adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Tech

Video games coming to Netflix? Latest hiring offers a clue – CTV News

Published

 on


SAN RAMON, CALIF. —
Netflix has hired veteran video game executive Mike Verdu, signaling the video streaming service is poised to expand into another fertile field of entertainment.

Verdu’s addition as Netflix’s vice president of game development, confirmed Thursday, comes as the company seeks to sustain the momentum it gathered last year when people turned to the video streaming service to get through lockdowns imposed during the pandemic.

Netflix wound up adding 37 million worldwide subscribers last year, by far the largest annual gain in its history. But the landscape has changed dramatically now that the easing pandemic has allowed people to return to a semblance of their normal lives.

300x250x1

The video service stumbled out of the gate during the first three months of this year, posting its smallest first-quarter subscriber increase in four years, and it predicted its springtime gains would also be meager. The Los Gatos, California, company is scheduled to report its results for the April-June period on Tuesday.

Adding video games would give Netflix another way to build upon the nearly 208 million subscribers that it boasted at the end of March. It wouldn’t come as a surprise either, given that Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings has long said the company competes as much against video games for a piece of people’s leisure time as it does against other video streaming services offered by the likes of Amazon, Hulu, Walt Disney Co. and Apple.

Netflix didn’t directly comment on its potential entry into video gaming, but left little doubt about its intent by announcing Verdu’s title at the company. Verdu is joining Netflix from Facebook’s Oculus, where he oversaw the virtual reality headset maker’s games. He previously worked at video game makers Electronic Arts and Zynga.

Now the biggest questions are when Netflix might start to offer video games and whether it intends to charge a separate fee to play them or include them as part of its video streaming services.

In a research note, CFRA analyst Tuna Amobi called video games a logical complement to Netflix’s vast library of TV series and films, helping to set the stage for eventual price increases that most subscribers will accept.

Greg Peters, Netflix’s chief operating officer, told investors in April that video games could be another way to engage subscribers already immersed in the stories unfolding in the service’s TV series and movies.

“We’re trying to figure out what are all these different ways that we can increase those points of connection, we can deepen that fandom,” Peters said at the time. Verdu will be reporting to Peters in his new job.

Investors seemed to be taking a wait-and-see attitude on Netflix’s potential foray into video games. The company’s stock price dipped by one per cent to close Thursday at $542.95. While much of the stock market has been notching record highs recently, Netflix’s shares are down by eight per cent from their peak of $593.29 reached in January.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

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

Published

 on

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.

300x250x1

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.

Source

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

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

Published

 on


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.

300x250x1

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 

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

Google partnership 'missing piece' in Apple AI strategy – analysts – Proactive Investors USA

Published

 on


News of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL, ETR:APC) and Google’s discussions over the rollout of the latter’s Gemini AI chatbot on iPhones sent shares higher and prompted positive feedback from analysts on Monday.

Apple climbed 1.4% on the reports that it would license Gemini to power new features in its latest iPhone software, while Google owner Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) jumped 4.6%.

As per Wedbush, such an agreement is the “missing piece” in Apple’s artificial intelligence strategy, due to materialise with the release of IOS 18 software for its products this year.

300x250x1

Such plans could involve the introduction of an AI App Store, as per Wedbush, alongside the incorporation of new features into the iPhone 16, expected in September.

These may well be among features unveiled by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, such as homegrown large language models.

“This is a major win for Google to get onto the Apple ecosystem and have access to the golden installed base of Cupertino,” analysts said in a note.

Indeed, some 2 billion-plus Apple devices are said to currently be in circulation globally, with Wedbush also highlighting a likely “major license fee” attached to the deal.

“For Apple, this will give them the foundation and technology blueprint to double down on AI features currently being developed,” the bank continued.

This should help “make sure that iPhone 16 will be a potential game changer iPhone release around AI functionality”.

Though details of the deal, reported by Bloomberg, are slim, Wedbush said more could be expected before June’s conference, while reiterating an ‘outperform’ rating for Apple.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending