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A Redditor going by u/LittleBanditReddit walked into a local Goodwill and picked up a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti for two dollars. Not two hundred, not twenty. Just two.

The card was apparently just about to be placed on the shelf by staff, and the buyer grabbed it before anyone else noticed. Back home, the GPU booted up fine and ran Cyberpunk 2077 at roughly 30 FPS at 1080p with FSR set to Balanced. For a card that launched back in 2016, that is a fairly solid result on a modern game nearly a decade later.

Finding a working GPU at a thrift store for pocket change is rare enough that it tends to go viral every time it happens. Earlier this year, one gamer walked away with a GeForce RTX 3060 12GB for five dollars, and stories like these keep popping up as more people realize old office and gaming PCs often get donated with the graphics card still inside.

At a time when the memory crisis is squeezing hardware manufacturers across the industry, companies are finding it difficult to reassure buyers and investors. Sony, at least, has confirmed that it has secured enough memory to meet its PS5 sales targets through March 2027. The confirmation came in Sony's Q1 FY26 earnings report, alongside a set of results that paint a complicated picture for PlayStation.

"Regarding the impact of memory market conditions on PlayStation 5 hardware, we have secured the quantity of memory necessary to meet our projected sales volume for FY26, and there is no change to our plan for hardware profitability for FY26 to remain similar to FY25," the company stated.

The wording also suggests that no further PS5 price increases are likely before March 2027. The PS5 has already seen significant price hikes this year, with the base model now sitting at $599.99, a $200 increase over its launch price nearly six years ago. Microsoft is raising Xbox prices again in August, Nintendo is implementing global price increases in September, and NVIDIA GPUs are reportedly facing another hike of up to 30% as AI hardware demand continues to pull memory supply away from consumer products.

Reddit is building a new video experience that would let users watch and listen to viral posts directly on the platform. CEO Steve Huffman revealed during the company's Q2 2026 earnings call that testing is expected to begin before the end of the year.

The feature is a direct response to a format that has been making Reddit's content enormously popular on other platforms for years. On TikTok alone, there are 19.6 million posts tagged with #reddit and another 9.9 million under #redditstories. The format is now its own distinct genre, featuring a text-to-speech narration of a viral Reddit post, usually from communities like r/AmITheAsshole or r/relationships, played over unrelated background footage like Minecraft parkour or cooking videos.

"There is an emerging content type elsewhere on the internet of, basically, podcasts where people read Reddit content," Huffman told investors. "I think this version of, like, listened-to or spoken Reddit can be really engaging, as well. So that would be almost a different format entirely."

Seagate has outlined its roadmap for 50TB hard drives during its Q4 fiscal 2026 earnings call. The company confirmed the drives are on track for customer qualification shipments in late 2027, with broader availability expected in 2028. The announcement came alongside strong financial results, with the company posting $3.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 48% year over year, driven almost entirely by AI data centre and cloud storage demand.

The 50TB drives will be based on Mozaic 5, the third generation of Seagate's HAMR platform, which enables platters with more than 5TB of capacity each. Seagate's flagship drives use ten platters, putting a 50TB drive well within reach once that density threshold is crossed.

CEO Dave Mosley confirmed Mozaic 5 remains on track for qualification shipments in late 2027. The current Mozaic 4+ platform already supports drives up to 44TB, and Seagate expects Mozaic 4+ to account for 50% of its HAMR exabytes shipped by the end of 2026.

MSI has added a new BIOS feature to its AMD AM5 motherboards called High-Efficiency Mode, and the motherboard manufacturer arguably couldn't have picked a better time. With EXPO ULL memory kits carrying premiums of up to 79% over standard EXPO kits, MSI is offering users a way to get close to ULL-level memory latency without having to buy new memory.

The feature works by automatically tightening secondary and tertiary memory subtimings on standard DDR5 kits. EXPO ULL profiles use the same approach when factory-validated on compatible modules. MSI tested the feature on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with an MSI B850MPOWER, comparing a standard DDR5-6000 CL30 kit against a G.Skill EXPO ULL kit with the same primary timings.

