We have with us the ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT OC Formula, the company’s new flagship graphics card, positioned a notch above even the RX 6900 XT Phantom Gaming. This sees the company revive its topmost “OC Formula” brand co-developed by Nick Shih, which represents the company’s boutique range of motherboards and graphics cards for professional overclockers taking a crack at world records of all shapes and sizes. What triggered the company to come out with an RX 6900 XT-based graphics card in particular, is a concerted preemption by AMD to NVIDIA’s rumored GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, an SKU slotted between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.
The Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU at the heart of the ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula isn’t the same chip as the one in the RX 6900 XT Phantom Gaming. AMD refers to this silicon as the Navi 21 “XTXH”. It is the highest bin of the Navi 21, designed to sustain up to 10% higher clock speeds than the regular RX 6900 XT. With its default “performance” BIOS, the RX 6900 XT OC Formula can now boost up to 2475 MHz, and achieve game clocks of up to 2295 MHz. The reference AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT sustains only up to 2250 MHz boost, and 2015 MHz game clocks, while ASRock’s previous RX 6900 XT-based flagship, the RX 6900 XT Phantom Gaming, does 2340 MHz boost, with 2105 MHz game clocks. Compared to the reference design, that’s exactly a 10 percent OC from ASRock.
The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is AMD’s current-generation flagship graphics card, which, along with the RX 6800 series, propelled the company back to the big leagues of enthusiast-segment graphics cards against NVIDIA. The RX 6900 XT is powered by AMD’s RDNA2 graphics architecture, which is its first to feature full DirectX 12 Ultimate readiness, including real-time raytracing. The RDNA2 architecture transcends platforms, and also powers the latest PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, which makes it easier for game developers to optimize for the architecture on the PC.
At the heart of the RX 6900 XT is the 7 nm Navi 21 silicon, which it maxes out. This chip features 5,120 stream processors spread across 80 RDNA2 compute units, 80 Ray Accelerators (components that accelerate raytracing), 288 TMUs, 128 ROPs, and an impressive 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. This memory, however, runs across a 256-bit wide memory interface. AMD attempted to shore up bandwidth by using the fastest JEDEC-standard 16 Gbps memory chips, and deploying Infinity Cache, a 128 MB last-level cache on the GPU die, which speeds up transfers between the GPU and the memory, by acting as a scratchpad. Together with the GDDR6 memory, Infinity Fabric unleashes memory bandwidths of up to 2 TB/s.
The ASRock RX 6900 XT features the company’s most opulent custom board design to date, with a large triple-slot, triple fan cooling solution that’s packed with innovations; the company’s most over-the-top power-delivery solution ever on a graphics card; and design optimization for professional overclocking using liquid- or extreme cooling methods. The Navi XTXH silicon not only sustains boost frequencies better, but is also designed for better overclocking headroom than the original Navi 21 XTX powering the reference RX 6900 XT. In this review, we take our first look at this exotic new graphics card to tell you if ASRock has tangibly improved performance of the RX 6900 XT over the reference, and whether it gets any closer to the RTX 3090.
Ubisoft announced that it’s developing a free-to-play game set in The Division’s universe, called The Division Heartland. The company also announced that a Division mobile game is in the works.
The announcement is light on details, so it’s not clear yet whether the game will be a battle royale style like Call of Duty: Warzone or Fortnite, but Ubisoft has said it’ll be coming to PC, consoles, and cloud gaming platforms at some point in 2021 or 2022. There are also basically no details about the mobile game, but Ubisoft said in a news release that more will be revealed at a later date.
It’s understandable why Ubisoft would want to launch its own version of the free-to-play and mobile shooter games: Fortnite makes billions of dollars for Epic, and CoD: Mobile alone reportedly made $10 billion in 2020. That’s not even mentioning the 100 million players for Warzone, another lucrative title.
Whether Ubisoft’s offerings in The Division universe will be as popular as its competitors remains to be seen, but Ubisoft is certainly trying to keep the game’s world culturally relevant: it’s still developing content for The Division 2, and is currently working on a movie version with Netflix starring Jake Gyllenhaal.
A Microsoft executive has admitted that the company doesn’t earn any profit on sales of Xbox consoles alone. The admission came as part of the Epic v. Apple trial yesterday, confirming what we’ve known for years: Microsoft sells Xbox consoles at a loss. Asked how much margin Microsoft makes on Xbox consoles, the company’s head of Xbox business development, Lori Wright, said, “We don’t; we sell the consoles at a loss.”
