After a few years off, the Far Cry franchise is back with a full-on numbered sequel, and we’re headed to the good ol’ United States this time. Specifically, the game is set in the wilds of the fictional Hope County, Montana. The player takes on the role of a rookie US Marshall, and they’re tasked with capturing an incredibly dangerous cult leader named Joseph Seed. Big surprise, it doesn’t go smoothly. At our sister site IGN, Far Cry 5 has earned a . It doesn’t quite hit the high watermark for the series, but that’s a big bump up from the .
Virtual reality headsets are becoming increasingly common. Many smartphones now double as VR viewers, but the most powerful VR experiences are restricted to computers with beefy graphics cards. Headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC can produce amazing 3D worlds, as long as you don’t need to walk very far — both headsets use wired video and power connections. A few products can make VR headsets wireless, and TPCast is taking it a step further with a new wireless VR system that can . It’s called the Business Edition Wireless Adapter, so you can imagine which market segment TPCast is targeting.
Sales momentum in the consumer space for HTC’s Vive VR headset may have been disappointing over the last year. But the company has been doing some brisk business in enterprise applications thanks to its early presence in the market, room-scale tracking, and flexible SDK. From listening to its most active customers and developers, HTC has picked off a few of their most requested features and incorporated them into its new Vive Pro. I had a chance to demo one at Nvidia’s GTC 2018, and found a number of pretty nice improvements. Improved Resolution The Vive Pro’s headline new feature is its improved resolution.
Facebook is under increasing scrutiny after the revelation that its lax privacy controls allowed UK-based Cambridge Analytica to . Like it or not, is a fixture on the web, and its business model involves building ad profiles on users like you. Mozilla is looking to shield users from Facebook’s snooping and score some good will at the same time. It’s launched a new browser extension that segregates your Facebook account from the rest of the web. To understand how the new extension works, you need to know how Facebook keeps tabs on you. It’s not just your activity on Facebook’s domain that matters.
When Apple launched its , it alienated a significant percentage of its professional user base. The then-new systems emphasized multi-GPU configurations and offered a large number of Thunderbolt ports, but the diminutive form factor limited users to a single CPU socket and very little internal storage. While the new design and capabilities worked for some professional users, . Five years later, third-party firms have taken it on themselves to offer the upgrades and capabilities Apple hasn’t added, and they’re using Apple’s older chassis to do it. The question is, will this meaningfully benefit professional users — and can a third-party vendor beat the 2013 Mac Pro or the newer iMac Pro using Apple’s Mac Pro 5.1 from back in 2012?
The New York Auto Show will be heavy on new and enhanced crossovers and SUVs when it opens later this week. Among key models that will be unveiled at the show will be new or mid-life refreshes for the Acura RDX, Hyundai Tucson, Subaru Forester, Toyota RAV4, and Volkswagen Atlas five-seater variant. Also look for a new version of the Nissan Altima sedan and a hatchback Toyota Corolla. Cynics scoff that New York is a taxicab-and-subway town. But that’s mostly Manhattan island, which also favors subcompacts that fit into ultra-small spaces. Metro New York has 20 million people, or one in every 16 Americans, and the country’s largest accumulation of wealth from the region’s businesses — which makes it the largest market for high end cars.
Google may be on the verge of changing how it approaches the market. After years of only allowing its hardware partners to put Chrome OS on devices with a laptop or desktop form factor, the . The Acer Chromebook Tab 10 shares some specs with the Samsung Chromebook Plus, but it doesn’t have a keyboard. This 10-inch tablet will launch in the US in April before expanding to the rest of the world in May. Google rolled out the first official Android tablets in 2011, and consumers seemed at least somewhat interested for a few years. However, tablet sales in general have declined — even the iPad isn’t the runaway success it was four or five years ago.
Android itself is open source and free to use, but Google’s “official” build of Android is the only one most people want to use. That’s the one that comes with the Play Store, Assistant, and all the other Google services. Device makers are supposed to get certified before bundling Google services with a phone, but some smaller companies have been trying to fly under the radar by distributing unofficial Google packages. Well, no more. Google is now on “uncertified” devices, which is also an added pain for users of custom ROMs. Google’s apps are proprietary, but they’re still widely distributed online for users of custom ROMs.
Both AMD and Nvidia have been enjoying rosy predictions and uplifted earnings from cryptocurrency mining, but financial analysts are afraid things could be turning south. Christopher Rolland, an analyst with Susquehanna, released a note today stating “We confirm a Bitmain Ethereum ASIC.” Supposedly 20 percent of AMD’s cryptocurrency sales and 10 percent of Nvidia’s sales are to Ethereum miners. Rolland cut his target stock price for AMD to $7.50 from $13 and Nvidia’s target to $200, from $215. There are several ways . On the one hand, any cooling off of the cryptocurrency market would be great for gamers, who have generally been stuck paying far more for GPUs than they otherwise would — foregoing upgrades, buying new systems, snapping up used cards, or employing other various workarounds.
