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Talking Point: Are You Suffering From Animal Crossing: New Horizons Fatigue? – Nintendo Life

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© Nintendo Life

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is something of a phenomenon, in case you hadn’t noticed. Not only has it sold by the bucketload, but it has also attracted celebrity fans like Danny Trejo and Elijah Wood, and seems to be the perfect tonic for the current coronavirus lockdown. Heck, we awarded it a well-deserved 10/10 when we reviewed it at launch, and in general, our admiration for this unique life sim has only grown over time.

However, any video game is likely to grow stale over time, even the best ones in the world – and now we’re a few weeks past the game’s release, it seems a fine time to ask that most vital of questions: are you fed up of Animal Crossing yet?

Damien McFerran, Editorial Director

Before I answer that question, it’s probably worth me outlining my own personal history with the Animal Crossing series, because I think it has some bearing on where I am right now.

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I got the GameCube version thanks to the overwhelming hype which surrounded its release, and pretty much bounced right off it. I didn’t have the time to dedicate to such a massive undertaking, and therefore my first ‘real’ experience of Animal Crossing was Wild World on the DS – a platform which I could take with me anywhere and was, therefore, a better fit for my hectic lifestyle.

I immersed myself in Wild World’s charms, playing it solidly during lunchtimes and in the evenings. Then I kind of stopped. The allure passed pretty quickly and I moved on to other DS games. Next up was New Leaf, which was pretty much the same story – I went in hot, I thought the game was amazing, then put it aside as other, more pressing titles appeared.

Perhaps the key issue here isn’t with the game – which offers a staggering amount of gameplay potential and content – but with me?

I’m sorry to say that the story remains the same with New Horizons. For the first few weeks, I played it every single day without fail – not booting up the game meant I risked my island being overtaken by weeds, or I could potentially lose a villager without even knowing. The improved customisation options hooked me in for longer than usual, but I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t loaded the game up for over a week now, and the longer I leave it, the less likely it feels that I’ll ever return. I know that my island will already be covered in weeds and the thought of collecting all of those apples, cherries, oranges and pears fills me with existential dread (there’s also the small fact that my real-world garden requires lots of care and attention right now, as my wife keeps reminding me).

It’s not that I’ve been hit with fatigue as much as fear; because I’ve had other games that have needed my attention (Lonely Mountains: Downhill, I’m looking at you), my limited game time in each day has been taken up elsewhere, and that means New Horizons has been pushed to the bottom of the pile. As I did with New Leaf, I’m sure I’ll pluck up the courage to load up New Horizons again soon, but my overriding fear is that I won’t have the stomach to fully commit myself to the cause every single day – and that’s really what’s needed for a game of this nature.

Perhaps the key issue here isn’t with the game – which offers a staggering amount of gameplay potential and content – but with me? Between running a network of sites, producing content, reviewing games and juggling the commitments of a house and family, my own ‘real-life’ game of Animal Crossing has robbed me of the time needed to truly enjoy Animal Crossing: The Video Game?

Gavin Lane, Features Editor

Animal Crossing New Horizons Chilling Trek

For me, Wild World was my first Animal Crossing and will likely always be my ‘favourite’. After devouring that game on DS, the idea of being tied down to a television seemed absurd. From my point of view, Animal Crossing was something you squeezed into your daily routine whenever and wherever you could, no matter what. You could be sitting on the bus or the train or the toilet and it wasn’t a problem – on a portable system you always had time pop into your village, check turnip prices and make sure your favourite residents weren’t packing their bags.

So, this is the first Animal Crossing I’ve played on big TV screen and every time I fire it up I’m still amazed at just how pretty it looks. PS5 and Xbox Series X won’t be losing any sleep, of course, but the lighting and attention to detail in New Horizons make it a pleasure to throw on the telly. Perhaps that’s a factor in why I’ve played it every day since launch – even at the expense of other games I’m itching to spend some real time with (hello Streets of Rage 4).

Much has been made of the fortuitous timing of New Horizons’ release, and it’s been a great help personally getting through this lockdown. Where pre-COVID-19 I might have gone for stroll of an evening to get some much-needed fresh air away from a computer monitor, I’ve found myself wandering around my island, idly catching bugs, fishing or arranging flower beds as a way to decompress at the end of the day.

