Gaming

According to a major European retailer, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series will become even harder to purchase between now and April. Prices of NVIDIA's latest graphics cards will continue to increase too, even those bought from retailers.

JLab Audio is known for its personal audio devices; however, it claims to have translated its expertise in that market to the plug-and-play USB-connected mic. There are three of these new products: the Talk GO, Talk and Talk Pro. They all have a 24-bit rate, although the recording sampling rate rises from 96k to 192k in the Pro.

As a part of its Chinese New Year celebrations, Ubisoft is giving away Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China for free on UPlay. One can redeem the game between now and February 15. Ubisoft is also offering attractive discounts on several other Assassin's Creed and Tom Clancy titles.

CDPR may well be busy fixing Cyberpunk 2077, but it now claims an unidentified hacker has compromised its servers. Apparently, the hacker lifted source codes to CDPR's games, including those of Cyberpunk 2077 and an unreleased edition of The Witcher 3.

Asus says it's ok to use generic USB-C adapters to recharge the laptop in spite of the warning label telling owners otherwise. When charging via the AC barrel port, however, be sure to use only those provided by Asus.

Thanks to the SwitchRoot team, Android 10-based LineageOS 17.1 can now be easily installed on the Nintendo Switch console. In the past, this popular game console received Android 8.1 Oreo from the same team. The new unofficial Android ROM brings deep sleep and a snappier overall experience to the Nintendo Switch.

RedMagic is a brand based on Android gaming phones with the specs and design required for players in this arena. However, it is now slated to branch into smartwatches in 2021, something confirmed by a new FCC listing. It is a round-faced wearable with an AMOLED display and heart-rate monitor.

AMD seems to be internally looking at a 2.5x performance increase for RDNA 3 compared to RDNA 2, flagship-to-flagship. RDNA 3 Navi 31 with 160 CUs is expected to be a multi-chip module while Navi 33 will continue to be monolithic. With Intel Xe also pegged to offer good ray tracing performance, NVIDIA Lovelace will have both Intel and AMD in its sights.

Andrew Spinks, a co-creator of the popular platformer Terraria, took to Twitter today to blast Google for failing to provide help with his locked Google accounts. Spinks' YouTube, Gmail, Drive, and other Google services have been locked for three weeks. As a result of what he claims is a lack of support from Google, Spinks also announced that the Stadia version of Terraria has been canceled.

Acer has released its latest consolidated financial report, which covers January 2021. It includes revenues that are its highest "for the same period" since 2013. This performance is based on solid year-on-year (YoY) growth for the OEM's gaming, creator-PC and Chromebook sectors.

A new report from Wccftech speculates that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 will be launched in February 26. Some of its key features include a GA-106-200 GPU, 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and 3,584 CUDA cores. Prices are expected to start at US$329.

There's a lot of data out there on the Playstation 5 and how power-hungry it can be when running games. Now, let's see if it's any more power efficient than the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, 3070, and 3080 gaming laptops.

The original soundtrack of the SNES classic Super Mario World is immediately recognizable to many retro gamers, but some fans of the title have gone a step further. Using data from the massive Nintendo leak last year, they have recreated uncompressed and lossless versions of the game's original soundtrack. Take a listen below.

EA has released the minimum and recommended system requirements for Mass Effect Legendary Edition. While the minimum specs are reasonable, the recommended hardware may be hard to come by for those that don't already have it.

Nioh 2: Complete Edition recently launched on PC. While the package is decent value, including all DLC released so far, the port is in a rough state. Nioh 2 doesn't currently feature NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 option, as promised. Worse yet, keyboard and mouse button prompts don't show up, making for a confusing experience.

The latest hotfix for Cyberpunk 2077 has arrived, hot on the heels of Hotfix 1.11. The latest hotfix fixes a critical vulnerability for Cyberpunk 2077 that could have been used to execute remote code on your PC.

The MSI Alpha 17 with an AMD CPU and GPU is worth a closer look for price-conscious laptop gamers. Not only is the price right but also the performance of the 17-inch gaming laptop.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is now speculated to come with 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM and 10,240 CUDA cores. Its 320-bit memory interface will allow for 730Gb/s of memory bandwidth, identical to that of the GeForce RTX 3080.

A financial blogger on Chinese social media has posted various images of Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series laptops being used for cryptocurrency mining. The rigs on show involve dozens of gaming notebooks stacked up just for hunting down some increasingly valuable Ethereum. Some of the laptops visible are RTX 3060 machines that cost around US$1,000.

Eve Devices originally pitched the Spectrum as the ideal display for enthusiasts - then pushed its delivery date back until well into 2021. However, it is still posting updates to its community website as a sign it is working on getting the product to the shipping stage. The latest one claims it is crossing things off a long list of desired features, which include VRR and an inbuilt frame-rate counter.

The cancelled HD remaster of GoldenEye 007 has leaked online, offering a fresh take on the Nintendo 64 classic. Briefly uploaded to XePartnerNet over a decade ago, the leaked build is a closed beta of GoldenEye 007 but one that features the whole campaign and a working multiplayer mode. The GoldenEye 007 remaster can be run in the Xenia emulator.

