Microsoft's console and gaming division, Xbox, has been working closely with game studios and game developers for years now, and in return for supporting the creation of games, the company gets its platform exclusivity, where the game is only available on Xbox series of consoles. Today, Xbox has decided to unveil a hefty list composing out of AAA titles exclusive to the Xbox Series X|S consoles. Starting off, we have the Forza Horizon 5 game, which delivers the experience of the open world of Mexico, while allowing you to drive the world's greatest cars. The game is set to become available on November 9 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Xbox Game Pass, PC via Steam on Windows, and Cloud Gaming service, which is in Beta.

Next up is a collaboration with 343 Industries game studio, which has unveiled its next-generation Halo shooter gameplay. Dubbed Halo Infinite, the game is a massive experience set in the world of Halo, which also includes a free-to-play multiplayer element aiming to bring millions of people together across Xbox consoles, cloud, and PC to join the fight. When it comes to new franchises, we have seen the announcement of Redfall, a co-op first-person shooter that sets you in a small island town of Redfall, which has now fallen to the pandemic of vampires, and your goal is to put it to the end. Coming from Arkane Austin, the developers of Prey and Dishonored, the game is sure to be a quality one.

TrendForce's latest investigations find considerable discrepancy between prices for graphics DRAM products in the contract market and in the spot market. Quotes for graphics DRAM products continue to rise in the contract market as the severe undersupply situation persists. Furthermore, the supply fulfillment rates for orders from some medium- and small-size clients have been hovering around 30%. This undersupply situation is expected to persist through 3Q21, during which graphics DRAM contract prices are expected to rise by 8-13% QoQ. Regarding the spot market, on the other hand, the value of ETH experienced continued uptrend from the start of 2021 until May, thereby driving up the demand for graphics cards, regardless of them belonging to the newer or older series. At the height of the graphics card boom, spot prices of graphics DRAM products were up to 200% higher than contract prices. Demand from miners for graphics cards are expected to be relatively muted before cryptocurrencies return to their previous bullish trends, and the gap between the spot and contract prices of graphics DRAM products will likely narrow in 3Q21 as a result.

Microsoft has recently confirmed that AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology will be coming to Xbox Series X/S. The new feature is AMD's response to NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0 AI processing found in RTX series graphics cards. The two technologies both aim to increase frame rates in select titles with various upscaling technologies without a significant reduction in visual quality. AMD boasts compatibility with a wider set of graphics cards including older NVIDIA GTX 10 series cards while also making the technology open-source. AMD will launch FidelityFX Super Resolution for select PC games on June 22nd which will show if they can hope to compete with the well-established DLSS 2.0. Microsoft has confirmed that they will bring the technology to their Xbox Series X/S consoles running custom AMD processors.

MicrosoftAt Xbox, we're excited by the potential of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution technology as another great method for developers to increase framerates and resolution. We will have more to share on this soon,

Pictures of the mysterious AMD 4700S SoC desktop kit just hit the web, courtesy Disclosuzen. As we reported earlier, the 4700S could be derived from the semi-custom SoC AMD originally co-developed with Microsoft for the Xbox Series X/S consoles. Close-ups of the PC motherboard reveals an interesting aspect—the board lacks any discernible display output, and instead relies on a PCI-Express graphics card. The board is built in the Mini-ITX form-factor, and draws power from a conventional combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors.

A custom-design fan-heatsink cools the SoC. There are no memory slots, an unknown amount of hardwired memory under the SoC heatsink. 6-channel HD audio, wired Ethernet, and twelve USB ports (six each of USB 3.x and USB 2.0), make for the rest of the I/O. Storage connectivity is interesting—there are no M.2 NVMe slots, just two SATA ports. Why AMD even came up with this contraption is anyone's guess, but we guess it serves two purposes—1, it lets AMD harvest dies with faulty iGPUs, and 2, it serves as a decent developer platform, for game devs to at least optimize for the CPU. The lack of any NVMe storage interfaces points to the likelihood of this board not being meant for the general audience. Retail channel availability of the board seems unlikely, although it won't surprise us if suppliers on AliExpress list it anyway.

