Latest News - Page 925

The PowerColor Liquid Devil Radeon RX 7900 XTX is described as the "newest and most advanced graphics card" in the PowerColor Radeon range - and it's not hard to see why. It features a custom-designed full-cover, pre-installed EK water block that is EK-Matrix7 compatible-a standard developed by EK to ensure perfect alignment and compliance for its range of products.

The PowerColor Liquid Devil Radeon RX 7900 XTX was officially revealed last month, and now with the cards available and in stock in "limited quantities" (via the EKWB store) we also have the price for this beast. As expected, this is pretty much the most expensive Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU currently being sold, with a price point of USD 1499 and AUD 2099. This puts its price close to the GeForce RTX 4090's MSRP of USD 1599.

It does look fantastic, though, and unlocks the full potential of AMD's flagship RDNA 3 offering. In addition to the nickel-plated copper base and Acrylic, it features a brand new 14-layer high TG PCB, a 17-phase VRM design, and an additional 2+2 phase for the 24GB VRAM. Inside you'll find monitoring and reporting for each phase's electric current and power consumption impressive. The card uses 3x8-pin power connectors that EK notes will be able to support "the heaviest overclocks."

NVIDIA's most recent WHQL-certified GeForce Game Ready Driver 531.18 featured a bug that would cause a 10% spike in CPU usage when closing games, which we reported here. NVIDIA was made aware of the issue fairly quickly, in addition to adding "Higher CPU usage from NVIDIA Container might be observed after exiting a game" to the known issues list.

NVIDIA also released a hotfix within a few days, which was great to see - but as GeForce Game Ready Driver 531.26 was a beta release, it wasn't pushed out to the wider GeForce audience as part of GeForce Experience or the usual official driver download locations. That's changed as NVIDIA has pushed out the official NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 531.29 WHQL drivers for all GeForce GPU owners.

It resolves the CPU usage issue but also resolves stability issues with Adobe applications. That said, one new issue related to HDR looks to have been added to the list, where turning the effect on and off can cause issues like crashing when a non-native resolution is being used. Plus, it looks like game-specific issues that cropped up with GeForce Game Ready Driver 531.18 for Hogwarts Legacy and Assassin's Creed Origins (which are fairly old now) are still being worked on.

The new Superior Pro SDXC UHS-II cards from Silicon Power have been designed for professional content creators, with impressive read speeds of up to 280 MB/s and write speeds of up to 170 MB/s.

With that, you can probably conclude that they're more suited for DSLR cameras, drones, and high-end video recorders than a Nintendo Switch for storing all your game downloads. However, you wouldn't be at fault for putting one of these inside a Steam Deck. And with that, the new Superior Pro SDXC UHS-II cards are also waterproof, shockproof, and temperature proof - with operating temps of 0°C to 70°C.

For content creators in the video and cinema space, the UHS-II interface supports the V60 Video Speed Class standard, which guarantees minimum write speeds of 60 MB/s. This ensures that any 360-degree photography, 4K video capture, and continuous, high-quality images are all captured without lag.

Retroware is reviving an obscure batch of cartoon misfits from the early 1990s in an explosive nuclear blast from the past.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ruled the 1990s with its cartoon series, which was a thinly veiled advertisement to sell colorful toys and merch. Everyone wanted in on the action, even Troma, a rebellious movie production company known for their incredibly violent B-grade horror movies. Through the love of money, the Toxic Crusaders were born.

The Toxic Crusaders cartoon series very loosely based on one of the most horribly violent and offensive movies during the mid-80s, the Toxic Avenger. Obviously there was no outright horror themes in the cartoon, but it did have a kind of disgusting charm to it nonetheless.

Microsoft has published a new fact sheet that reveals interesting figures about the games industry, including how much its competitors make from the mobile gaming sector.

