Gaming News - Page 16

The leaked PlayStation 5 Pro specs appear to be accurate, according to a new report from Insider Gaming.

Sony's new PS5 Pro sounds like a heavy upgrade over the original console. Recent reports from Moore's Law is Dead sparked debate among gamers, as the YouTuber outlined substantial power jumps with the Pro model. Now Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson says the leaks were real. Henderson, who has close ties with the going-ons in the industry, has since been proven trustworthy with his reporting.

Insider Gaming claims to have seen the leaked PS5 Pro documents and that the information came from a verifiable PlayStation developer portal. According to Henderson, the PS5 Pro codenamed "Trinity" will have 33.5TFLOPs of power, representing a 225% increase in raw performance over the base PlayStation 5 model. Apart from the sizable performance increase, the Pro is said to utilize two new advanced proprietary technologies: a built-in AI accelerator, and something called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling (PSSR), which is Sony's in-house answer to NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR upscalers.

The Embracer Group has divested another company, this time one of its biggest revenue-generating divisions.

Just years after the Great Expansion from COVID-19 spending, the games industry is now facing a Great Contraction. Companies are laying off workers en masse, cutting production budgets, and essentially stocking firewood for a harsh winter. This financial pressure has led Embracer Group, a once-mighty gaming empire with dozens of games in development at any one given time, to sell pieces of itself off in order to stabilize its accounts.

The reports were right. Embracer has chosen to sell Saber Interactive, one of its best-earning games divisions. The rationale is simple: Embracer wants to reduce its spending, and divesting a group will eliminate that group's production costs while also delivering a premium in the process. Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch bought Saber's independence, as well as the rights of 12 other studios for a total purchase price of $247 million. Karch opened a new company, Beacon Interactive, a Florida-based LLC for the rights buyout, and Beacon now owns the rights to these studios.

Created by NVIDIA using its powerful RTX Remix tools, Portal with RTX showcases what full path tracing can bring to an experience and how RTX Remix can transform a classic PC game like Portal into a cutting-edge modern masterpiece.

Path tracing is, of course, hardware intensive, and to play Portal with RTX at a decent frame rate, you'll need the help of DLSS 3 Frame Generation and a GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics card. Today, NVIDIA announced that it has updated and leveled up Portal with RTX to make it compatible with DLSS 3.5, allowing the new Ray Reconstruction tech to improve ray-traced image quality.

DLSS 3.5 is a game changer for RT image quality, as seen in Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake II, so it's great to see it added here. The update also supports RTX IO (aka DirectStorage) for faster loading times and a smaller storage device footprint (Portal with RTX now takes up 37% less disk space).

Star Wars Outlaws, from Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment (The Division, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora), is described as the first open-world Star Wars game and will launch later this year.

The story is set between Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. In it, you play Han Solo-like scoundrel Kay Vess as you "fight, steal, and outwit your way through the galaxy's crime syndicates."

As part of its latest DLSS update and round-up, NVIDIA has confirmed that Star Wars Outlaws will launch later this year and feature ray tracing, DLSS 3 Frame Generation, and Reflex support. The announcement arrives alongside a new RTX-powered ultrawide trailer showcasing snippets of some of the game's planetary (and out-of-space) environments.

Black Myth: Wukong is one of the most highly anticipated game releases for 2024. It is an epic action adventure based on the legendary Monkey King and Journey to the West myth, powered by the latest Unreal Engine 5 technology. The game fully uses NVIDIA's RTX technologies, and several impressive RTX On trailers have dropped over the years.

With the launch set for August 20, today comes word from NVIDIA and developer Game Science that Black Myth: Wukong will be one of the most visually impressive and cutting-edge (see: hardware intensive) PC games ever when it arrives in the second half of this year. In addition to DLSS 3.5 support (including Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction), Black Myth: Wukong supports full path-traced lighting.

Yes, this is the latest game to support full ray tracing, also known as path tracing. This technique presents realistic and cinematic lighting, shadows, global illumination, and reflections. It powers Cyberpunk 2077's incredible RT Overdrive mode, Alan Wake II's highest detail mode, and NVIDIA's path-traced Portal with RTX mod.

We've got some news about the AI upscaling on the beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console, which is reportedly called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR).

In a new video, leaker Moore's Law is Dead has sources that have explained to him that PSSR is Sony's new Multi-Frame Super Resolution (MSFR) implementation. It uses PlayStation Machine learning (PSML) to perform super-resolution processing on input data to generate color buffers with a current maximum resolution of 4K, although support for resolutions up to 8K are coming in a future version of the SDK.

PSSR is a machine learning-enhanced version of Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscal (TAAU). It will replace a game's existing temporal anti-aliasing or temporal upsampling. The inputs are "quite similar to DLSS or FSR" with full HDR support.

PGL has just announced its upgraded gaming PC setups for its CS2 Major Copenhagen 2024 event, where Counter-Strike 2 pros will fight for a $1.25 million prize pool.

PGL is ready to deliver an "unparalleled esports experience" at the PGL CS2 Major Copenhagen 2024 event with upgraded PCs featuring AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card. PGL chose the heart of this cutting-edge setup for its exceptional performance capabilities and the "ability to handle the demands of CS2" at what I'm sure are going to be the highest FPS the team can manage.

The systems have been fully optimized by "Afromnazareth" who is a PC optimizer in Paris, France. PGL explains that the team has "meticulously optimized this bespoke gaming setup to ensure that every participant experiences CS2 in the highest fidelity without compromise. The AMD RYZEN 7800 X3D stands out as a game-changer in the esports arena, promising to elevate the competitive play of CS2 to new heights".

Sony's upgraded PlayStation 5 Pro is a hot topic for a fresh round of rumors, where we're hearing that the PS5 Pro will feature up to 45% faster rendering performance over the standard PS5, but a whopping 2-3x performance boost in ray tracing when it drops later this year.

Inside the PlayStation 5 Pro console is a beefed-up "Trinity" semi-custom SoC from AMD, with the GPU being larger and using faster system memory, which should see 20Gbps GDDR6 memory inside. The new Trinity SoC has a new, more powerful ray tracing architecture, with 2-3x performance over the regular PS5. Moore's Law is Dead's sources said they've "seen 4x speedup in some cases," which is incredible if true.

AI is another big part of the PlayStation 5 Pro console. The Trinity SoC features a custom architecture for matching learning (ML), which is used for Sony's upscaling and anti-aliasing solution, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR for short.

Intel's APO (Application Performance Optimization) feature is now supported by a lot more games, boosting frame rates nicely for newer Intel CPUs.

By newer we mean Alder Lake (12-gen) and onwards, but there's a bit of a catch there which we'll come back to.

APO, which offers fps boosts in the order of 10%, or perhaps more - the mileage will vary depending on the game and exact Intel CPU - only originally arrived with support for two games (Metro Exodus and Rainbow 6 Siege).

Google has taken something of a different direction with its Google Play Games app for Windows 11 (or Windows 10) PCs, adding actual PC games to the service.

For the uninitiated, Google Play Games previously allowed for playing certain Android games on a Windows PC, with the app being released a few years back.

Now, though, the library will contain not just mobile games but actual PC titles - though the question is, which ones?