Latest News - Page 905

Would-be nephalem have a chance to enter Sanctuary once more in the second and final Diablo IV test build.

Can't wait to slay more demons and snap up awesome loot? Or maybe just blast enemies with the Necro's OP skills? We're right there with you. Luckily Blizzard has announced the Diablo IV server slam event from May 12-14, which will offer access to both console and PC players over the 3-day period. The event is free, and does not require players to have pre-ordered Diablo IV.

All progress from the previous closed and open beta tests will not carry over. The server slam wipes the slate clean and you start from scratch, but you can access all five classes. There's an added bonus that neither Xbox LIVE nor PlayStation Plus is required to play the server slam on consoles.

Statements made by Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb embroiled Xbox in another controversy...but this time the info appears to be wrong.

Gamers are pretty frustrated with the Xbox brand right now. There's just not enough new games to keep fans happy, despite the release of Hi-Fi Rush and Goldeneye in the same month, followed up by Minecraft Legends' launch just days ago. Xbox fans want more.

With this existing ire in check, gamers are typically more quick to latch on to certain reports in an effort to force change at Microsoft, including specific games meeting expectations. That was the case with Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks' stylish new rhythm game. Hi-Fi rush actually drew tons of acclaim and managed to amass 2 million players, but reports surfaced that the game simply didn't make much money. After all, how much could a direct-to-Game Pass title make in terms of sales?

Over in Japan, a retailer is running a pretty unique offer - certainly one we've never seen before - in the form of buy one GPU and get another (different one) free.

In this case, retailer NTT-X is mixing and matching NVIDIA and Intel graphics cards, with the offer being that if you buy an RTX 4090, you also get an Intel Arc A750 thrown in.

However, there are some notable caveats here for those in Japan who might want to avail themselves of the GPU bundle - the main one being that only five units are going on sale. So, if you want to grab one, you'll have to be very quick.

AMD Radeon RX 580 GPUs are finding a new use, with the graphics chips being made into keychains, as seen over in China.

These novelty keychains consist of a GPU and a pair of memory modules on a PCB, although they look like rather chunky and impractical keychains, it has to be said.

As spotted by Olrak on Twitter, the keychains are being sold on a second-hand site in China, with a few of them on offer (apparently only one is left up for grabs now, though).

Intel's XeSS upscaling tech - the rival to NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR frame rate boosters - is now supported by Cyberpunk 2077, and the result is a massive performance boost.

According to Intel's blog post trumpeting CD Projekt Red introducing XeSS with Cyberpunk 2077, turning the feature on generates up to a 71% boost in frames per second (fps), meaning the Arc A750 can now exceed 60 fps, regarded by many as the magic threshold for smooth gameplay.

To be precise, the A750 hits 67 fps compared to 31 fps with the feature turned off, and unsurprisingly, this is with XeSS in 'performance' mode (as opposed to the settings at the other end of the spectrum for better upscaling quality). This is with Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p resolution with ultra details and ray tracing set to medium.

Meta has laid off multiple game developers at Ready at Dawn as part of a significant multi-thousand layoff spree.

As Meta's Reality Labs division is hemmorhaging money to the tune of $26 billion in losses, the company has enacted two massive layoff rounds that will see 21,000 people without jobs. All of Meta's divisions are to be affected by the layoffs, including its Reality Labs VR gaming division that is home to multiple game developers including Ready At Dawn.

Meta originally acquired Ready At Dawn in 2020 to help bolster the Oculus VR games lineup. At that time, Ready At Dawn had released multiple VR games set in its Lone Echo series. Now fast-forwarding to three years later, the studio has been hit with multiple layoffs. According to recent reports, Meta has let go of nearly 1/3rd of Ready At Dawn's staff, including the studio head.

Xbox users have lost a key social feature that helped spread gaming clips and screenshots.

Microsoft has announced that Xbox gamers can no longer share game captures on Twitter, likely due to a new fee structure imposed by Elon Musk's controversial Twitter regime. Under the new rules, companies have to pay at least $42,000 a month (and at most $210,000 a month) to access Twitter's API, which is required to enable features like Xbox's direct-to-feed Game DVR capture sharing.

"We have had to disable the ability to share game uploads to Twitter directly from the console and Game Bar on Windows. You can still share your favorite moments to Twitter via the Xbox app for Android and iOS," the official Xbox Twitter account said yesterday.

NASA is continuing on its long road of getting humans on the surface of Mars, and a part of that development journey is figuring out what it will be like for humans to live on the surface of the Red Planet - without actually stepping foot on it.

