Latest News - Page 949

A Razer mouse with a price point that's more "mid-range GPU" than a "gaming mouse"? Introducing the Razer Viper Mini Signature Edition, an ultra high-end lightweight gaming mouse from Razer that weighs in at an incredible 49 grams. With a release date of February 11 and a price point of USD 279.99, it's undoubtedly the most expensive gaming mouse we've seen, and that's due to its "ultra-durable magnesium alloy exoskeleton."

Razer notes that not only does the use of high-end materials mean that it was able to achieve a 49-gram weight for the Razer Viper Mini Signature Edition, but it's also durable with an "exceptional weight-to-strength ratio." Each unit has undergone rigorous inspection to ensure it's of the highest quality.

Under the hood, it also uses Razer's best tech, the Razer Focus Pro 30K Optical Sensor, Razer Optical Mouse Switches Gen-3, and HyperPolling Wireless with 4000 Hz wireless polling rates. And as a wireless mouse, it can also fully charge in under 90 minutes with 60 hours of battery life.

The NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada workstation GPU isn't designed for gaming, but that hasn't stopped someone from putting its traditional 2-slot blower-fan cooling design to the test using the 3DMark Time Spy performance benchmark.

The 30518 graphics score represents a 72% boost over its workstation predecessor, the RTX A6000 Ampere-based GPU. The card is slower than the GeForce RTX 4090, but its intended use isn't gaming. According to the source, it reportedly hit closer to 36000 before a Windows update, so its performance could be much closer to the RTX 4090.

Specs-wise, the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada's 18,176 CUDA cores is an 11% increase over the RTX 4090's 16,384 CUDA Core count, and it also features more memory in the form of 48GB GDDR6 over a 384-bit interface. The card is also rated at 300W, which makes it an efficient powerhouse for workstation tasks.

A show called 'Nothing, Forever' runs 24/7 on Twitch using OpenAI's GPT-3 model to generate endless episodes of the hit sitcom Seinfeld. Visually it looks like an early 3D game that might have appeared on the original PlayStation or a 3dfx Voodoo PC from the 1990s.

And with the AI-generated jokes and dialogue being of the "very weird" and "strange" type, the stilted animation gives the whole thing a dreamlike quality. This is probably why thousands are tuning in to watch.

If you're a fan of Seinfeld, you'll no doubt be familiar with Jerry's apartment as the backdrop for many interactions, not to mention the crude renditions of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer. Except here, Jerry is called Larry, in a nod to Seinfeld's co-creator Larry David. There are even stand-up comedy interludes ala the show, but these sound more like bizarre stream-of-consciousness observations than actually funny jokes.

As per a new report at The Wall Street Journal, the state-run China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) - reportedly the country's top nuclear weapons research institute - has managed to get a hold of Intel and NVIDIA hardware. Which we assume have been used to do all of that atomic research.

Hardware from both suppliers has been on an export blocklist since 1997, but even so, the chips were obtained from resellers in China. The CAEP is specifically on the blocklist because of its work in nuclear science, with the report claiming that the study of "computational fluid dynamics" is code for nuclear explosions. To circumvent the restrictions, the CAEP has set up multiple entities and over a dozen aliases, and many of these have been added to the blocklist as recently as June 2020.

So then, how did they find out about the chips? A review of research papers published by CAEP over the past decade found references to hardware from Intel and NVIDIA - like an Intel Core i7-7800X processor and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. Multiple research papers feature sections about "maintaining nuclear stockpiles," which is a scary thought in its own right. The report notes that the chips used cover everything from 7nm to 14nm process nodes, though there are no records of Intel and NVIDIA chips launched within the last two years being used.

In an interview with Fox News, Dave Rubin, a conservative journalist, and Fox commentator described his experience while taking a 48-hour tour of Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco.

