Gaming News - Page 118

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is out this week, and it's the latest PlayStation 5 title to make its way to PC. And the PC version is shaping up to be something quite special, with improved visuals, enhanced ray-tracing, support for ultrawide resolutions, and NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation support on day one.

It also marks the arrival of NVIDIA RTX IO in a major AAA release, the DirectStorage-like technology that shifts decompression from the CPU to the GPU to deliver a massive increase in loading times and things like streaming in assets when paired with a fast SSD. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart joins the impressive path-traced Portal: Prelude RTX as one of the first games to support RTX IO.

At launch, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was a next-gen showcase of PS5 hardware and made full use of the console's new high-speed internal SSD to seamlessly and instantaneously shift between detailed environments as part of the game's 'Rift' mechanics. To showcase the benefit of RTX IO, NVIDIA has posted a video (above) where the new technology "enables rapid loading of assets, accelerating the seamless portal-jumping gameplay."

Xbox delivered a record-breaking Q4 period, but total-year revenues missed Microsoft's expectations due to weak performance of content offerings.

Microsoft just posted up its Q4 and full-year Fiscal Year 2023 results, and based on the figures provided we were able to key in some performance estimates for the Xbox video games division.

According to the info provided by Microsoft, Xbox gaming generated $15.477 billion in total revenues during Fiscal Year 2023, with the Q4 period delivered a record $3.5 billion in earnings. As per usual, the bulk of the division's revenues game from content and services, with Xbox pulling in a total of $12.198 billion in FY23 from game sales, subscriptions, DLC, microtransactions, and other content sold on the Xbox ecosystem.

In an indie game first, Sea of Stars, the new turn-based RPG from The Messenger developer Sabotage, will come to both PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass on day one.

A bit ago during the FTC v Microsoft trial, a badly-redacted Sony Interactive Entertainment document had some interesting things to say about subscription exclusivity. In the document, SIE said that Microsoft typically requires any game launching day one on Xbox Game Pass to be exclusive to the Game Pass service.

Bethesda has released three epic Starfield shorts that showcase the imagination and spirit of the new spacefaring IP.

In a surprise move, Bethesda today released three animated shorts set in its new Settled Systems Anthology series. The clips are a blend of some of the most colorful and expressive sci-fi influences of our modern era, with strong tones of classic mecha anime, Syd Mead futurism, and John Berkey's blazing vibrancy.

Apart from the visuals, the other thing that stands out is that there is no dialog in any of these videos. There doesn't have to be. The footage and the strong musical tones really tell the story...and that is something special.

The highly anticipated Remnant 2 from developer Gunfire Games is out this week, and it might be the first game without ray-tracing to require the use of NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, or Intel XeSS to achieve an optimal and playable 60fps experience in 4K. It's a visually impressive title, but many PC gamers are wondering why performance is so bad.

A high-profile PC game launch that has performance issues on day one? Not exactly headline news, but when it comes to Remnant 2, you absolutely need to have one of the upscalers mentioned above turned on - even on a GeForce RTX 4090. Gunfire Games confirmed as much over on Reddit, where it posted, "We designed the game with upscaling in mind (DLSS/FSR/XeSS)" and that for "the smoothest gameplay," you'll need to leave them on.

Over on DSOG, writer John Papadopoulos got to play the game early via the Ultimate Edition. He could not achieve native 4K 60fps performance using the game's Ultra settings with a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. "The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 cannot run Remnant 2 with 60fps at native 4K and Ultra Settings," he writes. "The game does not even use any Ray Tracing effects, so we really don't know what the hell is going on here."

Techland, the Polish developer of the popular Dying Light games, has become the next subsidiary of Tencent.

Tencent's gaming empire grows with the addition of Techland. Management for the Polish game dev today announced that Tencent is "in the process of becoming Techland's majority shareholder," effectively making the dev team a subsidiary for the overseas gaming giant.

Techland founder and CEO Paweł Marchewka says that the Tencent partnership will essentially supercharge the developer's capabilities. Tencent's coffers are indeed deep, with the company's video games unit generating roughly $23.7 billion USD from both domestic and international online games. The Chinese firm is known for its ownership buyouts of studios like Riot Games (League of Legends), Leyou Technologies (Warframe), and Funcom (Conan Exiles), and is involved in 45 video games companies in some extent including full ownership, variable stake, majority shares, and minority shares.

NVIDIA recently announced its RTX IO tech is present in Portal: Prelude RTX, and will be in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - and the company just underlined that it reckons this fresh innovation will help to fix stuttering in games.

Stuttering is one of the more frustrating experiences to blight a gaming session, as smoothness is everything when it comes to immersion - and indeed aiming in the likes of shooters.

As Wccftech reports, NVIDIA has shared a further statement on RTX IO to make it clear that Team Green is expecting the tech to do a good deal of heavy lifting in terms of minimizing any stuttering.

"Since they started hinting at it in Hearthstone in 1994, it was obvious that they would introduce Glorbo to World of Warcraft sooner or later," writes kaefer_kriegerin over on Reddit. The post references a character that doesn't exist; it's totally made up. The replies were all on board with the fiction, with one reply adding that the addition of Glorbo was exciting, but the character was OP or overpowered and could present a problem for WoW's meta.

The goal of the post was to trick an AI newsbot into posting the announcement as real news, and it succeeded! The outlet The Portal picked up the story, or whatever AI model the site used to publish news, where the text "I just really want some major bot-operated news websites to publish an article about this" was also included in the write-up.

What's concerning is that there's no confirmation or text on the publication's page acknowledging that it uses AI to generate news stories - with The Portal crediting the piece to Lucy Reed. Glorbo isn't real, and this little exercise made headlines at popular Blizard destination Wowhead.com - which even led to the original post being taken down, but not before it was archived.

The Nintendo Switch is the most popular gaming console on the planet, even though its hardware is starting to show its age. Powered by the NVIDIA Tegra X1 processor that features ARM CPU cores alongside an NVIDIA Maxwell-based GPU with 256 CUDA Cores - we've seen impressive results in recent games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which presents a massive open-world Hyrule to explore.

But we all know that in terms of visual fidelity, it's a generation or two behind something like the PS5 or Xbox Series X. And on paper, it's nowhere near as powerful as Valve's Steam Deck or the new ROG Ally from ASUS. What if you could mod a Nintendo Switch and use it to play PC games?

That's exactly what the team at Geekerwan has done, with a new video showcasing a hacked Nintendo Switch running Steam via Android and Ubuntu. It gets interesting with the sizable overclock applied to both the Nintendo Switch's CPU and GPU - using the OLED model as a basis. The native CPU clock speed of 1 GHz is pushed all the up to 2.3 GHz, with the GPU boat clock speed of 768 MHz pushed to 1267 MHz.

Diablo IV has helped Blizzard break $1 billion in quarterly revenues for the first time in its 32-year history, but how does the game's launch compare to its predecessor?

With $666 million revenue earned from game sales in just 5 days' time, Diablo IV is a fiery success. The sequel has done so well that it helped propel Blizzard to a new all-time revenue record that saw the segment making up the lion's share of ABK's quarterly earnings, which is something that doesn't happen very often.

The question remains, though: How did Diablo IV's launch compare to Diablo III's? To answer that, we have to look at Blizzard's past quarterly performance, and analysis shows that there is no easy clear-cut answer to this question.