The standard kit measured 79.4ns of latency in AIDA64 with High-Efficiency Mode disabled. Enabling the Tightest preset brought that down to 71.6ns, while the EXPO ULL kit measured 71.4ns with its factory profile in the same system. That puts just 0.2ns between a standard kit with a BIOS toggle and a kit designed specifically for low latency.

Keychron has announced ZGM, an open-source gaming mouse firmware project that aims to do for mice what QMK and ZMK did for mechanical keyboards by turning closed hardware into something enthusiasts can actually tinker with. The company plans to launch ZGM in Q1 2027, with its upcoming G6 HE wireless gaming mouse set to be the first product to ship with the firmware.

"Every gaming mouse on the market runs firmware you can't read, can't audit, can't change," Keychron wrote in its announcement on X. "So we built it ourselves." Gaming mice have historically been black boxes, with sensor tuning, polling behaviour, and click processing all locked behind manufacturer firmware that users have no way to inspect or modify.

ZGM is built on Zephyr RTOS, the same real-time operating system that underpins ZMK, a popular open-source keyboard firmware. The architecture is designed to be modular, meaning sensors, buttons, scroll wheels, and lighting drivers are decoupled layers that can be swapped or extended without rewriting the firmware from scratch.

We recently covered how Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey sent gamers back to Assassin's Creed Odyssey using Steam numbers alone, and now a new analysis backs that up across every platform.

Games analytics firm Alinea Analytics has published harder numbers on just how big this moment has been, and they go well beyond the movie alone. Combined daily active users for Odyssey across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation sat around 122,000 on July 17, the day Nolan's film hit cinemas. Ten days later, that number climbed to 233,000, a staggering 90% jump.

Xbox saw the wildest swing, up 134% to 84,000 daily players, while PlayStation nearly doubled to 114,000. Steam, by comparison, only grew 26%, which tracks given Odyssey isn't sitting on a Steam subscription the way it is on Game Pass and PS Plus. That also lines up with our rough Steam concurrent player numbers from earlier.

AMD is reportedly moving ahead with a fresh round of Radeon price increases, with board partners now being told to expect a jump of at least 10% starting in August. According to Chinese industry source Board Channels, cited by VideoCardz, AMD has sent official notice to its add-in board (AIB) partners confirming the increase on GPU and memory kits.

The GPU kit is the bundled package that pairs a Radeon GPU die with its VRAM memory allocation before shipping to partners like ASUS, PowerColor, and Sapphire. It's worth separating this price increase from the Radeon price hike chatter from earlier in July. This latest notification is a fresh confirmation, and apparently ties back to the plan AMD finalized last month but chose not to implement right away. It is apparently part of the 10-15% price hike AMD flagged for the second half of 2026.

Interestingly, the reporting suggests AMD sat on this decision deliberately, waiting to see what NVIDIA would do first. NVIDIA has already been raising GeForce kit prices for its own AIB partners in recent weeks, and now that Team Green has made its move, AMD appears ready to follow with its own increase. We have been seeing this hide-and-seek pattern all year between the two GPU manufacturers.

Stripped graphics cards keep turning up in secondhand listings, and the latest one is an MSI GeForce RTX 4080 that a Reddit user picked up locally for just $200. Once he cracked the shroud off, the PCB underneath was essentially empty. It had no GPU die, no VRAM chips, nothing but the power delivery components still soldered in place.

The post landed in r/LinusTechTips, and the photos show a graphics card that looks convincing from the outside. The heatsink, thermal pads, and backplate all appear intact, which is exactly the kind of detail that makes this dangerous for anyone shopping for a used GPU right now. An RTX 4080 still sells for close to $1,000 on the open market, so a card missing its two most expensive components is basically a paperweight.

At first glance, this looks like it lines up with a trend we have tracked all year. Memory prices have climbed steadily through 2026 as the wider shortage tightens supply everywhere, and both NVIDIA and AMD have pointed to VRAM cost as a reason for raising GPU prices.

If you're worried about graphics cards getting hit by further price hikes, it seems those fears might be justified, as a new report indicates that NVIDIA is increasing its pricing considerably - and it's backed up by a second rumor that comes via YouTube.

