Jobvi

Remember that rumour Intel was scaling back on its plans for its next-gen Battlemage graphics architecture we reported last month? At the time we said something about it didn’t square up. But now there’s new, arguably more substantial, information that implies Intel hasn’t reduced its ambitions for Battlemage at all. Intel’s next Arc GPU could still be targeting performance up to Nvidia RTX 4080 levels.

Battlemage, of course, is the follow up to the Alchemist GPU architecture in Intel’s current Arc GPUs including the A770 and A750. It’s generally expected to appear next year. The precise timings aren’t clear, but obviously the sooner the better for both gamers and Intel itself.

Anyway, the new data dump as communicated by Tom’s Hardware and originally unearthed by Twitter user Harukaze5719 involves the test tools Intel supplies for partners preparing to produce graphics cards based on its upcoming GPUs. To cut a long story short, it’s an interposer that’s related to the …

Just four days after the ugly launch of not-quite-a-survival-MMO The Day Before on Steam, developer Fntastic says it is closing its doors because the game flopped. A few hours after the studio announced its closure, sales of The Day Before on Steam were halted. 

“The Day Before has failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue,” the studio said in a statement posted to Twitter. “All income received is being used to pay off debts to our partners.

“We invested all our efforts, resources, and man-hours into the development of The Day Before, which was our first huge game. We really wanted to release new patches to reveal the full potential of the game, but unfortunately, we don’t have the funding to continue the work.”

Fntastic said in the closure message that it has taken no money from the public during the development of The Day Before, adding that there were no crowdfunding or preorder campaigns prior to release.

In a later tweet, the studio said…

Epic has been giving away games on the Epic Games Store since it launched at the end of 2018, enticing Steam users to install its launcher with freebies as big as Grand Theft Auto 5 and Civilization 6. More than 580 million free games were claimed just last year.

Giving away half-a-billion game copies a year, even when paying a small fraction of each copy’s list price, is not cheap. Thanks to documents that came out during Epic’s legal fight with Apple, we learned that the company spent $11.6 million on free games in just the first nine months of the program. Epic has been giving away games for six years now.

However, responding to a question about Epic’s free game strategy on a call with press earlier this week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that it’s been a “very economical” user acquisition program, with the bonus that the budget goes to game developers—a group it’s in a game store’s interest to see thrive—rather than toward Facebook or Google ads.

“Givi…

Know your QD-OLED from your QLED? And your mini-LED from your microLED? Good, because there’s a new display tech in town, it’s called QDEL and it might just be better than all of them.

Digital Trends got some brief eyeball time with the new panel tech, being developed by Sharp, at the CES show. As you might have guessed, the “QD” part of the name involves quantum dots, the same tiny particles used in QD-OLED panels and LCD screens with QLED backlights.

The idea with quantum dots, thus far, has involved their ability to absorb light and then kick it back out at a very specific frequency, effectively purifying the light and also adding efficiency compared to traditional colour filters used in both OLED and LCD panels to do the same job.

But what if you could use QD materials not to absorb light from another source and re-emit it, but to be the light source itself? Then you’d have the holy grail, in other words, an emissive quantum dot display. Enter the QDEL or Quant…

During the hearing for the FTC’s current case against Microsoft, Xbox boss Phil Spencer explained that part of the reason the company bought ZeniMax Media, the holding company that owns Bethesda Softworks, was the fear that Starfield might not come to Xbox. Bethesda had made a timed exclusivity deal with Sony for two of its other games, which would keep them off Xbox until a year after release.

“When we acquired ZeniMax one of the impetus for that is that Sony had done a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire [Tokyo]… to pay Bethesda to not ship those games on Xbox,” Spencer said, via The Verge. “So the discussion about Starfield when we heard that Starfield was potentially also going to end up skipping Xbox, we can’t be in a position as a third-place console where we fall further behind on our content ownership so we’ve had to secure content to remain viable in the business.”

Spencer explained to the court that releasing games on both consoles handed money to Sony that it t…