Check out these latest hardware announcements for today from around the web. Also included are some hardware news bits, and on some days, a few rumors tossed in for good measure. Click on the links below to read the official press release, visit the products web page, or to an independent news source.

• NVIDIA Lowers RTX 2060 Pricing – AMD Reconfigures Radeon RX 5600 XT
• Cooler Master Redesigns its TIM Packaging so Parents Don’t Think Their Kids are Doing Drugs
• Ek Waterblocks Reveals Soft Tube Cutter and Hard Tube Bending Tool
• Abkoncore HELIOS 500G SYNC Middle Tower with Two 200mm ARGB Fans
• Sharkoon Announces Four New Gaming Products
• AOC Launches Two New VA Monitors Based on 2560×1440 (Quad HD) Resolution
• Palit Introduces the Triple Fan GeForce® RTX 2080 SUPER™/2070 SUPER™ GP Series
• BIOSTAR Introduces 4 Top Picks for Your New PC Build In 2020
• Philips Launches New Over-Ear Wireless Active Noise Canceling Headphones

Source: TechPowerUp!

NVIDIA late Thursday released the GeForce 442.01 Hotfix driver. A hotfix driver is that which is pushed out to correct glaring bugs with the driver immediately, and tend to have much shorter change-logs than beta or WHQL releases. The driver fixes a bug with “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” streaming using StreamLabs OBS randomly stopping. Also fixed is a bug with “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Blood and Wine,” where a game-crash is observed in a specific cutscene. Lastly a minor stutter in SLI machines with G-Sync enabled has been fixed. The driver is otherwise identical to GeForce 441.87.

You can download the GeForce 442.01 Hotfix drivers via GeForce.com.

Ships deploy into World of Warships early access with new British Cruisers event bringing new Directives, British Tokens and Random Bundles 

The mighty Royal Navy has expanded in World of Warships today with the deployment of a new series of British heavy cruisers. The new ships come as part of a new British Cruisers event, introducing British Tokens, new Directives and Random Bundles, which is going live with today’s update 0.9.0.

Wargaming will also be celebrating the upcoming Lunar New Year with exciting new content, including new Pan-Asian ships, as well as rolling out a new season of Clan battles season in the later stages of the update cycle.

A new World of Warships update video can be viewed HERE.

The new British Cruisers event allows players to unlock four new heavy cruisers in Tiers V-VIII by spending British Tokens, a new temporary resource, to obtain random bundles in the Armory. The new ships are the Hawkins (Tier V), Devonshire (Tier VI), Surrey (Tier VII), Albemarle (Tier VIII) and come equipped with the regal Victorian White permanent camouflage.

The new British heavy cruisers come with a considerable amount of firepower which they utilize best at medium ranges. Also equipped with torpedoes, the cruisers’ survivability is considerable thanks to its strong armor distribution and effective Repair party. The British tokens may be obtained from Daily shipments or for completing Daily Missions and the four new Directives.

The second part of update 0.9.0 will bring Lunar New Year celebration to World of Warships with a theme from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. In celebration, three new Pan-Asian ships will be making their debut bringing with them unique commanders, flags, patches and permanent camouflages.

A select number of ships have been upgraded to premium status, allowing them to earn more credits for their owners once unlocked. These are the ARP Kongo, ARP Kirishima, ARP Haruna, ARP Hiei, ARP Myoko, ARP Nachi, ARP Ashigara, ARP Haguro and ARP Takao, as well as Southern Dragon and Eastern Dragon. Lastly, a new season of Clan battles will be introduced letting players take part in 7v7 battles on Tier X ships for the chance to win steel and other rewards.

Visit the official World of Warships website now for more game info and to sign up for World of Warships for free!

Source: Blue’s News

Infinity Ward announces that Season One for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is being extended until February 11th:

Over the next few weeks, a host of new items and challenges will arrive, including an in-game Challenge to earn the new Crossbow weapon, more remixed game modes, new playlists, and more in the Store to discover. To make room for all that activity, we are making a one-time extension of Season One – it’s now ending on February 11. During that time, there will be 2XP, 2X Weapon XP, and 2X Tier Progression to help you finish up your Officer Ranks and Tiers, and get you ready for an exciting Season Two.

