This week on the TT Show, Jak and Kosta finally discuss their recent trip to MSI's factory in Shenzhen, China. There, they saw MSI's new Z890 boards up close, Intel's latest Core Ultra 200 Series CPUs, and even watched as thousands of MAG Z890 TOMAHAWK WIFI boards were being made.

With new motherboards and chipset technology, a lot of cool new tech will make you want to upgrade - especially when it comes to flagship motherboards like the new MSI MEG Z890 ACE. With Arrow Lake and Intel Core Ultra 200 Series CPU benchmarks starting to show up and full reviews and availability coming later this month, it won't be long before the complete picture is known.

With the new Z890 motherboards also ready for the next generation of graphics cards, this week we learned that NVIDIA could be announcing three GeForce RTX 50 desktop graphics cards at CES 2025: the GeForce RTX 5090, GeForce RTX 5080, and GeForce RTX 5070.

SEGA and Atlus are hitting it big in 2024 with multiple best-selling RPGs.

In an industry dominated by billion-dollar live service games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, SEGA is proving that the age-old adage still rings true: Gamers will show up for great singleplayer games.

Take a look at the myriad of platinum games from SEGA and Atlus, for example. SEGA now has four separate releases that have each accumulated over 1 million copies sold throughout the year: Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, Unicorn Overlord, Persona 3 Reload, and Metaphor: ReFantazio, the last of which sold 1 million in its first day, making it the fastest-selling Atlus release of all time.

Like it or not, AI is here to stay...and it could help transform some aspects of the entertainment industry, especially video games.

Artificial intelligence is a hot-button topic for many reasons. Generative AI is seen as a potential threat that will impact jobs at a time when the games industry is already culling tens of thousands of workers in an effort to save money, reduce costs, and improve margins for the illusion of perpetual growth.

But executives and high-level creatives also see AI as an opportunity. EA, for example, is using generative AI to completely revolutionize user-generated content. Xbox is also using generative AI to help with writing and dialog of its games. Other teams have been more quiet on their AI usage, but it's fair to say that a portion of the biggest companies in gaming are using it in some way--except for Nintendo.

Popular streamer Asmongold has been banned from Twitch following controversial statements made about Palestinians regarding the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.

Last night, Asmongold made incredibly controversial comments that have incensed Palestinians. During the stream, Asmongold commented on the ongoing war in Gaza, claiming that Palestinians practice an "inferior culture in all ways," and that he has no sympathy for Palestinians being killed in the Middle East.

This has led to one of Asmongold's accounts being banned from Twitch--the zackrawrr account has been affected. "This channel is temporarily unavailable due to a violation of Twitch's Community Guidelines or Terms of Service," reads the banner.

BioWare's new Dragon Age game won't have any kind of DRM when it launches on Halloween 2024.

The first new Dragon Age game in 10 years is right on the horizon, but despite that long wait, BioWare and EA have chosen not to use DRM protections on the new game. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is due out on October 31 and won't have Denuvo at launch, which is typically a good thing for gamers as DRM can impact in-game performance. However, it does mean that PC users won't get to actually pre-load the new Dragon Age.

"As you prepare for October 31st, please find the preload times for each platform below. Dragon Age: The Veilguard won't include any 3rd party DRM (such as Denuvo) on any platform. The lack of DRM means that there will be no preload period for PC players," BioWare said in an update post.

Dragon Age developer BioWare is excited to flex the PS5 Pro's new horsepower and push higher-end console performance in their new Veilguard game.

The list of PS5 Pro enhanced games keeps growing, and some developers like BioWare have been busy adapting their games to the Pro's new AI upscaling capabilities. The Pro's built-in PlayStation Spectral Resolution (PSSR) AI library works in tandem with a new custom machine learning block that's built right into the console's SoC to upscale image quality, thereby giving developers more wiggle room in the age-old resolution vs performance battle.

Utilizing PSSR in creative ways, developers can lower their effective resolution targets, alleviating the need for native resolution assets. This can, among other things, reduce the size of assets that are streamed into PS5 Pro's GPU and CPU (which are already highly compressed), giving developers more resources to push things like better performance targets via FPS, more lush environments, and other effects. In short, PSSR is a kind of magic trick that can upscale images to make them look like 4K renders while the assets themselves are below 4K, thereby reducing the workload demands.

Windows 11 users are getting the 24H2 update, but as this upgrade is being gradually rolled out, some folks are encountering problems - one of which is 24H2 seemingly eating some of their drive space.

You may recall that we previously reported on this issue, whereby after the 24H2 update has been installed, the user will see 8.6GB of cached files for the upgrade, which can be removed by Disk Cleanup. However, when that cleanup is actioned, Windows 11 still reports that the 8.6GB of files remain.

This has left many people scratching their heads, but now Microsoft has come forth with an explanation. Essentially, the cleanup operation actually works fine, the bug is in the figure reported by Windows 11. So, your drive has actually had said space freed, it's just that the OS still says the files are present.

Microsoft's new duo of Xbox Series X consoles is now available in time for the holiday season.

In a bid to further its subscription-driven business, Microsoft's games division has released a new Xbox Series X model that's all-digital and doesn't have a disc drive. The move is meant to further solidify consumers into Microsoft's ecosystem of digital products and services that are more profitable than the traditional physical media found on store shelves.

The new Xbox lineup includes the all-digital Xbox Series X with a new white paint job, and for dedicated gamers, Microsoft has also launched the limited-edition galaxy black Series X that comes with a 2TB SSD. For more budget-conscious consumers, there's the 1TB Series S which effectively doubles the storage capacity over the launch model that was limited to just 512GB.

Despite the onslaught of layoffs and cost-cutting, ex-Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime says that the games industry is still growing.

Following massive expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic, gaming is going through a great contraction as the industry returns to a steady-state equilibrium. Gone are the days of thunderous growth spikes in spending across software and services. That growth is still happening, at least by analyst projections, but at a much more consistent pace; things aren't as wild as they were during the pandemic when everyone was stuck indoors.

Some industry figures have conceptualized this growth-shrink phase on a business level, and now we have similar comments from ex-Blizzard president Mike Morhaime. As the head honcho for one of the world's premiere service-oriented companies, Morhaime was privy to a lot of factors and insights on the industry.

Windows 10 will run out of support in less than a year now, but Microsoft is still developing the older OS - despite mulling a feature-freeze at one point - and drafting over features from Windows 11.

In a new Windows 10 preview - build 19045 in the Beta and Release Preview channels - there's a backported feature as highlighted by regular Windows leaker PhantomOfEarth on X.

This is the 'Copy' button in the Share menu which was brought into Windows 11 a few months back (plus you get a preview of the file's icon and its size), though we should note this isn't live in preview yet. It's hidden behind the scenes, and you need to use ViVeTool to enable the functionality.

Apple just revealed a new iPad mini in one of its lowkey launches (by which we mean - let's just bung a press release out there and have done with it).

This isn't the first time we've seen such an affair, and it won't be the last, no doubt. Of course, as you might guess, this one's being slipped out for a reason, namely because the new iPad mini - powered by an A17 Pro SoC - is more of a spec bump than anything else (which was what the rumor mill was saying all along, to be fair).

You get that new A17 Pro chip, and storage starts at 128GB (twice as much as its predecessor), plus the refreshed compact 8.3-inch tablet also comes with Apple Intelligence support on board, which means that the RAM for the entry-level model is now 8GB.