Game Tech News

If the rumors about Nvidia’s next-gen lineup are true, well-heeled gamers will have GPUs worth drooling over (except please don’t – Ed) All the rumors about outrageous power consumption and triple-slot coolers have done little to diminish peoples’ appetite for the upcoming RTX 40-series. Now there’s more fuel to add to the fire. One of the most notorious leakers has dropped a benchmark result for the RTX 4090. It’s just one benchmark, and it’s a synthetic test, but if it’s true, or even close to true, Nvidia truly has a beast of a card on its hands. The only bad news is another well-regarded leaker is saying the RTX 4090 will be the only Ada Lovelace GPU to drop this year.

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A blend of two things people tend to obsess over - Pokemon and Squishmallows - is now a very real thing.
Stuffed animal 'mons of Pikachu and Gengar are currently on display at San-Diego Comic Con 2022. If you want to get your hands on a Pokemon Squish of your own, you'll have to wait until the fall, when the Squishmallows x Pokemon collection hits PokemonCenter.com (US), PokemonCenter.com/en-gb (UK), and PokemonCenter.ca (Canada), according to toy company Jazwares. (Jazwares says the collection is "officially planned to launch" then, which implies -- at least to me -- that the release date could be subject to change.)

"As demand for Squishmallows continues to skyrocket, we're thrilled to debut this exciting partnership at San Diego Comic-Con, where celebrating collector culture with fans comes first," Jazwares' chief brand officer, Jeremy Padawer, said in a statement.

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Gamers are about to get some of their valuable time back.
Microsoft confirmed on Saturday that its Xbox Series X and Series S consoles will now boot faster thanks to a speedier startup animation. The changes improve boot times by five seconds.
Xbox's director of integrated marketing Josh Munsee tweeted about the improvement over the weekend.

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Google could be the next major tech company to throw its hat into the foldable ring. There have been rumors fluttering for a while that a bendy handset might see the light of day, especially given the company's recent focus on hardware. Google announced six new gadgets at its annual developer event, including its first smartwatch, as well as July's launch of the Pixel 6A.

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Minecraft developer Mojang announced earlier this week that it was banning blockchain and NFT technology from the popular block-based game. The general response from the community has been positive, but the purveyors of NFTs are feeling the sting. NFT Worlds, which has made a business of selling crypto-infused Minecraft content, is in search of a new path forward and may have to pivot by creating its own NFT-based version of the game.

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Intel’s PR rep for its Arc discrete graphics has sat down for another “Between Two Monitors” tech chat. The company has promised to continually offer information about Arc prior to its upcoming launch. The rationale is it will allow gamers to have all the info they need prior to purchase. To do that it will be releasing short videos tackling questions from gamers. This week it released a new briefing discussing how Arc would handle Variable Refresh Rates (VRR) and HDR, and there’s talk of support for HDMI 2.1.

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The world’s oldest video game is now available on a sought-after handheld game machine.

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An upcoming Steam update will prohibit developers from adding award and major review scores to their games’ primary visual assets.
According to Valve, developers have gradually prioritized their titles’ various accolades in Steam banner images (officially referred to as capsule images). This has resulted in cluttered visual assets that confuse potential customers when shopping for their next favorite game. Rather than allowing the eye to take in a game’s name and general design, these jam-packed capsule images often contain multiple review scores, impressive review quotes, and award information.

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Just a few short years ago, you needed expensive gaming hardware to play AAA titles, but cloud gaming is changing that. By offloading all the rendering to a server, these services can turn almost any screen into a portal for your gaming obsession, and Logitech wants in on the action. No, it’s not launching yet another gaming service. Logitech has partnered with Chinese megafirm Tencent to develop a “handheld cloud gaming” device.

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The final Pokemon Go Fest of the year will take place Aug. 27, game developer Niantic has announced. Players will have a chance to catch a variety of special Pokemon during the event, including three new Ultra Beasts, several new shiny Pokemon and Sky Forme Shaymin. Here's everything you need to know about the upcoming event.

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