Gaming

Nintendo has two new Switch gaming consoles in the works for launch this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, one will be a cheaper entry-level model and the other targeted at more serious gamers.

Leaked information about some potential upcoming laptops from Asus suggests that the Taiwanese manufacturer is preparing to reveal devices that feature both Picasso and Turing technology. Three different models are mentioned that combine two different AMD Ryzen APUs with seemingly three Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Asus has already released gaming laptops with the new Picasso chips but not with an Nvidia GPU.

A screenshot posted on Reddit has been stirring up some excitement among PlayStation 4 owners. The image shows a page from the Brazilian PlayStation Store, and there is a small window advert for EA Access. The EA Access service offers popular games like the Madden NFL series and the NHL range to Xbox One subscribers for US$29.99 a year.

It has been reported that Walmart has been meeting with a number of game developers and publishers to discuss a potential video-game streaming service. With Google just revealing its Stadia service and Nvidia’s GeForce Now platform gearing up for worldwide launch, there’s a good chance cloud gaming is going to revolutionize the way people play video games on a huge scale.

The chassis has plenty of enthusiast features including per-key RGB lighting and a 1080p144 IPS display, but it comes at the cost of chassis rigidity in some spots and a poor trackpad. While not a bad alternative to more popular gaming laptops, we recommend a warranty extension just to be on the safe side.

Tencent, which publishes games such as PUBG, has set up a collaboration with Razer in order to improve said apps' function on the gaming hardware giant's Android phones. This involves optimizing Tencent titles for the Razer Phones, as well as for the mobile-gaming peripherals Razer sells.

Microsoft's plans of introducing a disc-less version of the Xbox One S is well known and we're getting to know that the console is all set for a global launch on May 7. Expected to be known as the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition, the new console will be priced at the lowest tier in the Xbox One family to encourage newcomers to get a feel for the digital ecosystem.

Battlefield V’s battle royale mode, Firestorm, will be launched on March 25. It will come as an update to owners of the Battlefield V game and will give players the chance to utilize a range of vehicles in their quest for victory. Nvidia has posted a system requirement spec sheet for players, which includes the company’s own RTX 2070 graphics card.

Set to become the entry-level model of the Turing generation, the upcoming GTX 1650 appears to be almost as fast as the GTX 1050 Ti from the previous gen in the latest Final Fantasy XV benchmarks. This model is scheduled to launch in April for around US$179 with no RT or Tensor cores and only 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.

15 years after the release of the original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Paradox is finally announcing a sequel to the "cult" RPG game. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is set in modern-day Seattle, and the gameplay will include brutal first person melee fights, strong language, and hub-like levels with non-linear progression.

The Closed Beta of Mortal Kombat 11 will debut on March 28 with a roaster of five fighters, namely Baraka, Jade, Kabal, Scarlet, and Scorpion. At launch, the game is expected to come with a lineup of no less than 28 characters, including Cassie Cage, Kano, Sub-Zero, Raiden, and Kano. This new Mortal Kombat title will launch on April 23.

Razer has released its financial report for 2018. It shows that the gaming company's revenues are now stands at US$274.2 million. The firm made $79.5 million in terms of gross profit last year, and also cut its losses by 4.3% compared to 2017.

Switch owners rejoice. Cuphead, the popular side-scrolling run and gun game, is coming to the console next month. You can pre-order the game now on the Nintendo eShop before its worldwide release on April 18. StudioMDHR is also bringing new and free content to all platforms, which will be available on the Switch version on day one.

The first anniversary of PUBG for mobile devices comes with the Season 6 Royale Pass, parties on Spawn Island with fireworks and loot crates with special rewards, randomly spawned birthday cakes, dynamic weather on Erangel and Miramar, a new vehicle (a three-wheeled bus that replaces the Jeep, Dacia, and Mini Bus), and more.

A Respawn Entertainment community manager has taken to Reddit to warn fans of Apex Legends about the perils of believing datamined rumors. Jay Frechette’s comments were pragmatic and logical: “real info will come from us”. However, within days of his post two new potentially massive features for the battle royale hit have been shared by data miners.

Oculus and HP have unveiled their latest VR headsets during GDC week in San Francisco. The new headsets are a step up their previous efforts and feature improved optics, comfort and overall performance.

This is the cheapest we've seen a brand new GeForce RTX laptop go for. It may be a budget-class Dell gaming laptop, but it should easily perform as well as any GTX 1070 Max-Q system.

Following the recent leak of a Dell G5 15 laptop featuring the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, a few Vietnamese PC retail sites have started listing the MSI GL63 8SD gaming laptop powered by the new Turing GPU indicating that an official launch of the new card is imminent. Apart from the availability of the GTX 1660 Ti option, the rest of the specs of the MSI GL63 are the same as what we've seen during its announcement at CES 2019.

The Gen 11 GPU is Intel's upcoming integrated graphics solution for next-gen CPUs, as announced at GDC this year. It is associated with a possible 1 teraflop of single-precision performance. According to the leaker Tum Apisak, its first known benchmark shows double the score compared to the UHD 620.

Epic Games has used GDC to showcase its capabilities of its Unreal Engine 4.22 with ray tracing enabled. The demos, powered by a single Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080Ti, demonstrate jaw-dropping realism that could easily be confused for live action film.

Yesterday, Sea of Thieves celebrated its first anniversary. During the year that passes, the game received four major updates, and now everyone should get ready for the Anniversary Update, which is set to arrive at the end of April. This massive update — the biggest so far — promises to take Sea of Thieves to a whole new level.

A leaked email allegedly from Phil Spencer, the Xbox head executive, has given some ambiguous details about how Microsoft and Xbox will challenge Google’s recent massive announcement about its Stadia game-streaming service. It seems something big is going to happen at E3 though, which officially starts on June 11.

God of War has won another “Game of the Year” title to add to its growing collection. This time, it was the Game Developers Choice Award for Game of the Year that was given to the acclaimed action-adventure game. God of War, which was developed by Santa Monica Studio and published by Sony, was released in April 2018.

The Mek Mini is one step up from the ZBox series in terms of performance, features, and upgradeability. Its ample ventilation grilles on five of its six sides should hopefully be enough to keep temperatures and noise in check.

Intel has been very busy during a packed presentation at the Game Developers Conference. Among all the talk about the company's Odyssey initiative there was time to flash up some design renders of the upcoming Intel Xe discrete graphics card. Images of the card's potential shroud, created by designer Christiano Siquera, were shared with an excited audience.

The early access software is Intel's next step towards becoming a discrete graphics company. The chipmaker plans to take user feedback seriously by launching the Odyssey program for enthusiasts to share, engage, and collaborate with Intel along the way.

The Coffee Lake-H successor is mere months away and Intel is still being quiet on SKUs and specifications. For what it's worth, we at least know that Wi-Fi 6 and Optane H10 memory will be supported on the upcoming gaming laptops.

While Google has the performance side of Stadia covered with a custom hyperthreading CPU plus and AMD GPU capable of delivering 10.7 TF of processing power, testers of the demo version pointed out that input lag is quite noticeable, and the image quality may be affected in dynamic scenes. Hopefully Google is taking notes and the final version releasing this summer will be better optimized.

OWC is a company that caters to iMac fans who want to upgrade their new Apple all-in-ones. It has announced its new Memory Kits for the 2019 27-inch iMac (the 5K model). As this new 2019 variant has 4 user-accessible slots, OWC is also currently testing out the possibility of maxing its RAM to 128GB.

In a world where everyone seems to be a streamer or caster or some kind, a USB microphone may be a viable purchase. They combine the possible advantage of improved audio with a power source that is already built into your machine. A recent "data-driven" review puts the Blue Yeti at the top of a new list of the best of these devices.

Released at the end of November for the Nintendo Switch hybrid console, RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures is now finally reaching PC gamers all over the world. However, this release comes with a twist that Steam fans will not enjoy: Atari's new game is exclusively available via the Epic Games store.

Dell has announced that the G7 15 gaming laptop, the Alienware m15 notebook, and the powerful Alienware Area-51m computer are now available to customers in India. The devices can currently be ordered from the website for Dell India, and they will be made available in retail outlets such as Reliance Digital and Croma from April 1.

Google has officially announced its Stadia cloud gaming service at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Google Stadia will allow users to play games from any computer, smartphone, smart television or tablet that has an Internet connection. The GPUs that have been selected for the service’s hardware are custom Radeon chips from AMD.

An Alienware Area-51m laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU and an Intel Core i7-9700K processor has recorded a very impressive score of 25,039 in 3DMark’s Fire Strike 1.1 test. According to the chart details for the run, this puts this particular system ahead of 98% of all other results. The Graphics score was 30,306.

A new patch for Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been announced that contains software for ray tracing and DLSS support. Users will need to have an Nvidia GeForce RTX 20-series GPU in their system to enjoy the new features. The action-adventure game was released in September 2018 with Nixxes Software developing the Windows port.

Nvidia's own game streaming service is currently featuring more than 500 game titles, and users will be able to bring more games from platforms like Steam. Backed by new RTX blade servers with scalable RTX 2080 performance and blazing fast connections all across the world via the GeForce Now Alliance, Nvidia is aiming to provide the smoothest gaming experience for more than a billion systems that do not integrate gaming GPUs.

The game streaming infrastructure envisioned by Vectordash puts GPU-based cryptomining rigs to good use in order to bring a smooth gaming experience for computers that do not integrate dedicated gaming GPUs. The service will first be available only on the West Coast, but there are plans to expand support for the East Coast.

After a rather long wait, the French and Italian vehicles are finally joining Armored Warfare as the offerings of a new dealer, named Francine De Laroche. The Arabian Nights campaign is now moving on with new events, but the 0.28 update also comes with Battalion Ranked Battles, new achievements, as well as many tweaks and fixes.

Call of Duty Mobile is now official and should hit Android and iOS handsets later this year. Although there will not be a battle royale mode at launch, Activision has confirmed that this free-to-play title should offer this treat at some point in the future. Obviously, this "unique Call of Duty battle royale experience" will be accompanied by more content.

An MSI GeForce GTX 1650 GAMING X 4G graphics card has been spotted in a listing on the website for the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC). Scant details are offered in regard to the product; however, it does seem to confirm that Nvidia will be adding to its GTX 16-series soon. There is also a rumor that a GeForce GTX 1650 Ti card is in the works.

The team behind the much-delayed Atari VCS has announced an APU replacement for the game console. Previously, a customized A10 chip from AMD’s Bristol Ridge series was going to be installed, but perhaps wisely the developer has now upgraded that choice to a more modern dual-core Ryzen processor. Graphics will be processed by a Radeon Vega GPU rather than the R7 GPU.

Nvidia has announced that a number of Pascal-based graphics cards will soon be enabled to utilize DirectX ray tracing (DXR). GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB cards and higher will receive a Game Ready Driver update, which is currently expected in April, to allow their users to enjoy limited ray tracing technology in certain games.

Currently available only with a Full HD display option, the Alienware Area-51m gaming laptop will get UHD as an option in six to eight months, according to Frank Azor. He also said that the arrival of this option "wasn't supposed to take this long" so the machine was not designed for DIY display upgrades.

The Xiaomi Black Shark 2 has been launched today (March 18, 2019) in China. As expected, it is powered by the Snapdragon 855 processor, has a 6GB RAM base model and has a 6.39-inch FHD+ AMOLED display. This panel has some interesting HDR features, touted to enhance gaming and media experiences.

Snapchat is likely to launch its gaming platform for developers and content partners next month. Codenamed "Project Cognac", the platform will allow third-party developers to create games that run within the Snapchat app. With Snapchat's acquisition of game studios Prettygreat and PlayCanvas, first-party titles can also be expected.

Unveiled earlier this year at CES 2019 and still expected to hit the market, the EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti KINGPIN Hybrid graphics card has recently topped the 3DMark Portal Royal benchmark thanks to a massive overclock — 2.7 GHz core and 17 GHz memory — that resulted in a bandwidth of over 750 Gbps.