Rubin appeared on Fox News and discussed various aspects of Twitter and what happens behind closed doors at the company. According to the interview Twitter CEO and owner Elon Musk invited Rubin to the headquarters, and Rubin discussed various topics with Musk, such as what makes Twitter shadow-ban accounts, the current state of the underlying code, and how much work needs to be done to get Twitter where Musk wants it to be.

Throughout the interview, Rubin said that Musk was pretty much aware of every issue the company has, and he maybe thinks that the "entire code has to be torn down and start from scratch". Additionally, Rubin said at the end of the night, Musk described Twitter as a "flaming dumpster rolling down the street".

The team behind the viral artificial intelligence ChatGPT has created a tool that checks if text was written by a human or an AI.

It was only recently that OpenAI, the creators behind ChatGPT, talked about how popular their artificial intelligence has gotten since its release. Officials at the company explained that they had no idea that ChatGPT was going to be so popular and that the response they saw from the internet was "definitely surprising". Through ChatGPT's massive popularity, some problems have occurred, such as students using the AI to generate essays and other written work.

Since ChatGPT can produce text responses at a very impressive level, educators are having trouble determining if the students' work was written by them or an AI. In response to these complaints, OpenAI has rolled out a new tool that's designed to help individuals that wish to check if the specific text was written by a human or an AI. Unfortunately, the tool isn't entirely accurate, as its success rate is only around 26%. However, OpenAI says that the tool is best used with other methods for checking over text and that it may be useful to some people.

NASA has penciled in another flight for its Ingenuity helicopter, marking the small helicopter's 41st flight across the surface of the Red Planet.

For those that didn't know, NASA landed its Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars back in February 2021. Since then, the rover has been exploring the barren plains of the Jezero Crater, looking for any signs of ancient microbial life. Ingenuity has acted as a scout for Perseverance, flying around the rover and observing the surface, looking for any potential hazards the rover and its operators should know about.

With the information gathered by Ingenuity's flights, the Perseverance team is able to make the most efficient path for the rover whenever it needs to travel next. The 41st flight for Ingenuity happened on January 27, when the helicopter covered 600 feet in horizontal distance in just 109 seconds. NASA called this flight an "out-and-back flight" as the helicopter took off, flew to its destination, and then back to land in its original spot.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently experienced a glitch, but the observatory is now back online and conducting valuable science.

The space agency has taken to its official James Webb Space Telescope Twitter account to announce that Webb has honed its sensitive instruments on a region of deep space that contains ancient galaxies. NASA explains that the above image was snapped during instrument calibration to test Webb's ability to dig up galactic "fossils".

The European Space Agency (ESA) explains in its blog post that the large spiral galaxy seen at the bottom of the image is called LEDA 2046648 and is slightly over one billion light-years from Earth, residing in the constellation Hercules. Additionally, the ESA explains that one of Webb's main purposes is to gather information on distant galaxies so researchers can learn more about their formation, evolution, and composition.

NASA announced last week that one of the key instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope malfunctioned, causing a glitch to occur.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched in December 2021 and eventually made it to its destination at Lagrange point 2 in July 2022, where it began scientific operations after a lengthy warm-up period. Now, the space telescope is making major developments in multiple scientific fields. It has already captured incredible images of the iconic star-forming regions such as the Pillars of Creation, while also using its extremely sensitive instruments to analyze the atmosphere of exoplanets for any biological indicators such as water, oxygen, etc.

On January 15, Webb's Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) experienced a glitch that caused its flight software to time out. NASA wrote on its blog that this glitch was a communications delay that tripped the flight software, knocking out the NIRISS instrument until further notice. Now, NASA has announced on its blog that a full investigation was launched between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, the developers of the NIRISS instrument, and found the cause of the problem, which has been fixed.

Twitter is moving ahead with its plan to make Twitter Blue one of its main sources of revenue but ahead of the company is a long battle with bot accounts utilizing artificial intelligence.