An Epic Games lawyer asked a follow-up question: “Does Microsoft ever earn a profit on the sale of an Xbox console?” Wright replied, “No.” That doesn’t mean Xbox doesn’t make money, though. Microsoft was keen to point this out in a statement to The Verge just hours after Wright’s testimony yesterday.
“The gaming business is a profitable and high-growth business for Microsoft,” says a Microsoft spokesperson. “The console gaming business is traditionally a hardware subsidy model. Game companies sell consoles at a loss to attract new customers. Profits are generated in game sales and online service subscriptions.“
The Xbox Series S.Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
I asked Microsoft whether it never truly makes any margins on hardware alone, but the company didn’t respond in time for publication. Typically, Microsoft and Sony subsidize hardware at the beginning of a console’s lifecycle, but those early component costs tend to decrease over time. Those lower costs also translate to lower retail prices for consoles over time, though.
A teardown analysis of the Xbox One S, for example, revealed an estimated bill of materials of $324, which is $75 less than the $399 launch price for the 2TB version of the console, back in 2016. Microsoft also launched a disc-less version of the Xbox One S two years ago, which was presumably also sold at a loss.
Sony and Microsoft have similar business models for PlayStation and Xbox consoles, but Nintendo is the exception. In court documents, Microsoft estimates that hardware is generating a loss for Sony, but a profit for Nintendo. That’s backed up by Nintendo’s impressive 84.59 million Switch sales this year, up to March 31st.
Why all these costs are being discussed right now is a big part of the ongoing Epic v. Apple trial. Epic isn’t happy about Apple’s 30 percent revenue cut on in-app purchases for Fortnite, but Apple is arguing that Epic should also take issue with Microsoft or Sony’s identical 30 percent cut. It has resulted in hours of testimony about whether the iPhone is more like a PC or an Xbox, and a debate around open platforms versus locked-down ones. Microsoft clearly sees a difference between Xbox and PC, and has only cut the amount it takes on the Windows side to 12 percent, while the Xbox remains at 30 percent.
Microsoft obviously wants to maintain its business model for Xbox, and has attempted to push the industry toward digital games for years. Microsoft has very much sided with Epic Games in the case against Apple, and Epic has admitted it has never even questioned Microsoft’s digital sales cut. But how long this harmony will exist between the pair will very much depend on the future of digital game sales and cloud gaming. Microsoft is increasingly focused on its Xbox Game Pass subscription, which spans across devices that aren’t even Xbox consoles.
Game Pass also includes xCloud, Microsoft’s cloud gaming technology. Fortnite isn’t part of xCloud, because Epic Games won’t allow it. That highlights the emerging battles that are starting to take place in the game industry over shares of revenue. It looks like Microsoft has been preparing for some of them, but Epic v. Apple feels like the beginning of a greater war over the digital future of game stores.
Reviews for Capcom’s Resident Evil Village have gone live, and we’re taking the opportunity to look at how the game runs on the best graphics cards. We’re running the PC version on Steam, and while patches and future driver updates could change things a bit, both AMD and Nvidia have provided Game Ready drivers for REV.
This installment in the Resident Evil series adds DirectX Raytracing (DXR) support for AMD’s RX 6000 RDNA2 architecture, or Nvidia’s RTX cards — both the Ampere architecture and Turing architecture. AMD’s promoting Resident Evil Village, and it’s on the latest gen consoles as well, so there’s no support of Nvidia’s DLSS technology. We’ll look at image quality in a moment, but first let’s hit the official system requirements.
Capcom notes that in either case, the game targets 1080p at 60 fps, using the “Prioritize Performance” and presumably “Recommended” presets. Capcom does state that the framerate “might drop in graphics-intensive scenes,” but most mid-range and higher GPUs should be okay. We didn’t check lower settings, but we can confirm that 60 fps at 1080p will certainly be within reach of a lot of graphics cards.
The main pain point for anyone running a lesser graphics card will be VRAM, particularly at higher resolutions. With AMD pushing 12GB and 16GB on its latest RX 6000-series cards, it’s not too surprising that the Max preset uses 12GB VRAM. It’s possible to run 1080p Max on a 6GB card, and 1440p Max on an 8GB card, but 4K Max definitely wants more than 8GB VRAM — we experienced inconsistent frametimes in our testing. We’ve omitted results on cards where performance wasn’t reliable in the charts.
