improve and refine malicious cyber attacks.

The report also notes a growing trend with OpenAI's ChatGPT playing a role in business email compromise (BEC) attacks, with the generative AI language model being used to create sophisticated and personalized fake emails to compromise systems. It can be as simple as writing the fake email in their native language, translating it to English, and then using ChatGPT to flesh it out and make it sound more professional.

Meta's subsidiary company Instagram released what was deemed as the "Twitter killer", a new text-based app called Threads.

Millions of people rushed to try Threads and within the first five days of it being available to download the app received more than 100 million sign ups. The speed of which Threads gained new users earned it the title of the "fastest growing app ever", but with most things that seem to good to be true, they aren't, and the hype circling around the app has seemingly died off, according to a report from SimilarWeb.

The report states that within one week Threads' daily active users dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million. For comparsion, SimilarWeb reports that Twitter's daily active users sits around 109 million, which means that Threads during its peak of public interest reached nearly half of Twitter's daily active users within just one week. Another interesting metric is usage across the US, which on July 7 peaked at about 21 minutes of engagement within the app, but by July 14 was down to just 6 minutes.

The European Union has announced new regulations around using batteries in all devices to promote recycling and reuse and improve waste collection. It will come into effect in 2027, and one provision that stands out is that "portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user."

The announcement adds that having the new regulations in 2027 represents "sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement." And with that, it will affect the production and sales of smartphones in the region, including those from Apple, as well as portable gaming devices like the Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, and ROG Ally.

The new regulation has been on the cards for some time, and with it affecting everything that uses a battery, there will probably be some pushback from device makers whose products don't feature the option to remove and swap out batteries.

Rockstar's original Red Dead Redemption never made its way to PC, at least officially, with the game relegated to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era with modern consoles like the Xbox Series X able to present the game in 4K - albeit with the frame-rate capped to 30fps.

This has always been one of the main reasons why people are keen to see high-profile console-exclusive titles make their way to PC, as you (at least on paper) get a superior version of the game in question able to push higher resolutions, higher frame rates, and more advanced visual effects. Red Dead Redemption has been high on the list of 'games people want to see ported over to PC' for several years, it is a game from the creators of Grand Theft Auto, but the only way to experience it this way is via emulation.

This brings us to the latest deep dive from the all-things gaming team over at Digital Foundry, showcasing the original Red Dead Redemption running on a GeForce RTX 4090 powered rig running the game via Xbox 360 emulator Xenia and PS3 emulator RPCS 3.

With recent news confirming that Intel was ending production of its powerful range of mini PCs under the NUC name, it did state that it was pivoting to allow its "ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth." And with that, we'll see tiny PCs pop up for many more years to come, making this new entry from Chinese company ThundeRobot very interesting.

The MIX combines a 13th Gen Intel Core CPU with a GeForce RTX 4060 in a form factor 60% smaller than the compact Xbox Series S console (1.7 liters, apparently). In fact, the announcement at IT Home refers to it as a console first, PC second - making it a pretty cool Steam box you can sit in or on a TV cabinet without worrying about it taking up space.

ThundeRobot is huge in China, the third largest supplier of laptops and gaming peripherals like displays and keyboards, making it an ASUS of sorts in the region - alongside ASUS. As of writing, the full specs have yet to be revealed, though with a 13th Gen Raptor Lake HX-series mobile CPU; the GeForce RTX 4060 inside may be the mobile version too.

With rumors swirling that AMD is planning to launch its mid-range RDNA 3 graphics cards in September, we'll be hearing much more about the planned Radeon RX 7700 and Radeon RX 7800 GPUs in the coming months. Starting today, with some supposedly leaked benchmarks for these GPUs running the popular 3DMark synthetic benchmark Time Spy coming from @All_The_Watts over on Twitter.

With the flagship Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX out in the wild, which was recently joined by the mainstream Radeon RX 7600, a big gap in the line-up is ready to be filled. The consensus is that AMD has delayed the launch of its mid-range offerings for its latest generation of Radeon graphics due to existing RDNA 2 stock being available and sold at a discount.

But with stock levels dropping to the point where it's hard to find brand-new Radeon RX 6000 series cards in many regions, the time is right for AMD to launch new GPUs. And speaking of time, these Time Spy results showcase that the Radeon RX 7800 outperforms the GeForce RTX 4070 by around 5%, with the Radeon RX 7700 beating the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti by a more sizable 15%.

The European Space Agency has highlighted an image snapped by the famous Hubble Space Telescope, and this time in the limelight is the irregular galaxy known as Arp 263.

The ESA explains on its website that Arp 263 is located 25 million light years away from Earth and resides in the constellation Leo. Arp 263 was created through the merger of two galaxies, and using Hubble's powerful instruments, researchers set out with two investigations in mind.

The first was to observe recent sites of supernovae, and the second, was to image all peculiar galaxies within the Arp catalog, which is part of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys campaign. The data from this campaign will be used to find promising scientific prospects for the world's most powerful space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope.