Gaming

The mobile versions of Fortnite (those that work on the Android and Apple platforms) now allow the use of Bluetooth controllers rather than on-screen controls. This new level of support comes with the 7.30 patch update, which also adds the 60Hz support for select Android devices. It also offers the Chiller grenade, a new, seasonal, ranged weapon.

Artificial Intelligence is getting better, but can humans stay ahead of the machines? Unity thinks so and is offering $100,000 in prizes to any developers that can code an AI to beat Obstacle Tower, a new game designed to specifically test AIs. The game features procedurally generated levels that change with each playthrough, presenting a major challenge for programs that thrive on repetition.

Nintendo has been mum on the development of Metroid Prime 4 since its announcement at E3 2017, but it looks like development has not been going well. In a video announcement, Shinya Takahashi stated that Nintendo has decided to restart development of Metroid Prime 4 and hand over the reins to Retro Studios, the development house behind the first three Metroid Prime games.

Nvidia has announced that the financial guidance for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2019 has been lowered. A forecast revenue figure of US$2.70 billion had previously been given, but this has now been reduced to US$2.20 billion. One of the reasons given for the disappointing update was the apparent sales figures for the RTX series based on Turing microarchitecture, which were weaker than expected.

The significantly reduced base clock rate and TDP allow the mobile RTX 2080 to fit into a wider range of gaming laptop designs. Fortunately, memory bandwidth and number of CUDA cores remain unchanged.

XPS 15 9570 owners rejoice. We can confirm that Dell has finally fixed the NVIDIA GPU issue that has been plaguing some 9570 laptops for months with BIOS 1.7. Unfortunately, the update has introduced some fan peculiarities though.
Update: Dell has commented on the fan behaviour in BIOS 1.7.

PUBG Lite has been announced, and it is currently in beta testing but for players in Thailand only. The concept behind the battle royale title is to bring the PUBG experience to gamers who may not have the hardware requirements to play the full game. The developer team has also revealed that the game will be free to play.

If you were hoping to pick up a Nintendo Switch but have waiting patiently for the price to drop, we have some bad news for you. Nintendo president Suntaro Furukawa has told Japan’s Sankei News that the company currently has no plans for either a price cut for the console or even a successor in the near future.

Will there finally be a Rose Gold or bright pink Razer Blade laptop? The OEM has been teasing pink mice, keyboards, and headphones for weeks and a pink gaming laptop would essentially complete the collection.

Can the fastest consumer desktop GPU available beat the fastest laptop with SLI graphics? Not quite, but it's at least 50 percent faster than any gaming laptop out there equipped with a single GeForce GTX 1080 GPU.

The engineering sample spotted by Tum Apisak in the UserBenchmark database has a designation that is consistent with previously leaked codenames. As far as specs go, the early sample can boost to 3.7 GHz on a 105 W TDP, and also features 32 MB of L3 cache. In single-core tests, the 12-core CPU is 13% faster than the Ryzen 7 2700X.

DeepMind Technologies will be celebrating after its AlphaStar AI managed to defeat two human opponents in the popular RTS game StarCraft II. Five versions of AlphaStar were created to compete against each other, with the AI winner taking on highly ranked professional players. DeepMind, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., has already managed to create a program that beat some of the world’s best players at Go.

Everything appears to be on track to fulfill Nvidia's promised January launch window for the next generation of gaming laptops. Media, YouTubers, and everyone else in between will be posting their hands-on impressions in just a few short weeks.

Samsung display has launched what it says is the world’s first 15.6-inch 4K Ultra HD OLED display for notebooks. The display is virtually bezel-less, which has been the trend in both notebook displays and smartphones over the past couple of years and will be coming to high-end notebooks in Q1.

It's not a coincidence that the OLED XPS 15, Razer Blade 15, HP Spectre x360 15, and Lenovo Yoga C730 are all launching within 1 to 2 months of each other. These 15.6-inch laptops will likely source their 4K UHD OLED panels from the same provider.

