Gaming

According to a Videocardz report, NVIDIA is planning to launch a cheaper GeForce RTX 3060 Ti on November 17th, featuring 4864 CUDA cores and a 180W TDP. The card will likely be competitive with the popular GeForce RTX 2070 Super, while launching at a relatively affordable price-point.

AMD is working on its own implementation of super sampling similar to NVIDIA's DLSS technology. AMD's super-sampling technique is likely to be based on DirectML and is touted to be open source and cross-platform, which means this feature will also grace consoles such as the Xbox Series X and Series S along with the PlayStation 5 in the near future.

Intel has detailed its new Iris Xe Max DG1 discrete GPU solution for Tiger Lake laptops. Xe Max works together with the Xe iGPU in Tiger Lake processors to offer accelerated AI and media encode performance for creative workflows. While it does not work in an SLI-esque mode for gaming, Intel says Xe Max offers great 1080p gaming performance that rivals an NVIDIA GeForce MX350 for thin and light gaming notebooks.

Smartphone gaming is slowly becoming more of an important issue for smartphone manufacturers. Besides Asus and Xiaomi, Nubia is now also driving development in this area.

Leaked DXR benchmarks indicate that AMD's hardware ray-tracing solution could be better than expected. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the Radeon RX 6800 at native-res trails the GeForce RTX 3070 by only a slight margin, even with the latter using DLSS upscaling.

A leaked video clip of the PlayStation 5 in action has been amazing fans with its superfast load times. One of the highlights on display is the time it takes to get from the PS5 user interface to the Spider-Man: Miles Morales game save: two seconds. Only a few more seconds of waiting are required for the game to fully load.

PlateStation 5 has had to change its name due to legal issues in regard to the upcoming PlayStation 5 next-gen console. The third-party accessory/customizing company had released a handful of renders featuring the PS5 with different color plates. The firm is now known as Customize My Plates.

MiHoYo's well-received free-to-play action RPG Genshin Impact will be receiving a PlayStation 5 version with "enhanced graphics," according to the developer. This comment comes shortly after the release of the mobile-centric game's version 1.1 update and could indicate plans for next-gen consoles.

Intel's brand new Core i7-1165G7 processor can behave very differently depending on how OEMs decide to implement it onto their laptops. Our Dell and Asus examples show the pros and cons of two different methods we see on almost all laptops.

The PS5 is not a dainty console, by any means. Subject to memes mocking its size, the PS5 will probably be replaced by a more compact edition at some stage in its lifetime. In that vein, a concept has shown what a PS5 Slim could look, and if Sony offered it black, along with its current white finish.

ROCCAT has announced new additions to its gaming peripheral line-up. The new Vulcan keyboard series consists of Pro, Pro TKL and vanilla TKL variants. They are equipped with this OEM's Titan switches and AIMO lighting system, as is the new Burst Pro mouse. Its properties include feet made of pure, heat-treated PTFE to enhance its speed and responsiveness.

The RG280V is Anbernic's latest handheld games console, and its smallest to boot. The RG280V runs on OpenDingux and should be powerful enough to emulate N64 and PS1 games smoothly.

AMD is seemingly in a buoyant mood, trolling NVIDIA about the size and power requirements of its RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards. The red team has poked fun at NVIDIA's new 12-pin power connector too, but responses online suggest that AMD has misunderstood why people are excited about the likes of the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT.

Microsoft has confirmed that the Xbox Series X and Series S will be the only consoles that will support all the features of the new RDNA 2 architecture, the same one on which AMD has based its new Radeon RX 6000 cards. These features include DirectX Raytracing, Mesh Shading and Variable Rate Shading (VRS). The Xbox Series X and Series S will arrive next month.

Now that AMD officially announced the top-of-the-line Navi 21 GPUs, there is no reason to restrict AIBs from designing custom RX 6900 XT versions anymore. Industry insiders are hearing that AMD is already in talks with its partners to release such custom flagship cards, and availability could be set to early 2021.

The OneGX1 handheld gaming PC that surfaced earlier this year with an Intel Core i5-10210Y processor under the hood will soon get a more powerful sibling that has exactly the same looks. Dubbed OneGX Pro, it features the Intel Core i7-1160G7 processor and is much faster than its predecessor.

A new gameplay trailer for the PlayStation 5 exclusive title Demon’s Souls has been published and the next-gen console launch game looks incredible. However, a convenient side-by-side comparison video shows how the PS5 Demon’s Souls remake was inspired by the praiseworthy graphics of the original PS3 game.