Mars already presents numerous challenges for human exploration, but one of NASA's biggest concerns is how humans will survive the long stays on the Red Planet once we manage to get there. In an effort to understand more about the surface of Mars and how humans will react to their restrictive living quarters, NASA has set up Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, which is a ground-based mission that is expected to begin in June at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The upcoming mission is just one of three planned Mars simulation missions and will include numerous challenges for the participants. NASA writes in its blog that participants will be faced with many real-world problems, such as limited resources, equipment failures, communication delays, environmental stressors, and more.

In a move to make Twitter's verification checkmark a purchasable verification aesthetic, Twitter has gone ahead and removed blue checkmarks from accounts that were given them before Elon Musk took over the company in October 2022.

These blue checkmarks were given to accounts that went through Twitter's now-legacy verification system, which Twitter's CEO, Elon Musk, calls "deeply corrupted" and caused a "lord & peasants" system. Prior to Musk's takeover, accounts that were given blue checkmarks were typically journalists, celebrities, public figures, organizations, politicians, and any other account that applied, met Twitter's stringent guidelines, and passed an independent verification review.

Twitter announced on April 20 that it would be removing all legacy blue checkmarks and referred any account that previously had a blue checkmark to the Twitter Blue signup page, where the user would have to pay $8 a month to reacquire it. Many celebrities such as Bill Gates, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Shark Tank star Barbara Corcoran, Doja Cat, and more have lost their legacy blue checkmark.

NASA has confirmed via its blog that a decommissioned satellite reentered Earth's atmosphere on April 19, 2023, almost 21 years after it was first launched.

The retired NASA satellite is called the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, or RHESSI for short. According to the space agency, RHESSI was decommissioned in 2018, and throughout its operational time, it assisted scientists in their pursuit to understand the physics behind solar flares. NASA writes that the Department of Defense confirmed the reentry of the 660-pound satellite was over the Sahara Desert region, near the Sudan-Egypt border.

Astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell took to Twitter to post an image of where the satellite, or at least parts of it, would have landed. Officials anticipated that most of the dead satellite would burn up on reentry and only a few components would make it to the surface. RHESSI was launched in 2002 aboard the Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus XL rocket and went on to conduct ground-breaking science with its imaging spectrometer.

SpaceX launched the rocket slated to be the transportation method that the first astronauts will use to walk on the surface of Mars.

It was only a few days ago I reported that Musk was planning on launching SpaceX's Starship this week, and that launch could have occurred on April 20 (4/20), a celebrated holiday by cannabis users and Elon Musk. The launch happened to land on the comical holiday, and Starship lifted off from its launch pad at SpaceX's seaside Starbase facility at Boca Chica Beach, South Texas, at 9:33 a.m EDT.

The 394-foot-tall rocket, the largest and most powerful ever built, was a sight to behold as it climbed in altitude thanks to its powerful 33 first-stage Raptor engines. However, only three minutes after liftoff Starship failed to separate from its Super Heavy booster, the first stage of the rocket. Since both parts of the vehicle were still attached, Starship began to tumble mid-flight, and approximately four minutes after takeoff, the 394-foot-tall rocket exploded, or as SpaceX likes to describe it, a "rapid unscheduled disassembly".

An AI-generated song that attracted millions of plays has been removed after the Universal Music Group (UMG) discovered its popularity and the artists that were on track.

The song called 'Heart On My Sleeve' was released by an anonymous TikTok user called Ghostwriter977, and it featured vocals from Aubrey "Drake" Graham and Abel Makkonen "The Weeknd" Tesfaye. But these vocals didn't come from the artists themselves, they were created using artificial intelligence-powered tools that were fed voice samples of the artists to create imitated voices that are uncannily similar. At the moment, it remains unclear if the entire song was created with AI tools or just the voices of the artists.

Regardless of the intricacies of how the song was made, it generated more than 1,000,000 streams on Spotify, and Ghostwriter977's TikTok video of the song was viewed more than 15 million times. Additionally, a YouTube video of the song gained more than 275,000 views, and its creator commented on it, saying, "this is just the beginning". Overall the response to the song was very positive, with some people saying it was the best Drake song that has been released this year. Others recognized the quality of the song and immediately commented on how good AI is getting at sampling an artist's vocals.

Yesterday we got word that the upcoming ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld PC would feature a custom AMD Ryzen Z1 Series processor. Built using AMD Phoenix silicon with Zen 4 and RDNA 3 architectures, a new leak via the Geekbench tool gives us more info on what's powering ASUS's Steam Deck competitor.

The processor is the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, with 8-cores and 16-threads and a maximum boost clock frequency of 5 GHz. The Geekbench results also confirm the existence of Radeon Graphics, but the exact model specs outside of the iGPU using 8GB of VRAM and featuring 6 Compute Units still need to be confirmed.