It's not only graphics cards and CPUs that are best kept on the edge of manufacturing processes; in truth, one could even say that consoles have more to gain from these transitions when it comes to their manufacturers' financial outlooks. This happens because usually, consoles are subsidized by manufacturers in that their actual retail price is lower than manufacturing costs; this works as a way for console players to increase their platforms' attractiveness and user base, so they can then sell them games and subscription services, where the big bucks are actually made. We knew this already, but Microsoft's head of Xbox business development, Lori Wright confirmed it yesterday at the Apple vs Epic Games hearing. Lori Wright is quoted as answering "We don't; we sell the consoles at a loss" when asked whether Microsoft does or does not turn a profit on Xbox Series S | X hardware sales.

Considering the similarities between the Xbox Series X and PS5's SoC, it's very likely that Sony doesn't make a profit on console hardware sales either - or if it actually does, it's nothing actually meaningful. This is part of the reason why consoles are usually actually in the forefront of manufacturing processes' advancements, as it's a way for console players to quickly reduce the BoM (Bill of Materials) for their consoles. Since the specifications don't change within a console generation (discounting Pro models, which both companies have taken to launching some years into their generations), they choose to take advantage of process advancements due to the transistor density increases that allow for both lower silicon area for the SoC, and lower power consumption - which sometimes enables them to develop slim versions of their gaming consoles.

Remember that neat Microsoft engineering trick that boosted previous-gen's games' performance on their latest and greatest Xbox Series X|S consoles? Well, Microsoft has released a new update for FPS Boost which increases the number of titles from the previous 23. The update adds the FPS boosting capability to a mind-boggling 74 games in one go, increasing their performance up to 60 FPS at their respective rendering resolutions.

Of course, one might want some more changes to be made to the game. However, remember that this a wholly Microsoft endeavor - there's no developer work required or being done here. some developers have released "next-gen" updates to some of their releases from the Xbox One and PS4 era, but FPS Boost is developer agnostic, and works via the Direct 3D API on the Xbox consoles. Titles getting an FPS Boost include Assassin's Creed Unity (maybe now finally is the time to play that one Assassin's Creed game, uh?), Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Alien Isolation (get some scares at double the framerate, what's not to love?) Wasteland 3, and Far Cry 5 all moving to 60 FPS.

The worldwide new-gen game console sales are still booming with no indication of slowing down. However, pairing a new-gen console with a compatible high-resolution display that can push the limits of 120 Hz high refresh rates and beyond remained an unfathomable mission...until now. GIGABYTE's newly launched AORUS 4K gaming monitors have shed a new ray of hope for the long-awaited gamers. The full HDMI 2.1 compatibility that comes with the new AORUS monitors enable gamers to unlock higher frame rates and resolutions on new generation consoles, such as the PlayStation 5 and XBOX Series X.

The GIGABYTE AORUS 4K tactical gaming monitors are the ultimate two-way monitors. Not only do they promise an esports-grade display performance of up to 144Hz refresh rate and 0.5 ms response time, they also take full advantage of the HDMI 2.1 connector's bandwidth for getting the most out of the new-gen consoles, making them the ideal displays for gaming across different platforms. Through the HDMI 2.1 connectivity, gamers are able to fully enjoy extreme gaming performance powered by high-end graphics cards, such as the RTX 30 series while gaming on PC. When paired with the new-gen consoles, gamers for the first time can play their favorite AAA game titles at 120Hz for ultra-smooth gameplay at a stunning 4K resolution. In addition to the display performance supremacy, GIGABYTE has also succeeded in optimizing gaming experience with AORUS exclusive tactical features.

