Recorded just before they headed off to Taipei for the tech oasis that is Computex 2024, this week's episode of the TT Show sees Jak and Kosta discuss the latest news in gaming, tech, and science. Kicking off with Jak's impressions of Hellblade 2 (which he calls the best-looking game he's ever seen), the duo digs into Valve's next game - Deadlock.

Although it hasn't been officially announced, the next major release from the company behind Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Steam is significant news - even in leaked screenshot form. The game is described as a mix between the hero shooting of Overwatch and the MOBA lane-based gameplay of DOTA 2.

In the world of GPUs, AMD Anti-Lag 2 sees Team Red's latency reduction tech finally return after it was controversially disabled last year. This time, the tech requires game-specific integration, debuting in Counter-Strike 2 in Technical Preview form. In other Radeon news, FSR 3 Frame Generation makes its PS5 and Xbox Series X, bringing triple-digit performance to consoles.

Upgrading your computer can be an excellent way to enhance its performance and take full advantage of new features and improved security. For PC users looking to upgrade their operating system, Windows 11 Pro offers several benefits that can significantly elevate productivity and security. GoDeal24 is running a Mid-Year Big Sale where you can get the latest Windows OS at an attractive price. You can get Windows 11 Professional on sale for only $13.25 (reg. $199) from today.

Windows 11 Pro was upgraded with the hybrid working world in mind. It has new productivity, AI, and security features to help you do your best work. If you're an avid gamer, you'll appreciate DirectX 12 Ultimate, which improves the graphics of games to allow for a more immersive experience and 3D spatial sound, which makes the audio in whatever you're playing sound more realistic. Upgrading to Windows 11 Pro also means your system will continue to get future updates and features from MS, which Windows 10 won't get.

You can also snag a lifetime Microsoft Office Professional 2021 license for only $27.25 (reg. $299). That means you can create, organize, calculate, communicate, and more, all from this evergreen suite of apps for life, with no monthly subscription fees as you'd have with Microsoft 365. MS Office 2019 Professional is also at the lowest price this year - only $19.99 for lifetime use, which is great for those on a low budget. With your purchase, you'll get instant download and delivery of this suite on one PC, and lifetime updates are included.

AMD formally announced its next-generation Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPUs at Computex 2024 earlier this month, and the company is already optimizing and tweaking its 3D V-Cache driver.

This is getting us all excited about Ryzen 9000X3D processors, which will fight Intel directly with its upcoming Arrow Lake-S CPUs as the best gaming CPU on the market. In a post on X, leaker "harukaze5719" discovered AMD's new 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer driver.

AMD last updated the 3D V-Cache driver when it launched the Ryzen 7000X3D processors, and there's not much information on what the 3D V-Cache driver actually does. It was first released as a Windows 10 exclusive driver for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor, but it's also available with AMD's bigger Ryzen 7000X3D family of processors and works in Windows 11 with the 7000X3D series chips.

Project G-Assist was a surprise announcement from NVIDIA at Computex 2024. It is a new AI-powered digital assistant designed for PC gaming with a GeForce RTX graphics card - or what the company now calls an RTX AI PC. Like DLSS, it's a general LLM or AI model trained on a broad range of titles, and Project G-Assist is ready to be plugged into any existing or upcoming release.

Project G-Assist's capabilities and features blew us away when we got to participate in a live demo of the technology integrated into the popular survival game Ark: Survival Ascended with help from its developer, Studio Wildcard. One of Project G-Assist's key features is that it can analyze and see what's happening on the screen. Plus, it has real-time access to game-specific data.

Ark is a game full of dinosaurs, so a few of the first questions we asked were simple things like, "What's that dinosaur on the left there?" "What's the best weapon to take out that enemy, and where do I find it?" As a general model, Project G-Assist, as seen in this example, has access to up-to-date lore and various Ark knowledgebases and Wikis.

Game tech demos are usually created to showcase new rendering techniques, advanced animation, or stuff like real-time ray tracing. Even though NVIDIA and Inworld AI's Covert Protocol tech demo features an impressive-looking and lavish hotel lobby with detailed environments, ray tracing, and highly detailed character models, the visual fidelity is simply here to showcase a groundbreaking new bit of tech - digital humans that you can interact with.

NVIDIA first showcased Covert Protocol at GTX a few months ago. At Computex 2024 in Taipei, the company presented the same tech demo with AI digital humans powered by NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technologies running locally on a high-end GeForce RTX 4090 powered rig.

At the show, I had the chance to go hands-on with NVIDIA's impressive RTX AI technologies, and when it came to Covert Protocol, I was quietly blown away by the depth and breadth of its digital humans.

Samsung Electronics has unveiled its latest foundry innovations and outlined its vision for the "AI era" during its Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF) event, which it holds annually at its Device Solutions America HQ in San Jose, California, USA.

The theme was "Empowering the AI Revolution" to which Samsung reinforced its process technology roadmap, including two new cutting-edge nodes -- SF2Z and SF4U -- as well as its integrated Samsung AI Solutions platform that holds the "unique strengths" of its Foundry, Memory, and Advanced Package (AVP) businesses.

