News Patch v2.09

To Trust or Antitrust

The huge deal between Activision/Blizzard and Microsoft isn’t set to be completed for another year but the FTC might be heading up the investigation
Lina Khan (Lee.Na), the  FTC chair,  has promised to be tougher on tech companies, most notably with Nvidia’s failed purchase of ARM
The investigation could be focused on whether Microsoft, a console manufacturer, could absorb the entirety of the Activision/Blizzard catalog without hurting consumers and other companies

Old Intel

The only prototype of Intel’s old Larrabee GPU, in the world, sold on Ebay France last week for $5234.
Just when you think overpaying for a shiny, new 3090 was pricey, some “collector” goes and makes us feel a little better(?) about GPU prices.
This is a discrete Intel GPU, but NOT the upcoming Arc cards that we’ve talked about before. The Larrabee was Intel’s canceled project from 2009/2010
No technical specs on the card, but it did sport 32 cores at the time. 25 cores were supposedly enough to run Gears of War without AA. While it could’ve been a competitor back then, the power consumption was unacceptably high

It’s in RDNA

AMD says RDNA 3 GPU’s confirmed this year
Alongside of the release of the Zen 4 in the second half of 2022 AMD’s RDNA 3 Navi series chip is set to be a top competitor
Updates to the Radeon Linux drivers show that the RDNA 3 could support 8k/60hz or 16k/60hz HDR through DisplayPort 2.0
Prices however will not be going down and consumers can expect to see a 20% increase in GPU’s

You Can’t Cheat Me, but I Can Cheat You

While Epic Games has stated that the Steam Deck is an “amazing move” by Valve, they are saying that Fortnite will not be supported on it.
Basically, the Steam Deck is a handheld Linux PC and Fornite’s EAC/BattleEye instances are not optimized to run on it.
This is Epic admitting that they would not be able to combat cheating on many Deck configurations at this time, but a huge effort is underway to do so.

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