The AMD 4700S is a new processor being advertised by Chinese manufactures as a complete ITX compatible solution. The processor is soldered to a custom "Cardinal" motherboard produced by AMD which lacks memory slots and instead features 16 GB of GDDR6 memory located around the processor. These specifications seem to closely reflect those of the Xbox Series X APU. The 4700S is an 8-core 16-thread 7 nm Zen 2 CPU with 12 MB cache and a boost clock of 4.0 GHz which is actually higher than that of the Xbox Series X/S at 3.8 GHz and 3.6 GHz respectively. This higher boost clock is likely due to the exclusion of an integrated GPU which increases the power available for the processor.

The seller also provided benchmarks for the processor in various Cinebench configurations where it outperformed the Intel Core i7-9700 and performed just below the AMD Ryzen 7 4750G. The processor paired with an RX 550 GPU also outperformed the Intel Core i7-9750H paired with an RTX 2060 and 32 GB memory in Cinebench and x264/x265 video encoding. The seller has a picture of the Xbox Series X APU in their advertising material for the new processor lending weight to the theory that these are reused processors which failed qualification.

AMD has announced that Microsoft's Xbox Series S|X now features support for the company's FidelityFX suite. This move, which enabled previously PC-centric technologies on Microsoft's latest-generation gaming consoles, will bring feature parity between RDNA 2-powered graphics, and will eventually enable support for AMD's FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution), the company's eventual competition to NVIDIA's DLSS tech.

This means that besides the technologies that are part of the DX 12 Ultimate spec (and which the consoles already obviously support), developers now have access to AMD's Fidelity FX technologies such as Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, Variable Rate Shading, ray traced shadow Denoiser, Ambient Occlusion and Screen Space Reflections. All of these AMD-led developments in the SDK allow for higher performance and/or better visual fidelity. However, the icing on the cake should be the FSR support, which could bring the Series X's 8K claims to bear (alongside high-refresh-rate 4K gaming) - should FSR turn out be in a similar performance-enhancing ballpark as NVIDIA's DLSS, which we can't really know for sure at this stage (and likely neither can AMD). No word on Fidelity FX support on the PS5 has been announced at this time, which does raise the question of its eventual support, or if Sony will enable a similar feature via their own development tools.

AMD is slowly preparing to launch its next-generation client-oriented accelerated processing unit (APU), which is AMD's way of denoting a CPU+GPU combination. The future design is codenamed after Van Gogh, showing AMD's continuous use of historic names for their products. The APU is believed to be a design similar to the one found in the SoC of the latest PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. That means that there are Zen 2 cores present along with the latest RDNA 2 graphics, side by side in the same processor. Today, one of AMD's engineers posted a boot log of the quad-core Van Gogh APU engineering sample, showing some very interesting information.

The boot log contains information about the memory type used in the APU. In the logs, we see a part that says "[drm] RAM width 256bits DDR5", which means that the APU has an interface for the DDR5 memory and it is 256-bit wide, which represents a quad-channel memory configuration. Such a wide memory bus is typically used for applications that need lots of bandwidth. Given that Van Gogh uses RDNA 2 graphics, the company needs a sufficient memory bandwidth to keep the GPU from starving for data. While we don't have much more information about it, we can expect to hear greater details soon.

HyperX, the gaming division of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., today announced the release of the refreshed HyperX ChargePlayTM Duo Controller Charging Station for Xbox. Tested and approved by Microsoft for guaranteed compatibility with the latest Xbox wireless controllers, the officially licensed ChargePlay Duo is designed to work with both the new Xbox Series X|S and legacy Xbox One wireless controllers. Gamers can fully charge their controllers in under three hours.

An environmentally-friendly accessory for dedicated Xbox gamers, ChargePlay Duo includes two 1400mAh rechargeable battery packs to eliminate the need of buying AA batteries. This new charging station also includes charge-through battery doors for both Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One wireless controllers, allowing users to charge the controller without removing the battery pack.

When we were designing Xbox Series X|S, we wanted to ensure that games feel true-to-life, load incredibly fast, and sound as if you were dropped in the middle of the action. We embraced spatial sound processing by including custom audio hardware to offload audio processing from the CPU, dramatically improving the accessibility, quality, and performance of these experiences. Having a high-quality set of headphones at an affordable price for your new console or existing Xbox One will help you feel immersed, react faster to the action, and connect further with your gaming worlds.

