Gaming

Estimated figures for the launch day sales for both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles have revealed that although Sony’s device has greatly outsold its rival, there has still been plenty of demand for the Microsoft machines. In terms of weekly console sales, the Nintendo Switch has been happily snapping at the heels of the PS5 and XSX/S.

A recent Sony patent for a virtual reality headset with haptic feedback indicates strongly that the company is working on a successor to the PSVR, despite saying that it had no plans to do so. The patent illustrations indicate that the purported PSVR2 will be far lighter and thinner than the original. But, with no official announcement from Sony, it's up in the air as to when (or if) the PSVR2 will arrive.

The XFX Speedster MERC319 AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT BLACK features a dual-BIOS design with overclocked speeds of up to 1925 MHz (base clock), 2110 MHz (game clock), and 2360 MHz (boost speed), all alongside 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. Sadly, this new graphics card is not in stock yet, but it should become available soon.

Early 3DMark results for the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti have made their way online, a week before its expected announcement. The results show NVIDIA's upcoming budget Ampere card offering 88% of the performance of the RTX 3070 at an expected 79% of the price.

XMG's NEO 15/17 models now come with 1440p 165 Hz screen options, and for a limited time, these versions can be pre-ordered at as low as 1581 Euro and 1503 Euro, respectively. The 1440p panels from BOE require at least an RTX 2070 Super GPU, but do not expect to hit 165 fps in too many new games.

Almost two months after the release of World Update I: Japan, Microsoft Flight Simulator gets a new free update, namely World Update II: USA. This update features an improved elevation model, new aerial textures, four new US airports (Atlanta, Dallas/Fort Worth, Friday Harbor, New York Stewart), new activities, and more.

A reseller group has been detailing how its members managed to get hold of almost 3,500 PlayStation 5 consoles purely for the purpose of selling them at a much higher price than RRP. As the PS5 is now reportedly sold out worldwide, country-specific sites for eBay have become littered with thousands of listings for Sony’s new console.

The Last of Us Part II cleared up at the Golden Joystick Awards 2020 with five awards, six if you include developer Naughty Dog’s win for Studio of the Year. There were no prizes for big names like Ghost of Tsushima and Final Fantasy VII Remake though. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 scooped the Best Gaming Hardware title.

Subscribers can collect a total of 48 free engrams over the course of a year. The partnership suggests that Destiny 2 will eventually be making its way to Amazon's game streaming service much like how it's already playable on Google Stadia.

$1000 can get you pretty far this holiday season when it comes to gaming laptops. If you're willing to go through the hassle of rebates, then this 15.6-inch Aorus 5 will be a strong contender.

The first Radeon RX 6900 XT from a board partner is here and is by ASRock. The card is merely a reference AMD design by another name though, with no ASRock branding or customisations to speak of. Custom RX 6900 XT cards should arrive after December 8, if there are any.

The Vizio-Gamestop partnership might be more beneficial to the Microsoft XBox series than for the Sony PS5 at least in the short term. The TV maker is pushing hard to make it the brand of choice for console gamers.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has been benchmarked in Ashes of the Singularity on the Crazy_1080p and Crazy_4K presets. Inevitably, people have been drawing comparisons between the RTX 3060 Ti and AMD's latest cards, and it does not lok good for NVIDIA's upcoming budget offering. The Radeon RX 6800 outperforms the RTX 3060 Ti across both presets, and by quite a margin.

Retro gamers have managed to get the popular emulator frontend Retro Arch installed on the Xbox Series S and Series X consoles. Not surprisingly, performance is excellent, but considering the frontend's limitations of previous consoles, the retro gaming capabilities of Microsoft's new gaming machines are impressive.

Gigabyte has finally taken the lid off its new AORUS Gaming Boxes, confirming that they will feature NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. While both high-end Ampere GPUs will be held back by the performance limitations of Thunderbolt 3, the new AORUS Gaming Boxes are the first eGPUs with water cooling.

ASUS has registered multiple Radeon RX 6900 SKUs with the EEC in Russia, raising the possibility of AMD announcing a cheaper alternative to the RX 6900 XT. The RX 6900 has been listed seven times, all with 16 GB of VRAM. If it is an error, then the listing should mean that ASUS is planning to release plenty of RX 6900 XT SKUs, at the very least.

