Latest News - Page 937

Sony has announced the free PlayStation Plus games for March 2023 during its State of Play showcase.

March's PlayStation Plus freebies will help give new life to EA's unsuccessful shooter--the online-only Battlefield 2042 live game will be available for all PlayStation Plus subscribers next month. EA isn't quite ready to make Battlefield 2042 free-to-play, which is something we argued that needs to happen in order for the game to turn itself around, however DICE has released several new updates and is now on season 4. Sony and EA will offer both the PS4 and PS5 versions of Battlefield 2042 on PS Plus.

The other PS Plus titles include the well-reviewed Code Vein from Bandai Namco--which is also on the PS Plus Game Catalog for Extra and Premium subscribers--and Minecraft Dungeons, a dungeon-crawling RPG with Diablo-style ARPG action and an isometric view. Both of these games are the PS4 versions.

Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive will be a part of the FTC's merger investigation as a non-party/third-party in the relevant video games market.

Take-Two Interactive has hired three lawyers to represent the company in the Federal Trade Commission's ongoing administrative proceedings of the Microsoft-Activision merger. The merger's case file was updated with three notices of appearances for Take-Two's chosen legal counsel.

The games company has hired James Attridge, Michael Keeley, and Jason Wasserman from the Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider law firm to represent Take-Two during the merger proceedings. Axinn had previously advised Take-Two on its $1 billion bid for Codemasters back in 2020.

A recent Apple filing suggests that the MacBook Air 15-inch might just be nearing release, or possibly other Macs.

The filing was spotted in the Bluetooth Launch Studio database, and it pertains to a product that supports Bluetooth 5.3.

Now, that could be anything as no product name is attached to the filing, but it does reference a previous device running macOS - so that's a strong hint that this will be a Mac.

The display of Apple's iPhone 15 could be larger than the existing iPhone 14, if a new leak is correct.

However, don't expect the screen to be much bigger, as the rumored increase - and remember, this is just a rumor - is very slight.

This comes from 9 to 5 Mac, who got hold of 3D CAD files that are purportedly for the iPhone 15, and indicate that the display is going to be 6.2-inches, just a tad bigger than the iPhone 14 which sits at 6.1-inches.

AMD's RX 7800, RX 7700 and RX 7600 - which will represent more affordable RDNA 3 graphics cards - could still be some way off launching, if a new rumor is right.

This speculation comes from the MyDrivers forum in China, a regular source of leaks, but one that must be treated cautiously (it's not always the most reliable, so bear that in mind).

But the theory advanced by Kuai Technology on MyDrivers is that the RX 7000 GPUs to follow the high-end RX 7900 cards (which have been the only RDNA 3 models to hit shelves thus far) won't turn up until June 2023.

The initial public release of Microsoft's Bing Chat integrated into the Edge browser caused a wave of concern as the AI-powered chatbot seemingly went off the rails after too many messages.

Bing Chat is powered by an upgraded version of the technology underpinning OpenAI's extremely popular ChatGPT. However, Bing Chat is separate from ChatGPT as it's integrated into the Microsoft Edge browser, enabling users to search the internet traditionally while also being able to ask an artificial intelligence chatbot to generate what Microsoft intends to be a faster, more thorough answer.

However, the small public release of Bing Chat didn't go as planned, and it was quickly discovered that the more messages users sent to Bing Chat, the more the AI's answers became deranged. In one instance of a user interacting with Bing Chat, the AI chatbot began insulting the user, gaslighting them, and even threatened to carry out revenge by exposing their personal information, which would ruin their reputation. Another user found that after a lengthy conversation with Bing Chat, it decided that the user was its "enemy" and requested that they stop talking to it.

Officials at Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, dropped an update on two of the agency's spacecrafts currently docked at the International Space Station (ISS).

For two months, these Russian spacecrafts have been docked at the ISS, with officials announcing in December that the Soyuz crew capsule called MS-22 sprayed liquid from a severed cooling line. The same problem occurred earlier this month with Russia's second docked spacecraft called Progress MS-21. Initially, officials didn't know what caused the severing of the cooling line, but now Roscosmos is saying that two separate "external impact" caused the damage to the spacecrafts.

As noted by Ars Technica, the likelihood of an "external impact", or a micrometeoroid, damaging the same components on two separate spacecrafts is very low, leading some to speculate that Russia's spacecrafts actually experienced a manufacturing malfunction that the agency is covering up.

On February 10, officials celebrated the second anniversary of their first interplanetary mission that featured a new advanced rover landing on the surface of Mars.

China's Tianwen 1 had its anniversary on February 10, and a part of that mission was the landing of the Zhurong rover on the surface of the Red Planet on May 14, 2021. Unfortunately, not much has been heard about the Zhurong rover since officials announced the rover was entering a hibernation state following declining solar power availability as a result of Mars' northern hemisphere.

Reports indicate that officials expected Zhurong to wake back up sometime in December when solar power became more readily available. However, the rover, or at least China, has been strangely silent on the operations of the rover, leading some to believe that it's now a very expensive piece of Martian trash. Notably, China's state-run media posted short articles celebrating the second anniversary of the mission, with no mention of the current status of the rover, its overall health, or any new images of its location.

The team behind the extremely popular artificial intelligence-infused chatbot, ChatGPT, has said that AI is expected to replace doctors, entertainment and increase productivity.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has taken to his personal Twitter account to discuss the future of artificial intelligence and how it will impact society as we know it. The CEO of OpenAI explained via a long Twitter thread why and how he thinks AI chatbots such as ChatGPT will revolutionize multiple industries and how it's a good thing. Altman wrote that AI tools will adapt to the world relatively quickly as the "benefits and fun have too much upside!"

According to Altman, these artificial intelligence-infused tools will allow humans to be more productive with their work, as the AI will be able to handle menial tasks such as daily email checking. Additionally, AI chatbots are expected to become medical advisors for people that can't afford care while also being tutors for students that are struggling to learn in a specific field. Furthermore, Altman says that AI will create more entertainment in the form of "AI memes".

The new ROG Strix XG27AQMR Gaming Monitor features a 300Hz Fast IPS 27-inch display, but unlike other super-high refresh monitors, this one is WQHD with a resolution of 2560 x 1440. Which, for many, is the sweet spot at this size. ASUS calls it a display for professional gamers and those who love to be immersed in games. And it will pair nicely with the latest GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD, thanks to the latest generation of graphics cards actually being able to push 1440p frame rates to 300 fps without having to run things on low settings.

ASUS is backing the immersion claim up with DisplayHDR 600 compliance and 97% of the DCI-P3 color space, which is very impressive. In addition to going up to 300Hz, the ROG Strix XG27AQMR's Fast IPS panel features a 1ms gray-to-gray response time (GtG), with additional NVIDIA G-Sync Compatibility, AMD FreeSync Premium, and ELMB (low-motion-blur technology) support. So not only will it be fast, but it'll look great too. Naturally, as we start to see refresh rates top 300 Hz in the WQHD space, this is awesome for those playing competitive games and immersive cinematic titles.

Connectivity-wise, you've got two HDMI 2.0 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4 port, two USB 3.2 ports, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Here are the specs.

NVIDIA DLSS continues to grow, and the AI-based rendering for GeForce RTX GPUs has been one of the most important and impressive additions to PC gaming in the last decade-a sizable performance bump while minimizing the impact on visual fidelity.

And with the arrival of the new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs and its beefed-up AI hardware, DLSS 3's Frame Generation goes one step further by using AI to create entire frames and push performance to even crazier heights.

The only downside is that DLSS 3 is limited to the new NVIDIA GPUs, but any game with DLSS 3 also supports DLSS 2 (DLSS Super Resolution). And with that, we've got an updated list of DLSS-enabled games, with February featuring the following titles.

After a bit of turmoil regarding new GPU drivers for AMD Radeon graphics cards, it looks like Team Red is back on track. Its latest AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 23.2.2 Driver is a unified driver release covering AMD Radeon RX 7000, Radeon RX 6000, and older GPUs. Primarily it adds support for two new PC game releases - Atomic Heart and Company of Heroes 3.

For Company of Heroes 3, AMD notes that the new drivers deliver a decent performance boost - up to 13% for the Radeon RX 7900 XT at 4K and up to 9% for the Radeon RX 6800 XT at 4K. The update also fixes a few issues relating to video encoding, with a few game fixes coming to Hitman 3 and when using the Valve Index VR headset.

Unfortunately, the high idle power issue for the Radeon RX 7000 series is still listed as a known issue - so hopefully, that fix will come soon.

If you've been using your PC to play games, you'll no doubt have dealt with an unresponsive app where you need to open up the Task Manager, find the process, and kill it via the 'End Task' function. It's just a part of the process of playing games, and for many PC gamers, Task Manager is used exclusively for this one, well, task.

The only issue is that you're more than a few clicks away from getting to that point, which makes this new feature discovered in Windows 11 build 25300 in the Windows Insider developer channel something to celebrate. And really, we're wondering why this hasn't been an option in Windows for years. The ability to right-click on the app on the taskbar and select 'End Task' to kill the process.

The advanced feature was discovered by Windows Insider PhantomOcean3, who posted the screenshot you can see here. Even so, it's a hidden feature in the Windows 11 build that needs to be enabled via the ViVe tool developed by Albacore using the command: vivetool /enable /id:42592269. After that, it appears as an option, and yeah, it's a great little feature.

ENERMAX is introducing a new power supply, the Revolution D.F. 2 850W, which is 80 PLUS Gold certified. As per the headline, it uses the company's Dust-Free Rotation (DFR) technology, which enables the PSU fan to blow away any dust accumulating on the fan blades as it's powering up. Where does the dust go from there? Well, that's your business.

The ENERMAX Revolution D.F. 2 850W is more than a PSU that can clean itself, it also features an upgraded circuit design that allows peak power wattage output to reach 200%. The Revolution D.F. 2 850W can stably provide an impressive 1700W for a microsecond.

This is very cool to see, as momentary power spikes in the age of high-powered GPUs and CPUs are real. And a feature like this goes a long way to mitigate potential power issues.

Call of Duty's annual 2024 release could launch on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles for maximum exposure, sales, and in-game purchase earnings, Insider Gaming reports.

New details from Activision's recent data breach indicate that Call of Duty 2024 may release on last-gen console hardware like the PS4 and Xbox One family of systems. Insider Gaming has scanned some of the leaked Activision documents and found references to older consoles, however it remains unclear whether or not the plans have changed. Developments could also shift if Microsoft is able to close its proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard.

Call of Duty 2023 was originally expected to be the last game to release on the PS4 and Xbox One, however Activision has recently unified the entire franchise under a single engine that's optimized for both last-gen and current-gen consoles. Starting with Modern Warfare 2's release in October 2022, the series now runs on a cross-gen, cross-platform engine capable of high-def performance on varying hardware. The unification efforts required all of Activision's studios to work together and represented a significant investment of manpower.

Half-Life gets reborn with a new unofficial raytracing mod that's now available on PC.

Valve's beloved 1998 shooter just got a big lighting overhaul thanks to a new Half-Life RT mod that adds full path tracing to the original game.

The results speak for themselves. Not only does Half-Life gleam, glimmer, and radiate with new visual life, the Half-Life RT mod injects quite a bit of tension to the Black Mesa sequences. Shadows are thicker than ever, ambient lighting glows with an eerie cast, and there's just something sinister and oppressive about some of the interior visuals. The RT mod really helps bring out the horror elements of Valve's FPS. And that test chamber sequence...just wow.

AMD's incoming Ryzen 9 7950X3D and 7900X3D processors will come with the ability to manually modify the CCD priority via the BIOS, according to fresh details unearthed on Twitter.

HXL, a regular hardware leaker, tweeted to flag up the new ASUS X670 beta BIOS, which allows the user to tweak what workloads are assigned to which CCD.

And that's an important feature because of the way these Ryzen 9 chips are configured.

Apple's iPhone 15 models will be beefed up with a larger quantity of RAM, or faster memory in some cases, according to the latest nugget from the rumor mill.

Analyst firm TrendForce just produced a report (spotted by MacRumors) that claims Apple is set to 'bump up the capacity and specifications' of the RAM that's incorporated in its next-generation iPhones.

We're talking about an increase in capacity from the current 6GB seen in the iPhone 14 Pro to an 8GB loadout for the iPhone 15 Pro, or that's the possibility put forward by TrendForce in a previous leak.

The Bing chatbot is already allowing users to have (slightly) longer conversations with it, and Microsoft tells us that it's testing a trio of options for different AI personalities with the bot.

Microsoft announced this in a blog post, and the company already upping the length of chat sessions has raised an eyebrow here and there, seeing as the software giant only just enforced a strict limit.

That said, this is more a case of fine-tuning than sweeping changes. Whereas last week, Microsoft imposed a limit of 5 chat exchanges per separate session and a total of 50 per day, which has been raised to 6 and 60 respectively.

The AMD's Ryzen 7000-series of CPUs feature integrated graphics with an RDNA 2-based GPU. However, we're talking about something basic, as you've got 128 stream processors and 2 CUs designed purely to display graphics. And not, you know, play games. As with all tech, this hasn't stopped someone from overclocking the GPU to see how far the performance can be improved.

And that's precisely what SkatterBencher has done, pushing the clock speeds to an impressive 3.1 GHz - delivering a performance uplift of roughly 42%. Overclocking the integrated GPU wasn't easy as it required playing around with AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive settings and increased voltages and power limits.

"While overclocking the Ryzen 7000 integrated graphics was not supported at launch, recently AMD has expanded the overclocker's toolkit with options to do so," Pieter at SkatterBench writes. "While I wouldn't say overclocking the integrated graphics provides a viable path to meaningful gaming performance, I wouldn't be a SkatterBencher if I didn't try overclocking it anyway."