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19 Aug 2025

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Transport agency disputes 'systemic failure' led to Johnathon Walters' death
It says it was an individual's actions that caused the death.

Tongan language is at the heart of its people's identity - academic
Tongan Language Week is being celebrated in Aotearoa this week under the theme, 'Our language is a vital strand of our Tongan culture'.

Star midfielder returns to All Whites after six-year hiatus
Ryan Thomas has been named in Darren Bazeley’s 23-man squad for next month’s Soccer Ashes friendlies against Australia’s Socceroos.

‘Abhorrent’: Rugby player cops 32-week ban for telling female referee to ‘get your baps out’
The referee described how she had been “shocked” and how her parents, who were among the crowd and heard the remarks, were “heartbroken and angry”.

Murder, they travelled: Why TV fans are flocking to this small Kiwi suburb
Brokenwood — though not a place in reality — has certainly become a destination.

Marsden Fund says it was given only a day's notice of further funding cuts
The Marsden Fund, which backs fundamental research is among three contestable funds to lose millions to help set up the new Institute for Advanced Technology.

Thinking about solar? Here are questions to ask
The first step is making sure your roof is suitable, says the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority.

SONAR releases “Blue to Blue” app to keep your trucks running in the best lanes

Oracle’s Longtime Security Chief Leaves in Reorganization

Clean energy investors relieved by Trump tax rule changes

US court reopens Citgo parent auction for bids, winner to be recommended this month

How to tell if you have a ‘dopamine deficit’ and what you can do to reset
Maybe you'd like to spend time on hobbies or hang out with friends, but nothing feels as exciting as it used to - so you squander another hour on social media.

Samoa general election: 187 candidates vying for 50 seats
Samoans head to the polls on 29 August.

‘Leaks', 'mould' and sewage: The kura in Christchurch still waiting for permanent site
Christchurch's first kura-a-iwi has spent a decade in old, decrepit buildings, the school's leadership feels frustrated at the lack of progress, and says their success is being dismissed.

Stainless steel, cast iron, or non-stick? Choosing the best cookware surface
Whether you're starting from scratch or looking to upgrade or replace cookware, you might be wondering what surface is best.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now adds killer upgrades: RTX 5080, DIY game installs
Nvidia’s GeForce Now service is offering its Ultimate tier subscribers an enormous upgrade today: GeForce RTX 5080 servers, cinematic visual upgrades, and a new “install to play” service that will “download” new games directly to the cloud, making them instantly ready to play. Nvidia is leaving the price of the GeForce Now Ultimate tier unchanged at $19.99 per month, and $99.99 for six months, Nvidia said at the Gamescom show. Nvidia is also adding an annual GeForce Now Ultimate subscription for $199.99. A GeForce Now Ultimate daily membership will be available at launch, Nvidia said, presumably for the current price of $7.99. Session lengths will remain at eight hours for Ultimate subscribers. The point of Nvidia’s GeForce Now service has always been to deliver a cloud gaming experience that’s as close as possible to what a gamer would experience on a PC. The price of graphics cards, of course, has climbed to astronomical heights, making GeForce Now a way of partially offsetting the hundreds of dollars a gamer would need to shell out for the latest RTX 4000 or 5000 series cards. Of course, playing a game in the cloud has traditionally meant forcing certain restrictions upon the subscriber: a limited resolution and image quality to minimize the amount of data sent back and forth over a broadband connection, and some level of latency or delay between a user’s input and a corresponding response from the game running on the server. Nvidia’s GeForce Now upgrades attack all of those angles to improve the experience. Nvidia’s new GeForce Now upgrade offers an RTX 5080 performance upgrade, but only on some games. Naturally, the most high-profile upgrade is the jump from the current RTX 4080 servers to the new RTX 5080 servers powered by Nvidia’s “Blackwell” architecture. Those come with all the bells and whistles you might expect from an RTX 5080 card, including DLSS 4 multi-frame generation that enables 5K resolution at 120 fps, and Nvidia Reflex technology with support for 360 fps at 1080p resolutions. Nvidia’s saying that if you’re in a GeForce Now-supported region, the “majority” of gamers will experience sub-30-millisecond latency. There’s a catch, however. Nvidia isn’t saying that all of its games will be playable on its Nvidia 5080 “Blackwell” servers, just that “you’ll be able to play select games with RTX 5080 performance.” Additional 5080-supported games will roll out weekly, Nvidia said. Nvidia isn’t saying exactly which CPUs will be used to power its new GeForce Now servers, but did say that they’ll be driven by AMD’s “Zen 5 CPUs” and Nvidia’s own ConnectX-7 SmartNICs. Currently, the Ultimate tier offers 16 virtual CPUs, and presumably that will remain the same. All told, there are 62 teraflops of gaming performance and 48GB of frame buffer available, with up to 100Mbps of data streamed down to your PC. That will boost performance on the Steam Deck from 60 to 90 fps, Nvidia said, and to 120 fps on the Lenovo Legion Go S. LG TVs will be able to game at 5120×2880 when connected to Windows or a macOS device — yes, macOS. The GeForce Now client on macOS will receive the same upgrades as the Windows app, finally turning Cupertino’s hardware into a gaming machine. Nvidia is also thinking about how games will actually look on your screen, too. If you game on a laptop, Nvidia will auto-detect what resolution it can game at, and will deliver you the best visual quality it thinks you can stand. GeForce Now will use YUV color with 4:4:4 chroma sampling to make games look great, tapping into AI where necessary to smooth graphical overlays. You’re going to like Nvidia’s new “install to play” One of the most exciting upgrades, however, is a not-so-obvious one: install-to-play. The legacy GeForce Now service required you to own a game, then “load” it onto one of Nvidia’s cloud servers. After you finished playing, however, those server resources would be reassigned to other users, instead of maintaining a persistent server dedicated to your gameplay alone. That meant a small delay while your game once again “loaded” onto a GeForce Now server. Now, that’s changed. Nvidia is assigning 100GB of dedicated cloud storage to each GeForce Now Ultimate subscriber, meaning that one or a few games will always be instantly available to play, including saved data. You’ll also be able to buy additional storage for 200GB for $2.99 per month, 500GB for $4.99 per month, and 1TB for $7.99 per month. Users who subscribe to the cheaper performance tier will also receive the install-to-play storage options, too. All told, the upgrade adds about 2,200 install-to-play games to the existing GeForce Now streaming library, for a total of about 4,500 or slightly more. They will include games like Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds 2, the Paradox sequel Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2, or Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 from Activision. Nvidia believes that you’ll get better performance streaming its games than with a PlayStation 5 Pro. Finally, Nvidia is offering more click-to-play options to try out GeForce Now. For example, if your buddy wants you to drop in and play Fortnite, they’ll be able to drop a “link” right in Discord. As long as you have an Epic gamertag set up, you’ll be able to jump right in — even if you’re on your ancient office desktop without a GPU installed. Nvidia also said that it’s “lightening” its Project G-Assist AI app, allowing it to be played on all RTX-equipped PCs with more than 6GB of VRAM.