In fact, it’s telling that I haven’t made much progress at all in terms of my house extensions or things like that. I managed to complete my fossil collection a couple of evenings ago, but that’s about it. I’ve been using the game more as a relaxation tool, and it’s in that capacity that I’m returning every night.

I can’t say whether I’ll still be playing when life returns to ‘normal’ again, but I’ve got more than my money’s worth from New Horizons in these past two months and I’m happy to potter about watering plants and making Star Trek uniforms. Lovely!

Alex Olney, Senior Video Editor

Animal Crossing New Horizons Stonks Decline© Nintendo Life

Just like Gav upstairs my first dive into the wild world of Animal Crossing was on Animal Crossing: Wild World, although unlike his Gavvishness it’s not my favourite. Looking back it was great for the time, but it’s aged poorly and has naff all to do in comparison to the modern counterparts. Then it was New Leaf, and now it’s that other one that I’m supposed to be talking about.

Even though not all of the 150 hours I put in were entirely voluntary – having to play video games for a career is hard – I can honestly say that through the frustrations of trying to find certain fish and having to wait days for things to happen, I’ve enjoyed every one of those hours spent.

Suffice it to say though, the lustre is starting to lose its sparkle somewhat. What was a daily ritual every morning and most evenings has now become a dip-in-dip-out sort of affair. My island’s in largely good shape, I have some of the residents I want, but the drive to go back and get into the game isn’t as strong as it once was.

When I do pick it up though, I quite quickly tumble into a spiral of lost hours, even though when I booted it up I was certain I didn’t have much to do. Hell, last night after what was rather a frantic and exhausting day of more video games for money, I had so little energy for anything I just booted up the game and wandered around for a bit with no real purpose. And you know what? It was wonderful.

New Horizons may not have the vice-like grip it had on me before, and I may not be playing it as much as I once had, but I think it’s a game I’ll always be dipping in and out of, especially if these updates keep coming.

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Apple in talks to let Google's Gemini power iPhone AI features, Bloomberg News says – theSun

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Apple is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the situation.

The negotiations are about licensing Gemini for some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, the report said, adding that the terms or branding of an AI agreement or how it would be implemented have not been decided.

Alphabet shares jumped more than 6% in early U.S. trading, while Apple was up 2.5%.

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It is unlikely that any deal would be announced until June, when Apple plans to hold its annual conference of developers, and the iPhone maker also recently held talks with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI about using its model, according to the report.

Apple, Alphabet-owned Google and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

A potential deal between the firms could help Google expand the use of its AI services to more than 2 billion active Apple devices, boosting the search giant’s efforts to catch up with Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

It could also help allay investor fears about the slow roll-out of AI apps by Apple, which has lost the crown of the world’s most valuable firm after a 10% decline in its shares this year.

The firms have a years-long partnership that makes Google the default search engine on Apple’s Safari web browser, and a genAI tie-up may help the Alphabet unit navigate fears that services like ChatGPT could threaten its search dominance.

But the agreement could also invite sharper scrutiny from U.S. regulators, who have sued Google on grounds that it unlawfully stifled competition by paying billions of dollars to Apple to maintain its monopoly in search.

“This strategic partnership is a missing piece in the Apple AI strategy and combines forces with Google for Gemini to power some of the AI features Apple is bringing to market,“ said Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush.

“This is a major win for Google to get onto the Apple ecosystem and have access to the golden installed base of Cupertino with clearly a major licence fee attached to this,“ he said, referring to Apple’s California headquarters.

Google in January partnered with Apple’s rival Samsung to deploy its genAI technology in the South Korean firm’s Galaxy S24 series of smartphones, as part of its efforts to boost the use of Gemini after some missteps during its roll-out.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month that the company was investing “significantly” in generative AI and would reveal more about its plans to put the technology to use later this year.