The first report is from the Economic Daily in Taiwan (as spotted by Eurogamer), which cites a BenchLife report, and a claim that NVIDIA has just bumped up the price of its graphics cards by about 20% to 30%, which is a big leap.

It's noted that this follows two previous price hikes this year, one of which happened at the very start of 2026, and another which followed in May (just two months back). The latter increased the (now astronomical) price of the RTX 5090 only, but this time around, the rest of the Blackwell line-up is being repriced in an upward direction.

An initial review of AMD's new RX 9050 has popped up and the GPU doesn't fare that well in comparison to NVIDIA's RTX 5050, at least not at first glance - although there are issues with this evaluation as we'll see.

The RX 9050 has just arrived on the scene, and the 8GB graphics card has been tested by Japanese tech site Hermitage Akihabara (as flagged by VideoCardz).

Hermitage Akihabara put these AMD and NVIDIA GPUs through their paces in a head-to-head, comparing synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks across a raft of titles.

Sony will not change its mind and reverse its decision to phase out PlayStation game disc production for new software released after January 2028.

Sony management was asked about its controversial decision to start phasing out physical game discs at the company's recent Q1'26 earnings call. Sony CFO Lin Tao confirmed that the group will go forward with its plans "cautiously" while also considering the thoughts and feelings of the PlayStation community.

In the call, Tao makes the point that digital's predominance has been building over time, especially on PlayStation where, on a software revenue basis, physical made just 8.9% of total Q1 SW revenues (when isolating physical, digital, and other software), whereas digital made the remaining 91.1%.

Around a week ago, we heard rumors that NVIDIA was planning to increase the price of its GeForce GPU bundles, which pair RTX chips with GDDR6 or GDDR7 memory. This week we've got more information on this rumored price increase, which would be what NVIDIA partners like ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, and others pay for GeForce RTX hardware.

According to a new report from Taiwanese outlet Economic Daily News, the price increase will see NVIDIA raise prices for all GeForce GPU bundles by 20 to 30%. This isn't the first increase of its kind this year; this up to 30% price hike would be the third for NVIDIA. OF course, NVIDIA isn't alone, as the DRAM crisis has also seen companies like AMD and Intel pay a lot more for GPU memory for their consumer graphics card products.

Based on this information, it seems that this price increase is already taking hold in China. As reported earlier this week, cards from partners like Colorful are now selling at prices 60% higher than their original MSRPs, with MSI's line-up of GeForce RTX 50 Series cards having seen their prices increase by 20% in the past week alone.

For its next-generation 1.4nm process, TSMC is currently constructing a new 1.4nm advanced process plant as part of the company's expansion. According to a new report via Taiwan's Commercial Times, construction of this new plant is currently ahead of schedule, with the first manufacturing phase of the expansion set to be completed by April 2027.

Of course, this doesn't mean that production for TSMC's 1.4nm process or A14 node will commence right away, but if the April 2027 timeline holds, the first trial production run could kick off as early as Q3 2027. Again, assuming there aren't any unforeseen delays or hiccups, this would then lead to mass production beginning by mid-2028.

Located in the Taichung Phase II Park of the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP), the location's Administration Director Hsu Mao-hsin has confirmed that the faster-than-expected progress included the use of AI for image recognition and the development of safety systems, with VR simulations also leveraged for safety training for the cutting-edge facility.

Blizzard has given Diablo 4 players their first look at Season 15, and a lot is coming, including the return of some iconic items from Diablo's past. Called Legacy Uniques, they draw from the original Diablo, Diablo 2, and Diablo 3, with ten new items in total.

With five available to all classes and five available to a mix of classes, Diablo fans will definitely recognize a few of these items and their powers. The Stone of Jordan ring, an iconic item from Diablo 2, is making a return. As is Diablo 3's Leoric's Crown, which will feature a similar power that will enhance the effect of any gem socketed into the helm.

Other iconic items making a return include Messerschmidt's Reaver, a two-handed axe from Diablo 2; The Furnace, which is a powerful two-handed mace from Diablo 3; and Hyperion Spear, another powerful two-hander from Diablo 2. One of the more fun blasts from the past Legacy Uniques coming to Diablo 4 is Nemesis Bracers, gloves that spawn Elites just like they did in Diablo 3.