Anyway, let’s hit the benchmarks. Due to time constraints, we’re not going to run every GPU under the sun in these benchmarks, but will instead focus on the latest gen GPUs, plus the top and bottom RTX 20-series GPUs and a few others as we see fit. We used the ‘Max’ preset, with and without ray tracing, and most of the cards we tested broke 60 fps. Turning on ray tracing disables Ambient Occlusion, because that’s handled by the ray-traced GI and Reflection options, but every other setting is on the highest quality option (which means variable-rate shading is off for our testing).
Our test system consists of a Core i9-9900K CPU, 32GB VRAM and a 2TB SSD — the same PC we’ve been using for our graphics card and gaming benchmarks for about two years now, because it continues to work well. With the current graphics card shortages, acquiring a new high-end GPU will be difficult — our GPU pricing index covers the details. Hopefully, you already have a capable GPU from pre-2021, back in the halcyon days when graphics cards were available at and often below MSRP. [Wistful sigh]
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Granted, these are mostly high-end cards, but even the RTX 2060 still posted an impressive 114 fps in our test sequence — and it also nearly managed 60 fps with ray tracing enabled (see below). Everything else runs more than fast enough as well, with the old GTX 1070 bringing up the caboose with a still more than acceptable 85 fps. Based off what we’ve seen with these GPUs and other games, it’s a safe bet that cards like the GTX 1660, RX 5600 XT, and anything faster than those will do just fine in Resident Evil Village.
AMD’s RDNA2 cards all run smack into an apparent CPU limit at around 195 fps for our test sequence, while Nvidia’s fastest GPUs (2080 Ti and above) end up with a lower 177 fps limit. At 1080p, VRAM doesn’t appear to matter too much, provided your GPU has at least 6GB.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Turning on ray tracing drops performance, but the drop isn’t too painful on many of the cards. Actually, that’s not quite true — the penalty for DXR depends greatly on your GPU. The RTX 3090 only lost about 13% of its performance, and the RTX 3080 performance dropped by 20%. AMD’s RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT both lost about 30-35% of their non-RT performance, while the RTX 2080 Ti, RX 6800, RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti, and RTX 3060 plummeted by 40–45%. Meanwhile, the RX 6700 XT ended up running at less than half its non-DXR rate, and the RTX 2060 also saw performance chopped in half.
Memory and memory bandwidth seem to be major factors with ray tracing enabled, and the 8GB and lower cards were hit particularly hard. Turning down a few settings should help a lot, but for these initial results we wanted to focus on maxed-out graphics quality. Let us know in the comments what other tests you’d like to see us run.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The performance trends we saw at 1080p become more pronounced at higher resolutions. At 1440p Max, more VRAM and memory bandwidth definitely helped. The RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, RTX 3090, and RTX 3080 only lost a few fps in performance compared to 1080p when running without DXR enabled, and the RX 6800 dipped by 10%. All of the other GPUs drop by around 20–30%, but the 6GB RTX 2060 plummeted by 55%. Only the RTX 2060 and GTX 1070 failed to average 60 fps or more.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
1440p and ray tracing with max settings really needs more than 8GB VRAM — which probably explains why the Ray Tracing preset (which we didn’t use) opts for modest settings everywhere else. Anyway, the RTX 2060, 3060 Ti, and 3070 all started having problems at 1440p with DXR, which you can see in the numbers. Some runs were much better than we show here, others much worse, and after repeating each test a bunch of times, we still aren’t confident those three cards will consistently deliver a good experience without further tweaking the graphics settings.
On the other hand, cards with 10GB or more VRAM don’t show nearly the drop that we saw without ray tracing when moving from 1080p to 1440p. The RTX 3060 only lost 18% of its 1080p performance, and chugs along happily at just shy of 60 fps. The higher-end AMD and Nvidia cards were all around the 15% drop mark as well.
But enough dawdling. Let’s just kill everything with some 4K testing…
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Well, ‘kill’ is probably too strong of a word. Without ray tracing, most of the GPUs we tested still broke 60 fps. But of those that came up short, they’re very short. RTX 3060 is still generally playable, but Resident Evil Village appears to expect 30 fps or more, as dropping below that tends to cause the game to slow down. The RX 5700 XT should suffice in a pinch, even though it lost 67% of its 1440p performance, but the 1070 and 2060 would need lower settings to even take a crack at 4K.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Even with DXR, the RTX 2080 Ti and RX 6800 and above continue to deliver 60 fps or more. The RTX 3060 also still manages a playable 41 fps — this isn’t a twitch action game, so sub-60 frame rates aren’t the end of the world. Of course, we’re not showing the cards that dropped into the teens or worse — which is basically all the RTX cards with 8GB or less VRAM.
