Latest News - Page 929

NVIDIA could be readying a further spin on its RTX 3060 graphics card, and if so, that would mean Team Green will have pushed out no fewer than four variations of this board.

The leaked variant that might be inbound was highlighted on Twitter by T4C Fantasy, who's in charge of the Tech Powerup database, and unearthed the model somewhere. (We aren't told where, but presumably in GPU-Z validations, as VideoCardz, which first reported on this, points out).

It'll be quite different from existing takes on the RTX 3060, apparently, running with an entirely different chip and faster memory too.

A yet unheard-of future generation of Intel processors might have been revealed courtesy of a leak via a LinkedIn profile.

Tom's Hardware spotted the profile in question for an Intel graphics hardware engineer, which contained details of the products they're working on - and that included Panther Lake.

As a graphics engineer, they are of course on the integrated GPU side of the equation, and apparently, Panther Lake processors will use Intel's Xe3 Celestial GPU architecture.

Windows 11 looked to have rid itself of the Bing ChatGPT-powered AI from the taskbar, but actually this isn't the case, Microsoft has clarified.

There's no disputing that the Bing chatbot suddenly vanished from the taskbar (as we reported earlier in the week) after being announced as coming to that part of the Windows 11 interface with the latest major update (called 'Moment 2').

However, Microsoft has explained to TechRadar that the AI hasn't simply been banished from the taskbar, but rather that it's out of rotation.

Google I/O 2023 will kick off on May 10, the company has confirmed. The keynote will take place at Google's Mountain View, California HQ and will also be livestreamed for those who can't attend or just want to follow along at home.

While essentially a developer affair, Google I/O has historically also played host to new hardware launches and updates on the state of Android. We expect no different this time around and it's possible that we will see Google announce the Pixel 7a smartphone as well.

Those who can't attend will not only be able to see the keynote online. Google has said that it will also be making all of the sessions available to watch on-demand afterward as well. That's a good job as well, with only a 'limited live audience' set to be allowed into the event.

The Nothing Phone (2) has reportedly already entered serial production, with the company also getting all of its certification ducks in a row.

The next phone out of the UK-based Nothing is already shaping up to be an interesting one and now Twitter tipster Mukul Sharma claims that the company is already beginning to grease the wheels of production ahead of a full global release later this year.

Nothing has of course already confirmed that the Phone (2) will get a global launch, and while it had also said that the phone would use a Qualcomm 8-series chip, we've now been told by Qualcomm's side that it'll be a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. That's mildly disappointing news, partly because we would have hoped that Nothing would use Qualcomm's current flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

Japan's counterpart to NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), launched its new H3 rocket on Monday, and it could have gone better.

The new H3 rocket was stationed on the launch pad at Tanegashima Space Center before it began lifting off on Monday, March 6, at 8:37 p.m. EST. Only 5 minutes and 27 seconds into the rocket's flight, officials were heard over the livestream of the launch informing viewers and listeners that commands had been sent to the rocket to instruct it to separate its stage and ignite its second stage. Unfortunately, 7 minutes into the rocket's flight, officials are heard confirming the second stage failed ignition and that the rocket's velocity was steadily declining.

Since the launch of the rocket failed, and the separation/ignition commands were carried out, the rocket began to freefall back down to the surface of Earth. This prompted JAXA officials to announce that they'd sent a "destruct command" to the rocket as there was no hope of achieving mission success. Notably, this isn't the first time Japan's H3 rocket has attempted a launch. On February 13, officials had to abort the launch after an issue with the rocket's electrical system that supplies power to the rocket's LE-9 engines presented itself.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has entered into a heated exchange with a Twitter employee over his role at the company and the amount of value he has/was providing.

The storm of tweets began yesterday when Twitter user "Halli" asked about their employment status at Twitter after not hearing a response from the company for over 9 days. Halli publicly tagged Elon Musk in a series of tweets that explained that access to his computer was cut off, along with approximately 200 other Twitter employees, and that Twitter's HR department wasn't able to confirm if they were an employee or not. After thousands of retweets on that post, Musk replied by asking what "work" Halli had been doing at Twitter.

The thread continued, and Musk approved of Halli's request to break confidentiality on explaining what they were doing at the company, which resulted in Musk firing back with rebuttal questions asking specifically about the work and the value it provided Twitter. Additionally, Musk wrote that Halli "did no actual work", and claimed that "his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm." Musk then added, "Can't say I have a lot of respect for that," while posting a link to the video found below.

NASA's Curiosity rover has achieved yet another scientific milestone achievement by capturing the first images of Sun rays seeping through Martian clouds.