Musk took over Twitter back in October, and since then, the Tesla CEO has made a plethora of changes while also dramatically reducing Twitter's total number of employees. One of its main focuses for Musk is bringing value with Twitter Blue, which now gives a blue "verified" checkmark to any account that purchases it. Before Musk's takeover, the verified checkmark indicated the account was authentic, while Musk's pay-wall system has given nefarious actors an easy way to gain access to the "verified" checkmark.

Now, reports are surfacing regarding Twitter accounts operated by bad actors using artificial intelligence systems to generate profile images that imitate real-life people. Since the profile picture appears to be a real-life person, these accounts are given the checkmark. Unfortunately, the operators of these accounts are using their verification to push specific political agendas across the platform. For instance, one account that was found described itself as a "nationalist," "anti-liberal," and "anti-cringe".

Alienware has announced that its GeForce RTX 40 Series laptops are set to debut next week, with the Alienware m18 launching in the US on February 9 with a GeForce RTX 4080 starting from USD 2899. This is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 12GB GDDR6, 150W, 2280 MHz Boost version.

The Alienware m18 features a large 18-inch display (165Hz 1440p or 480Hz 1080p) alongside the latest GeForce RTX laptop graphics, Intel's 13th-gen HX mobile CPUs, and even up to 9TB of internal storage via 2x 4TB and 2x 512GB PCIe NVMeM.2 SSDs.

It's a beast for sure, and even though it features a larger display, the overall size is similar to the Alienware m17, thanks to improved cooling and airflow. The Alienware m18 is also coming to Australia on March 3 with the GeForce RTX 4070 model featuring a price point of AUD 3999.

With PC sales declining at levels that haven't been seen in a long time, prices for new and existing products have remained relatively consistent, especially regarding CPUs and GPUs. As part of a new financial report that outlined how AMD managed to maintain profitability in the closing months of 2022 due to sales in the server sector, consumer CPU and GPU sales have dropped.

PC sales dropped by 51%, with gaming sales dipping by 7%.

For those wondering why we haven't seen any significant price drops or more aggressive pricing to compete with other suppliers, it turns out that AMD has been limiting the supply of its chips - which we assume was done to not flood markets and keep prices stable. This isn't new, and the odds are that companies like Intel and NVIDIA have been doing the same thing as the industry experiences a downturn.

AMD has confirmed the launch dates and pricing for its highly anticipated Ryzen 7000 X3D lineup, which includes three models.

These CPUs are the successor to the popular Ryzen 7 5800X3D with increased 3D V-Cache, which is said to deliver improved gaming performance across the entire line-up. On that front, AMD has showcased some of its internal 1080p benchmarks for the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, compared to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Covering popular titles like Rainbow Six Siege, CS:GO, and DOTA 2, you're looking at a 20-30% increase.

Naturally, companies like to cherry-pick their results, so we'll have to wait until reviews start showing up to see if it's the same story across most games.

Sony is shutting down the excellent PlayStation Plus Collection on May 9, 2023.

The PlayStation Plus Collection was one of the best surprises of the PlayStation 5's launch. The program is an added PlayStation Plus subscription bonus that gives PS5 owners access to a library of recommended PS4 games. Sony essentially gave all new PS5 buyers a head start with a pre-sorted games collection. It was also the best way to bridge the PS4 and PS5 generations.

The PS Plus Collection is coming to an end on May 9, but PlayStation Plus subscribers can still claim the games currently offered at any point up until then and keep them forever. Years ago, I said the PS Plus Collection was a golden ticket for subscriber retention, and Sony could use some other ways to spark PS Plus retention especially as subscribers fell by nearly 2 million last quarter.

EA has cancelled a new Titanfall singleplayer game in an effort to reduce spending and keep profits stable.

Following a $235 million reduction in holiday net bookings, Electronic Arts is tightening its belt so it can navigate the current volatile market with a more lean frame. The publisher announced that a new cost reduction plan was instituted during the holiday quarter that is expected to reduce spending by up to $140 million in the second half of the year.