The Microsoft-Activision merger isn't just about Call of Duty. The best-selling franchise definitely factors into Microsoft's buyout rationale--with over $31 billion in revenues and 425 million copies sold, it's impossible to ignore Call of Duty--however understanding this deal in its entirety requires higher-level optics. Microsoft wants to use Activision Blizzard King properties to disrupt the games industry on multiple levels. It's not about Xbox vs PlayStation, but Xbox vs all competitors, and ATVI games/services/content will give Microsoft an edge to take on mobile gaming's supposed duopolists Google and Apple.

A quick glance at Microsoft's latest pro-merger fact sheet underlines its mobile plans. According to Microsoft, who cites data from analyst firm Newzoo, the mobile market is dominated by Tencent, Apple, and Google. The data shows that the combination of mobile gaming's Big 3 made up over 64% of total global mobile games earnings for 2022.

NVIDIA's RTX 4070 graphics card is about to be launched, but if the latest rumor about the GPU is correct, the price will be far higher than expected.

According to a regular provider of GPU leaks on YouTube, Moore's Law is Dead (MLID), NVIDIA might pitch the suggested price (MSRP) of the RTX 4070 at an eye-watering US$750.

Hang on a minute, we hear you cry - the RTX 4070 Ti has an MSRP of US$799, doesn't it? Why, yes, it does, and therefore this purported recommended price for the vanilla RTX 4070 seems way too close for comfort, to put it mildly.

Microsoft continues making very opportune and well-planned business deals that could help get the Activision merger passed.

Microsoft has executed another phase of its merger approval strategy. The tech giant signed a 10-year licensing deal with cloud gaming subscription Boosteroid to offer Activision Blizzard and Xbox PC games on the service. Boosteroid isn't widely known, and while it is barely mentioned by regulatory discussions of the cloud gaming market, Boosteroid is said to have 4 million members.

The deal is a net benefit to Microsoft. In fact, all of Microsoft's current licensing contracts offer very little downside to the company by virtue of the Xbox business model. Microsoft isn't interested in making a walled garden and has operated its games business as an open, cross-platform ecosystem of products and services. This new 10-year deal with Boosteroid has the same goal as Microsoft's recent 10-year deals with Nintendo and NVIDIA: To dismantle regulatory arguments while making pro-competition posturing.

Nintendo management seems to hint the next Switch 4K model will be backwards compatible with the current-gen Switch.

We've been reporting on a next-gen Switch for many years now. Nintendo through everyone a curveball back in 2017 when it announced the Switch uses an NVIDIA Tegra X1 SoC, the same kind you find in NVIDIA's Shield TV box. Another surprise was the mysterious Supplemental Computing Device from 2016, a patented attachment that connects to a Switch to boost processing power for cloud applications.

Since then, we've been postulating and researching possible avenues for the next Switch. Reports indicate the Super Switch/Switch 4K/Switch 2.0 will use NVIDIA's new powerful Orin T239 Tegra SoC to deliver higher-end performance akin to a PS4 or Xbox One. The Switch will also target 4K gaming with the help of NVIDIA's DLSS super-sampling tech, which has indeed been tested on mobile ARM processors.

Windows 11 just received a major new update known as 'Moment 2' which is now rolling out across all PCs, but there are early signs of issues with the upgrade.

Granted, early adopters running into problems with an update is nothing new, and to be fair to Microsoft, reports of issues are thin on the ground thus far - but there are already a couple of worrying red flags being waved.

This is on the Reddit thread (from Jen Gentleman of the Windows engineering team at Microsoft) introducing the cumulative updates for Windows 11 (KB5023706 for Windows 11 22H2, and KB5023698 for Windows 11 21H2).

Nothing is set to announce its Ear (2) wireless earbuds on 22 March and now a new leak appears to have shared details about what the earbuds will have in terms of specifications. We've also been treated to what seems to be official product marketing shots for the as-yet-unannounced noisemakers.

With Nothing having already confirmed when the new Ear (2) earbuds will be announced very soon indeed it was perhaps only a matter of time before more information started to leak out. And that's what's happened with leaker Steve Hemmerstoffer (aka OnLeaks) sharing information with TheTechOutlook.

As expected, it looks like Nothing hasn't changed all that much from the previous model which means that we continue to have a clear case design in terms of the earbuds as well as the case. There are some tweaks though, with the noise-canceling microphone seemingly now moved to the top of the earbud. Whether that will improve performance or not, time will tell.

It was only last week that I reported on the International Space Station (ISS) being forced to fire up its thrusters to dodge a potential collision with a satellite.

NASA confirmed the news of the ISS maneuver via its blog on March 6 and explained that the floating laboratory was at risk of colliding with a satellite that was later discovered to be a commercial Earth-imaging satellite. This maneuver required officials to engage the thrusters on the Progress 83 resupply vessel, raising the orbit of the entire outpost so the satellite could safely pass underneath. The ISS conducted these maneuvers successfully.

According to a report from Roscosmos, Russia's own version of NASA, the ISS had to perform a similar maneuver on March 14 involving the same resupply vessel, Progress 83. Russia's space agency writes that Progress 83 fired its thrusters for 183 seconds to raise the altitude of the ISS to an average of 230 miles above the surface of Earth. Notably, the maneuver that was performed on March 6 required the resupply vessel thrusters to be fired for approximately six minutes.

Google will reportedly announce two new phones at its Google I/O event on 10 May. And we might even know how much they'll cost when it does it.

Everyone is waiting for Google to announce the Pixel Fold, the company's first foldable phone. That's now expected to get a Google I/O debut alongside the much cheaper Pixel 7a. New reports have the phones costing between $450 and $1500.

A new report by 9to5Google has Google announcing the Pixel Fold in Carbon and Porcelain colors, or black and white if you prefer. That's based on supposed retail listings for the product which also claim that there will be storage options of 256GB and 512GB, although the latter might be limited to the Carbon color.

A Japanese astronomer was monitoring the moon in late February and caught the moment a meteorite collided with the moon's surface.

The Japanese astronomer is named Daichi Fujii and posted the footage onto his personal Twitter account, where he explained that the event took place February 23, 2023, and that the footage was taken from his home in Hiratsuka, Japan. The impact is quite difficult to see, but watching the bottom right side of the moon, a bright flash will appear for just over a second and then disappear.

Notably, since the moon doesn't have an atmosphere, meteorites on track to collide with the surface are invisible to observers on Earth. Ground observers see meteorites entering Earth's atmosphere from the friction build-up that turns them into a bright fireball that sometimes eventuates into an explosion. This friction is caused by Earth's dense atmosphere and the extreme speed the meteorite is traveling. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere, which is why we don't see bright streaks regularly appearing across the surface of the moon.

OpenAI has released GPT-4, the newest version of the underpinning technology powering ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat.

The upgraded version of the technology ushers in a slew of features and improvements to the software, some of which are generally quite shocking when you first see them. Elon Musk, a long-time cautionary of the development of AI, and one of the founders of OpenAI, but departed from the company in 2018, has commented on the release of GPT-4.

The Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter CEO commented on a post by Brett Winton that showcases OpenAI's internal testing results on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 performing simulated exams that are commonly sat by human students. The exam results show GPT-4 having dramatic improvement over GPT-3.5, with OpenAI's previous language model scoring 10th percentile on the bar exam and GPT-4 reaching the 90th percentile. Musk commented on this graph, writing, "What will be left for us humans to do? We better get a move on with Neuralink!"

Microsoft has taken to its website to announce that Bing Chat is running the latest version of OpenAI's language model, GPT-4.

Microsoft announced on its blog that its partners at OpenAI have rolled out an update to the underlying technology powering both the immensely popular ChatGPT AI tool and Bing Chat, the search assistant companion on the Bing search engine. GPT-4 ushers in a wave of new features and improvements to the language model, enabling users to use the AI tool in a variety of new ways and at increased levels of accuracy and efficiency.

