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Weekly News Recap: April 23, 2017

Hooooooly graphics cards, you guys. This week, we brought you reviews on the AMD Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 graphics cards, and what followed was the resultant deluge of AIB cards. AMD announced pricing info, and off we went. Some RX 550s snuck in there as well. Sprinkled in there was a raft of Nvidia cards and related updates from third party makers, too, just for good measure, but in any case, if you’ve been waiting for some more GPU options, this week was a veritable Christmas.

AMD:

  • VisionTek Brings Its Vision To The Radeon RX 500 Series
  • The PowerColor Red Dragon RX 550 Graphics Card Rides
  • Sapphire Announces Pulse RX 500 Series Graphics Cards
  • Gigabyte Brings Seven Radeon 500 Series Cards To The Party
  • Asus Has Nine New RX 570, RX 580 Graphics Cards
  • MSI’s Gaming And Armor Series Reinforce RX 570 And RX 580 Lineup
  • PowerColor Reveals Red Devil, Golden Sample RX 580 Graphics Cards
  • AMD Reveals Pricing For RX 580, RX 570 Partner Cards
  • Sapphire Leads RX 570, RX 580 Charge With Nitro+ Cards

NVIDIA:

  • Inno3D Launches New GTX 1080 And GTX 1060 GPUs With Faster Memory
  • MSI’s GAMING X+ Series Brings Faster Memory To Its GTX 1080 Cards
  • MSI, Corsair Partner Up For Hydro GFX GTX 1080 Ti, Available For $800
  • EVGA Updates GTX 1080 FTW2, SC2 Graphics Cards With 11GHz Memory
  • Colorful Reveals iGame GTX1080Ti Vulcan X OC With 2GHz Boost Clock
  • EK Water Blocks’ Asus ROG Strix 1080 Ti Water Block Features A New Terminal Block Cover
  • And of course, AMD issued a new Crimson ReLive driver for the RX 580 and RX 570, too.

Gear Up

This week saw some new hardcore laptops debut. HP announced no fewer than five workstation lappies, and although the lower-end models are trying to scoot by with Ultrabook-class CPUs, the others are a bit more robust, with up to Intel Xeon CPUs and AMD Radeon Pro or Nvidia Quadro GPUs.

MSI outed some new thin and light gaming laptops, or should we say “thin and light,” because at 4.8-5.95lbs., they’re not exactly Ultrabooks. But hey, no one said building gaming horsepower into laptop form factors was easy. These Leopard series machines feature 7th-gen Intel chips; GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, or 1060 GPUs; and options for NVMe SSDs. Yet they range in price from $1,100-$1,600. Not bad.

Speaking of 1050 Ti GPUs, Origin’s EON15-S gaming laptops have them now, too.

In other gear news, Logitech showed its willingness to take a design departure with the G413 mechanical gaming keyboard. Although the G413 is by no means ostentatious, it’s not the simple black rectangle design of the G810, G610, and Pro; we wonder if it’s a trial balloon for some new design directions for Logitech.

  • Biostar Announces Mini-ITX AM4 Motherboards For Ryzen (Updated)
  • NZXT Showcases Beauty And the S340 Elite Hyper Beast
  • Asus Brings Its Tinker Board To North America
  • Lenovo Announces The Flex 11 Chromebook, Computing With A Twist
  • Eizo Unveils ColorEdge Prominence Monitor With Full HDR, DCI-4K
  • Tiny Asus VivoPC X System Gets Oculus Bundle, Pricing

Getting Real, Virtually

The VR world gave us a gift: Rick and Morty in virtual reality. Although professed Rick and Morty superfan Kevin Carbotte found aspects of the game lacking, overall he dug it–which is unsurprising, because the folks behind Rick And Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality are the same hilarious weirdos who made Job Simulator.