NASA has taken to its Mars Exploration-dedicated website to explain that Curiosity captured a "uniquely moody" Martian sunset on February 2. The space agency details that rays of sunlight broke through a bank of clouds, illuminating them and creating what NASA calls "crepuscular rays", which is the Latin word for "twilight". Notably, these images of the sun's rays are the first time they have been so clearly viewed from the surface of Mars.

The blog post explains that most Martian clouds are at an altitude of no more than 37 miles above the surface of the Red Planet and that these clouds are mostly composed of water ice. However, the recent photographs snapped by Curiosity show a group of martian clouds at a much higher altitude where it is much colder, leading researchers to believe that their composition is carbon dioxide or dry ice.

According to new court records, the army of professional lawyers and advisors has billed a collective $38 million plus expenses for just the month of January.

FTX, the previous position holder for the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, filed for bankruptcy in November after it was discovered exchange officials were illegitimately managing customer funds. Since then, a widespread effort has been implemented to clean up the financial mess created by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), along with his other top-ranking officials from FTX and its sister company Alameda Research. Notably, some of these officials have turned on SBF and are cooperating with regulators and authorities.

Shortly after the collapse of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO of the company, and John Ray III was brought in as the new CEO. Notably, John Ray III was responsible for assisting in the clean-up process of the energy firm Enron. FTX bankruptcy administrators have Sullivan & Cromwell on retainer as counsel, as well as Quin Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Landis Rath & Cobb. All of the aforementioned firms contain approximately 180 lawyers and more than 50 staffers that are all working on the FTX case.

Regarding keyboard and mouse combos with funky designs, we often think of RGB-lit tanks with neon lights aimed at the gaming market. Of course, there are exceptions, like Logitech's stylish and retro typewriter-inspired Pop Keys range.

The new Samsung Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Mint Choco combo take a different route - a road leading to sweet dessert delights.

You don't often want to bite into a PC mouse to see if it's full of ice cream, but that's precisely what happened when I first saw this new mint chocolate ice cream design. Chocolate chips sprinkled on top of a mint-colored keyboard and mouse combo, a new design currently listed on Samsung's Korean site. Here's hoping the design makes its way to the rest of the world because there's nothing quite as universal as chocolate and ice cream.

A new in-depth report via CNBC (which you can watch in full via the video below) offers a deep dive into NVIDIA, with CEO and founder Jensen Huang discussing the company's history and recent shift into AI. It's a cool look at the rise of discrete graphics cards and serves as a nice little history lesson on NVIDIA - from the release of the first GPU to advances like CUDA.

It also touches on the company's brief dip into mobile hardware (that said, Tegra hardware still powers the Nintendo Switch) and its recent failed attempt to acquire Arm. Plus, cloud gaming, the current crypto mining boom, and NVIDIA's recent steep gaming revenue decline. The focus of the deep dive into NVIDIA is the company's success in AI - where it has gone all in on the technology. And with that, the rise of AI models like ChatGPT, where tens of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs power AI technology.

On the gaming side, if you go back to the release of the GeForce RTX 2080 in 2018, you'll no doubt find many takes at the time wondering if the addition of dedicated AI hardware versus simply beefing up GPU specs even further was the right move. The shift had been on the cards for far longer than that.

When NVIDIA debuted the first GeForce RTX range of GPUs back in 2018 with the arrival of the GeForce RTX 20 Series, it introduced dedicated hardware for ray tracing and AI. And with that, the company paved the way for real-time ray tracing in games alongside AI-based rendering in the form of DLSS.

With the arrival of the GeForce RTX 40 Series last year and cards like the GeForce RTX 4070 and GeForce RTX 4060 on the horizon, the company's hardware-based RT and AI Tensor cores have advanced quite considerably. DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is now at a point where if it's available in a game, you enable it for a sizable performance boost without adversely affecting image quality.

NVIDIA has announced that over 390 games and applications now support GeForce RTX technologies - NVIDIA DLSS, Ray Tracing, and the new AI-based Frame Generation of the GeForce RTX 40 Series' exclusive DLSS 3 suite - which also includes NVIDIA Reflex.

AMD Radeon driver Adrenalin Edition 23.3.1 is available now for all Radeon RX users. It supports the recently released Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty (available on PC Game Pass). It also Halo Infinite's ray-tracing update, which is also available on PC Game Pass.

For those wondering about ray-tracing support in Halo Infinite, it's all about RT sun shadows in multiplayer as part of this month's Season 3 "Echoes Within" update.

Weirdly though, it doesn't look like it applies to the campaign, where a hardware-intensive effect like ray tracing makes the most sense. The Adrenalin Edition 23.3.1 release notes confirm that outside of these two game-specific updates, outstanding bugs for Dying Light 2 and Returnal have been addressed. Other known Radeon issues remain under investigation, including the "high idle power" issue relating to the new Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs, which has been on the list of things to fix since the cards debuted late last year.

