Latest News - Page 857

NVIDIA's RTX 4060 graphics card has already witnessed price drops, at least in Europe - so will we see them in the US next?

Wccftech spotted the price cuts in Germany and France, where the freshly launched GPU has dropped 6% below its MSRP.

MindFactory, a major German retailer, is now selling the MSI GeForce RTX 4060 Ventus 2X Black OC for €310, and in France, over at Hardware.fr, the same graphics card has been dropped to €309.

A new report from Financial Times has revealed that Apple is suffering from production issues for its Vision Pro headset, which has caused the company to rein in its sales target for 2024.

The new report from FT states that Apple is experiencing Vision Pro production issues that can be traced back to the headset's complex design, which has led to many technical issues popping up with Apple's suppliers. Notably, Apple already reduced its sales target shortly after the company unveiled the Vision Pro, reducing its initial projection of 1 million units to 150,000 units within the first 12 months of the product launch.

Reports indicate that Apple has pushed back the launch of the Vision Pro to "early 2024" to give developers some time to create software/apps that can run on the company's new operating system VisionOS, which powers the Vision Pro headset.

Many subreddits are still protesting the recent API changes made by Reddit, and some of these subreddits are getting creative in how they are making themselves heard.

For those that don't know, Reddit recently announced it was changing its rules around its API, which is used by many third-party developers to create new apps and tools to improve the overall Reddit experience.

Reddit's API was originally free, but the company changed its tune after it realized people were using Reddit's data to train artificial intelligence systems that could be potentially extremely lucrative. Reddit changed its API rules to charge third-party developers access to its API, forcing many third-party developers to close down their tools and services.

Meteorological authorities have warned that China is expected to be battered by multiple natural disasters through the month of July.

According to meteorologists, China is about to be smacked with "multiple natural disasters" in the month of July, following officials issuing a warning to the population on Tuesday about potential rain-triggered disasters, according to the Xinhua news agency. The Xinhua news agency warned of "multiple natural disasters in July, including floods, severe convection weather, typhoons, and high temperatures".

Reports indicate that more than 400 emergency personnel have been sent to inspect the damage around affected areas. Furthermore, Chinese publications reported on Tuesday a railway bridge on the outskirts of southwestern metropolis Chongqing had collapsed after it was "damaged by the impact of mountain torrents". More than 460,000 people have been affected by the downpours, and 85,000 people have had to evacuate from their homes.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has commented on the recent unveiling of Threads, an Instagram app, created by Meta to compete directly with Twitter.

According to a new listing on the App Store and the Google Play Store, Meta is preparing to launch its answer to Twitter on July 6. The new app, which will essentially operate like Twitter in how people interact with each other, is called Threads, an Instagram app, and according to its listing, it will come with full integration with Instagram as users can sign into the new app with their Instagram account and migrate their followers.

Twitter owner Elon Musk and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey have highlighted an aspect of Threads that many people will have a problem with, users that download Threads will surrender a lot of privacy rights as the app collects a lot of personal data. For example, the Threads listing states that the following data may be collected and linked to the user identify: health and fitness, financial info, contact info, user content, browsing history, usage data, diagnostics, purchases, location, contacts, search history, identifiers, sensitive info and more.

NASA has confirmed that only a few days ago, the Sun released a solar flare so powerful that its radiation could have reached Earth's surface.

The space agency, along with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), confirmed on Sunday, July 2, the Sun released an X-class solar flare, which can be traced back to a sunspot known as AR3354 bursting. Notably, this sunspot is approximately seven times larger than the Earth, and when it burst, it released the strongest type of solar flare, smacking Earth with ionized radiation that resulted in a 30-minute radio black over western parts of the United States and Pacific Ocean.

The flare was between the 10th and 14th biggest flare of this year's solar cycle, solar cycle 25, according to Solar physicist Keith Strong, who took to Twitter with the information. NASA's official Sun & Space Twitter account shared a video of the sunspot bursting, explaining, "Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground."

Scientists from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA are observing the Sun closely as it reaches its solar maximum.

New reports indicate that the Sun has broken a record that was set in 2002, and that record is for the most sunspots produced in a single month. Researchers have announced that the Sun produced more than 160 sunspots in June, the highest number of sunspots produced in a single month in 21 years. The Sun is currently going through its 25th solar cycle, and according to reports, researchers estimate the solar maximum, the period of the cycle where the Sun has the most sunspots, will arrive in a year's time.

Why is this important? Sunspots have the potential to release solar flares, which can hit Earth and impact critical infrastructure such as satellite communications, GPS, radio communications, and even electrical grids. The strong magnetic fields produced by these flares can cause satellite operators to lose track of their satellites, which could potentially lead to a catastrophic domino effect of space junk.

Twitter's competition has seemingly gained a massive boost following Elon Musk's changes that were rolled out over the weekend.