In development since 2017 and available for PC gamers since December 2018, the Vikendi winter map for PUBG is now available on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The new map is accompanied by the Survivor Pass: Vikendi that rewards players of all levels for completing more than 200 missions over a multi-week season.

Navi is the currently-accepted name for the generation of AMD processors to succeed the Radeon VII GPU. Cards based on this upcoming 7nm platform may be released later this year. A new leak points to new chipset variants for the series that may differ from those mentioned in previous rumors.

We’ve known for some time that the Nintendo Switch has been a hit for the Japanese company. What we didn’t know was exactly how big, until now. New figures from the NPD Group show that Nintendo beat all-comers in 2018 to take the crown for the biggest selling gaming console.

There is a possibility that Dell could be considering incorporating a 120 Hz or 144 Hz panel with the Alienware m17 laptop at some point in the future, although nothing concrete has been confirmed (or denied). The topic was raised when Dell’s Frank Azor asked a concerned gamer on Twitter what they would miss about the Alienware R4 series.

Now that Nvidia almost cleared its Pascal inventories, gamers are looking for a good price/performance ratio. The RTX 2070 and 2080 cards are certainly overpriced for now, and even the RTX 2060 could be a bit too much for the budget builds. According to the latest rumors, the budget gaming sector should get the GTX 1660 / Ti GPUs next month, and these may also replace the GTX 1050 / Ti laptop GPUs, as well.

A new leak has named the rumored AMD APU that will power the next generation consoles as Gonzalo. Many speculate that the Gonzalo APU will be used in both the PlayStation 5 (PS5) and next-generation Xbox (Xbox Scarlett). The APU will be built on a 7 nm Zen 2 CPU and a Navi-based GPU. These rumors fortify the belief that AMD will once again be the sole CPU and GPU manufacturer for the major players of the next console generation. As such, AMD stands to enjoy continued financial success from the console market.

The CR400 is a cheap Mid-Tower case with a large side window and a ventilated mesh front panel. The case has mounts for two 240 mm radiators to keep components cool and is big enough to handle full-size GPUs and PSUs.

Jensen Huang is trying to divert attention from stock prices and investor troubles with an optimistic outlook over the inventory troubles that the green team has been having since early 2H 2018. Nvidia's CEO was happy to announce that the entire Pascal GPU inventory is almost gone, but this might not actually be good for end users who will be stuck with overpriced RTX 2000 cards.

Consumer PCs will finally benefit from PCIe 4.0 devices this year thanks to AMD's support via the Ryzen 3000 CPUs, but the high-end sector will also be getting a taste of the PCIe 5.0 some later in 2019, and the two standards are expected to coexist for a few years. PCIe 5.0 will push the theoretical bandwidth to 128 GB/s on x16 duplex lanes running at 32 GHz.

An ever-increasing body of leaks point to '1660 Ti' as the name for one of the first GTX cards to feature the Turing architecture. It suggests that it may be an RTX 2060 counterpart, just without ray-tracing. A new rumor has indicated, however, that it will not have as many CUDA cores as the low-tier RTX.

The first benchmarks using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 reference device have started to roll in. This new processor has done impressively well compared to its predecessor in two separate tests. It has also outdone devices with the Kirin 980 and A12 Bionic chipsets, albeit mostly in terms of graphics performance

Not long after its early December 2018 unveil, Mortal Kombat 11 is now ready to be fully revealed. However, this new installment in the 25-year old fighting game series will only be launched on April 23, 2019. Mortal Kombat 11 will be available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One.

AMD could make 5000 - or less - Radeon VII GPUs for sale for their February release, according to sources cited in a new TweakTown report. This may be because the new 7nm cards are Radeon Instinct cut-downs. In addition, this report indicates that there will be a dearth of Radeon VII custom cards.

Anandtech claims to have obtained access to some materials that indicate Intel is planning to release a new, extremely high-end desktop CPU. This processor, the i9-9990XE, is described as having a base clock of 4.0 GHz, 14 cores, 28 threads and a TDP of 225 watts. However, it will be open to OEM bids only.