With each new generation of our Xbox accessories, we've raised the bar for innovation by focusing on performance, stand-out features, quality, and accessibility to deliver immersive experiences across console, PC, and mobile devices. We are excited to build on this legacy with the latest accessory to join the family: the new Xbox Wireless Headset.

4A Games is one of those rare developers that seemingly gives more to its fans and game-owners than it takes. The company has just announced they're readying a new, Enhanced Edition version of Metro Exodus - receiving significant graphical updates that are mostly focused on added raytracing capabilities. The new version of the game will be made available for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles - but carries additional features in the all-powerful PC version, including Ray Traced Reflections (which will not be included in the console version) as well as support for NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0, the best iteration of the technology so far.

According to the developer, the engine changes are so substantial that they couldn't push it as a simple update/game patch - the entire game has had to be recompiled to allow for the seamless integration of the new features. 4A Games announced that the new, Enhanced Edition, which will be available later this year, will be available for all Metro Exodus owners as a free, additional download. The new version makes such extensive usage of raytracing - every light source is now raytraced, per-pixel-raytraced global illumination, and a plethora of other changes you can see in the feature comparative below - that the company is now listing a raytracing-capable GPU (whether AMD or NVIDIA) as the minimum requirement. Now if only one could find decent raytracing graphics cards readily available...

Members form the UK Parliament are apparently preparing to introduce a bill that would regulate the scalping phenomenon that's being witnessed worldwide. According to Scottish politician Douglas Chapman, in an interview to IGN, "The issue of scalping first came up with constituents contacting me to explain their frustration about being unable to get hold of certain games consoles or computer components pre-Christmas." He then expanded on that by adding that "On investigation, we uncovered more details of the unscrupulous practice of 'scalping' by automated bots to bulk buy these goods and sell them on at inflated prices." Oh, and this bill is unlikely to pass, by the way.

Scalping, however, isn't done only in the UK; it's a pervasive international issue that crosses borders. And scalping, as it is known, is nothing but a form of speculation, which some might say is part of the backbone that keeps the world's capitalist blood pumping through the economy - some might even argue that scalping occurs directly due to mechanisms of supply and demand, and thus, isn't an unlawful activity in and of itself. Companies, corporations, and all other legal entities, however, have to adhere to strict anti-monopoly/anti-cartelization laws, which deal with the same base issue, although in another facet of it. The problem is that it appears that in some countries, speculation is regulated at the enterprise level, but not at the citizen level. And herein lies the crux of it.

One person is all that stands between humanity and the greatest threat it's ever faced. BioWare, a studio of Electronic Arts Inc. today revealed that the Mass Effect Legendary Edition will launch May 14 worldwide on PC via Origin and Steam, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with forward compatibility on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The Mass Effect Legendary Edition features the single-player base content and 40+ downloadable content (DLC) story, weapons and armor packs from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 and will allow players to relive the legend of Commander Shepard in 4K Ultra HD with HDR.

"It's been an incredible journey revisiting the stories, characters and iconic moments of the Mass Effect trilogy, enhancing the experience for modern platforms while staying true to the spirit of the original," said Mac Walters, Project Director on the Mass Effect Legendary Edition and lead writer of the original trilogy at BioWare. "Remastering a game, let alone three, is a huge undertaking as there's over 100 hours of gameplay included, but we wanted to do this for our fans as well as a new generation of gamers looking to jump into the iconic story of Shepard."

As it stands, Cyberpunk 2077 is the game many either love or love to hate. The game launched last December 10th after three delays to a great reception of the PC platform - and a good one on current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X|S - but was a fiasco on last-gen consoles and their mid-life refreshes to such an extent that Sony removed the game from their digital store. A great deal of digital ink has already been written on CD Projekt Red's handling of the situation, and it could - really could - have been handled better.