The point isn’t how badly some of the cards did at 4K Max (with or without DXR), but rather how fast a lot of the cards still remained. The DXR switch often imposed a massive performance hit at 1080p, but at 4K the Nvidia cards with at least 10GB VRAM only lost about 15% of their non-DXR performance. AMD’s GPUs took a larger 25% hit, but it was very consistent across all four GPUs.
Resident Evil Village Graphics Settings
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You can see the various advanced settings available in the above gallery. Besides the usual resolution, refresh rate, vsync, and scaling options, there are 18 individual graphics settings, plus two more settings for ray tracing. Screen space reflections, volumetric lighting and shadow quality are likely to cause the biggest impact on performance, though the sum of the others can add up as well. For anyone with a reasonably high-end GPU, though, you should be able to play at close to max quality (minus ray tracing if you don’t have an appropriate GPU, naturally).
But how does the game look? Capturing screenshots with the various settings on and off is a pain, since there are only scattered save points (typewriters), and some settings appear to require a restart to take effect. Instead of worrying about all of the settings, let’s just look at how ray tracing improves things.
Resident Evil Village Image Quality: Ray Tracing On / Off
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Or doesn’t, I guess. Seriously, the effect is subtle at the best of times, and in many scenes, I couldn’t even tell you whether RT was on or off. If there’s a strong light source, it can make a difference. Sometimes a window or glass surface will change with RT enabled, but even then (e.g., in the images of the truck and van) it’s not always clearly better.
The above gallery should be ordered with RT off and RT on for each pair of images. You can click (on a PC) to get the full images, which I’ve compressed to JPGs (and they look visually almost the same as the original PNG files). Indoor areas tend to show the subtle lighting effects more than outside, but unless a patch dramatically changes the way RT looks, Resident Evil Village will be another entry in the growing list of ray tracing games where you could skip it and not really miss anything.
Resident Evil Village will release to the public on May 7. So far, reviews are quite favorable, and if you enjoyed Resident Evil 7, it’s an easy recommendation. Just don’t go in expecting ray tracing to make a big difference in the way the game looks or feels.
Dr Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, will deliver a keynote address at an all virtual Computex 2021. The keynote will be titled “AMD Accelerating – The High-Performance Computing Ecosystem” and will cover AMD’s recent consumer innovations, including CPUs and GPUs for PC enthusiasts and gamers.
“The past year has shown us the important role high-performance computing plays in our daily lives — from the way we work to the way we learn and play,” said Dr Lisa Su. “At this year’s Computex, AMD will share how we accelerate innovation with our ecosystem partners to deliver a leadership product portfolio.”
During the keynote AMD will share its vision for the future of computing, including the company’s high-performance computing and graphics solutions aimed at enthusiasts and gamers. Since Computex is a trade show mostly covering consumer technology, despite the title of the keynote AMD does not promise to discuss its datacenter / supercomputer HPC innovations, which include EPYC processors as well as Instinct compute GPUs, at least not in depth.
It remains to be seen whether AMD formally unveils its new Radeon RX 6000-series for notebooks and desktops at Computex, but there is certainly an outside chance. Furthermore, it is likely to give a glimpse on what to expect from its Ryzen Threadripper processors for high-end desktops.
The Computex 2021 keynote will be delivered on Tuesday, June 1, at 10:00 AM Taipei time (May 31, 10:00 PM Eastern Time). Both Taitra, the organizer of the trade show, and AMD yet have to announce where to watch Dr. Su’s keynote address.
HTC might be manufacturing very few smartphones these days, but the Taiwanese company is still going strong in the VR department. It will hold Vivecon on May 11-12 and at the event we expect to see two new VR headsets.
One will be a new standalone device called Vive Focus 3 Business Edition, while the other is likely to be the Vive Pro 2 – a high-end PC headset.
Set your expectations accordingly 🧐 pic.twitter.com/fh1dbPsyBF
— Mike – VRO (@vr_oasis) May 4, 2021
The event, taking place virtually, has been teased with some hardware photos on social media. One image revealed a black device with outward-facing tracking cameras, under which HTC wrote “Ready to work in virtual reality?”. There might not be details about the device, but it clearly will be an enterprise device.