The Twitter owner announced on his personal account that Twitter developers are combating "extreme levels of data scraping" and that temporary limitations will be put on each account for the number of tweets an individual account can view. These new limitations were specifically for accounts that weren't signed up to Twitter Blue, Twitter's premium subscription program that enables several new features and adds a verification checkmark. Accounts were limited to 600 tweets per day.

These changes caused a massive influx, or perhaps outflux, of Twitter users rushing to competing apps such Spill, or Twitter found Jack Dorsey's new project, Bluesky. Reports indicate that Spill was the top app over the weekend, with more than 100,000 new accounts created and trending top on the App Store's social networking for the weekend and third overall. Bluesky is invite-only, and despite this limitation, users jumped from 184,000 on Friday to 238,000 on Saturday.

Meta is currently preparing to launch its Twitter competitor, a brand new app that will be very similar to Twitter, but have full integration with Instagram.

The rumors seem to have been true, as parent company Meta is preparing to launch "Threads, an Instagram app". The company's answer to Twitter has appeared on the App Store and the Google Play Store, showcasing a brand new listing that reveals an app icon, description, images, release date, and a pre-download button (App Store listing).

Previous rumors indicated that Meta was preparing to release a new app that would be very similar to Twitter, but come with automatic integration with Instagram, as users will be able to instantly migrate their followers to the new platform. These rumors proved to be true as the screenshots provided in the App Store listing reveals a sign-in option with an Instagram handle and "follow the same accounts you follow on Instagram".

YouTube's parent company Google is testing out a new method of stopping ad blocker users from browsing countless YouTube's videos without being exposed to a single advertisement.

Google has been rolling out updates to YouTube to stop ad blockers from working, but it seems that just after a few days, the developers of these ad blockers just update the extensions, and the users are back to an advertisement-free experience on YouTube. Google obviously wants to stop this as it's costing the company potentially millions in advertising.

Now we are hearing about a new tactic from Google that was first spotted by BleepingComputer, which cited a Reddit user sharing a screenshot to the r/YouTube subreddit. The screenshot can be seen above and indicates that YouTube's video player will be "blocked after 3 videos".

With the FTC case looking to block Microsoft's planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard wrapping up and a decision expected any day now, which will determine if the deal goes ahead or not, a treasure trove of info related to Xbox, PlayStation, and titles like Call of Duty and Minecraft has emerged.

We learned that 200-plus million dollar budgets for exclusive AAA titles like Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part II for PlayStation consoles rivals big-budget movies. We learned Minecraft makes four times as much money on the Switch as on Xbox. And we learned that Xbox's Phil Spencer decided to make all future Bethesda titles exclusive to PC and Xbox - seemingly starting with Starfield.

But this is all 2023 news related to the current console war between Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony; what about the mid-to-late 1990s when it was all about Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, and consoles like the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and the fresh-on-the-scene Sony PlayStation. Well, a massive 272-page PDF of classified Sega of America documents from the era has made its way online with some cool revelations (via Sega Retro).

If you thought real-time ray-tracing effects in games like shadows or reflections were taxing on GPU hardware, you probably haven't seen path-tracing in action. Path tracing essentially makes all lighting and light-related effects a real-time calculation, like RT on steroids, and the results are incredible but also incredibly taxing on GPU hardware.

Last year we saw the release of Portal with RTX from NVIDIA, which took Valve's iconic first-person puzzle game and turned it into a stunning path-traced showcase. This a glimpse at the future because even on a GeForce RTX 4090, you still need DLSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation to play it with a high frame rate.

The same goes for the recent Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive mode from CD Projekt Red, which takes the game's impressive RT effects to present a Technical Preview of a full path-traced Night City to explore. The results are stunning, but like with Portal, you'll need DLLS 3 to experience it properly without devolving into a stuttering slideshow. But what if you get real-time path tracing to run on a mainstream GPU like the Intel Arc A750?

It has only been a couple of weeks since we saw an LN2-cooled Colorful GeForce RTX 4090 iGame LAB hitting an impressive 3.93 GHz, but the race to hit a stabled 4 GHz clock speed continues with ASUS taking the OC crown. With its new flagship ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 and 'sub-zero liquid nitrogen overclocking,' the GPU has hit an impressive 3.94 GHz (or 3945MHz).

Like Olympic track and field events, sometimes a 0.01 GHz increase is enough to determine the gold from silver. Announced at Computex 2023, the new flagship liquid-cooled ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 all-in-one is ASUS's top-of-the-line RTX 4090 and will ship with the highest GPU boost clock for a custom card to date - though this will be considerably lower than 3.94 GHz.

ASUS sent the GPU to overclocker SPLAVE, who achieved this incredible result with the GPUPI v3.3 benchmark. Although it only represents a 15 MHz increase over the recent Colorful GeForce RTX 4090 iGame LAB result, we're reaching the theoretical endpoint for how far the RTX 4090 GPU can be pushed. So every MHz counts.