By Krzysztof Hukalowicz @ Guru3D

Today, we are reviewing an AIO cooler from Arctic: the LIQUID FREEZER II 280. The series has been introduced on the 9th of December this year. Arctic is no “newbie” in the AIO segment of the market. It’s already been four years since they announced the Liquid Freezer I series. This time around, there’s no RGB either, and the system is still not expandable (similarly to most of the solutions on the market today), unlike the Alphacool Eisbaer 280 Extreme or Swiftech H240 X3 that we reviewed this year.

Read the Review Here

Source: TechPowerUp!

AMD has released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition. Version 20.1.2 beta is released to the main driver update channel, and adds support for the new Vulkan 1.2 graphics API. This is in comparison to the GeForce 441.99 drivers with Vulkan 1.2, which were released as a “developer beta.” In addition, the drivers add optimization for “Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot.” Among the two fixed issues with this releases are Unreal Engine 4 titles such as “KovaaK 2.0: The Meta,” “Tetris Effect” and “Snooker 19″ failing to launch with Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020; and a bug where single-display systems running Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards experience intermittent reboots when the system is left idle on the desktop.

The new Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.1.2 drivers are available online at the AMD driver download page.

ARMA 3′S NEW ‘OLD MAN’ SCENARIO TURNS THIS MILITARY SHOOTER INTO AN OPEN WORLD ADVENTURE

By Ian Boudreau @ Wargamer

Just before the holiday break, Bohemia Interactive dropped a bit of a bombshell on us: they were putting the beta version of the upcoming Old Man scenario for Arma 3 on the Steam Workshop for anyone to try out. Admittedly, I had not been paying a lot of attention to the latest in Arma news since Contact came out in the summer, so Old Man came as a complete surprise. And it’s continued to surprise me as I’ve played this huge scenario.

Old Man is a singleplayer scenario set on Tanoa, a fictional South Pacific island included with the Apex expansion. It pulls in elements of many of Arma 3′s other DLCs, but it’s doing something completely novel for an Arma 3 add-on. It feels somewhat surreal to say this, but some skunkworks project at Bohemia is creating the Arma 3 version of Far Cry, and it’s going to be free for all players (as long as you own Apex, that is).

Read on…

The shambling monstrosities at Rebellion have released a blood-curdling 101 Trailer for Zombie Army 4: Dead War, featuring over six minutes of brand new footage from the upcoming alternate history co-op shooter.

The 101 Trailer features tons of new reveals including never-before-seen enemies, special abilities, weapons, levels and locations, as well as the bigger and more challenging Horde Mode. It’s the perfect introduction to the undead-slaying madness of Zombie Army 4.

The trailer details the brand new story campaign for 1-4 players coming to Zombie Army 4, taking players to 1946 Italy and beyond. Despite the defeat of the undead Führer, his reanimated hordes continue to wreak havoc across Europe, and a sinister plan is lurking in the darkness…

The 101 Trailer also provides the lowdown on the game’s terrifying array of twisted enemies, deep player progression and customization systems, the enhanced X-Ray Kill Cam (now featuring dismemberment!) and more.

Zombie Army 4 launches on PS4, Xbox One and PC on February 4th.

More information and screenshots are available on the official Zombie Army 4: Dead War website.

This is the announcement you were all waiting for. Join us on Twitch on Monday January 20 for the announcement of the release date of Panzer Corps 2.

Shards, producer for the game, will be live in studio and showcase all the innovations in Panzer Corps 2, as well as answer all your questions. Live on Monday January 20 at 5 pm GMT on our Twitch channel.

Then, following our stream, at 6 pm GMT the strategy youtuber Pixelated Apollo will be streaming the single player campaign of Panzer Corps 2 for the first time ever. We will host him on our own channel, so you can just stay once our stream is over and watch a full scenario of Panzer Corps 2 in action.

Source: TechPowerUp!

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020.

Vulkan continues to evolve by listening to developer needs, shipping new functionality as extensions, and then consolidating extensions that receive positive developer feedback into a unified core API specification. Carefully selected API features are made optional to enable market-focused implementations. Many Vulkan 1.2 features were requested by developers to meet critical needs in their engines and applications, including: timeline semaphores for easily managed synchronization; a formal memory model to precisely define the semantics of synchronization and memory operations in different threads; descriptor indexing to enable reuse of descriptor layouts by multiple shaders; deeper support for shaders written in HLSL, and more.