NVIDIA's next-generation mobile GPUs will be arriving from January 2021 and with AMD Ryzen 5000H series APUs, according to a new report. Apparently, NVIDIA has targeted a starting price of US$999 for RTX 3060-powered laptops and US$1,299 for RTX 3070 ones. Meanwhile, the RTX 3080 laptops will start at US$1,999. Intel Tiger Lake-H laptops with NVIDIA GPUs will be available, too.

The two new compact cases from Sharkoon come with stylish looks, optimal airflow, and plenty of space to accommodate tall CPU coolers and long video cards, as well as additional coolers. For both the SK3 and TK4, the manufacturer's suggested prices do not exceed the 50 Euros (roughly US$59) barrier.

Playing as a nomad, a game tester managed to play Cyberpunk 2077 for over 175 hours without reaching the end credits. However, he did this on the hardest difficulty setting by playing more stealthy than usual while looting everything and using every single feature this upcoming game has to offer.

Although it missed the October 27 global launch date, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands arrived less than a day ago, as rescheduled. This major update for Blizzard's iconic product includes new items and adventures, as well as technological advancements such as DirectX ray-traced shadows, ambient occlusion, and improved multi-threaded performance.

A thorough PlayStation 5 teardown has revealed a particular concern with one of the GDDR6 memory modules. Temperatures during testing reached an uncomfortable 93.3 °C (199.94 °F) on the bottom memory module of the PS5 console. This has the potential to cause system crashes, especially in countries with hot summers and high temperatures.

We already knew that Sony would be enabling M.2 SSD expansion on the PS5 via a future software update, but that is also the case for variable refresh rate (VRR) support. Sony is yet to confirm when either functionality will arrive, though.

AMD's 7nm Big Navi architecture continues to impress with strong overclock scaling. Overclocker Takukuo managed to push the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT to a remarkable 2.8 GHz under LN2, just 10 percent short of the world record for GPU clock speeds.

A board partner has revealed almost all the specifications of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which is supposedly due for release on December 2. The card will offer 4,864 CUDA cores on NVIDIA's GA104-200-A1 GPU, along with 8 GB of VRAM and a 448 GB/s memory bandwidth. The RTX 3060 Ti is expected to launch for US$399.

1440p could soon become the standard resolution for gaming laptops and Eluktronics is already offering a few models integrating the new 1440p@165 Hz panels from BOE. These are only $50 more expensive to produce than the usual 1080p displays and offer 78% more screen real estate with low latency and good color gamut. As downsides, most notable are the requirement for powerful mobile GPUs like the Nvidia RTX 2070 and the sub-par scaling for lower resolutions.

The release of the RTX 3060 Ti is believed to be a few weeks away, but the card has already been benchmarked on Geekbench. The upcoming Ampere card averaged a score of 326,396 in OpenCL, putting it 10% behind the RTX 3070. Geekbench has seemingly confirmed several of the specifications of the RTX 3060 Ti, too.

Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay footage has been leaked online and it looks spectacular, especially as the footage was taken from PlayStation 4 gameplay. Although many gamers are expecting CD Projekt to release the game as scheduled on December 10, there is a persistent rumor that Cyberpunk 2077 will be delayed yet again.

The new T-FORCE ZEUS DDR4 memory kits by Team Group target both desktops and laptops, featuring multiple frequency options, up to 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) capacity choices, and high-quality IC with stable performance under heavy workloads. All kits will come with a lifetime warranty, but there is no pricing information available yet.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition has made a photographic debut in a handful of images that show the Ampere graphics card from the front and rear, and even the Nvidia-branded packaging makes an appearance. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, which is expected to launch on December 2, looks identical to the RTX 3070 Founders Edition.

AMD's Scott Herkelman hinted that the company is working to offer an open implementation of super-sampling in partnership with Intel and NVIDIA that works across PCs and consoles unlike NVIDIA's proprietary DLSS. He also said that ray tracing performance of current Radeon RX 6000 cards will improve with time. Further, Frank Azor added that AMD will look into the possibility of enabling Smart Memory Access with non-500-series chipsets as well.

According to the final system requirements for the PC version of the game, Cyberpunk 2077 will only launch with ray tracing support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX video cards. Although the AMD Radeon RX 6000 lineup also comes with this capability, it looks like Cyberpunk 2077 will add support for it in a future update.

