Gaming - Page 318

CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA announced a new path-tracing powered visual mode for Cyberpunk 2077 called RT: Overdrive during last year's big GeForce RTX 40 Series reveal. With tech like NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) for all in-game objects ranging from neon lights to car headlights and full-resolution reflections, it was initially showcased alongside NVIDIA's new DLSS 3 rendering with Frame Generation.

With DLSS 3 now an option in the game, we've got word via the GDC 2023 presentation "Cyberpunk 2077' RT: Overdrive - Bringing Path Tracing into the Night City (Presented by NVIDIA)" that the new RT: Overdrive mode is set to arrive in Night City as part of Update 1.62 coming on April 11.

No doubt the mode, like the fully path-traced Portal with RTX, will be super demanding on even the most powerful GPUs - including the GeForce RTX 4090. Odds are DLSS 3 will be required for a playable frame rate above 60fps at both 1440p and 4K, though it will be interesting to see if the mode is togglable on non-GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs. NVIDIA's Portal with RTX remaster has no restrictions on what hardware you need, even though it is limited to the top end of the GPU spectrum.

Multiple PC users are reporting that their NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti video cards malfunctioned while playing the recent Diablo IV early access beta test.

While Diablo IV's lenient PC spec requirements indicate a well-optimized game, some users share troubling reports of their expensive graphics cards failing during gameplay. There have been multiple reports of NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti GPUs failing while playing the Diablo IV early access beta, with symptoms like GPU fan usage skyrocketing to 100% following an outright hardware shut down.

The amount of posts on Blizzard's Diablo IV forums indicate the problem may be serious. One post entitled Diablo 4 Bricked my GIGABYTE 3080 Ti is the top-viewed forum post. The official Diablo Reddit also has lots of comments lamenting GPUs lost due to this glitch and relating the issue to what happened with EVGA's graphics cards with New World. The bricking issue seems to affect GIGABYTE RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards the most. Users are at odds with a possible cause, but the general consensus seems to be pre-existing issues from faulty hardware.

Valve has officially announced Counter-Strike 2, a sequel to CS:GO built on Source 2.

It's happening! Counter-Strike 2 is set to release Summer 2023 as a free upgrade to Counter-Strike GO, Valve today announced. Counter-Strike 2 will be fully optimized and overhauled in Valve's upgraded Source 2 engine, complete with major updates to lighting, physics, and other effects. A bunch of maps have been rebuilt from the ground up to really make the new engine shine.

In essence, Counter-Strike 2 is more like a big upgrade similar to Overwatch 2, or maybe the new Fortnite that's running on Unreal Engine 5. So much has been changed--UI, lighting, graphical fidelity, smoke grenades got a big adjustment, and even Half-Life Alyx's incredible bottle fluid effects are included.

Remedy's latest sci-fi shooter Control is a big success that has earned a 300% return on investment, new financial reports have revealed.

Control is the biggest game that Remedy Entertainment has ever made. Mostly known for its Max Payne trilogy, Finnish game developer Remedy delivered in 2019 a unique blend of Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and The Twilight Zone in an action-packed third-person shooter. The results speak for themselves. Control radically changed Remedy's business and the success of the game made Control into a fully-fledged franchise with multiple new games in development.

What's also interesting about Control is how much it took to make--or how little. Control had a development budget of €30 million, which is considerably less than most AAA games these days. According to Digital Bros, the parent company of 505 Games who published Control, Remedy's shooter made a total of €92 million in revenues and has sold over 3 million copies.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today confirmed plans to lay off 9,000 more workers, bringing Amazon's total mass layoff count to 27,000.

Pandemic spending has dried up, replaced in just a few short years by inflation-driven recessing spending. Consumers are tightening their belts to weather higher prices and corporations are fighting rising costs in one of the only ways they know how: job reduction.

Amazon has already displaced the jobs of18,000 people, but now it will also lay off 9,000 more people in the next few weeks. Divisions like Amazon Web Services and Twitch, the popular game streaming service, will be affected. Twitch is going to lose 400 jobs

CD Projekt may have reset development on one of its new Witcher games, a new investor filing indicates.

It appears that CD Projekt has made the decision to reboot development of one of its new Witcher games. The publisher currently has five separate Witcher projects in various stages of development, including Canis Majoris (Witcher 1 remake), the new Witcher mainline trilogy codenamed Project Polaris, and Project Sirius, a new experimental game from The Molasses Flood, a previously independent studio that made The Flame in the Flood.

This lineup may not be going according to plan. A new investor report confirms that CD Projekt has created an impairment allowance for Project Sirius, which indicates the game has been scrapped in its current statement. CD Projekt intends to charge the current amount of Project Sirius' development costs of 42.9 million PLN (about $9.7 million) to its 2022 and 2023 impairment allowance. CD Projekt will recognize these charges as a loss and write them off.

After 16 years of streaming innovation, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is leaving the company.

In a shocking announcement, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear confirmed he will be leaving the company and will no longer lead the billion-dollar streaming service into the future. The CEO, who started working at Twitch in 2006, says the he'd like to spend more time with his family: "Twitch is ready to move out of the house and venture alone."

Current Twitch President Dan Clancy will now take over for Shear as Twitch's new CEO, and Shear will stay on as an advisor for the company.

Square Enix is bringing its latest Final Fantasy game to Steam in an effort to sell more PC copies.

Square Enix's exclusivity contract with the Epic Games Store is now up, and Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin is coming to Steam next month. The Team Ninja-developed action RPG had been a one-year exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC and will soon jump over to Steam, where it can sell many more copies.

The Japanese publisher has also lowered the base price of Stranger of Paradise to $39.99 on all platforms. The current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game also have the same price.

Real-time ray-tracing has been one of the most talked about advances in PC gaming in recent years, and one of the most impressive games to feature the technology is CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077. A game that makes use of ray tracing for reflections, lighting, and other effects to add considerable depth and cinematic visuals to the game's futuristic Night City setting.

When NVIDIA lifted the lid on its new flagship GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080 GPUs last year, it presented a look at a new ray-tracing mode coming to Cyberpunk 2077 called RT: Overdrive. The RT update is still in development and will make full use of DLSS 3 technologies and will be showcased by NVIDIA at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) next week in a presentation called Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive - Bringing Path Tracing into the Night City.

This is interesting for several reasons, but mainly because when we hear about path tracing in games, it uses ray-tracing for all in-game lighting, ala NVIDIA's Portal with RTX and Quake II RTX mods. Seeing this in one of the most technically demanding games in recent years is surprising and impressive.

Square Enix reveals new details on its complicated NFT game Symbiogenesis.

Square Enix isn't messing around. The publisher is going all-in on blockchain and NFTs, and has created an eye-opening roadmap for its new NFT game Symbiogenesis. The game now has a website with a dearth of information.

The website presents an RPG that's been misshapen to fit into a strange new experimental mold. These's a lot of creative ideas here but most of them probably will not catch on to any meaningful degree. The information is indeed confusing and not intuitive whatsoever, prioritizing layered mechanics and engagement-driven systems like forcing an odd co-op element to get players to work together to unlock the final mission.

Exclusive to the GeForce RTX 40 Series of graphics cards, DLSS 3 bundles DLSS Super Resolution (i.e., DLSS 2), NVIDIA Reflex, and Frame Generation into a single AI-powered rendering package. Frame Generation, which leverages the latest specific AI hardware found in GPUs like the GeForce RTX 4090, 4080, and 4070 Ti, is what people refer to when they say DLSS 3.

AI-generated frames that massively boost performance while maintaining impressive visual fidelity. It can be a revelation in games like Cyberpunk 2077, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and F1 22 - especially regarding 4K gaming. NVIDIA notes that in the first six months of its release, DLSS 3 has been adopted seven times faster than the first six months of DLSS 2.

With the Game Developers Conference (GDC) happening next week, NVIDIA is announcing a few developer-friendly things in relation to its AI-powered DLSS tools. But it's also confirming that a couple of the biggest PC games set to debut in the next few months will fully support DLSS 3.

Retroware is reviving an obscure batch of cartoon misfits from the early 1990s in an explosive nuclear blast from the past.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ruled the 1990s with its cartoon series, which was a thinly veiled advertisement to sell colorful toys and merch. Everyone wanted in on the action, even Troma, a rebellious movie production company known for their incredibly violent B-grade horror movies. Through the love of money, the Toxic Crusaders were born.

The Toxic Crusaders cartoon series very loosely based on one of the most horribly violent and offensive movies during the mid-80s, the Toxic Avenger. Obviously there was no outright horror themes in the cartoon, but it did have a kind of disgusting charm to it nonetheless.

Microsoft has published a new fact sheet that reveals interesting figures about the games industry, including how much its competitors make from the mobile gaming sector.

The Microsoft-Activision merger isn't just about Call of Duty. The best-selling franchise definitely factors into Microsoft's buyout rationale--with over $31 billion in revenues and 425 million copies sold, it's impossible to ignore Call of Duty--however understanding this deal in its entirety requires higher-level optics. Microsoft wants to use Activision Blizzard King properties to disrupt the games industry on multiple levels. It's not about Xbox vs PlayStation, but Xbox vs all competitors, and ATVI games/services/content will give Microsoft an edge to take on mobile gaming's supposed duopolists Google and Apple.

A quick glance at Microsoft's latest pro-merger fact sheet underlines its mobile plans. According to Microsoft, who cites data from analyst firm Newzoo, the mobile market is dominated by Tencent, Apple, and Google. The data shows that the combination of mobile gaming's Big 3 made up over 64% of total global mobile games earnings for 2022.

Microsoft continues making very opportune and well-planned business deals that could help get the Activision merger passed.

Microsoft has executed another phase of its merger approval strategy. The tech giant signed a 10-year licensing deal with cloud gaming subscription Boosteroid to offer Activision Blizzard and Xbox PC games on the service. Boosteroid isn't widely known, and while it is barely mentioned by regulatory discussions of the cloud gaming market, Boosteroid is said to have 4 million members.

The deal is a net benefit to Microsoft. In fact, all of Microsoft's current licensing contracts offer very little downside to the company by virtue of the Xbox business model. Microsoft isn't interested in making a walled garden and has operated its games business as an open, cross-platform ecosystem of products and services. This new 10-year deal with Boosteroid has the same goal as Microsoft's recent 10-year deals with Nintendo and NVIDIA: To dismantle regulatory arguments while making pro-competition posturing.

Nintendo management seems to hint the next Switch 4K model will be backwards compatible with the current-gen Switch.

We've been reporting on a next-gen Switch for many years now. Nintendo through everyone a curveball back in 2017 when it announced the Switch uses an NVIDIA Tegra X1 SoC, the same kind you find in NVIDIA's Shield TV box. Another surprise was the mysterious Supplemental Computing Device from 2016, a patented attachment that connects to a Switch to boost processing power for cloud applications.

Since then, we've been postulating and researching possible avenues for the next Switch. Reports indicate the Super Switch/Switch 4K/Switch 2.0 will use NVIDIA's new powerful Orin T239 Tegra SoC to deliver higher-end performance akin to a PS4 or Xbox One. The Switch will also target 4K gaming with the help of NVIDIA's DLSS super-sampling tech, which has indeed been tested on mobile ARM processors.

Sony has been shipping freight containers of mysterious development kits, and they might be PS5 Pro devkits.

Today Insider Gamer published new reports that Sony is readying a PlayStation 5 Pro model. Sources say the PS5 Pro could release as early as 2024, although information on upgrades or new hardware enhancements remains unclear. Sony's shipping records may lend credence to the PS5 Pro reports.

According to Sony Interactive Entertainment's freight shipment records, SIE Inc. Japan sent a sizable shipment to its San Mateo, California-based SIE America subsidiary that consists of 240 cartons, or 2,609kg (5751lbs), worth of "Development Kits for Interactive Entertainment Software."

Valve's Steam Deck just got a new update that applies some bug fixes to a few games and allows for fancier graphics in Doom Eternal.

Version 3.4.6 of SteamOS is now available to all Steam Deck owners and brings ray tracing support to Doom Eternal. While your immediate reaction might be to think this is going to run terribly on Valve's handheld, apparently that isn't the case.

Feedback we've seen online - albeit pertaining to the preview of this update - suggests that id's first-person shooter runs relatively smoothly with ray tracing on the Deck, and the visuals are taken up a measurable notch. So, that's definitely something to try out for those who have the game.

A PlayStation 5 Pro might be in the works and Sony could release the console late in 2024, according to the rumor mill.

Obviously, add a heavy dose of seasoning - maybe help yourself to a couple of handfuls of salt here - but sources have spoken to Insider Gaming about the potential PS5 Pro being inbound.

The gaming website clarifies that the recently rumored PlayStation 5 with a detachable disc drive is a separate project, and that this isn't a PS5 Pro. The detachable drive spin on the PS5 will purportedly arrive this year, with the PS5 Pro to follow next year, but not until late in 2024 as mentioned.

Forspoken was apparently an expensive video game to make...and it may have missed sales expectations by quite a bit.

Square Enix's new action RPG Forspoken may have flopped. The publisher says that sales of the game have been "lackluster" to the point where the publisher sees potential risks for its Q4 and full-year earnings. It's unknown if the game is totally in the red and whether or not the publisher has taken a loss from Forspoken's lower-than-expected sales, but we do apparently know how much Square Enix has spent on the fantasy RPG.

According to game writer Allison Rymer, Forspoken had a budget of over $100 million. "Wrote the bible, script, and downloadable content for a fantasy AAA video game ($100,000,000+ budget) with release date set for Fall 2022," Rymer's LinkedIn reads.

The Bing chatbot has been in the headlines a lot lately, and that probably won't change as Microsoft looks for different features to add to the AI's capabilities - and different angles to promote it, the latest of which is as a tool for gamers.

In a new gamer's guide to the Bing AI, Microsoft goes into some depth on how the chatbot "knows a hell of a lot about video games" while showing a whole bunch of examples of how people can use it in this way.

The ChatGPT-powered AI can field a wide range of queries from recommending games - like the best shooter that can be completed in under 10 hours - to giving hints and tips.