Apple is increasingly focusing on building its own devices and expanding its ecosystem by taking steps towards a more native experience for users and relying less on third-party accessories. While the Cupertino-based tech giant's HomePod and AppleTV have left quite the mark in the smart home category, it generally relies more on outsourcing cameras and other hardware for smart homes. Now, a new report suggests that the company intends to create a fully integrated experience by developing its own smart home accessories. Gurman hints about Apple working on making smart home products like security cameras for a more integrated experience […]
We’re continuing our Best of Black Friday posts today with a look at the best current deals on power stations and their respective bundle options. Folks across the country and beyond have been steadily investing more and more in the industry for a vari...
Blizzard has announced that two decades after its release, World of Warcraft is finally going to let players build a home and live in it. The feature has long been requested by WoW players and now it’s finally coming in the game’s next expansion.Read m...
Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds will receive the Godspawn update, adding a new 50-player boss battle, a new 10-player raid, and a legendary spear. Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds is getting the first major update "Godspawn" on November 19th, expanding the story with new story chapters The MMORPG Guild Wars 2 by ArenaNet is receiving its first major update for the Janthir Wilds expansion soon. It's the first of three major updates, and it'll land on November 19. The update will add new content to the game for the players. The Janthir Wilds expansion DLC was released in August this year, […]
There’s a moment in Black Myth: Wukong that would be the perfect visual metaphor for the game’s hopeful, proud ascension as China’s big breakthrough into the Western AAA pantheon. Unfortunately, that moment is restricted, and we can’t talk about that.R...
Compared to other games like Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield doesn't look as good, but the game developed by Bethesda can still be made to look great with select mods that improve its visuals A new video shared by Digital Dreams on YouTube shows the latest RPG by Bethesda running at 8K resolution on an RTX 4090 GPU with the Beyond all Limits Reshade ray tracing preset and over 50 mods, including the Natural and Atmospheric Space LUT. Besides showing how good the game can look with mods, the video also shows how the RTX 4090 GPU is an absolute beast of […]
Basemark has just released its latest ray tracing benchmark called Breaking Limit which can be used to evaluate GPU performance across various devices including PCs running NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPU hardware. NVIDIA Remains The King of The Hill In Basemark Breaking Limit Ray-Tracing Benchmark While AMD Passes Ampere RT Performance There aren't a whole lot of ray-tracing-specific benchmarks out there. The ones that come to mind are 3DMark and its various RT evaluation benchmarks. Now, Basemark has rolled out its latest and cross-platform "Breaking Limit" benchmark which not only supports a wide range of high-end GPU hardware but can […]
Our most loyal readers might recall that Atomic Heart suddenly dropped its promised ray tracing features practically the day before its February 2023 launch on PC. At the time, the development team at Mundfish only said it would re-evaluate the potential addition of ray tracing after launch. Nearly sixteen months after the game's release date, today's 1.14.4.0 update has finally introduced ray tracing to the PC version of Atomic Heart, albeit in a beta state. Here's what the update log says: Added Ray Tracing (beta) support in 3 modes**: Performance Quality Balanced **Requires a graphics card supporting DXR with at […]
NVIDIA has announced an update to the NvRTX branch of Epic's Unreal Engine 5. The major new feature is the addition of experimental support for ReSTIR Global Illumination, the ray tracing algorithm first discussed by NVIDIA researchers in the seminal paper Spatiotemporal Reservoir Resampling for Real-Time Ray Tracing with Dynamic Direct Lighting released at ACM SIGGRAPH 2020. ReSTIR GI allows 'direct lighting from millions of moving lights' with ray budgets that are compatible with the demands of real-time rendering for games. The approach also doesn't require complex light structure, baking, or global scene parameterization, while still providing results up to […]
AMD seems to be making some big changes with its Ray Tracing Engine on its upcoming RDNA 4 GPU architecture. AMD's Next-Gen RDNA 4 GPUs To Feature Major Ray Tracing Engine Changes Versus RDNA 3 The latest rumor comes from @Kepler_L2 who has shared the patches for AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 GPUs and its RT (Ray Tracing) engine. It is stated that the AMD RDNA 4 GPUs which are expected to launch with the Radeon RX 8000 graphics card lineup are going to incorporate a new RT engine that should yield much better performance versus the existing engine featured on […]
One week after Dragon’s Dogma 2’s March 22 launch, Capcom has released the first update to the game. Update 1.050 adds a handful of features to Capcom’s action RPG including one of the most requested options since launch, the ability to start a new gam...