EA management was vague on exact details of its new plan, but it didn't take long to realize where the savings would come from. The publisher is slashing its production spending to help stabilize revenues against costs. EA has cancelled three games altogether, including two mobile games like Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile. EA is also apparently shutting down the Industrial Toys studio that worked on the Battlefield mobile game. EA executives say that both Apex and Battlefield Mobile will be rebooted.

EA has taken "disciplined" cost-saving measures to help keep the company more slim during the volatile economic market.

The games industry is starting to reveal its holiday 2022 earnings reports, and it appears gaming's downward trend will continue. Like a few video game companies (and likely many more to come), EA has reported lower year-over-year earnings for the 2022 holiday period. There's a few reasons for this: one is that 2021 was a good year for gaming, and two, consumers are spending less on games content, titles, and services.

EA is responding to market contractions by reducing operational costs. This has led to game reboots and cancellations, and layoffs. during yesterday's earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson assured investors that the company had a plan to counter falling revenues and rising costs, but did not talk about employee layoffs.

And not just DirectX 9 gaming, but modern titles also benefit from performance increases. And with a price drop for the Intel Arc A750 to USD 249 - Intel is positioning the GPU as a more affordable mainstream alternative to NVIDIA's most popular GPU, the GeForce RTX 3060. Those who buy an Arc GPU before July 31 will also be eligible for two free games; Nightingale and The Settlers: New Allies.

With the new price and impressive driver-based performance increases, Intel claims that the Intel Arc A750 delivers 52% more performance per dollar compared to the GeForce RTX 3060 across several DX9, DX11, and DX12 titles.

From Metro Exodus to popular competitive jams like Overwatch 2, Fortnite, and League of Legends, Intel is looking to deliver on the promise of Arc with this new driver update.

In addition to blistering speed potential that will put it alongside some of the fastest DDR5 memory we've seen, it's built on the highly regarded and high-performing Hynix A-die memory module. Some users have been able to push the SK Hynix A-die to DDR-8600+ speeds with relative ease - leading to the tech being hailed as the fastest memory on the planet.

With 16GB and 32GB kits available, each featuring a slick layer of RGB lighting, the Z-RGB series from NETAC starts at 6200 MT/s CL32 at 1.35V, going up to 8000 MT/s CL38 spec. That will require 1.5V, so it might be limited to certain motherboards. If you're looking at this sort of kit, you're probably rocking a high-end board.

Regarding compatibility, NETAC has stated that the Z-RGB range supports both Intel and AMD, though XMP and EXPO profile support hasn't been confirmed from what we can see. With both overclocking profiles established in the DDR5 space, we'd be surprised if it weren't.

Cyberpunk 2077 was prominently showcased during NVIDIA's big GeForce RTX 40 Series reveal last year. The visually stunning game was shown taking advantage of cutting-edge DLSS 3 rendering alongside the reveal of an RT Overdrive mode that will push the already intensive real-time ray-tracing in the game even further.

Exclusive to GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs (RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 4070 Ti), DLSS 3 is a combination of DLSS Super Resolution, NVIDIA Reflex, and Frame Generation. The latter needs the new GeForce GPUs because it is an intensive AI process involving specific hardware that can generate new frames to boost performance. As per the video posted by NVIDIA above, we're talking about the sort of leap that has made DLSS 3 one of the most talked about bits of PC gaming tech in the past year.

Corsair has lifted the lid on its latest power supply series, the RMx SHIFT 80 PLUS Gold Fully Modular ATX Power Supply. What makes them stand out isn't that they're all ATX 3.0 certified and come with PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR cables perfect for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, but that all the connections are on a side panel. "A revolutionary patent-pending side cable interface."

A first for PSUs and something we're surprised hasn't happened until now.

According to Corsair, moving the modular connections to the side panel on the new RMx SHIFT 80 PLUS series makes it easier to manage cables and connect PC hardware. Accessing a PSU and connectors from the side would no doubt be something many potential PC builders would love - and the new RMx SHIFT 80 PLUS series is launching in everything from 750W to 1200W variants.