The EEC files reveal the existence of several RX 6600 XT models from ASRock, all of them coming with 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, This suggests that these versions may still be based on the Navi 22 SKU with 192-bit bus, but probably have low clocks that only require a single-fan cooler.

Lenovo announced that the Legion 5 Pro will be updated in 2021 with Ryzen 5000 silicon, RTX 30-series graphics and a 16:10 display. A Google-cached product specs reference let slip by the company ahead of its March release seems to confirm this, as well as how much RAM and storage space the machine can support.

Asus combines beauty and speed into a successful blend in the Zephyrus G15. The compact 15-inch gaming device is available with a white case and a GeForce RTX 3080 laptop GPU.

There have been some posts on Reddit claiming to show the PlayStation 5’s Oodle Kraken tool working at its best in regard to compressing game data from Control Ultimate Edition. While Xbox Series X owners have to give up around 42.5 GB of SSD space for the game files, PS5 owners only relinquish about 25.79 GB of room.

The list of products that IKEA designed in collaboration with Republic of Gamers, the well-known Asus sub-brand, includes over 30 products, including gaming desks and chairs, a drawer unit, as well as various small accessories such a mug holder, a mouse bungee, a ring light, and so on. Global sales will start later this year.

For its Ampere generation of GPUs, Nvidia was very generous when it came to TDP thresholds. In case of the TUF Dash F15, equipped with a GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop, Asus chose to configure it with the lowest possible TDP threshold.

Sony has released its financial performance report for October to December 2020. They show that the company shipped approximately 4.5 million PS5 units during that time, compared to about 1 million phones. It also posted 208% greater operating profits year-on-year (YoY), even though there were also 2% less sales for this quarter.

Thanks to liquid nitrogen cooling, the GALAX GeForce RTX 3090 HOF was pushed from 1.8 GHz to over 3 GHz and it broke multiple benchmark records, including 3DMark Vantage Extreme, Port Royal, Fire Strike, Superposition, and other tests. Gamers on a (very!) generous budget can choose one of the six RTX 3090 HOF variants released by GALAX.

Nvidia looks impressively strong in the PC video card usage chart in Steam’s latest monthly Hardware & Software survey. There are new entries for both the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3090, while the RTX 3080 enjoys a third month of popularity. In terms of overall percentage share, Nvidia has no real rival in the GPU space yet.

Steam has published its hardware and software survey for January 2021 and there are certainly some differences in comparison to the previous month in terms of processor usage and share. AMD has achieved its highest share against Intel, likely aided by the uptake of fast Ryzen 5000 processors among the gaming community.

People have discovered a new issue affecting Cyberpunk 2077, and it is one that could allow the execution of malicious code on your PC. CDPR blames external DLLs and claims that it will fix the problem soon. However, people apparently warned CDPR of the issue before it released Hotfix 1.11. Cyberpunk Engine Tweaks has reputedly already addressed the vulnerability, though.

Google Stadia has already proven itself as a video game streaming service, with triple-A titles like Cyberpunk 2077 having made the jump to the platform. However, its big breakthrough remains a long way off, and the closure of the in-house Stadia Games & Entertainment points to a re-focusing of Stadia just 14 months after its launch.

The RTX 3060 is said to launch soon based on an Ampere chip variant called the GA106-300. A GPU leaks site claims to confirm its existence with a new live image showing this silicon, alongside the latest news on its supposed specs. They are said to include 12GB of RAM and fewer CUDA cores than it conceivably could.

Santa Monica Studio will release a free God of War patch that will bring new visual enhancements to those playing the 2018 hit title on the PlayStation 5. Gamers will be able to choose to play God of War in “enhanced performance mode” on the PS5 at 4K (checkerboard) and 60 FPS.

Apple is said to have added support for both the Sony PS5 DualSense controller and the Xbox Series X/S controller to the first iOS 14.5 beta. The relatively quick addition of support for the next-gen console controllers continues to point to Apple’s gaming ambitions.

A Gigabyte G5 KC gaming laptop with an Intel Core i7-10870H and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU has been spotted on Geekbench turning out a terrific OpenCL score that would place it roughly between the RTX 2070 and RTX 2070 Super desktop cards in the benchmark chart. Unfortunately, the TGP of the RTX 3060 is not mentioned.

Out of the Ampere laptops that we have tested so far, the XMG Neo 17 from Schenker Technologies came out on top with the best performance. Thanks to the high TDP, the RTX 3070 laptop GPU even computes faster than many RTX 3080 devices.

Microsoft has now confirmed that stock levels of its next-generation Xbox consoles will not be getting better anytime soon. According to the company, it will be at least June before the Series S, and Series X are easier to purchase through official retail channels.

Sales of the Nintendo Switch family are close to eclipsing the lifetime sales of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with 79.87 million Switch consoles having been sold since March 2017. Sadly, Nintendo has confirmed that it does not plan to announce a new Switch model 'anytime soon'.

Control: Ultimate Edition recently launched on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Remedy's latest game has evidently joined the ranks of ninth-gen titles running at 30 FPS with a sub-native resolution, thanks in large part to its hardware ray-tracing implementation. Could ray-tracing hold back progress in other aspects of scene complexity and visuals this generation?