According to sources, the Focus 3 Business Edition has been listed in company documents with a price tag of €1,474/$1,771. The Pro 2 will definitely be cheaper – just €842/$1,012. Sadly, there are no specifications about any of the devices, but we’ll hear more at Vivecon in just a week’s time.
Canalys has posted its quarterly report on the PC and tablet market, and the numbers for Q1 2021 are more than impressive – computers and slates doubled in sales on a yearly basis, while Chromebooks in particular posted a whopping a 275% increase.
Canalys is keeping the Chromebooks in a separate category because they are indeed laptops or two-in-one devices, but at the same time, they are more affordable with a different Chrome-based UI, catered to a specific audience. They are extremely browser-centric and these devices are perfect for work and study – something many of us had to do from home.
Tablets, in general, have been on a steady quarterly increase, but compared with Q1 2020, the increase was 51.8%. All major players managed to record an annual growth aside from Huawei which is still struggling to stay afloat without access to US-made technologies.
The PC market saw Lenovo stay on top, ahead of Apple, HP, Dell, and Samsung. The Top 5 kept their positions, compared with Q1 2020, but all of them improved their sales results.
Canalys analyst Brian Lynch has revealed that the education sector might be a key driver for the majority of shipments across all these categories, but general popularity with consumers is also rising. The situation was compared with a rising tide that brings all boats afloat, allowing companies to be back in the game.
João Silva 15 hours ago Featured Tech News, Gaming PC
Gigabyte is getting into pre-built gaming PCs, starting with two new models – the Model X and the Model S. The Model X is a more traditional ATX system based on your choice of Intel Z590 or AMD X570 and an RTX 3080 GPU, while the Model S is a compact, 14-litre PC that packs high-end hardware despite its small size.
The Aorus Model X chassis offers good thermal performance and stylish aesthetics thanks to a half-vented, half-tempered glass front panel with RGB lighting and a half-vented top panel with RGB. Rated with acoustic performance below 40dB while gaming, the inside of the Model X was organised to allow less experienced users to mount an SSD or add another component to the system with ease. The chassis comes with an integrated GPU bracket and a 360mm AIO cooler. The side panel can either be transparent or metallic.
The Aorus Model S shares some similarities with other cases such as the NZXT H1 and the darkFlash DLH21. Featuring an AIO thermal design, the Model S has more space to fit the remaining components. The air intakes are concealed to keep the sleek aesthetics of the chassis, which features an RGB-lit Aorus logo on the front panel. During operation, the rated noise performance sits just below 36dB.
Whether you choose AMD or Intel for the CPU, some specifications are shared across both variants. For instance, the Model S comes with a 750W power supply for both Intel and AMD configurations. There are also some differences, with AMD-based PCs coming with slower memory options compared to an Intel-based PC.
The following table shows the specifications of the AMD-powered Aorus Model X and S gaming systems:
Model
Aorus Model X
Aorus Model S
Platform
X570
B550
CPU
AMD R9 5900X
AMD R9 5900X
RAM
32GB DDR4-3600 RGB
32GB DDR4-3600
GPU
RTX 3080
RTX 3080
PSU
850W 80 Plus Gold
750W 80 Plus Gold
Storage 1
M.2 2280 Gen4 1TB
M.2 2280 Gen4 1TB
Storage 2
M.2 2280 NVMe 2TB
M.2 2280 NVMe 2TB
The next table shows the specifications of the Intel-based Aorus Model X and S gaming PCs:
Model
Aorus Model X
Aorus Model S
Platform
Z590
Z590
CPU
Intel Core i9-11900K
Intel Core i9-11900K
RAM
16GB DDR4-4400 RGB
32GB DDR4-4000
GPU
RTX 3080
RTX 3080
PSU
850W 80 Plus Gold
750W 80 Plus Gold
Storage 1
M.2 2280 Gen4 1TB
M.2 2280 Gen4 1TB
Storage 2
M.2 2280 NVMe 2TB
M.2 2280 NVMe 2TB
The Intel version of the Model S comes with 32GB DDR4-4000 memory and the Intel Model X with 16GB DDR4-4400 memory. AMD versions of both PCs come with DDR4-3600 or DDR4-4000 memory instead. It’s also worth noting that the AMD Model S comes with a B550 motherboard, while the Model X features an X570 motherboard.