The Bloomberg report said Apple was planning to use its own homegrown AI models for some new capabilities in its upcoming iOS 18, but was seeking a partner to power genAI features, including functions for creating images and writing essays based on simple prompts. (Reporting by Jahnavi Nidumolu and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza, Janane Venkatraman, Varun H K and Susan Fenton). – REUTERS

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PlayStation 5 Pro rumored to beef up GPU and ray tracing, bring AI acceleration

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The PlayStation 5 launched in late 2020, though it feels like it arrived later due to supply issues. A Pro model will reportedly arrive four years later with a much improved GPU, AI acceleration and other enhancements.

The GPU will be the biggest upgrade on the PS5 Pro. Rumors claim up to 45% higher rasterization performance and 33.5 TFLOPs of compute power. Future SDK versions will support resolutions up to 8K and higher frame rates with 4K @ 120fps and 8K @ 60fps being possible.

Ray tracing performance is set to include 2-3 times, even 4 times on some occasions. This is thanks to a massive increase from 18 BVH4 work groups to 30 BVH8. The so-called “Bounding Volume Hierarchies” help speed up ray intersection calculations (i.e. does this ray of light hit this object or not?). We will skip the technical details, but the digit after BVH means that each individual work group will be able to do more work.

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The Pro will also feature the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaling and antialiasing technology (PSSR for short). This will be especially helpful for ray tracing, which sees computation demands explode as resolution goes up.

The PlayStation 5 Pro will also bring a custom machine learning architecture. An AI Accelerator will offer up to 300 TOPS of 8-bit and 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point computation. This might be the most interesting part as modern generative models can create realistic textures and speech, write out text based on a prompt and so on – what can developers do with this?

The console will also come with a modest boost to the CPU, which will have a “High CPU Frequency Mode” that goes up to 3.85GHz (from 3.5GHz), a 10% increase. By the sound of it, the PS5 Pro is very close to thermal limits, so this mode will drop GPU frequency by 1.5% (resulting in 1% performance loss).

The Pro model will have faster RAM that does 18 gigatransfers per second, a 28% increase from 448GB/s to 576GB/s. This is needed to feed the beefier GPU.

The audio subsystem will also get a boost with 35% more performance that can be spent on higher quality sound effects.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is expected to have 1TB onboard storage and a detachable Blu-ray drive similar to the slim models. Sony might release the Pro model in Fall 2024, but there has been no official acknowledgment of the console.

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Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is for lower-tier high-end phones – MobileSyrup

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Qualcomm has a new Snapdragon 8-series chip aimed at devices that aren’t quite flagships but are not quite mid-range either.

The new chip offers manufacturers more options but also further contributes the Qualcomm’s increasingly weird and confusing product lineup. The new 8s Gen 3 is like the opposite of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ chips, which typically offer a little more than the company’s annual flagship product.

The 8s Gen 3 matches most of what Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 flagship offers, but with just a little less. For example, the chips have a similar GPU, but the 8s Gen 3’s version has one less performance core and runs at a lower frequency. Additionally, the 8s Gen 3 uses the previous generation Snapdraogn X70 5G modem with Wi-Fi 7 support, compared to the X75 modem in the 8 Gen 3.

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Since AI capabilities were one of the major highlights of the 8 Gen 3, the 8s Gen 3, unsurprisingly, also sports similar (but not quite as good) AI chops. The 8s Gen 3 can support generative AI on-device and is capable of running large language models (LLMs) of up to 10 billion parameters. That includes LLMs like Llama 2 and Gemini Nano.

While that’s all well and good, it’ll be interesting to see how manufacturers use the 8s Gen 3, and how consumers respond to the new chip. Flagships will likely keep going for the flagship Qualcomm chips, like the 8 Gen 3 or inevitable 8+ Gen 3, whenever it arrives. But Qualcomm also offers the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, just a hair below the new 8s Gen 3. Will the 8s Gen3 offer enough to make it a worthwhile choice over the 7 Gen 3? If you’re already looking at the 8s Gen 3, does it make sense to just go for the 8 Gen 3? Only time will tell.

Qualcomm expects the 8s Gen 3 to land in devices from Honor, iQOO, Realme, Redmi and Xiaomi in the coming months, though notably, none of those brands sell phones in Canada.

Header image credit: Qualcomm

Source: Qualcomm Via: The Verge 

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