Dr. Siyoung Choi, President and Head of Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics, said: "At a time when numerous technologies are evolving around AI, the key to its implementation lies in high-performance, low-power semiconductors. Alongside our proven GAA process optimized for AI chips, we plan to introduce integrated, co-packaged optics (CPO) technology for high-speed, low-power data processing, providing our customers with the one-stop AI solutions they need to thrive in this transformative era".

TSMC is absolutely dominating, and we all know it. The big AI chip players are eating up its 3nm production into 2026, and now upstream IC design companies are reporting price increases.

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple, and Google are all working on getting chips made on TSMC's new 3nm process. Ctee reports that Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen4 processor is made on TSMC's new N3E process, and its quotation has increased by 25% compared to the previous generation, which Ctee reports "does not rule out subsequent price increases."

Another issue is that semiconductor competitor Samsung led the mass production of 3nm chips using the GAA (Gate All Around) process on June 22, but the first-gen N3 node "SF3E" was not successful at all. The yield rates of Samsung's in-house Exynos 2500 chips dropped, and Google Tensor processors are all made by Samsung. The current fourth-generation Tensor SoC uses Samsung's new 4nm process, but the rumored fifth-generation Tensor chip will switch to TSMC's new 3nm process.

The world of AI chips hasn't stopped, and won't stop, with advanced packaging production capacity in short supply.

TSMC's new CoWoS plant in Nanke Chiayi Park is entering the "environmental review stage," reports UDN, with TSMC now purchasing equipment to help speed up the construction of the new CoWoS advanced packaging facility. At the same time, the two new CoWoS advanced packaging factories were planned to be built in Nanke Chiayi Park, but they're "not enough," reports UDN.

TSMC reportedly sent personnel down to southern Taiwan to scout for land for a third CoWoS advanced packaging facility. UDN reports that the Chiayi County Government previously announced that TSMC's new advanced packaging plant will be located in Nanke Chiayi Park, covering an area of around 20 hectares. The first CoWoS advanced packaging plant was planned to take up around 12 hectares of space, will be completed by 2026, and will create 3000 jobs.

Reuters reports that Taiwanese chip design giant MediaTek is developing an Arm-based PC processor that will run Windows. " Three people familiar with the matter" say this.

We have been hearing whispers of MediaTek teaming with NVIDIA for a new Arm-based AI PC processor and comments from Dell CEO Michael Dell that we will see an NVIDIA-based processor released for a next-gen AI PC in 2025.

Microsoft also revealed its next-generation laptops with chips designed by Arm last month, its huge new Copilot+ PC push, and the huge relationship with Qualcomm and its Arm-based Snapdragon X series of processors that are inside Copilot+ PC systems running Windows. It seems Qualcomm has the exclusivity here, but that will run out in 2025 and we're going to see an absolute flood of Arm-based AI PC processors hitting the market.

ASRock has launched its new DeskMeet X600 Mini-PC that has a very cool trick up its sleeve: it features a PCIe extension cable that lets you use an external graphics card... which is something we don't see in a world dominated by Thunderbolt 4 and OCulink connectivity.

It's impossible to cram in a monster GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card inside a Mini-PC system, but with a full PCIe interface through an external PCIe extension cable, it just makes sense. ASRock has placed the PCIe connector hidden under a cover (because some users won't use an external discrete graphics card) that can be taken off and used at any time.

The company does miss a huge opportunity, though: ASRock doesn't include a high-quality PCIe extension cable with its new DeskMeet X600 Mini-PC. This means you'll need to find one yourself, and if you have problems, it's not ASRock's issue. ASRock, you should've included the PCIe extension cable with the system.

AMD has one of the best gaming processors on the planet with its Ryzen 7 7800X3D and its second-gen 3D V-Cache technology. However, it looks like the 7800X3D will be a faster gaming CPU than the next-gen Zen 5-based Ryzen 9 9700X, and that's coming directly from AMD.

In an interview with Tom's Hardware, AMD's Senior Technical Marketing Manager, Don Woligroski, said: "Is it the fastest in gaming? It's faster than the competition in our tests. X3D is still the king of the hill, but by a much smaller margin than typically between X3D and non-X3D. So a 7800X3D would, yes, be faster than 9700X, but maybe not by as much as you would expect".

In an interview with PCGamer earlier this week, Donny said: "The X3D stuff, we have a lot to say about it. The best part about it is we're not just resting on laurels. We're improving what we can do with X3D, it's really exciting and I'm super looking forward to talking to people about that. It's not like, hey, we've also added X3D to a chip. We are working actively on really cool differentiators to make it even better. We're working on X3D, we're improving it".

NVIDIA's next-generation flagship GeForce RTX 5090 has some new leaked specs, with the GB202 GPU configuration being leaked onto X by kopite7kimi:

GB202 is going to be an absolute freaking beast, offering 33% more CUDA cores than the AD102 GPU inside of the GeForce RTX 4090, with GB202 rumored to pack in an incredible 24,576 CUDA cores. AD102 has just 18,423 CUDA cores in comparison. GB202 will power the new ultra-enthusiast flagship GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, which is rumored to have a monster 512-bit memory bus with ultra-fast, next-generation GDDR7 memory.