KitGuru says: What do you think of Gigabyte’s latest Aorus gaming PCs? Would you go for an Intel or AMD based system?
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Home/Tech News/Intel ‘Atlas Canyon’ NUC 11 Essential to feature Jasper Lake processors
João Silva 15 hours ago Tech News
A new leak shows that Intel is working on a new affordable NUC powered by Jasper Lake processors. Codenamed ‘Atlas Canyon’, the NUC 11 Essential leak details its specifications and a possible release date, which might be as late as Q1 2022 due to the ongoing chip shortage.
The leak, which was shared by FanlessTech, shows Intel has apparently removed the 2.5-inch drive from its predecessor and replaced it with an M.2 slot. The small and compact casing includes an active cooling system, but a fanless system seems doable given the low TDP.
The slide below shows that there will be three CPU options: the 4C/4T Pentium Silver J6005 (up to 3.3GHz), the 4C/4T Celeron J5105 (up to 2.9 GHz), and the 2C/2T Celeron J4505 (up to 2.7 GHz). The NUC 11 Essential support up to 16GB of DDR4-2933 memory in dual-channel configuration and up to 2x 4K displays. Some models include 64GB of eMMC storage.
Image credit: FanlessTech
Featuring a vast set of connectivity ports and features, the NUC 11 Essential supports Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and 1Gbps Ethernet connectivity. As for the ports, there’s an HDMI 2.0b port, a DisplayPort 1.4, 2x front USB-A 3.1 ports, 2x rear USB-A 3.1 ports, 2x rear USB-A 2.0 ports, an audio-in 3.5mm jack, and an audio-out 3.5mm jack.
The NUC 11 Essential will be reportedly available as a mini PC, a barebone kit, and as a board only. All should feature a 3-year warranty.
KitGuru says: Despite its entry-level specs, the NUC 11 Essential is very useful as a media PC for the living room or as a work computer that can be mounted on the back of a mid-size monitor to save some desk space.
Matthew Wilson 16 hours ago Competitions, Featured Announcement
We are back with another giveaway this month! This time around, we are teaming up with Asetek and XPG to give away a great hardware bundle, featuring a new 360mm AIO liquid cooler and a trio of peripherals to spruce up your gaming setup.
The bundle includes an XPG Levante 360mm AIO liquid cooler, an XPG Primer Gaming Mouse and Battleground Prime Mousepad, as well as XPG’s Summoner keyboard. Everything here is equipped with RGB lighting, giving you everything you need for a colourful and customisable gaming setup.
TO WIN:
This competition is being hosted via Gleam, so all you need to do to enter is follow the instructions below. Alternatively, you can head to the competition directly on Gleam.
Kitguru Spring Takeover Giveaway With Asetek & XPG
This competition is open to UK and EU residents only. The competition runs from Wednesday the 6th of May until the 31st of May. Shortly after closing, a winner will be announced on KitGuru.net. In compliance with GDPR, your entry data will be deleted after the competition is closed and your details will not be shared, we respect your privacy.
KitGuru Says: Good luck to everyone entering! We’ll be back in a few weeks to announce a winner.
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Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti said to be announced May 31st
Narrowing down the RTX 3080 Ti launch window has been a pain for insiders, with the date shifting every couple of weeks. The latest reports indicate that the RTX 3080 Ti will now be announced on the 31st of May, followed by a retail launch in June. According to some sources, the RTX 3070 Ti will launch in a similar time frame.
Matthew Wilson 18 hours ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
Activision is finally opening up about its plans for Call of Duty in 2021. During a financial call that took place last night, the publisher confirmed that Sledgehammer Games is leading development for this year’s game.
Speaking on this year’s plans, Activision Blizzard COO, Daniel Alegre, stated: “Development is being led by Sledgehammer Games, and the game is looking great and on track for its fall release”. Alegre goes on to confirm that this year’s game is “built for next generation”, indicating that this year’s entry could be the first to only be available on PC, Xbox Series X/S and PS5, skipping over the last-gen systems.
This lines up with recent leaks, which claim that Sledgehammer is working on Call of Duty WWII: Vanguard, which will have a campaign set in an alternative history timeline. However, recent reports have also claimed that the project is not in good shape and is heading towards a bad launch.