Although the game itself is free, Fortnite also features virtual coins that can be used to purchase various in-game items. Scammers use stolen credit cards to buy V-bucks and then sell them for good rates to legitimate players. Just as expected, these transactions are being done via the Dark Web.

The Twitch Streamer “Exotic Chaotic” must have felt like he won the lottery after unexpectedly having another Twitch Streamer deposit US$75,000 into his PayPal account.

HyperX has announced its Cloud MIX headphones, a wired gaming headset that also doubles as a set of lightweight and portable Bluetooth headphones. The Cloud MIX has an understated design, 20 hours of battery life over Bluetooth and supports Hi-Res Audio.

Lenovo's latest lineup of Legion laptops aims directly for budget-conscious gamers with its fairly low starting prices. All models share very similar internals between them despite their distinct appearances. We compare and contrast the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Amazon apparently wants to join other big names in the cloud gaming market. The conditions appear to be more than ripe for the online shipping giant. There are signs that Amazon may want to start offering game streaming as early as 2020.

Dell has revealed that it plans to start offering the XPS 15 with an OLED panel in March 2019. Such a laptop would be able to offer a much better contrast ratio and more vivid colors than its LCD-wielding counterparts. It’s also possible the new XPS 15 might follow in the footsteps of the refreshed XPS 13 and have its webcam placed on the top edge of the screen.

In a dissapointing but perhaps unsurprising move, Dell has postponed the release of its BIOS update for the XPS 15 9570. The news comes after the company previously said that it would release BIOS 1.7 by the end of 2018, which Dell claims will fix the NVIDIA dGPU issue that has plagued some XPS 15 9570 laptops.
Update: Dell has now released the BIOS 1.7 update. We will give you a full breakdown of our findings in the coming days.

Although all SKUs may look identical, their sizes are very slightly different between them due to changes in the cooling solution and GPU. We've compiled all the size differences here so potential buyers can more easily compare the Blade 15 versions before committing to a full purchase.

The new Infinite S budget-friendly series will feature mid-range specs like the gen 9 i7 / i5 CPUs accompanied by the RTX 2060 GPU from Nvidia, while the Trident X models now represent MSI's mid-to-high-end compact gaming solutions that integrate top specs like the gen 9 i9-9900K CPU and Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti GPU.

Released only for the Xbox 360 (2008 in Japan and North America, 2009 in Europe and Australia) and PlayStation 3 (2009, just in Japan), Tales of Vesperia is now back in a remastered version that can be enjoyed on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam (Microsoft Windows only).

With dozens of configurations to choose from across the whole lineup, Zotac has provided a useful table comparing and contrasting some of the major features between all the latest SKUs. It makes for an excellent starting point for users considering a mini PC.

The developer studio Bungie has announced that it will publish its flagship series, Destiny, independently, thus ending its partnership with Activision. This eventuality has been anticipated by industry insiders and observers for some time. However, this is the first time that Bungie has made an official statement on the subject.

The outspoken CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has been offering some choice comments about AMD’s exciting new GPU, the Radeon VII. It seems Huang isn’t too worried about competition from the revolutionary new release, labeling it “underwhelming” whilst claiming that Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 will “crush it.” The AMD Radeon VII is based on a 7 nm manufacturing process.

The manufacturer will be leaving behind the Aorus X design in favor of a newer narrow-bezel look with more heat pipes, more ventilation, and a slightly thicker profile. The change will hopefully address some of the most common drawbacks of the original Aorus chassis including noise and heat.

While some are not happy to hear that the successor of the XPS 15 9570 is not being developed yet, many users are still waiting for Dell to make things right for them. The issues that need to be fixed are the DPC latency, coil whine, and the dGPU throttle.

The MXM form factor preceding DGFF never took off even though it was marketed for its versatility and ability to support future GPUs. If Dell isn't careful, they may repeat the same mistakes and run into a wall with DGFF once Nvidia launches a Turing successor.