Month: September 2024

Watch On

Lots and lots of jobs in the sky: that’s what Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 promises. Don’t get me wrong, flying around in full-scale simulation of the entire planet is amazing on its own. But the next iteration of the 30+ year franchise will add some much-needed structure with a bunch of cool-looking jobs you can do in planes, choppers, blimps, hot air balloons, and more.

I guess it had to release this year, just because of its name, but now we have confirmation. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will release on November 19. The trailer shown at the Xbox Games Showcase can be gawked at above.

For those who enjoy simulating commercial flights, here’s something to be excited about: passengers. Instead of just parking next to the gate and sorta pretending, the trailer shows passengers walking down the jetway and actually boarding the plane. It also shows the pilot—that’s you—walking along the tarmac before the flight. You have a body now. Congratulations!

More sky jobs are shown: an air ambulance landing to help an injured victim get to a hospital, a VIP charter service in a sleek private plane, crop dusting in a helicopter, and even…

Capcom premiered its final Street Fighter 6 showcase on April 20, giving us a further look into the fighting game’s various modes and surprising us with a demo—albeit one that PC gamers have to wait an extra week to play. The game may still be six weeks away but the developer has already unveiled the first four DLC characters who will be added to the roster over the coming year.

Returning characters Rashid, Ed and Akuma are joined by newcomer A.K.I., and will release one by one between this summer and next spring. There’s not much else we know about each character right now. They’ll be folded into Street Fighter 6’s World Tour story mode though, so our custom characters can pick up some of their moves and learn a bit of each one’s backstory.

No word on how monetising DLC fighters will work in Street Fighter 6, either. There’ll no doubt be your standard season pass and the option to individually purchase each fighter. Street Fighter 5 had an interesting system, however, where you could (very slowly) grind out a large amount of in-game currency to purchase seasonal characters. You wouldn’t be able to nab all five seasons’ worth of characters with it, but it was a…

Shadowplay is now able to capture games in 120 fps, as a part of a wider redesign within the new Nvidia App, which launches in beta today.

Usually accessed via Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software, Shadowplay is moving to the new and improved Nvidia App. The overlay we’re used to seeing when we hit Alt + Z has been replaced in the new app by a tab that appears on the left-hand side of the screen—a cleaner look for the trusty capture software.

All the same functionality remains in the Nvidia App for Shadowplay: highlights, instant replays, and bog-standard recording, and all still using Nvidia’s own GPU-based, low-overhead encoding and capturing software to minimise the impact on your PC’s performance. Though the big change is you can now capture in 30 fps, 60 fps, or 120 fps at any resolution up to 4K. At 8K, you’re limited to 60 fps, but that’s probably the least of your worries trying to game and capture 8K all at once.

It’s a good idea to crank up the bit rate for smooth and high quality recordings, however. That will mean using up more storage space. You can always set a limit on how much storage space Shadowplay is allowed to gobble up via the settin…

AI has its uses. While it’s tempting to think of AI in terms of chatbots, image -generators and perhaps the thing that might end us all if we’re not careful, major tech companies have been busy implementing AI and machine learning optimisation into multiple aspects of their business, in a quest to integrate what used to be a fringe concept into the processes that create the products you may already own.

I recently had the chance to chat to Intel India President and VP & Head of Client Computing Group Sustainability, Gokul Subramaniam, in a wide ranging discussion about Intel’s sustainability goals, product life cycles and more. 

I took the opportunity to ask how Intel uses AI and machine learning models in regards to efficiency within its products, and whether AI was used to optimise the process.

“We have AI in engineering as a big focus area, starting from the front end of our silicon design at the RTL level, to the back end, which is basically post powering on the silicon leading it all the way to production readiness. And then in our software development and debug, we use AI as well as in our manufacturing use, and to test how we use AI.

“We a…