Recently we reported on a bug related to the latest official NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver (531.18), where after exiting a game or logging on, CPU usage would spike by over 10% - the culprit, an NVIDIA process. NVIDIA confirmed this as an issue, and today the company has released GeForce Game Ready Driver 531.26 Hotfix to resolve the issue.

The notes address the "Higher CPU usage from NVIDIA Container might be observed after exiting a game" issue and a random bug related to laptops with older GeForce GTX GPUs. The CPU issue was reported by several users and seemed to be widespread (I noticed it, too, running a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti), so this Hotfix is well worth grabbing directly from NVIDIA here.

That said, as a Hotfix, it's not an official driver update and is considered a Beta release, so you must download and install it manually.

Reports indicate that Sony could make an acquisition offer to buy out Take-Two Interactive, however that deal seems much more unlikely now.

Acquisition rumors are a dime a dozen in the video games space. The pending $68.7 billion Microsoft-Activision merger has fueled lots of speculation of potential acquisitions. The most popular report is that Sony Interactive Entertainment could make an aggressive move to buy Take-Two Interactive and acquire Rockstar Games and the lucrative billion-dollar Grand Theft Auto franchise, as well as 2K's powerful sports brands and Zynga's heavy-hitting mobile content.

The reports were already pretty shaky from the start. For one, Take-Two just bought Zynga for $12.7 billion, the second largest video games acquisition in history, which boosted the company's valuation past $20 billion. Could Sony make a buyout offer for Take-Two? Potentially, but it might be tough to get approval from the board and/or investors due to the high valuation costs and the fact that SIE may need to exceed current TTWO share value for the buyout to be appealing.

Meta is reportedly readying its subscription service for virtual reality games called Meta Quest Pass.

Meta may create its own Quest Pass subscription for VR apps and games. Twitter user Shiny Quagsire spilled the beans with a recent discovery of Project Apollo, which is the codename for the Quest Pass subscription.

The service would function similar to PlayStation Plus Essential and Xbox LIVE by giving out two free VR games/apps every month. Users would also have to keep their subscription active in order to access and play the games they have unlocked. Meta Quest Pass is very different from the competing Viveport VR games subscription which offers all-you-can-play access to a pool of games, similar to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

AMD is running a session at GDC 2023 (Game Developers Conference) which pertains to its FidelityFX SDK, and there's a chance we might see an initial info drop on FSR 3.0.

FSR 3.0 is the third take on FidelityFX Super Resolution, AMD's frame rate booster that rivals NVIDIA DLSS.

The session takes place on March 23rd, and AMD notes that it will "include an exciting sneak peek of new FidelityFX technologies that will be available soon."

YouTube has confirmed that it is going to do away with what it calls Overlay ads, a format of ad that was particularly irritating for those who have to see them.

Overlay ads are ads that appear on top of video content on the YouTube desktop website, and they require user interaction to make them go away. Now, YouTube has confirmed that it's making them go away itself, and for good.

The positive news came via a post on the YouTube Help Forum in which it was confirmed that starting April 6, 2023, Overlay ads will no longer appear on YouTube. The streamer said that it's all about helping to improve viewer experiences, but it then went on to ruin that somewhat by suggesting that engagement and higher-performing ad formats are going to be the order of the day.

Xbox executive Phil Spencer walks us through Microsoft's game plan as it relates to its pre- and post-merger video games operations.

The Xbox ecosystem has evolved beyond its console roots. Xbox is now a service that connects multiple platforms together with one principal goal: Gaming for everyone, everywhere. Now that its biggest games are monetized, Microsoft benefits tremendously from this approach--more players can lead to more payers.

Xbox's core gaming focus has been dissected as part of regulator's ongoing scrutiny on the Microsoft-Activision merger. We've talked about the Xbox business in length, but Microsoft's own gaming VP Phil Spencer has a quick breakdown to remind players, investors, and regulators what the goal of Xbox is.

Video games giant Take-Two Interactive makes a round of layoffs as it tightens its belt against economic uncertainty.

Following record earnings during the pandemic, the video games industry is now contracting to reflect the current economic backdrop affecting the market. Inflation and rising costs mean consumers have less discretionary income to spend on gaming, leading to lower-than-expected quarterly results at lots of video games companies. Take-Two Interactive has been impacted--Q3 net bookings missed guidance by $77 million--and now the company is responding by making layoffs to reduce overall expenses and costs.

Sources have told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that Take-Two is starting to make layoffs and job cuts across its company. The layoffs have affected workers at Take-Two's Private Division video games publishing label, which is responsible for hit games like The Outer Worlds, Hades, and Kerbal Space Program 2.