A remaster of classic action game Star Wars: Episode I: Jedi Power Battles, slated for release tomorrow on on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch, has gotten a new trailer that you can check out below to celebrate its launch.The short trailer gives us a quick glimpse at the fast-paced title, which allows players to take on levels based on Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace with a host of different characters. For context, the original release of the game was all the way back in 2000, coming out on PlayStation and Dreamcast.The side-scrolling arcade-style action game will allow players to engage in fights against a host of different varieties of droids from The Phantom Menace. There are also a host of playable characters, including Mace Windu, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, and even deep cuts from the Star Wars universe like Plo Koon and Adi Gallia.The game also unlocks special characters like Ki-Adi Mundi, Darth Maul, Queen Amidala, and even a Battle Droid right from the start. Players had to complete various challenges in the original release of the game to unlock these characters.The title also features multiplayer in the form of local split-screen co-op, where up to 2 players can take on the games 10-level campaign side-by-side. Players can also complete bonus mini-games throughout their journey through the campaign.Among the new features coming to Star Wars: Episode I: Jedi Power Battles are the option to use classic controls or a new modern control scheme, a New Game+ mode, fun cheat codes that can be toggled like Big Head Mode, and even a host of new playable characters like the Tusken Raider.

AMD looks like it is getting ready to release its new line-up of graphics cards soon. Head of the consumer GPU and CPU division at AMD, David McAfee, took to social media platform X to reveal that AMD is targeting a March release window for its new set of graphics cards.While no specific release date has been announced yet, McAfees post indicates that AMD has been on track when it comes to ironing out its driver software for the upcoming Radeon 9000-series graphics cards.Radeon 9000 series hardware and software are looking great and we are planning to have a wide assortment of cards available globally, posted McAfee. Cant wait for gamers to get their hands on the cards when they go on sale in March!With McAfee mentioning the entire Radeon 9000 series rather than any specific GPU, it is possible that AMD will be launching all four of the graphics cards it had unveiled during CES 2025 in March.These four GPUs are the Radeon RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, RX 9060, and the RX 9060 XT. While the company hasnt yet provided concrete details on things like the clock speeds on the new GPUs, it did reveal that the new naming system for the Radeon 9000-series graphics cards is meant to allow consumers to deduce their specs from equivalent GPUs from Nvidia.The few technical details we do know about AMDs new GPUs is are that the RX 9070 and 9070 XT will feature 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, while the 9060 and 9060 XT will feature 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and the fact that all four new graphics cards are based on the 4nm process node.During the announcement, AMD had stated that the RX 9070 and 9070 XT would compete with Nvidias GeForce RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti, while the RX 9060 and 9060 XT would compete with RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti cards respectively, both in terms of performance and pricing.One of the key new features of AMDs new generation of graphics cards revolve around FSR 4, which is set to bring with it improvements to high-resolution rendering up to 4K, as well as features like Anti-Lag 2 and FSR Frame Generation.While AMD might be targeting the mid-range hardware market, Nvidia took to the stage at CES 2025 to unveil its new high-end GeForce RTX 5000-series graphics cards. The new GPUs include the top-of-the-line RTX 5090, which features 32 GB of GDDR7 VRAM and 21,760 CUDA cores, as well as the RTX 5080, RTX 5070, and RTX 5070 Ti.The GeForce RTX 5090 will be priced at $1,999, making it Nvidias most expensive consumer-grade GPU. The RTX 5080, on the other hand, is slated for release in January with a price tag of $999. The upper mid-range RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti will be hitting stores in February, and will be priced at $549 and $759 respectively.Along with the graphics cards, Nvidia also announced a host of new software features under the DLSS 4 umbrella. The new features include a completely new AI model that makes use of transformers, as well as the capability of the new 50-series GPUs to use multi frame generation.Radeon 9000 series hardware and software are looking great and we are planning to have a wide assortment of cards available globally. Cant wait for gamers to get their hands on the cards when they go on sale in March! David McAfee (@McAfeeDavid_AMD) January 20, 2025

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025Posted by Jim ThackerAfter Effects latest beta lets you preview HDR compshtml PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Adobes promo for the new betas of its video apps. The section on After Effects starts at 01:25.Adobe has released a new beta build of After Effects that makes it possible to preview High Dynamic Range projects within the compositing and motion graphics software.The beta release also features a new caching system that is not restricted to the RAM on a users machine, making it possible to play back longer compositions.Other current beta features include the option to customize the color of the softwares transparency grid and panel backgrounds.Preview comps in HDR with support for two common HDR formatsThe current beta reflects the increasing availability of HDR displays, even in non-specialist laptops, making it possible to preview compositions in HDR.Artists can now import HDR media, place it in a composition, and preview the result in HDR.The beta build displays HDR video in a range of standard formats in HLG (Hybrid Log Gamma) and PQ (Perceptual Quantizer) color spaces.Users can preview HDR output on a local display, or an external display via Mercury Transmit. The changes should make it more practical for editors and motion graphics artists to work on HDR projects within After Effects, although many artists still rely on Adobe Media Encoder to export HDR content, as discussed in this thread on Adobes Community site.New caching system makes it possible to preview longer projectsThe beta also reworks After Effects caching system to use the disk cache for rendered preview frames, rather than storing them solely in RAM.The resulting increase in cache capacity should make it possible to preview longer projects without having to wait for frames to render, and to preview projects at higher resolutions.Adobe also says that the change improves performance on less powerful systems.Other current After Effects beta featuresThe current beta also includes features added before todays update, including the option to change the color of panel backgrounds, and the color and size of the transparency grid.Other beta features include Quick Set Anchor, a new UI feature for setting the anchor point in 2D layers to common locations, including the corners and edge centers of the layer.Price, system requirements and release dateBeta builds of After Effects are available to subscribers via the Creative Cloud desktop app. Adobe hasnt announced when the beta features will become available in a stable release.The current stable release, After Effects 25.1 is available for Windows 10+ and macOS 12.0+ on a rental-only basis. Single-app After Effects subscriptions cost $34.49/month or $263.88/year.Read more about the new beta features in After Effects on Adobes blogRead a full list of the current beta features in After EffectsHave your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we dont post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.Latest NewsAfter Effects' latest beta lets you preview HDR compsCheck out the latest beta features in the compositing and motion graphics app, including the option to preview HLG and PQ video.Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025New version of iOS and Android scanning app Kiri EngineKiri Engine 3.13 improves the quality of 3D Gaussian Splatting in the app, sharpening scans and reducing 3DGS file sizes 'approximately 50%'.Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025RE:Vision Effects launches Twixtor StandaloneGPU-accelerated, AI-powered video retiming tool can now be used without a host app, for under half the price of a regular plugin license.Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025See the new features due in Unreal Engine 5.6 and beyondCheck out upcoming features in the game engine, from rendering and simulation to Megaworlds biomes, next-gen terrain and Anim Next.Tuesday, January 21st, 2025Left Angle releases Autograph 2025Big update to the compositing and motion design app adds a DaVinci Resolve Live Link, an After Effects converter - and a new free edition.Tuesday, January 21st, 2025Check out this GPU-accelerated Houdini Skin Slide DeformerDNEG TD Mengya Zhang's OpenCL-based tool generates realistic skin sliding without tissue simulation. Free to try on personal projects.Monday, January 20th, 2025More NewsCheck out this free 2D Rim Light Tool for NukeCreate motion graphics in Nuke with the new Screen FX pluginMaster Cinematic Sand & Dust Simulations Using HoudiniGet the new free version of ZibraVDB for Unreal EngineChaos releases V-Ray 7 for Cinema 4DThese simple free tools convert Maya shaders to BlenderGet 75+ free modular shop assets for Unreal EngineAdobe releases Substance 3D Designer 14.1Adobe unveils Live Co-Editing in PhotoshopFree tool: Hair Cinematic Tool for Unreal Engine 5Master World Building using Blender and PhotoshopGet 6 free smoke and fire effects sequences from FX BackPackOlder Posts

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Fortnite reclaims top spot on revenue and engagement charts for December 2024 | Newzoo ChartsIndiana Jones and the Great Circle made the MAU Top 20 charts with boost from Day One release on Xbox Game PassImage credit: Epic Games News by Sophie McEvoy Staff Writer Published on Jan. 22, 2025 Fortnite reclaimed the top spot on Newzoo's overall revenue and engagement charts for December.Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2/3/Warzone/Black Ops 6 was pushed down to No.3 on the revenue charts and No.4 for monthly active users.Focusing on the revenue charts, Path of Exile 3 came in at No.5 during its launch month followed by fellow newcomer Marvel Rivals at No.6.A trio of RPGs returned to the Top 20 following holiday discounts, with Hogwarts Legacy at No.13, Cyberpunk 2077 at No.17, and Baldur's Gate 3 at No.19.On the individual platform charts, Indiana Jones and Great Circle launched at No.10 PC and No.13 on Xbox. Gran Turismo 7 rose from No.39 to No.14 on PlayStation following its 25th anniversary celebrations.As for player engagement, Marvel Rivals settled in third place after displacing other popular live-service titles. Overwatch 2 saw the biggest drop in terms of MAU, falling from No.9 to No.12.Indiana Jones and the Great Circle settled at No.17 despite not being available on PlayStation. Newzoo attributed this boost in engagement to the game being a Day One release on Xbox Game Pass.Here are the Top 20 games by revenue in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy for December 2024, across PC and consoles, according to Newzoo:RankLast month RankTitle12Fortnite23EA Sports FC 2531Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, 3, Warzone, and Black Ops 644NBA 2K255N/APath of Exile 26N/AMarvel Rivals77League of Legends816Grand Theft Auto 596The Sims 41015EA Sports College Football 251111EA Sports Madden NFL 251212Minecraft1321Hogwarts Legacy1425Roblox158Valorant1614Super Mario Party Jamboree1727Cyberpunk 20771813World of Warcraft1923Baldur's Gate 32018Counter-Strike 2 & GoAnd here are the Top 20 games by monthly active users across US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy for December 2024, across PC and consoles, according to Newzoo:RankLast month RankTitle11Fortnite22Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, 3, and Warzone 2.03N/AMarvel Rivals45Grand Theft Auto 553Minecraft64Roblox76Rocket League87EA Sports FC 2598Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege1010EA Sports College Football 251111EA Sports FC 24129Overwatch 1 & 21312Counter-Strike 2 & Go1415NBA 2K251513The Sims 41614Apex Legends17N/AIndiana Jones and the Great Circle1820Valorant1913Red Dead Redemption 22019Fall Guys

If youre spending more time indoors to escape the icy winds or need something impressive to enjoy the Super Bowl, a new TV might be in order. Although its a couple of years old now, the LG C3Amazon and Walmart. Theyre selling the 65-inch model for $1,196.99 ($302 off), which is matching its all-time low price.RelatedThe LG C3 offers a great picture quality with vivid color, no light blooming or bleeding, and deep, inky black levels for a practically infinite contrast ratio. If you somehow havent seen how good an OLED panel can look yet, then a trip to Best Buy is in order. It appeases most home theater and gaming needs with a 120Hz variable refresh rate and auto low-latency mode across all four of its HDMI ports, Dolby Vision and HDR 10 Plus, Dolby Atmos audio, and an incredible upscaling engine that can make older content look fantastically sharp. Youre not missing out on much by skipping the LG C4, either, and the incoming C5 may not have enough to justify waiting and paying significantly more. LG advertises a substantial brightness boost in the newer models, but in reality, the C4s panel doesnt blow the C3 out of the water. The C4 is also capable of a higher 144Hz refresh rate, though thats a largely discernible jump thats only relevant for PC gamers. Both run webOS, which offers a deep selection of apps for gaming, music, and video with voice-activated content discovery.LG C3$1197$150020% off$1197$1197$150020% offThe LG C3 offers more processing power than its predecessor and several new picture modes. It continues to offer a 120Hz refresh rate and low input lag as well, along with support for Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync variable refresh rate tech.$1197 at Amazon$1197 at WalmartMore ways to saveCostco members can pick up the Insta360 X4 adventure bundle for $429.99 ($7 off) at Costco. The waterproof 8K action camera comes with two batteries, a 114cm selfie stick that Insta360s software can automatically remove from your footage, and a 256GB V30 microSD card. You can shoot up to 30 frames per second at its max resolution, or step down to 5.7K for up to 60 frames per second and 4K at 100 frames per second all decent improvements over the X3. Another new feature is a detachable lens guard to protect the glass element, one that doesnt noticeably impact your image quality when shooting in 360 mode.The CMF Buds from Nothings affordability-focused sister brand are already a ridiculous bargain, but Amazon is discounting select colors to an even better $27 ($12 off). The IP54 wireless earbuds support active noise cancellation that can reduce up to 42dB of noise and have four noise-filtering mics to help with call quality. Theyll last up to eight hours per charge with a total 35.5 hours available with the case, and they have Bluetooth 5.3 with Google Fast Pair support. You can customize them in Nothings companion app, too, allowing you to change gesture behaviors and tweak audio modes.If you need a really good Android phone thatll get major software updates for more than half a decade, you should start with the Google Pixel 8A. You can get the 128GB model for $399 ($100 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, and the Google Store right now. Its using Googles Tensor G3 processor, which supports computational photography and other AI features being baked into Android. The phone also has a 120Hz display, Qi wireless charging, and a decent camera thats not quite as nice as those on its flagship counterparts but still capable of impressive results. Read our review.

YouTube Premium users are getting a slew of new experiments to try out before anyone else alongside an option to reduce their membership cost when bundling subscriptions. Subscribers can now also sign up to test multiple experimental features all at once, instead of being limited to just one at a time.There are several new experiments that users can try out, including 256kbps bitrate audio quality on videos, and options for iOS users to view YouTube shorts in picture-in-picture mode and automatically download recommended Shorts for offline viewing. The AI-powered skipping feature that allows users to jump right to the most-watched part of a video is also available on web browsers after initially being introduced for mobile devices last year.These will eventually be joined by expanded playback options for mobile devices that can increase video speed by up to four times. YouTube hasnt mentioned when this experimental feature will be available, however, only that its coming soon.YouTube is also rolling out a deal that makes YouTube Premium a smidge cheaper when you purchase it as a bundle with Googles cloud storage. The offer is eligible on Google One Premium plans (which start at $9.99 per month for 2TB) or higher, but youll only save $2 per month on YouTube Premium bringing the price back to 2023 levels.

SDL 3 Released / News / January 22, 2025 / SDL, or the Simple DirectMedia Layer is one of the most important open-source game development frameworks and they just released SDL 3. Well technically its SDL 3.2.0, but it is the first production ready version of the SDL 3 branch. Key features of SDL 3 include:Extremely good documentation: Weve spent a ton of effort writing and revising the API reference.Example programsto get you started,running in your web browser!More consistent API naming conventions. Everything is named consistently across the API now, instead of different subsystems taking different approaches. Also, weve tended toward more descriptive names for things in SDL3.Main Callbacks: optionally run your program from callbacks instead of main().GPU API: access to modern 3D rendering and GPU compute in a cross-platform way.Dialog API: access to system file dialogs (file and folder selection UI for opening/saving).Filesystem API: simple directory management and globbing, access to topic-specific user folders.Storage API: Abstract interface to platform-specific storage.Camera API: access to webcams.Pen API: access to pens (like Wacom tablets and Apple Pencil, etc).Logical audio devices: different parts of an app can get their own unique audio device to use.Audio streams: handle buffering, converting, resampling, mixing, channel mapping, pitch, and gain. Bind to an audio device and go!Default audio devices: SDL3 will automatically manage migrating to new physical hardware as devices are plugged in, ripped out, or changed.Properties API: fast, flexible dictionaries of name/value pairs.Process API: Spawn child processes and communicate with them in various ways.Colorspace support: Surfaces and the renderer, etc, can manage multiple colorspaces.The Clipboard APIcan support any data type(SDL2 only handled text), and apps can provide data in multiple formats upon request ina provided callback.Better keyboard input, for all your keypress needs.Customizable virtual keyboardson iOS and Android.High DPI support is dramatically improved over SDL2.App metadata APIfor letting SDL report things about your app correctly (like in the About dialog on macOS, etc).and much, much more.If you are migrating from SDL 2 be sure to check out the migration guide linked below. Key LinksSDL 3.2.0 Release DetailsSDL HomepageSDL 3 Language BindingsSDL 3 Migration GuideSteam Games using SDLYou can learn more about the Simple DirectMedia Layer game development framework as well as the SDL 3 (technically 3.2.0) release in the video below.