Today's launch of the GeForce RTX 3070 was another bust for fans of Founders Edition cards, following a major retailer emptying customer baskets to attempt to cope with the influx of website traffic. Unsurprisingly, resellers have flooded market places like eBay with RTX 3070 Founders Edition cards, where they are selling for nearly 50% more than the RTX 3080.

AMD's partners have started announcing custom versions of the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT, including a liquid-cooled card by ASUS. Gigabyte will be selling what look like reference cards, while MSI has at least a GAMING X TRIO version of the RX 6800 XT planned.

GeForce Now gets a boost this week with new games including Watch Dogs: Legion and Ghostrunner, as well as free subscriptions for RTX 3070 and eligible Chromebook owners. The service now has over 650 games available and has new titles added every week.

Intel has offered a high-level overview of the architectural changes coming to Rocket Lake-S next year. Rocket Lake-S will be based on a Cypress Cove architecture, which is a combination of an Ice Lake CPU and an Xe iGPU. Rocket Lake-S will offer PCIe Gen4 support and offer enhanced overclocking and double-digit percentage IPC benefits over Comet Lake-S.

The rumor mill has been pointing to an upgraded Nintendo Switch coming in 2021 for some time now. The latest detail to emerge about the purported handheld console is that it will sport mini-LED technology which should deliver improved contrast ratios and deeper blacks for more engaging gameplay.

NVIDIA apparently has an RTX 3080 Ti with 9,984 CUDA cores in development and is likely to position it between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. Details of the rumored RTX 3080 Ti are not fully available except for the fact that it uses a GA102-250 GPU with a 384-bit memory bus and possibly feature either 12 GB or 24 GB of GDDR6X VRAM.

For the first time in over a decade, AMD has reclaimed the performance crown on both the graphics and CPU fronts with the launch of its Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 CPUs and its RDNA2 Radeon RX 6000 GPUs. What does this mean for the market and for competitors NVIDIA and Intel?

Noctua has announced new additions to its chromax.black line-up. For the uninitiated, they are versions of this Austrian OEM's PC coolers or fans in an all-matte black finish. These latest examples are new versions of the award-winning NH-D15 asymmetric cooler and the NH-U9S compact fan.

AMD introduced the RX 6800 as the most vanilla of its all-new RDNA 2-based line-up today (October 28, 2020). However, based on its specs, it may pack a punch of its own. It offers the same GDDR6 memory and Infinity Cache as its higher-end siblings, albeit with fewer compute units (CUs) and the series' lowest base clock thus far.

Gigabyte and MSI have filed multiple Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT with the EEC, following their launch by AMD. Gigabyte has certified another RTX 3060 Ti SKU with the regulator too, following the ones that it registered earlier this month.

The RX 6900 XT is here, and AMD claims that it takes on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 for just US$999. AMD's most-powered RDNA 2 GPU will debut in December, albeit only as a reference card initially.

Initial benchmark leaks of the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X show excellent leads in single-core performance over the Intel Core i9-10900K in PassMark and Geekbench 5. The scores seem to indicate anywhere between 16 to 20% benefits in single-core applications for the Ryzen 9 5950X. Even the Ryzen 5 5600X seems to have managed quite a decent lead over Intel's flagship offering.

Seems like AMD is winning in so many markets now. Desktop CPUs, server CPUs, AI soon (with the Xilinx acquisition?) and now it finally reclaims the GPU crown with the announcement of the RX 6000 series. The RX 6800 XT model is beating the RTX 3080 in raster performance, gets 6 more GB VRAM, and costs $50 less, but we are hearing the ray tracing performance is not quite there yet.

NVIDIA has based the RTX 3070 Max-P and Max-Q on the GA104M GPU, according to a list of PCI IDs. Assigned the IDs 249c and 249d, the RTX 3070 mobile cards will undoubtedly offer pared-back performance compared to the desktop RTX 3070. It seems that NVIDIA has been testing tonnes of other GA104 and GA102-based cards, too.

The RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti should be arriving before the end of November, according to multiple pre-order listings on Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao. The RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti may cost upwards of US$450 too, which would make them around US$50 cheaper than the RTX 3070.

The PlayStation boss Jim Ryan has been discussing the phenomenal reception of the upcoming PlayStation 5 in an interview. Pre-orders for the next-gen console in the US have gone way beyond what the PlayStation 4 could manage, and a noted analyst has suggested that over one million PS5 pre-orders may have already been made worldwide.

A PS5 SSD price tag that purportedly comes from Walmart has appeared online, and if it is accurate then the practically must-have PlayStation 5 accessory seems like a steal. Little further information can be gleaned from the tag, although US$115 for a 500 GB SSD that operates at the PS5’s next-gen standards is a bargain.
Update: The drive has been revealed to be a simple Seagate Game Drive external SSD.

An astonishing claim has been made by a self-proclaimed “Xbox insider” in regard to the performance abilities of the upcoming PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S, with the latter apparently beating the PS5 in terms of frame rate and ray tracing. Elsewhere, Ubisoft and Capcom have been updating gamers with news about expected next-gen console titles.
Update: A change by Ubisoft has cast further doubt on the frame rate claim.

Rockstar Games has given an insight into what improvements it plans to bring to the next-generation version of GTA V. Specifically, how its triple-A game will differ on the PS5. The game will benefit from improved rendering distance and a higher resolution, among other changes.

Acclaimed battle royale PUBG will deliver enhanced performance on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. According to the PUBG Corporation, both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will deliver a 60 FPS experience when running under the "Framerate Priority Mode."

Here we go again. CD Projekt Red has delayed the release of Cyberpunk 2077 for the third time; this time re-scheduled for December 10. Apparently, the company is guilty of its own ambition this time.

Razer's freshly-announced Hallowe'en 2020 sale is good news for those in need of an older mobile gaming controller from this brand. There is also up to 23% off Black Widow keyboards and Mamba mice. Certain Blade laptops are US$100 less their usual price-tags.

NVIDIA is rushing to release an RTX 3070 Ti after all, keen to take on AMD's impending 'Big Navi' cards. The card will be based on the company's GA102 GPU and will feature a 320 W TGP, along with 10 GB of GDDR6X VRAM. 7,424 CUDAs will be present too, as will 232 Tensor cores and 58 RT cores.

Info regarding the official Navi 21 presentation tomorrow has been leaked and things are not looking good for the RTX 3080 GPUs from Nvidia. Sources close to RedGamingTech claim that the RX 6800 XT cards will show better raster performance in significantly more 1440p and 4K titles. Once again, the ray tracing performance of the AMD cards is said to lag behind, still, at least it is on par with the RTX 2080 Ti in this regard. We could expect something similar to DLSS by early 2021.

An infographic depicting the alleged noise development of various consoles has been posted online showing the Xbox Series X to be apparently quieter than a whisper during operation. While the PlayStation 5 is not present, the divisive graph has the PS4 Pro at the wrong end of the scale closing in on the noise level of a hair dryer.

The official unboxing embargo of the PlayStation 5 lifts today, but YouTuber Austin Evans got an early feel for the console's DualSense controller. While the actual PS5 demo is still some time away, Evans could pair the DualSense controller to a Surface Laptop Go and a Pixel 5. He could also game on the Pixel 5 using this controller via Microsoft xCloud. Teardown of the DualSense controller revealed a 1,560 mAh battery among other cool hardware.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti's specs are all but confirmed, thanks to a new GPU-Z listing. It will feature a GA104-200 GPU, 4,864 CUDA cores, and 8GB of VRAM with a memory bandwidth of 448GB/s. NVIDIA is expected to launch the card sometime in November for around US$400.

Initially announced as one of the Sony-published launch titles for the upcoming PlayStation 5 console, the vehicular combat game Destruction AllStars has had its launch date pushed to early 2021. The good part is that the game will come (almost) for free with a PlayStation Plus membership.

Looking through images that compare PlayStation devkits with the final products reveals a couple of things: Both the PlayStation 5 devkit and final design PS5 console are revolutionary in comparison to their predecessors, and a lot can be expected from the PS6 devkit now Sony has raised this particular bar.

The now — unofficially, of course — declassified achievement list for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War contains no less than 44 items that cover various milestones that players need to reach in the campaign, multiplayer, and zombie modes. The platinum trophy gets awarded to those who hit 1,000 points.

Tipster @patrickschur_ reports that an AIB Radeon RX 6800 XT part boosts to 2.5 GHz and beyond when running 3DMark 11. The sample was listed as an engineering sample, indicating that retail clocks could go even higher.