Now, CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwiński has released a 5-minute video where he approaches Cyberpunk 2077's release state; assumes, alongside the direction, full responsibility for the state of the game; and doubles-down on CD Projekt Red's commitment to improve the Cyberpunk 2077 experience. he doesn't go into too much detail as to how and why things went awry, but says that a smattering of management decisions led to today's situation. And considering the current situation, plans for post-launch DLC (akin to those that happened with The Witcher 3, which featured new armor, weapons, haircuts, missions, and a New Game + mode) will be arriving slightly later than predicted, so as to allow the team to fully focus on straightening out the games' rough patches.

HyperX, the gaming division of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., today unveiled new additions to its award-winning product line at CES 2021. Participating in the digital version of CES this year, HyperX continues to support the gaming community by expanding its professional-grade products used by gaming pros and HyperX fans. The new products revealed during the virtual show include the company's first 60 percent keyboard, the HyperX Alloy Origins 60 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard; a new charging accessory, the ChargePlay Duo Controller Charging Station for Xbox Series X/S and global availability1 of the Pulsefire Haste Gaming Mouse, Cloud II Wireless Gaming Headset and Cloud Revolver Gaming Headset + 7.1.

"Gaming became an even more go-to activity this year as people searched for safe, entertaining ways to stay connected with friends and family," said Daniel Kelley, director of corporate marketing, HyperX. "HyperX's new product lineup reflects our ongoing commitment to the ever growing gaming community to deliver best in class products for whenever or however one plays."

Ikea has created some new PS5 and Xbox Series X shaped enclosures to help customers find suitable Ikea products to house them. These placeholder game console boxes come with some clever comments including; "Which IKEA media storage unit will be able to fit my new, meme-ishly oversized, game console?" on the PS5. These fake consoles include dimensions that help when looking for suitable media cabinets to store the consoles. This is a clever move from Ikea as many people will be looking for a complete media center upgrade along with their new console. This smart marketing strategy has been well received by customers who have been posting about it online.

Michael Driscoll, an Oracle data engineer, has written a data scraper that runs through eBay listings for the latest hardware, comparing products with their sale price. The objective was to see just how pervasive scalping actually is, and to get a (flawed and incomplete, but still extremely interesting) outlook at the scalping ecosystem and their gains with the current hardware and console shortages. Driscoll analyzed sales for the Xbox Series X|S, the PS5 (discless and disc-based) as well as NVIDIA's RTX 30-series, AMD's RX 6000 series, and Zen 3 processors. There are some assumptions on the gathering and analysis of this data, but that is part of the beast.

The results are potentially desperation-inducing. AMD's Zen 3 CPUs have sold for sometimes 240% of their MSRP (looking at the biggest offender, the Ryzen 9 5950X. The RX 6800 XT graphics card has been selling for within an inch of 200% of its MSRP as well, with a median price over the past week set at $1247 (compare that to the $649 MSRP). The RTX 3080 has been selling at 180% of its MSRP for the past week, but it has been moved at 220% of its MSRP before. The case repeats with several degrees of severity for the Xbox family and PS5 consoles.

The title says it all, really. We've only just been able to add AMD's latest RX 6800 and 6800 XT graphics cards to our shopping carts in multiple etailers, but the cat is already out of the bag and into scalpers' pockets. This has been a recurring event for all gaming-related tech, from DIY PC parts to the latest-gen games consoles from both Microsoft and Sony. At this point, it becomes moot to talk about availability issues, or demand issues, or reaching a conclusion between the two - the stock just isn't there for anything gaming-related, period.

Some etailers are only selling their graphics cards in-person, as a way to both control flow of stock and protect themselves from scalpers buying up the entire inventory with recourse to some digital sidekicks that automate the purchase process, and then allow them to resell anything from graphics cards from NVIDIA to AMD, passing through AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 series and the Xbox Series X and PS5 gaming consoles.

XBOX boss Phil Spencer recently warned interested parties on the new Microsoft Xbox family of devices that supply shortages may not be so short-lived as we would've hoped. More recently, XBOX chief Financial Officer Tim Stuart said he believes that demand will continue to outstrip supply well after the holiday season and at least until April 2021 - a point at which Microsoft might just be able to match demand with its supply.

"I think we'll continue to see supply shortages as we head into the post-holiday quarter, so Microsoft's Q3, calendar Q1," said Xbox chief financial officer Tim Stuart, Speaking at the Jefferies Interactive Entertainment Virtual Conference (transcribed by Seeking Alpha). "And then when we get to Q4, all of our supply chain continuing to go full speed heading into kind of the pre-summer months. And that's where I start to - I expect to see a little bit of the demand - the supply profile, meeting the demand profile." Microsoft's fiscal Q4 runs from April through June. Whether or not that's true, one thing we can now for sure: while supply isn't enough to satisfy demand, we'll see scalpers continuing to sell what consoles and graphics cards they managed to snag for outrageous prices. Don't cede: vote with your wallet and don't give them a pat on the back with your hard-earned money.

The latest Steam Client Beta update has added initial support for the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and Xbox Series X/S controllers. The DualSense 5 is supported but advanced features such as rumble, trackpad, and gyro are not yet implemented, it is unknown if Steam will receive full support for these options. The Xbox Series X/S controller should have much better compatibility with this beta fixing an issue with the gamepad appearing twice. This feature is currently in beta and will likely roll out to all users shortly.

2K and Gearbox Entertainment today re-launched their critically acclaimed looter-shooter, Borderlands 3, releasing new content, cosmetics, and retail editions, as well as an upgrade that optimizes the experience for next-generation consoles. Borderlands 3's next-gen upgrade is now available on the Xbox Series X|S. It will also be available on the PlayStation 5 when the console launches on November 12 in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea and on November 19, 2020 in the rest of the world.

Borderlands 3 has been fully optimized to take advantage of the next-gen consoles' processing power, bringing a new level of graphical fidelity to the Borderlands universe. The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 display Borderlands 3 at up to 60 frames per second in 4K resolution during single-player and online co-op, and all next-gen consoles support three- and four-player split-screen for local multiplayer. In addition, vertical split-screen for two-player local co-op is now available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S and will be available on PlayStation 5 as soon as the console launches.

Teaming with 343 Industries, Seagate today announced the latest addition to its popular line of storage for gamers - Game Drive for Xbox Halo: Master Chief Limited Edition. Celebrating the legendary Master Chief from the Halo video game franchise, this limited edition Game Drive features a one-of-a-kind sleek case design that celebrates the Master Chief John-117. A limited Master Chief vinyl die-cut sticker set also comes in the box for fans to collect. The new drive is available in 2 TB and 5 TB capacities so gamers can install more games and downloadable game content by balancing their gaming workload between console and external HDD.

Gamers can easily begin their Halo journey as the Game Drive is compatible with and automatically recognized by the full family of Xbox One devices, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S consoles, and easily installed in under two minutes through Xbox OS. It is USB 3.2 Gen 1 bus powered and does not need a separate power cord to play so fans can unite in their mission from anywhere. Users can play legacy games and archive next generation games on the Game Drive which can store more than 502 downloaded games.

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, today announced the Kaira Pro Designed for Xbox, a high-performance wireless gaming headset for Xbox Series X|S featuring Razer's latest award-winning audio technologies, delivering a next level audio experience on the next generation of Xbox consoles. Using Razer's TriForce Titanium 50 mm Drivers and HyperClear Supercardioid Mic, and with Xbox Wireless and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, the Kaira Pro provides stunning audio and clear voice comms for both Xbox Series X|S and cloud gaming players.

Today, gamers can access more than 100 game titles on Xbox consoles, PCs and - with the advent of cloud gaming - Android devices with a membership to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. But a lack of cross-platform compatibility left gamers using different headsets to play the same game on different devices, often compromising on performance and features. With the Razer Kaira Pro, gamers can use the same high-quality, feature-rich headset on their Xbox Series X|S, PC and Android phone or tablet, to enjoy the rich, immersive sound and crackle free comms for that perfect gaming experience, whether at home or on the go.