Out of the various methods employed in document search systems, retrieve and rank has gained quite some popularity. Using this method, the results of a retrieval model are re-ordered according to a re-ranker. Additionally, in the wake of advancements in generative AI and the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), rankers are now capable of performing listwise reranking tasks after analyzing complex patterns in language. However, a crucial problem exists that appears trivial but limits the overall effectiveness of these cascading systems.The challenge of the bounded recall problem, where a document is irrevocably excluded from the final ranked list if it wasnt retrieved in the initial phase, causes the loss of high-potential information. To solve this problem, researchers came up with an adaptive retrieval process. Adaptive Retrieval (AR) differentiates itself from previous works by leveraging the rankers assessments to expand the retrieval set dynamically. A clustering hypothesis is applied in this process to group similar documents that may be relevant to a query. Adaptive Retrieval (AR) could be better understood as a pseudo-relevance feedback mechanism that enhances the likelihood of including pertinent documents that may have been omitted during the initial retrieval.Although AR serves as a robust solution in cascading systems, contemporary work in this vertical operates under the assumption that the relevance score depends only on the document and query, implying that one documents score is computed independently of others. On the other hand, LLM-based ranking methods use signals from the entire ranked list to determine relevance. This article discusses the latest research that merges the benefits of LLMs with AR.Researchers from the L3S Research Center, Germany, and the University of Glasgow have put forth SlideGar: Sliding Window-based Adaptive Retrieval to integrate AR with LLMs while accounting for the fundamental differences between their pointwise and listwise approaches. SlideGar modifies AR such that the resulting ranking function outputs a ranked order of documents rather than discrete relevance scores. The proposed algorithm merges results from the initial ranking with feedback documents provided by the most relevant documents identified up to that point.The SlideGar algorithm utilizes AR methods like graph-based adaptive retrieval (Gar) and query affinity modeling-based adaptive retrieval (Quam) to find document neighbors in a constant amount of time. For LLM ranking, the authors employ a sliding window to overcome the constraint of input context. SlideGar processes the initial pool of documents given by the retriever for a specific query and, for a predefined length and step size, ranks the top w documents from left to right using a listwise ranker. These documents are then removed from the pool. The authors used the reciprocal of the rank as a pseudo-score for the documents.The authors employed the MSMARCO corpus data for practical purposes and evaluated its performance on REC Deep Learning 2019 and 2020 query sets. They also used the latest versions of these datasets and de-duplicated them to remove redundancies. A variety of sparse and dense retrievers were utilized. For rankers, the authors employed different listwise rankers, including both zero-shot and fine-tuned models. The authors leveraged the open-source Python library, ReRankers, to apply these listwise re-rankers.After conducting an extensive set of experiments across diverse LLM re-rankers, first-stage retrievers, and feedback documents, the authors ascertained that SlideGar improved the nDGC@10 score by up to 13% and recall by 28%, with a constant number of LLM inferences over the SOTA listwise rankers. Furthermore, regarding computation, the authors discovered that the proposed method adds negligible latency (a mere 0.02%).Conclusion: In this research paper, the authors propose a new algorithm, SlideGar, that allows LLM re-rankers to address the challenge of bounded recall in retrieval. SlideGar merges the functionalities of AR and LLM re-rankers to complement each other. This work paves the way for researchers to further explore and adapt LLMs for ranking purposes.Check out the Paper. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our65k+ ML SubReddit. Adeeba Alam Ansari+ postsAdeeba Alam Ansari is currently pursuing her Dual Degree at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, earning a B.Tech in Industrial Engineering and an M.Tech in Financial Engineering. With a keen interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, she is an avid reader and an inquisitive individual. Adeeba firmly believes in the power of technology to empower society and promote welfare through innovative solutions driven by empathy and a deep understanding of real-world challenges. Meet 'Height':The only autonomous project management tool (Sponsored)