The 4:2:2 chroma subsampling further limits the color space and some fine details can appear blurred in HDR games running at 4K@120 Hz. It's not clear if this is a hardware or software issue. Xbox Series X is not using the full 48 Gbps HDMI 2.1 bandwidth either, as it is limited to 40 Gbps, but the additional 8 Gbps allows it to correctly display 4:4:4 chroma definition.

Although the absence of a physical release resulted in many canceled pre-orders for GameStop customers, Nintendo Switch users will be able to get Doom Eternal as a digital-exclusive release. Sadly, there is only the official confirmation of this launch, but no accurate date to talk about yet.

Priced at US$1,999.99, EVGA's flagship product GeForce RTX 3090 KINGPIN Hybrid targets extreme overclockers and it should be accompanied by the Hydro Copper variant as well, which doesn't have a price yet. The list of features includes a triple-BIOS design with pre-configured OC and LN2 profiles, PROBEIT support, and much more.

Bypassing Apple's onerous restrictions on game streaming apps on the iOS App Store, including individual game certification and approval, NVIDIA recently launched a beta version of its GeForce Now service as a web app for the Safari browser.

Nvidia reported nice growth figures in its Q3 2020 earnings call, but things might not look that good for Q4. Team Green is now estimating that the RTX 3000 supply shortages could continue well into 2021, and this problem may also impact AMD with its newly launched RX 6800 / XT cards.

Problems involving the PlayStation 5 are starting to appear en masse online, with system errors, hardware-related coil whine, scalping activities, and delivery issues among the most common complaints. However, at least an apparent fix for the PS5’s “queued for download” bug has now been issued.

The PlayStation 4 smash-hit adventure game The Last of Us Part II has amassed 10 nominations for The Game Awards 2020, including in the Game of the Year category. Indie hit Hades managed to grab eight nominations, while the critically acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima received seven nominations. Winners will be announced on December 10.

Estimated sales figures for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles in Japan have revealed that Sony’s device is outstripping sales of Microsoft’s hardware by over 5 to 1, but overall sales are down on the previous generation. November 19 was PS5 launch day for the rest of the world, as the now current-gen console lands in 65 countries around the globe.

The RX 6800 GPU particularly efficient when it comes to undervolting, as its TGP can be reduced by 45 W down to 183 W. These figures are already laptop-friendly if we look at Nvidia's RTX 2080 Super mobility GPUs, so we can expect to see an RX 6800M GPU with 150-180W TGPs that matches the performance of a desktop-grade RTX 2080 Ti soon.

There will be no successor to the PlayStation 5, according to some analysts from Citi Securities Japan. The reason is cited to be the long wait between generations and rising costs associated with manufacturing consoles. The analysts speculate that cloud gaming will eventually replace hardware-based consoles.

AMD is back in the game with the latest RX 6800 / XT cards. Does it steal the performance crown? Not quite, but we still haven't seen what the RX 6900 XT has to offer. Nevertheless, the new AMD cards appear to be priced correctly, and we reckon the RX 6800 could end up as the preferred solution for the majority of gamers.

The Neo 17 brings all the current computer games smoothly to the responsive 17.3-inch screen (FHD, IPS, 240 Hz). The level of the hardware is right: a mechanical keyboard, 32 GB of working memory (dual-channel mode), an NVMe SSD (1 TB), and a Thunderbolt 3 connection are included.

Far Cry 6 has a tentative release date of 26 May 2021, according to the game's Microsoft Store listing. Ubisoft is yet to announce its launch date officially after delaying it indefinitely. However, the Xbox Store is likely correct, as it accurately predicted many game launches earlier.

Just as expected, the Red Devil video card takes it way above and beyond the reference Radeon RX 6800 XT design. PowerColor's custom card features a triple-fan design, dual-BIOS, a 14+2 phase VRM with DrMOS, high polymer capacitors, and two 8-pin PCI-E connectors. It should hit the market in a week or two.

AMD's been very tight-lipped about ray-tracing capabilities on its Big Navi cards. However, AMD announced it'll be releasing the Hangar 21 demo video on November 19th, showcasing a whole range of DX 12 Ultimate effects. While benchmarks have indicated relatively modest ray-tracing capabilities on Big Navi, the demo will be a good indicator of what we could expect from upcoming console releases.