A new 16-pin power connector able to deliver up to 600W of power, what should have been an interesting footnote in the transition to a new standard, became one of the defining parts of the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 launch, with reports of melting cables and no one knowing why, the seemingly innocuous collection of numbers and digits '12VHPWR' is now tied to the idea of catastrophic failure.

According to a new in-depth report at Igor's Lab, PCI-SIG is set to replace the 16-pin 12VHPWR power connector with the new 12V-2x6 power connector as part of the new ATX 3.1 standard. We don't have to wait long for the new connector, as MSI's new MAG GL Series power supplies (recently revealed) features support the new '12V-2x6' connector.

Cue the good news, the new 12V-2x6 power connector is backward compatible with the 12VHPWR connector - so it's more of a revision than a complete redesign. With most melted cables chalked up to user error or not being fully seated during installation, one has to wonder if this revision rectifies a specific design flaw.

Last week we reported on an interesting four-slot Founders Edition cooler, which we assumed was a prototype for a potential GeForce RTX 4090 Ti or TITAN-class Ada GPU. With its unique vertical orientation for the I/O ports and truly massive cooling potential, whatever its intended use was - undoubtedly, it would have been for a monster.

And we say 'was' because what you're looking at is essentially just the cooler, no PCB, no GPU, and no actual hardware to make it a functional graphics card. Still, that hasn't stopped this mysterious Founders Edition oddity from appearing on Taobao's Goofish platform, where someone under the name "Hayaka" is asking for a cool USD 120,000 (or RMB 888,000) for this admittedly rare piece of GeForce hardware.

NVIDIA's flagship GPU for the Ada Lovelace-powered GeForce RTX 40 Series is the GeForce RTX 4090, an already massive GPU that sits in a class all its own with a price point to match its impressive performance. There are enough leaks and info out there to suggest that NVIDIA has considered releasing a more powerful GeForce RTX 4090 Ti with beefier specs, but it looks like these plans have been put on hold.

A new report from analyst firm Newzoo concludes that console gamers are more likely to go from players to payers.

Console gaming has more payers than mobile and PC gaming, a new report from Newzoo indicates. Based on the report, which measured a size of 59,040 gamers in a global weighted average across 36 markets, roughly 57% of people who played video games in the last 6 months actually spent money on them. This implies that around 43% of gamers, or over 25,000 people, play free-to-play titles and don't actually spend money on games.

The data is part of Newzoo's robust Global Gamer Study analysis, which can be found here.

One of the best ways to make money in Starfield is to sell data from planets that you survey.

Starfield has 1,000 planets, and while only about 100 of them have life, that doesn't mean the rest of the 900 planets are complete barren wastelands with nothing to do. Bethesda has outlined an interesting player motivation loop that will keep you busy and reward you for venturing into the unknown and discovering planets.

In a very real sense, Starfield will make players into a kind of interstellar data analyst. You'll land on a planet, survey its life and resources, and then sell that data to a group in the game. This also brings lots of interesting implications--can you sell the data to the highest bidder? What happens if you sell it to the the pirates at the Crimson Fleet...will they start landing on the planets more often? Hmm...

Microsoft's Xbox games division helped Bethesda unlock the full potential for Starfield.

Following the Microsoft-ZeniMax buyout deal for $7.5 billion, ZeniMax is now a limited-integration company within Xbox, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft's game dev teams and technology specialists haven't helped with Starfield's development. In fact, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty confirmed that Xbox has been involved with Starfield's development since early 2022, with Xbox's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) assisting Bethesda Game Studios with various console-level optimizations.

In a recent interview with KFG, Bethesda Game Studios' Todd Howard says that Xbox's help has allowed the studio to reach its ambitions with Starfield. Howard responds to the pressures of Starfield essentially being a big proving point for the Xbox first-party games division, and how Microsoft's assistance helped accelerate Starfield's development and allow new improvements like the upgraded Creation Engine 2 optimizations on Xbox platforms. These ambitious new features include things like volumetric fog, the new global illumination lighting systems, physics effects, and more.

In a move that's very much against the overall grain of the GPU market as a whole, Lovelace graphics cards are set for modest price increases in one region.

That would be China, or at least this is what we're told from the Board Channels forums over in the country, a source of many leaks and rumors - but one that should be treated with more than the usual dose of skepticism.

The theory is that everything from the newly launched RTX 4060 to the flagship RTX 4090 graphics cards will be subject to price hikes of 2% to 4% starting this month, and indeed, the RTX 4060 has already had an increase.

ZeniMax head of publishing Pete Hines is not confident Starfield could still release in September 2023 if it was not exclusive to Xbox.

During the FTC v Microsoft federal court case, we heard a lot about about exclusivity. It's a hot topic in the gaming world, particularly in the case of paying studios to skip Xbox--a practice that has earned Sony the designation as a "hostile" competitor against Microsoft.

Conversely, we also heard first-hand about the merits and benefits of exclusivity. These include upfront payments and royalty deals, closer access to console engineers, and, in ZeniMax's case, the ability to launch games more quickly.