Razer has announced a pair of new keyboards for competitive gamers with the new Razer Huntsman V3 HE Magnetic 8KHz lineup. With customizable Hall Effect (HE) magnetic switches and 8000 Hz HyperPolling, the new Huntsman V3 HE keyboards are available in two form factors, TKL and compact Mini 65%.

Both are powered by custom Razer Hall Effect Magnetic Switches, which seem to be different from the Razer Analog Optical Switches Gen-2 that powered the recent Razer Huntsman V3 Pro TKL 8K. That said, overall performance looks to be similar for these more affordable gaming-focused options, with adjustable actuation from 0.1 to 4.0 mm, a 100-million keystroke lifespan, and 8000 Hz HyperPolling that Razer notes delivers competitive 0.60ms average latency.

Although they might lack the media buttons, control dial, and wrist rest of the Pro option, these new Razer Huntsman V3 HE Magnetic options are all about delivering the "absolute best in esports performance."

The future of Xbox will be determined by four C's: Core, content, creation, connection.

With FY26 now closed and the games division seeing a -$1.7 billion drop in revenue and the worst annual console earnings in over a decade, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has outlined her plans for what's next for the games division.

In a memo acquired by The Verge, Sharma's strategy centers around four key concepts.

A proposed Linux kernel patch could reduce frame hitches on the Steam Deck and other AMD-based gaming hardware running Linux. In early testing using Civilization VI's benchmark, the patch improved 1% low frame rates by 31.8% and frame generation times at the 99th percentile by 4.1%, without affecting average FPS at all.

The patch comes from David Vernet, a Linux kernel developer at Meta, and targets a specific inefficiency in how AMD's P-State driver handles EPP mode during gaming workloads. When a game's main or render thread pauses briefly while waiting for the GPU, the current driver can misread that short sleep as reduced CPU demand and begin lowering the core's clock speed. When the thread wakes up, it starts back at a lower frequency than it actually needs, causing momentary frame time inflation that shows up as stutters and 1% low spikes.

Switching the processor to full performance mode eliminates the issue. Still, it kills the power efficiency that EPP mode is designed to provide, which is concerning on a handheld where the CPU and GPU share a power budget. Simply raising the minimum performance target permanently also backfires by interfering with the shared CPU and GPU boost management on Steam Deck hardware.

One word that every PC gamer who has spent enough time browsing Reddit threads or YouTube tutorials eventually runs into is "modding." As synonymous as it has become with PC gaming, installing mods is rarely the simple drag-and-drop experience you'd hope for. Nexus Mods' new owner, Victor Foledinho Folmann, has outlined an ambitious plan to fundamentally change how mods are built, shared, and installed on the platform.

"For going on 25 years now, this platform has been modeling mods as files," Folmann wrote. "Mods are not files. Mods are systems. With dependencies, with conflicts, with load orders, with versioning, with environments, all that complexity. Everything that has been making you angry over the years can be attributed to one factor: the platform models your mods as files."

The plan is to fix that at the infrastructure level. Rather than leaving users to manually manage dependencies, resolve conflicts, and spend hours on Reddit hunting for why a Skyrim mod refuses to load, Nexus Mods wants to handle those difficult parts itself. The goal is for a mod to be a repeatable, reliable experience for everyone who installs it, not just the person who made it.

Despite reports to the contrary, BioWare's co-founder believes the studio could technically bring Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age II back for a remastered duology...but it wouldn't be easy.

Following the reception of Veilguard, EA seems unlikely to resurrect the Dragon Age franchise any time soon, but former BioWare dev and executive producer Mark Darrah says EA probably couldn't do it even if they wanted to. The reason? No one currently at BioWare has enough experience with Dragon Age's old Aurora-based Eclipse Engine to make the project actually happen.

However, BioWare co-founder Trent Oster is optimistic on Dragon Age remasters. "I've seen a fair bit of chatter about the impossibility of remastering Dragon Age. I like to think of myself as someone who talks a bit, but more often lets my work speak for me. In my opinion, it is possible, but by no means a trivial exercise," Oster said on Twitter.