On the hardware side of VR, HTC took a step forward by unloading a pile of resources for developers working with the Vive Trackers and also restocking its supply of available Vive Trackers. Simply put, you can stick a Vive Tracker on just about anything–weapons, your feet, a cat, etc.– and it will get tracked inside your VR title. This effort will significantly expand what you can do in VR–or should we say, what you can bring into VR.

Untethering has become one of the next golden nuggets of VR, and although we’ve seen a number of efforts to untether HMDs, the Nefes Data Kit is designed to untether your USB peripherals in VR–without interfering with any other wireless technology involved.

  • Oculus’ April Software Update Includes Better Three-Sensor Support, Extended Touch Compatibility
  • HTC Announces First ‘VR For Impact’ Projects
  • Insta360 Pro 8K Camera Now Available For Pre-Order
  • ‘Arizona Sunshine’ Horde Modes Goes On The Move With Free ‘Undead Valley’ Update
  • HTC Bundles Vive HMD With GTX 1070, PCs (Updated)
  • Facebook Is Using Computer Vision To Bring AR To The Masses, Dev Platform Available Now
  • Facebook Spaces Social VR App Enters Early Access On Oculus Platform
  • Google Adds Search Function, Oculus Support To Google Earth VR
  • SpaceVR’s Satellite Gets Added Funding Boost From HTC
  • ‘Downward Spiral: Prologue’ Is A Mediocre Game With Amazing Zero-Gravity Locomotion

Security

There was a new development in the ongoing drama between Google and Symantec. Earlier, Google announced that Chrome would distrust Symantec certificates, and this week Symantec responded. It’s…complicated. The whole thing is a slightly odder because the two companies have worked together on identifying and solving these problems, but it seems they’re at loggerheads nonetheless.

  • Researchers Use Ambient Light Sensors To Steal Browser Data
  • Design Flaw May Have Allowed Attackers To Bypass LastPass Two-Factor Authentication
  • Microsoft Fixed The Shadow Brokers’ Bugs In Silent March Update
  • Facebook Takes Down Major Spam Operation
  • Google’s Data Handling Practices Force Company To Turn Over Foreigner’s Data

And All The Rest

Although it was certainly more interesting from the perspective of those of us inside the industry, the news that Intel is killing off its Intel Developers Forum (IDF) annual event was startling. The plan seems to be to split IDF into a series of more focused events (IoT, data center, PC, XR, etc.), but even so, in our conversation with an Intel representative about the announcement, it sounded like there aren’t yet any firm plans one way or another. We’ll have to stay tuned; there’s already an overabundance of industry events (we could be on the road every day if we wanted to be), so more is not necessarily better. On the other hand, more focused events can be easier to cover and also more enriching.

  • Twitch Helps Streamers Get Paid With New Affiliate Program
  • Facebook Updates Instant Games, Gameroom At F8
  • Microsoft Confirms Six-Month Windows 10 Update Schedule
  • Samsung, Amazon To Support Improved HDR10+ Standard
  • Samsung: Second-Gen 10nm (10LPP) Process Is Ready For Production
  • Application ‘Power Throttling’ Comes To Latest Windows 10 Insider Preview (Build 16176)
  • Baidu Upgrades Cloud Services With Nvidia Tesla P40 GPUs And Deep Learning Platform
  • ‘Call Of Duty: WWII’ Announced, Livestream Coming April 26
  • ‘Dark Souls III: The Fire Fades Edition’ Comes To PlayStation 4, Xbox One, But Not PC
  • ‘Code Vein’ Is Bandai Namco’s New Title, Coming In 2018
  • Blizzard Announces ‘StarCraft: Remastered,’ Coming This Summer (Update: Freebies!)
  • Latest ‘Prey’ Footage Shows Off The Talos I Space Station
  • Here’s The Roadmap For ‘Star Citizen’ Update 3.0
  • ‘Star Wars Battlefront II’ Arrives November 17
  • Genji Leaps From ‘Overwatch’ To ‘Heroes Of The Storm’

Alright then. As always, pore through the pile of links above for all the rest of the important tech news of the week, and you folks have a lovely weekend.