NVIDIA may be gearing up to launch an RTX 4090 Ti
if leaked photos are any indication, although many are speculating that the photos
might depict a new RTX Titan or perhaps another graphics card
that isn't remotely worth its MSRP. I'm Riley Murdoch.
This is TechLinked and this massive cooler was first spotted in October last year
and was claimed to have a cooling capacity of 900 Watts,
double the TDP of NVIDIA's current 4090 flagship.
More than likely, however, this heatsink was a prototype for the 4090.
GeForce RTX is written on it, whereas Titan cards normally say Titan
as a way to differentiate between a card bought by a normal person
and a card bought by someone continually looking for something to fill the endless void in their soul.
Use money to smother the sadness. It is a money-shaped hole.
Other evidence from this being a 4090 prototype is that the heatsink says RTX 4090 on it,
which is, it's pretty cut and dry. But here's the thing,
if you're one of the many that thinks the 4080 should have been the 4070 Ti when it came out
or that the upcoming 4060 should have been a 4050,
it's possible that the best bang for the buck 4090
might have also gotten a downgrade during development and this heatsink will end up on a future 4090 Ti.
We can't know, which is why we said the word might, about 20 times in the story.
Don't do the math. Speaking of the upcoming 4060 leaked 3DMark tests
for the card show a 23% performance improvement over the 3060 12 Gigabyte version.
So there's actually a chance this card could be a good deal.
AMD and their partners seem to think so since multiple Radeon RX 7600 models
have been discounted days before the 4060's release.
Do you see gamers? Do you see what happens when you simply don't buy
an overpriced product like the 4060 Ti? Oh, I'm getting a transmission from the future.
The RTX 4090 Ti sold out on day one. Damn it.
Why don't you listen gamers? We've talked about this many times gamers.
No one wanted Stadia to fail except everyone. So now YouTube is internally testing a new way
to play online games instantly according to an email seen by the Wall Street Journal.
I mean, after Google got a taste with Stadia they couldn't just cold turkey quit
offering gaming services no one wants. Their newest alleged foray is called Playables
and will make online games instantly playable within YouTube's website and apps.
Which sounds less like the next big thing in gaming and more like 2008 when your Facebook was flooded
by requests from every one of your casual acquaintances
to help them grow corn. I didn't help anyone. The only game mentioned in the email is StackBounce
in which players aim to smash layers of bricks with a bouncing ball.
Sounds like my kind of Friday night, you know what I mean? I've never.
While both the Verge and Polygon think it sounds like a clone of the popular Atari game Breakout
I used a radical new journalistic technique called Googling to find StackBounce.
And it seems to be the game you see in every mobile game ad that doesn't feature Pedro Pascal.
I wish, his are the best. After Stadia was retired
the services general manager Phil Harrison did say Google wasn't giving up on gaming
and that Stadia's underlying tech could make its way to Google services like YouTube.
What Harrison didn't say was you'd now be able to play at all of the shovelware games that advertise on YouTube
without leaving the website. Finally, a convenient new feature
for the lowest common denominator. We need more of those. There's not enough stupid things.
And Microsoft has made some lofty claims while defending themselves in court
since the FTC simply will not let them be.
In a legal filing arguing that Nintendo should be considered part of the high end console market
questionable along with the Xbox Series X and PS5
Microsoft argued that both Xbox and PlayStation offer cheaper consoles priced similarly
to the Nintendo Switch. Microsoft brings up the Xbox Series S
and the PS5 digital edition while also saying Sony is expected to release
a PlayStation 5 slim later this year at a $400 price point.
This is probably a reference to the PS5 console with a detachable disk drive that was first reported
on back in September of last year. It's so kind of Microsoft
to help their rival Sony announce their products. That was so sweet.
You only fight sometimes but maybe don't believe everything Microsoft says
because that same legal filing says Sony is set to release a handheld version of PlayStation 5
later this year for under $300. If that is a reference to Sony's already announced
project Q, either Sony vastly undersold Q
during its announcements and we're about to get a wonderful surprise.
Or Microsoft is throwing whatever legal arguments they can at the legal argument wall to see what sticks.
It's mostly gum on there. A little bit of spaghetti. The high school kids love that wall.