At this point, Activision expects to ship this year’s Call of Duty in Autumn 2021, which likely translates to an October release window, similar to other Call of Duty titles in recent years.
KitGuru Says: While Modern Warfare (2019) turned out to be great, I haven’t really been enjoying Black Ops Cold War. Do you think Call of Duty will bounce back this year with another WWII game?
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Matthew Wilson 21 hours ago Featured Tech News, Security
It was revealed this week that Dell is in the process of updating hundreds of PC models to address a security bug affecting machines dating all the way back to 2009. The vulnerability allows an attacker to gain kernel-level permissions in Windows.
The vulnerability was found by security firm Sentinel Labs and while no evidence of this vulnerability being exploited has been found, a fix is still needed. The vulnerability exists in the ‘dbutil_2_3.sys’ driver and would have been installed on Dell PCs via a firmware update through one of Dell’s applications, such as Dell Command Update or Alienware Update.
The vulnerability exists on 380 Dell PC models, including recent XPS systems and older PCs dating as far back as 2009, although an attacker would need physical access to the PC in order to exploit it.
Updated firmware is now rolling out to address the issue. If you have a Dell PC, it would be worth opening up Dell Command Update, Dell Update, Alienware Update, or installing the latest version of Dell System Inventory Agent or Dell Platform Tags to ensure your system is secure. Alternatively, you can find the affected file and delete it manually.
KitGuru Says: This vulnerability has been flying under the radar for a long time now, but fortunately a fix has finally arrived. If you own a Dell system, be sure to update and stay secure.
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Gamescom 2021 will once again be an all-digital event
2020 saw many of the industries biggest events either get cancelled outright, or translated into …
Matthew Wilson 2 days ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
While it looked like Microsoft may acquire Discord in recent months, those negotiations unceremoniously ended and now, it looks like Discord has chosen to partner up elsewhere. In a surprising announcement last night, Sony announced that it has invested in Discord and plans to integrate the app with PlayStation consoles.
In an announcement straight from Sony Interactive Entertainment head, Jim Ryan, we learned that starting next year, Discord will integrate with PlayStation consoles, a move that will include Discord friends lists, group chats and server communities accessible on console:
“Together, our teams are already hard at work connecting Discord with your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network. Our goal is to bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year, allowing friends, groups, and communities to hang out, have fun, and communicate more easily while playing games together.”
Sony also has a minority stake in Discord moving forward, although the exact investment amount has not been disclosed yet. We could be moving towards a future where Sony’s PlayStation social features are replaced by Discord.
There is no reason why these integrations couldn’t also come to Xbox. Discord already has basic integration with Xbox, allowing your account to be linked to Discord to display games being played on Xbox consoles.
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KitGuru Says: Discord integration on consoles is something I’ve been hoping to see for a while. Xbox and PlayStation party chat was good enough back in the day, but nowadays, it is lacking compared to PC offerings like Discord.
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Gamescom 2021 will once again be an all-digital event
2020 saw many of the industries biggest events either get cancelled outright, or translated into …
Matthew Wilson 2 days ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
A few weeks ago, we learned that Epic Games had spent around $330 million on obtaining Epic Games Store exclusives so far. Now, thanks to testimony given during the first day of the Epic Games v Apple trial, we know that the Epic Games Store is well away from being profitable, but Epic expects things to take a turn by 2024.
Epic Games CEO, Tim Sweeney, gave testimony yesterday during the trial, stating that the Epic Games Store is “hundreds of millions of dollars short of being profitable”. Sweeney later added that this is due to the upfront costs of starting the store and that it is expected to turn a profit “within three or four years”.
An Epic Games 2019 strategy review (via PCGamer), which was one of the many documents uncovered as part of this trial, shows the five year plan to profitability for the Epic Games Store. Starting in 2019, the store generated a $181 million loss, followed by a $274 million loss in 2020. Epic expects these losses to wind down over the next few years, leading to an eventual $45 million profit in 2024.
Even with the Epic Games Store being a money drain for the time being, the company is far from being in any form of financial trouble. Fortnite still brings in billions each year and just recently, a group of investors injected the company with another $1 billion in funding.
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KitGuru Says: The dominance of Steam as the go-to PC gaming platform really shows here. Just to even attempt to compete, Epic has had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars with the hope that those investments will eventually pay off.
