Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's popularity has continued to increase since its release way back in 2012, and today, it remains the most played game on Steam each week, boasting over one million concurrent players. Now, Valve has launched Counter-Strike 2, a graphical and technological update that upgrades Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to the Source 2 engine, leveraging newer graphics APIs for improved fidelity and responsiveness. NVIDIA has worked with Valve to make sure system latency, which is critical to winning, is at an absolute minimum with the addition of NVIDIA Reflex.

In competitive shooters such as Counter-Strike 2, higher FPS and lower system latency allows you to acquire targets faster, react more quickly, and increase aim precision. On a GeForce RTX 40 Series PC or laptop, your skill won't be constrained by system latency, or frame rates. Get the ultimate Counter-Strike 2 competitive experience, powered by GeForce RTX 40 Series for unbeatable performance, and NVIDIA Reflex for the lowest latency. Gamers with a compatible graphics card can enable NVIDIA Reflex in Counter-Strike 2 to reduce system latency by up to 35%.

NVIDIA joined Pixar, Adobe, Apple and Autodesk today to found the Alliance for OpenUSD, a major leap toward unlocking the next era of 3D graphics, design and simulation. The group will standardize and extend OpenUSD, the open-source Universal Scene Description framework that's the foundation of interoperable 3D applications and projects ranging from visual effects to industrial digital twins.

Several leading companies in the 3D ecosystem already signed on as the alliance's first general members—Cesium, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, SideFX and Unity. Standardizing OpenUSD will accelerate its adoption, creating a foundational technology that will help today's 2D internet evolve into a 3D web. Many companies are already working with NVIDIA to pioneer this future.

Respawn Entertainment boss Vince Zampella has been engaged in press duties for the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor marketing cycle this week, and is likely having to field questions about the sci-fi action adventure's poor technical performance on PC and consoles alike. In an interview conducted by Barron's Magazine a few days ago, Zampella was probably relieved to have the focus shift to a happier topic - the Titanfall franchise. He seemed to be quite open to the prospect of making a third game: "I hate to say yes, then people latch onto that, and then skewer you when it doesn't come. But I would love to see it happen is the real answer." His studio was founded in order to develop the (multiplayer only) first-person shooter Titanfall (2014), a platform exclusive on PC/Origin and Xbox One. Prior to starting Respawn Entertainment in 2010, Zampella and colleague Jason West were lead designers on the mainline Call of Duty series at Infinity Ward/Activision.

A sequel to the original Titanfall arrived in late 2016 to rave reviews from the press and hardcore fans of the series - the inclusion of a single player campaign was considered to be a highlight - this story campaign borrowed gameplay ideas (to the surprise of many) from Valve's Half Life series, and added time traveling elements to an already mind-bending mobility system. In an unfortunate move for Zampella and Respawn, publisher Electronic Arts decided to launch Titanfall 2 during a very busy release window - the main competition at the time being Activision's Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and (EA's own) Battlefield 1. A mainstream crowd proceeded to ignore the Titanfall sequel thanks to poor marketing on EA's part and a crowded games market - sales figures were underwhelming, even with a PS4 version, and the game was heavily discounted within a couple of months of release. Respawn moved on to create a spin-off multiplayer shooter - the smash hit free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends, and the Star Wars Jedi series.

A Half Life 2 modder, Igor Zdrowowicz, has managed to integrate path tracing into the game - with striking results, even at an early stage in development. His project - codenamed "HL2RTX" - has been in-progress for a handful of months, and the modder has managed to integrate a ray tracing system into Valve's classic shooter (sort of) via NVIDIA's RTX Remix SDK. That package has become open source only very recently, so Zdrowowicz stated that a Portal RTX-derived binary was the tool of choice.

NVIDIA's Lightspeed Studios has already created an impressive RTX conversion of Valve's fan favorite puzzle-platform game Portal (2007), and modders have been poring over the underlying technology and update technique processes. A number of old favorites, running on past iterations of the Source Engine (DirectX 8 and 9), are getting the amateur mod community sprucing up treatment. It is posited that Zdrowowicz will have an easier time with his current conversion project, thanks to an official release of NVIDIA's RTX Remix toolkit (albeit in early access).

Intel Alder Lake source code for BIOS/UEFI building and optimization has been leaked in a massive 6 GB leak that appeared on 4chan and GitHub. While this number may seem small, it is a colossal codebase, given that the regular code files take up small space. We assume that the documentation is bundled there as well, however, we can not check ourselves as the repository has been taken down. Tom's Hardware has contacted an Intel representative to talk about the code leak and the rep issued a statement for the website.

Intel SpokespersonOur proprietary UEFI code appears to have been leaked by a third party. We do not believe this exposes any new security vulnerabilities as we do not rely on obfuscation of information as a security measure. This code is covered under our bug bounty program within the Project Circuit Breaker campaign, and we encourage any researchers who may identify potential vulnerabilities to bring them our attention through this program. We are reaching out to both customers and the security research community to keep them informed of this situation.