Still, this is more confirmation that ROG Ally's Z1 Extreme CPU is a customized version of the Ryzen 7 7840U CPU - with the benchmark results putting its performance in line with laptops sporting the processor and Radeon 780M integrated graphics. The overall score is on par with the GeForce GTX 1060 in OpenCL.

The US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has imposed a pretty hefty fine (defined as a "civic penalty") on Seagate for selling over 7.4 million HDDs to Chinese' tech company Huawei during 2020 and 2021.

The BIS puts the value of the HDDs at over 1.1 billion dollars, with the penalty being a whopping USD 300 million that Seagate will need to pay over the course of the next five years - to the tune of USD 15 million per quarter.

The BIS's Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement, Matthew S. Axelrod, calls the order "the largest standalone administrative resolution in our agency's history" adding that this settlement calls for all companies to comply with BIS export rules.

Netflix is about to stop the thing that defined it as a company back in the early part of the 2000s - that is, sending out DVDs via the mail to its customers. Before it became the streaming giant that forever changed the media landscape, Netflix was all about offering customers a quick and easy way to get their hands-on the latest movies and DVD box sets of TV shows.

Netflix has confirmed that September 29, 2023, will be the last day it sends out one of its red envelopes with a DVD inside. "It has been a true pleasure and honor to deliver movie nights to our wonderful members for 25 years," writes Netflix's DVD division in a Tweet. "Thank you for being part of this incredible journey, including this final season of red envelopes."

Netflix notes that since the company started as a DVD mail-order service 25 years ago, it has delivered over 5.2 billion DVDs in red envelopes to its customers - which is a pretty remarkable statistic. Netflix started its streaming service in 2007 when it slowly but surely took over in a big way.

AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 23.4.2 is available now for Radeon GPU owners, and most notably, it adds support for the recently released Dead Island 2. A game was announced well over a decade ago, with the co-op zombie action proving divisive among critics.

Still, with the latest drivers, AMD notes that Radeon RX 7900 Series GPUs see a performance increase of up to 14% when playing in 4K, with Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs seeing a performance increase of up to 15%. Not too shabby.

The drivers also add support for the zero-g orbital shooter Boundary (another game that has been a long time coming), with additional Vulkan extension support coming too. There are notable fixes in this new release - namely, visual corruption in Red Dead Redemption 2 looks to have been fixed.

With the launch of the new GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card, many have noticed that there's stock available for almost every model in most markets. Also, pricing has remained close to the MSRP of USD 599 and sometimes even lower. Videocardz.com recently reported that a GeForce RTX 4070 model from Palit saw its price drop in Poland to roughly 9% below the MSRP in the region.

Although exact sales figures aren't available, based on retailer info and charts, it's pretty clear that the new GPU hasn't been flying off the shelves. Would the situation have been different if the GeForce RTX 4070 landed with the same MSRP as the GeForce RTX 3070? Indeed, a USD 499 price point would make the GeForce RTX 3080-like performance of the RTX 4070 more attractive.

Perhaps the performance needed to be notably higher than the RTX 3080, where the previous generation's RTX 3070 was able to match the flagship RTX 2080 Ti.

Google staff members weren't too impressed with the state of Bard when asked to test the AI before its launch, and indeed warned the company that the AI wasn't ready to meet its public.

This is according to a Bloomberg report, which relayed information from some 18 current and former employees of Google, as well as from internal documents - and the overall vibe is of stark warnings that Bard needed more polish.

Bard was labeled as 'cringeworthy' and a 'pathological liar' alongside being called 'worse than useless' in an internal message to thousands of staffers, many of whom agreed. The comment about being useless was followed by a plea not to launch Bard, we're told.

Proton has just added another app to its growing library of products focusing on tight privacy and security, and the latest offering is a password manager.

It'll come as no surprise that the name is Proton Pass, fitting in with the likes of Proton Mail (security-focused encrypted email), Proton Drive (secure cloud storage locker) and Proton VPN (no prizes for guessing what that is).

Note that Proton Pass is still a limited beta right now on iOS and Android (plus there are browser extensions for Chrome and Brave), and it argues a strong case for upping its levels of protection in comparison to your average password manager.

Windows 11 just had a new preview build drop that comes with some beneficial changes on the power front for laptops.

Preview build 25346 landed in the Canary channel and came with fresh work on an existing feature, Content Adaptive Brightness Control (CABC).

This intelligently adjusts the brightness of your display according to the content being shown, allowing for dimming some areas and therefore saving a bit of power (it all adds up over time).