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Gamescom 2021 will once again be an all-digital event
2020 saw many of the industries biggest events either get cancelled outright, or translated into …
That question was asked — implicitly and explicitly — over and over on the third day of Epic v. Apple testimony. The antitrust trial started on Monday with some heady pronunciations about Fortnite, the game and/or metaverse at the heart of the case. Yesterday, both sides argued about whether iPhones and iPads were truly locked down. And today, Apple and Epic delved into one of the biggest questions of the trial: whether saying iOS violates antitrust law would make every major game console an unlawful monopoly too.
Apple’s attorneys issued a dire warning to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft during its opening statement, saying that their business models were all fundamentally similar. “If Epic prevails, other ecosystems will fall too,” they warned. But today, Epic called up Microsoft’s Xbox business development head Lori Wright as a sympathetic witness. In response to a line of questioning, Wright divided computing devices into “special-purpose” and “general-purpose” devices — in a way that clearly defined iPhones as the latter.
The Xbox, as Wright describes it, is a special-purpose device. “You are basically building a piece of hardware to do a specific thing,” she told a judge. “The Xbox is designed to give you a gaming experience. People buy an Xbox because they want to play games.” As a result, Microsoft keeps tight control of what content users can access — it’s a “curated, custom-built hardware/software experience.” The market is also much smaller: tens or hundreds of millions sold, compared to “billions” of Windows devices. Later in the day, Epic engineering fellow Andrew Grant gave his own, similar definition of gaming consoles in general, calling a console “a single-purpose device for entertainment.”
Windows computers, according to Wright, are “general-purpose” devices. “You’re buying it to do a wide variety of things, and that changes every day as new ideas are getting created,” she said. “It can do a bunch of things already, and it has the aperture to do a bunch more things.” These platforms can support unexpected, emergent applications across more aspects of people’s lives, particularly when it’s easy to get an app onto them in the first place.
Wright made a point of discussing all the different ways that users could get apps on Windows. That includes Microsoft’s own app store, but also Steam, the Epic Games Store, and direct downloads from a website. Microsoft recently dropped its commission on Windows apps to 12 percent to compete with Epic, while the Xbox still takes a 30 percent commission. Wright says there’s no plan to change that discrepancy. That’s despite the fact that under the hood, there’s not a massive hardware difference between an Xbox and a desktop PC.
It’s hard to call the iPhone anything but a general-purpose device under Wright’s definition. (She described a “special-purpose” Apple product as something like an iPod.) Intentionally or not, Wright also linked the distinction to one of Epic’s major talking points: profit.
Epic describes profit as one of the biggest differences between iPhones and consoles. It argues console makers have to treat app makers better because they lose money on hardware, unlike Apple, so they need to plan around attracting developers to the platform. And from Microsoft’s point of view, Wright emphasized in testimony that no Xbox console has been sold at a profit, even late in a generation’s lifespan after manufacturing costs fall. So part of that curated hardware/software experience includes planning around a specific genre of app and attracting the developers who will build it, rather than simply turning it loose and seeing what happens.
Microsoft later hedged in a statement saying that “profits are generated in game sales and online service subscriptions,” but it didn’t really contradict the claim — it just made clear, as Wright did, that the overall operation is profitable.
Will these distinctions convince the court? It’s hard to say, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has asked questions that appear lightly skeptical of Epic’s hard lines between consoles and iPhones and Wright’s strict delineation of “general” and “specific” devices.
Apple’s attorney didn’t spend as much time arguing over precise definitions. Apple’s strategy relied more on questioning Wright’s credibility by noting that she’d failed to produce documents that Apple requested. Later, an attorney similarly lambasted Grant for working on the hotfix that secretly introduced a new payment system into Fortnite, insisting that “you knew you were being dishonest, didn’t you?”
But Apple did push Wright to lay out in detail just how much more locked-down Xbox is than Windows, asking whether it did things like support rival game stores or streaming services. (This questioning was muddled by the fact that Microsoft refers to both its consoles and general gaming division as “Xbox,” so you can have an “Xbox store” on PC — a fact that led to some confusion during cross-examination.)
Why is this useful to Apple? Well, Epic began the trial by saying that iOS should work more like macOS. Both operating systems have a reputation for relative security and seamlessness, but only the latter allows installing software from outside the App Store. Epic’s opening statement questioned why Apple needed to lock down the iPhone when it had already created a perfectly workable but more open system. But with Wright and Microsoft, Apple has a perfect comparison point: a major computing company that offers two very different versions of a big black box.
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