Source Code of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 got leaked today. It seems like Valve hasn't been careful with control of its output, and a few leaks came out. All of the licensees of the Source Engine, a multi-platform game engine used in all Valve's games like Dota 2, Half-Life, and CS: GO, have been empowered by Valve with access to the source code of 2017/2018 versions of CS: GO and Team Fortress 2. Someone down the line, however, took that opportunity and access to leak the source code. The original news source is the SteamDB Twitter account, so we don't have any link to the actual source code.

This pretty big news since CS: GO can be considered as the most popular game on the Steam platform, and IP that Valve holds on it is very valuable. The 2017/2018 version that is leaked is probably outdated by a mile now, but it still represents an act of theft and should be treated as such. We are yet to see the response from Valve and how they will handle this situation.

Valve has taken the proverbial wraps off the already-teased, and now revealed, Half Life: Alyx. The latest installment in the Half-Life universe, again, isn't a sequel to the narrative that has been left midway with the ending of Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Instead, it's a prequel of sorts, situated in the 20-year time gap between the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2. It's at this point in the timeline that players will accompany Alyx and her father, Elias, in their fight against the Combine.

Engine-wise, the game will make use of the Source 2 engine, and will be released with accompanying Source 2 tools for worldbuilding, allowing players to design and distribute their own worlds set in this universe. The game will be a single-player, story-driven FPS affair, and will make heavy use of Half-Life's physics interactions. The game is being announced as a full-length game release built from the ground-up for VR - it's not just a VR adventure the development team embarked on, though it did start that way. But let that be for a while: go after the break to watch the game's trailer. I dare you to say this doesn't quite look like your Half-Life dream game.

Today Intel announced ModernFW - an experimental approach to building a minimum viable platform firmware for machines such as cloud server platforms. The reason for this software is that, while traditional PC Firmware has evolved over time and retained its backward compatibility, it has become very big and often inefficient.

So to meet the requirements of new platforms that need to be built quickly and adapted easily, Intel decided to offer a new software package that will help with that. The new firmware package targets x86_64 from ISA standpoint and Linux kernel based OSes.

In June 2016 Valve announced 'Destinations', a Steam workshop not easy to find anymore, that allowed the end user to enter real and fictitious scenarios through the magic of virtual reality. The idea was intriguing, but the media was not completely sold and judged Valve's proposal as both "the best and the worst of VR". From all this, however, came a singular discovery: those who reverse-engineered its code discovered in it the HLVR acronym, which initiated a wide debate about the potential appearance of a Half Life VR (HLVR) version specifically developed for VR headsets.

Lending further credence to this hypothesis was Gabe Newell's announcement in February 2017 that Valve was preparing three big titles for virtual reality- two of them based on Source 2, and one of them based on Unity. More such signs appeared in the summer of 2018, and everything was pointing towards this project being indeed real, that it would likely be based on Source 2, and that it would offer a full-fledged blockbuster title that this generation of VR has been desperately seeking. We now have more data courtesy a "leaked email" to Reddit user 2flock that suggests Valve's work is apparently going beyond just VR game development, as images of a prototype device seen below confirm that Valve is also working on its own VR head-mounted display (HMD), one whose development would also be more advanced than initially suspected.

NVIDIA has reportedly briefed its add-in card (AIC) partners about its upcoming GeForce product family, codenamed "Turing," and bearing a commercial nomenclature of either GeForce 11-series, or GeForce 20-series. This sets in motion a 2-3 month long process of rolling out new graphics cards by board partners, beginning with reference-design "Founders Edition" SKUs, followed by custom-design SKUs. Sources tell Tom's Hardware Germany that AIC partners have began training product development teams. NVIDIA has also released a BoM (bill of materials) to its partners, so aside from the ASIC itself, they could begin the process of sourcing other components for their custom-design products (such as coolers, memory chips, VRM components, connectors, etc.).

The BoM also specifies a timeline for the tentative amount of time it takes for each of the main stages of the product development, leading up to mass-production. It stipulates 11-12 weeks (2-3 months) leading up to mass-production and shipping, which could put product-launch some time in August (assuming the BoM was released some time in May-June). A separate table also provides a fascinating insight to the various stages of development of a custom-design NVIDIA graphics card.

Mushkin Enhanced MFG, an industry-leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance computer products, is announcing the Mushkin Source Series, a new line of solid state drives (SSDs) for the retail, e-tail, system integrator, and channel markets. The Source Series features a powerful, yet cost-effective design suitable for a wide-range of applications.

"The market has never been more ready for SSDs," says Brian Flood, Director of Product Development for Mushkin Enhanced MFG. "With the ultimate balance of value, capacity, and performance, the Source Series leverages all of the great benefits expected from an SSD without breaking the bank."