I'm sorry everyone, it's probably the latter case after Phil Spencer said during the hearing
that Microsoft bought Bethesda to prevent Sony
from making Starfield a timed exclusive for the PS5.
And he said that Sony uses the 30% cut
on any Microsoft games sold on PlayStation platforms
to help fund strategies to, quote, reduce Xbox's survival on the market
by presumably doing harmful bad things like offering competing products and services.
I mean, when you think about the fact that poor Microsoft only gets a mere 70%
of Microsoft games sold on PlayStation as opposed to the 100% they get
when selling on their own platforms, it really starts to make sense
why the $2.5 trillion company is losing the console war.
Donate today. Hey, hey, eyes up here.
I'm more than just tech news, okay? I'm a person.
Not a piece of meat. Well, I am that. The cost for NASA to collect exotic sand is ballooning
according to, well, NASA. The Mars sample return mission is meant to pick up
the samples taken by the Perseverance rover over the last two years
and transfer them back to Earth for study. The cost estimate, however,
has jumped from up to 4.4 billion in 2020
to up to potentially double that amount. Ooh, there are multiple factors to this.
Costly mistakes made by the Jet Propulsion Laboratories updated sample retrieval plans to ensure collection
if Perseverance has died by the time the mission launches and worst of all, inflation.
And we're not talking about the balloons that are used by the rover and some,
I'm assuming there's balloons. Don't Google it. Because not even robots in space
can believe the price of a loaf of bread these days. The CEO of Google's DeepMind told Wired
that their next generation model, Gemini, will be more capable than ChatGPT
without saying in what way exactly. Like, will it stop making things up about me
and emailing them to my friends and family because I'm not sure that was supposed to be a feature.
Can it juggle? Gemini will combine the powers of a large language model
with the kind of reinforcement learning techniques that, quote, helped AlphaGo defeat a Go champion in 2016,
which would be impressive if a human hadn't just beaten one of the top Go playing AIs last year.
Google, please just test this one before you demo it.
That was embarrassing. Meta has launched a new MetaQuest Plus subscription service
joining the exclusive ranks of PlayStation Plus,
Apple TV, slash fitness, slash other things, Plus, Disney Plus, and many, many more.
The word Plus, basic math's way of saying this, but more so.
For 7.99, subscribers will receive two games every month,
two specific titles that Meta chooses for you. July's titles are rhythm games,
slash first person shooter, Pistol Whip, and video game about playing a video game Pixel Ripped 1995.
August's titles, however, will be Walk About Minigolf
and Mother Gunship Forge. And I desperately wish I was the kind of person
who would enjoy all of those games equally. They must be so happy.
UK police are blaming a recent Android update for an uptick in emergency center butt dials.
One new feature automatically dials emergency services when the power button is pressed five or more times,
something that can be accidentally accomplished while trying to dig out a particularly pernicious wedgie.
Did you think about that, UK police? Or, as the British call it, wedgie.
But in the accent like that. Wedgie.
Wedgie. Wedgie. The feature was already available on Pixel phones,
but there's been a major increase in British butt cheeks, unknowingly dialing 999,
now that the feature is available on all Android devices.
A Google spokesperson said that device manufacturers will address this issue shortly,
and that users that continue to experience this issue
should switch emergency SOS off for the next couple of days.
So, if you're looking to commit a crime somewhere in Britain in the near future,
here's your chance. Horses.
Horses. Horses. And Amazon is recruiting small businesses
to help deliver packages throughout the US, including coffee shops, clothing stores, and florists,
because that's what your local grocer slash bookstore slash U-Haul Depot needs.
Another side hustle. These are intended to be last mile delivery outposts,
which receive packages from larger distribution centers and drop them off at customers' doors.
Amazon didn't say exactly how much it will pay per package, but they did say that they expect partnering businesses
to make around $27,000 a year, delivering an average of 30 packages a day.
So, with the power of grade school math, we can determine that they will be paying around 250 a package.
The other option available to them was to raise delivery driver wages
in order to attract more delivery drivers instead of paying random florists to deliver packages.
But you know, honestly, I see where they're coming from. It's a hard situation.
And I'll see where you're coming from if you come back for another episode of TechLinked on Wednesday.
How will I see where you're coming from? I'm a really good hacker. Okay, I just hack and hack stuff.
I'm big into hacking.