All of these improvements have been outlined in the two articles that are linked below, where the majority of the improvements are covered more in-depth. An overview of the improvements includes the now possible use of images being converted into text, which can come in the form of a user writing notes down on a piece of paper, snapping a photo of that piece of paper, uploading it to ChatGPT and requesting that the contents of the image be converted into HTML, JavaScript, or any other language, programming or not.

OpenAI has just announced the newest version of the technology powering popular AI-based tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat.

The newest version of the underlying technology is called "GPT-4", which is a step up of .5 from the previous version, GPT-3.5. While the .5 may not sound like much at face value, the improvements in this technology upgrade shouldn't be understated. GPT-4 is many more times powerful than GPT-3.5 and comes with a range of new features that only adds to its applicability. For example, GPT-4 introduces the ability to use images as well as text, which OpenAI demonstrates during the company's announcement livestream.

The above video demonstrates that a user can draw an idea for a website on any piece of paper, snap a photo of that piece of paper and upload it to the AI to analyze. OpenAI explains that when the image is uploaded to the AI, the user is actually communicating with a neural network that has been fed an "unimaginable" number of content and is trained on "what to predict next".

The newest version of the immensely popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ChatGPT has been announced by its developers, Open AI.

OpenAI took to its social channels and to its website to unveil the highly anticipated GPT-4, the underlying technology powering both ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing Chat. For context, both ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat are currently using GPT 3.5, which, at least on ChatGPT, has been upgraded to GPT-4. This upgrade ushers in a range of improvements from the total amount of words the AI chatbot can produce, increased safety features, more advanced reasoning skills, and basically an overall increase in quality in all aspects.

Notably, OpenAI details on its website that GPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT in every test that they were compared in. According to the website, GPT-4 achieved 90th when it took a simulated Uniform Bar Exam, compared to ChatGPT's GPT-3.5 language model, which scored 10th. When taking the LSAT test, GPT-4 scored 88th, compared to GPT-3.5, scoring 40th. In math, the differences weren't as severe, with OpenAI's newest language model scoring 89th and GPT-3.5 scoring 70th.

Sony has been shipping freight containers of mysterious development kits, and they might be PS5 Pro devkits.

Today Insider Gamer published new reports that Sony is readying a PlayStation 5 Pro model. Sources say the PS5 Pro could release as early as 2024, although information on upgrades or new hardware enhancements remains unclear. Sony's shipping records may lend credence to the PS5 Pro reports.

According to Sony Interactive Entertainment's freight shipment records, SIE Inc. Japan sent a sizable shipment to its San Mateo, California-based SIE America subsidiary that consists of 240 cartons, or 2,609kg (5751lbs), worth of "Development Kits for Interactive Entertainment Software."

Google has revealed a major infusion of AI tech for its Workspace suite of apps, with some pretty smart sounding abilities coming to the likes of Gmail and Google Docs.

As Google puts it, these new features bring the 'power of generative AI' to Workspace and allow people to create content and collaborate more easily.

Writing an email in Gmail? That's going to be a snap with an AI assistant (hopefully), as you'll be able to note down quick bullet points of what you want the message to say, and then let the AI write the full body of the mail for you.

Valve's Steam Deck just got a new update that applies some bug fixes to a few games and allows for fancier graphics in Doom Eternal.

Version 3.4.6 of SteamOS is now available to all Steam Deck owners and brings ray tracing support to Doom Eternal. While your immediate reaction might be to think this is going to run terribly on Valve's handheld, apparently that isn't the case.

Feedback we've seen online - albeit pertaining to the preview of this update - suggests that id's first-person shooter runs relatively smoothly with ray tracing on the Deck, and the visuals are taken up a measurable notch. So, that's definitely something to try out for those who have the game.