Today is the day that Diablo IV gets its ray tracing update, which was developed in collaboration with NVIDIA. Blizzard has released a detailed explanation of each improved effect, starting with shadows. By default, with the rasterized method, shadows are way too hard and stark. When enabling ray tracing, they get much more sparse, soft, and realistic as they get further away from the object they were cast from, as you can see in the screenshot comparison below. The other major ray traced effect added to Diablo IV is reflections. For instance, spell effects and even distant environmental objects that […]
AMD has finally made its HIP Ray-Tracing library an open-source asset, allowing developers to incorporate RT capabilities into applications and leverage them. AMD Decides To Empower Developers Through Open-Sourcing HIP RT, Now Allowing a More Efficient Use Of It Phoronix reports that AMD has made its HIP RT library open-source to make coding on HIP-based applications much more straightforward. AMD's HIP (Heterogeneous-Compute Interface) is a "hybrid" API, allowing programmers to write a "universal" code executable on multiple interfaces, such as those from AMD and NVIDIA. It acts as a translation layer, allowing the use of one computing platform over the […]
In these last few years, the postprocessing injector ReShade has transformed PC gaming by allowing users to seamlessly customize and enhance the graphics of pretty much any game. A few hours ago, a new major release of ReShade, version 6.0, was made available through the official website. These big releases are few and far between (for example, version 4.3 landed in May 2019, while version 5.0 was launched nearly two years ago), but they bring entirely new features that shader developers can then exploit. ReShade 6.0 is no exception. Among other things, it introduces support and special handling for RTX […]
Judging from the Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar Games may be heavily leaning into ray tracing with the next entry in the series. A new analysis shared by the tech experts at Digital Foundry highlights how ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections can be clearly spotted in the game's reveal trailer in the internal scenes with strong exterior light sources, where light bounce looks realistic and in the car sequence where the wing mirror reflection shows detail that is not present in the screen space. Rockstar Games may also be using a hybrid solution combining both software and hardware ray […]
CD Projekt Red said it plans to move on from Cyberpunk 2077 now that its big Phantom Liberty DLC and 2.0 systems overhaul are out, but it still has a few things left to patch. A new 2.01 update that went live on October 5 fixed corrupted save issues on...
Vampire Survivors draws tons of inspiration from Castlevania, so it is no surprise that the new Ode To Castlevania DLC is fantastic. I’m here to guide you through unlocking each Hero and evolving each weapon, because that’s how you’ll end up accessing ...
I started playing Overwatch in 2019. By the time I was pushing payloads and getting Play of the Game with a well-placed Tactical Visor, a lot of the old hero kits and team compositions that were infamous when the hero shooter launched in 2016 were more...
There’s a moment in Black Myth: Wukong that would be the perfect visual metaphor for the game’s hopeful, proud ascension as China’s big breakthrough into the Western AAA pantheon. Unfortunately, that moment is restricted, and we can’t talk about that.R...
