Game Tech News

The rumor mill is abuzz once again as Nvidia’s next-gen Ada Lovelace GPUs draw closer. Notable tipster @kopite7kimi is offering new details in the Twittersphere on what Nvidia has in store for gamers in the fall. This time around they’re shedding some new light on top three GPUs in the product stack, which will likely be the first to launch.

In a series of new tweets, @kopite7kimi details the specs for these upcoming GPUs. As has been reported previously, the flagship die will be AD102. Interestingly, the top-shelf “Lovelace” GPU will be outfitted with 24GB of GDDR6X running at 21Gb/s. This is the exact same configuration as the current RTX 3090 Ti. It should be noted that the previous generation Turing-based Titan RTX also had 24GB of GDDR6 memory. It seems that for now, this is as far as Nvidia wants to take memory allocation on its high-end SKUs. There were previous rumors that AD102 might come equipped with GDDR7 memory running at 24Gb/s, but those might be incorrect. What is seemingly firmer at this stage is the GPU’s Total Board Power (TBP). It’s once again listed as 600W, which seems like a given since Nvidia wants to push this card to the absolute maximum level of performance. It might have to in order to fend off AMD for this round.

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It's official: 2022 is the year of the sequel. Movie theaters have been dominated by franchise films for years, but the pandemic has crunched the past couple of years worth of blockbusters into one bonanza year at the box office (apart from the ones that are delayed until 2023).

2022 release dates:

• Along for the Ride (May 6, 2022)
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (May 6, 2022)
• Shin Ultraman (May 13, 2022)
• Senior Year (May 13, 2022)
• Men (May 20, 2022)
• Bob's Burgers: The Movie (May 27, 2022)
• Top Gun: Maverick (May 27, 2022)
• Crimes of the Future (June 3, 2022)
• Jurassic World: Dominion (June 10, 2022)

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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness hit theaters last Friday, with director Sam Raimi returning to Marvel for the first time since his Spider-Man trilogy wrapped up in 2007. An encounter with new hero America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) forces the former Sorcerer Supreme to step outside the familiar Marvel Cinematic Universe and explore other realities, seeking aid from fellow Avenger Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) along the way.

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Imagine if Star Wars, instead of resolving the reveal that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father, completely ignored it. Or, at best, made a few joke references to it and went about its business as if nothing really happened.
That would be crazy, right?
But that's sort of what happened with Monkey Island, the pirate-theme, cult point-and-click adventure series created by Lucasarts. After dropping two classic video games in 1991 and 1992, Lucasarts woudn't release another Monkey Island game until 1997. And when that game was released, it completely skimmed over the cliffhangers that took place in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Including a reveal that the game's major bad guy, The Ghost Pirate LeChuck, was actually the protagonist Guybrush Threepwood's brother.

This happened, partly, because the game's creator, legendary game developer Ron Gilbert, left Lucasarts just a few short years after the release of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. To continue the Star Wars analogy: Imagine George Lucas, after releasing Empire Strikes Back, decided to give up on Star Wars completely, leave it in the hands of a completely different group of people and do something completely different for the next two decades.

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These days it seems like everything in the GPU world is beginning to fall back to earth. We all know prices have begun to reflect the impact of post-pandemic gravity. Also, several weeks ago AMD’s upcoming RDNA3’s specs were taken down a peg by the rumor mill. Now, it’s Nvidia’s turn in the barrel. Noted GPU rumor monger @kopite7kimi has released a “summary” of the AD102 die’s rumored specs, and they’re decidedly more sane than what they previously reported.

The biggest news, in our opinion, is the Total Board Power (TBP) has been significantly reduced. It was first reported to be an eye-popping 850W back in February. This naturally caused a lot of consternation as it’s totally unheard of for a consumer GPU. That number was dialed back a bit to 600W in April. This aligned with leaked PCI Express 5.0 specs that showed you could push that much power through a single GPU cable. Now the official rumor is the RTX 4090’s TBP is a much more palatable 450W. The reduction in power consumption is due to a downgrading of the total number of CUDA cores.

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AMD announced a gaggle of new products and platforms at Computex this week. In addition to discussing its plans for the desktop AM5 platform, it also spent a considerable amount of time discussing its plans for notebooks. In addition to brandishing products for corporate and mainstream users, it also divulged a new platform for mobile gamers: AMD Advantage. This program is a set of features that are required for all notebooks to receive the AMD Advantage branding. They are all designed to maximize gaming performance, and they include a host of new “Smart” technologies.
AMD says its goal with AMD Advantage is to “raise the bar” for what people expect from a gaming notebook. The program includes three must-have features: fast displays with 100Hz+ refresh rates, 100fps gaming performance, and a nebulous “built to game” aspect to it. That last one seems to be a reference to the company’s new Smart technologies, of which there are five. Let’s discuss them one at a time.

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We’ve all been there: We’re in VR but we’re stuck in our living room and unable to take our metaverse experience to the local coffee shop.
Zotac’s VR GO 4.0 backpack PC is hoping to change that. It’s a full-blown workstation-slash-mobile gaming PC in a backpack form factor. As its name implies, it’s the fourth generation of Zotac’s wearable PCs. It’s essentially a slim PC with a desktop GPU that you can strap to your back. It can sit on your desk like a regular computer, then be unplugged for on-the-go VR gaming. It even includes hot-swappable batteries and an RTX GPU to boot. The VR Headset is sold separately, of course.

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When the new Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries hits Disney Plus Friday, it'll provide a direct bridge between the prequels and the original trilogy. Which means now is the perfect time to rediscover the original Star Wars films.
It's easier than ever to get hold of the complete run of Star Wars movies: They're all on Disney Plus or available to rent and buy. But you face a dilemma: If you watch them in the order they were made, you get the original (and best) trilogy out of the way first, and it's pretty much downhill from there.

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"There has been an awakening. Have you felt it?" Fans of a galaxy far, far away have gathered in California for Star Wars Celebration Anaheim. It's the first such convention since 2019's Celebration Chicago, and will undoubtedly bring an array of announcements about upcoming Disney Plus shows, video games and merchandise.
Celebration Anaheim runs from Thursday, May 26, to Sunday, May 29, and there are still some tickets left if you're eager to immerse yourself in Star Wars fandom.

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Animated Star Wars series Tales of the Jedi was unveiled Saturday during Star Wars Celebration Anaheim. The shorts will reveal previously unseen past adventures of Ahsoka Tano and Count Dooku, who'll get three episodes each.
The six episode-series is scheduled to hit Disney Plus this fall. Show creator Dave Filoni revealed that he wrote the episodes while flying back and forth to shoot live-action Star Wars series The Mandalorian.

Dooku's episodes will feature his apprentice Qui-Gon Jinn as a young man. We previously saw Qui-Gon as a seasoned Jedi in The Phantom Menace, the first movie in the prequel trilogy, where he was played by Liam Neeson. Liam Neeson will return to the role in Tales of the Jedi, and the actor's son Michael will voice the younger version of the character.

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