Compared to other games like Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield doesn't look as good, but the game developed by Bethesda can still be made to look great with select mods that improve its visuals A new video shared by Digital Dreams on YouTube shows the latest RPG by Bethesda running at 8K resolution on an RTX 4090 GPU with the Beyond all Limits Reshade ray tracing preset and over 50 mods, including the Natural and Atmospheric Space LUT. Besides showing how good the game can look with mods, the video also shows how the RTX 4090 GPU is an absolute beast of […]
Basemark has just released its latest ray tracing benchmark called Breaking Limit which can be used to evaluate GPU performance across various devices including PCs running NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPU hardware. NVIDIA Remains The King of The Hill In Basemark Breaking Limit Ray-Tracing Benchmark While AMD Passes Ampere RT Performance There aren't a whole lot of ray-tracing-specific benchmarks out there. The ones that come to mind are 3DMark and its various RT evaluation benchmarks. Now, Basemark has rolled out its latest and cross-platform "Breaking Limit" benchmark which not only supports a wide range of high-end GPU hardware but can […]
Our most loyal readers might recall that Atomic Heart suddenly dropped its promised ray tracing features practically the day before its February 2023 launch on PC. At the time, the development team at Mundfish only said it would re-evaluate the potential addition of ray tracing after launch. Nearly sixteen months after the game's release date, today's 1.14.4.0 update has finally introduced ray tracing to the PC version of Atomic Heart, albeit in a beta state. Here's what the update log says: Added Ray Tracing (beta) support in 3 modes**: Performance Quality Balanced **Requires a graphics card supporting DXR with at […]
NVIDIA has announced an update to the NvRTX branch of Epic's Unreal Engine 5. The major new feature is the addition of experimental support for ReSTIR Global Illumination, the ray tracing algorithm first discussed by NVIDIA researchers in the seminal paper Spatiotemporal Reservoir Resampling for Real-Time Ray Tracing with Dynamic Direct Lighting released at ACM SIGGRAPH 2020. ReSTIR GI allows 'direct lighting from millions of moving lights' with ray budgets that are compatible with the demands of real-time rendering for games. The approach also doesn't require complex light structure, baking, or global scene parameterization, while still providing results up to […]
AMD seems to be making some big changes with its Ray Tracing Engine on its upcoming RDNA 4 GPU architecture. AMD's Next-Gen RDNA 4 GPUs To Feature Major Ray Tracing Engine Changes Versus RDNA 3 The latest rumor comes from @Kepler_L2 who has shared the patches for AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 GPUs and its RT (Ray Tracing) engine. It is stated that the AMD RDNA 4 GPUs which are expected to launch with the Radeon RX 8000 graphics card lineup are going to incorporate a new RT engine that should yield much better performance versus the existing engine featured on […]
One week after Dragon’s Dogma 2’s March 22 launch, Capcom has released the first update to the game. Update 1.050 adds a handful of features to Capcom’s action RPG including one of the most requested options since launch, the ability to start a new gam...
Today is the day that Diablo IV gets its ray tracing update, which was developed in collaboration with NVIDIA. Blizzard has released a detailed explanation of each improved effect, starting with shadows. By default, with the rasterized method, shadows are way too hard and stark. When enabling ray tracing, they get much more sparse, soft, and realistic as they get further away from the object they were cast from, as you can see in the screenshot comparison below. The other major ray traced effect added to Diablo IV is reflections. For instance, spell effects and even distant environmental objects that […]
AMD has finally made its HIP Ray-Tracing library an open-source asset, allowing developers to incorporate RT capabilities into applications and leverage them. AMD Decides To Empower Developers Through Open-Sourcing HIP RT, Now Allowing a More Efficient Use Of It Phoronix reports that AMD has made its HIP RT library open-source to make coding on HIP-based applications much more straightforward. AMD's HIP (Heterogeneous-Compute Interface) is a "hybrid" API, allowing programmers to write a "universal" code executable on multiple interfaces, such as those from AMD and NVIDIA. It acts as a translation layer, allowing the use of one computing platform over the […]
In these last few years, the postprocessing injector ReShade has transformed PC gaming by allowing users to seamlessly customize and enhance the graphics of pretty much any game. A few hours ago, a new major release of ReShade, version 6.0, was made available through the official website. These big releases are few and far between (for example, version 4.3 landed in May 2019, while version 5.0 was launched nearly two years ago), but they bring entirely new features that shader developers can then exploit. ReShade 6.0 is no exception. Among other things, it introduces support and special handling for RTX […]
Judging from the Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar Games may be heavily leaning into ray tracing with the next entry in the series. A new analysis shared by the tech experts at Digital Foundry highlights how ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections can be clearly spotted in the game's reveal trailer in the internal scenes with strong exterior light sources, where light bounce looks realistic and in the car sequence where the wing mirror reflection shows detail that is not present in the screen space. Rockstar Games may also be using a hybrid solution combining both software and hardware ray […]
CD Projekt Red said it plans to move on from Cyberpunk 2077 now that its big Phantom Liberty DLC and 2.0 systems overhaul are out, but it still has a few things left to patch. A new 2.01 update that went live on October 5 fixed corrupted save issues on...