Latest from TweakTown

GTA 6 is set to feature Rockstar's most physically diverse NPC population yet, with pedestrians varying significantly more in height and body shape than any previous Rockstar game.

Speaking to IGN, Rockstar studio co-head Rob Nelson explained that the developer has created a new system that enables GTA 6 to have a wide variety of NPCs, and this new system hinges on dynamically retargeting character animations on-the-fly to accommodate different body proportions. In previous games, characters with different builds often shared the same animation sets, limiting how much Rockstar could vary their height and shape.

That becomes particularly important when characters physically interact with objects or the environment within the world, because if the NPC's height exceeded the animations, they wouldn't line up on screen. An animation designed for a 5-foot-6 NPC, for example, may not correctly line up when applied to someone who is 6-foot-2 during a fight, while sitting inside a vehicle, or when interacting with the environment. GTA 6's new system dynamically adjusts those animations to better fit the character performing them, enabling a wider variety of possible NPCs.

An extremely early version of GTA 6's map has been recreated inside GTA 5 using leaked Rockstar development assets, giving players a playable look at how Vice City was taking shape more than a decade ago.

The build reportedly uses material dating back to around 2014/15 that recently surfaced as part of a roughly 192GB archive connected to Rockstar Games' 2022 data breach. Modders have since imported the unfinished map data into GTA 5 on PC, allowing portions of the early environment to be explored.

Unsurprisingly, the result is extremely rough. Streets and terrain use basic placeholder textures, while floating labels mark potential locations and development ideas. The recognizable city area only loosely resembles the modern Vice City Rockstar has shown in official GTA 6 footage, highlighting just how early the leaked material is.

The Last of Us co-creator and former Naughty Dog developer Bruce Straley says mentioning God of War Laufey in a wider discussion about AAA gaming problems was a mistake.

Well-known game dev Bruce Straley was recently caught up in a controversy where it looked like he was poking fun at God of War Laufey, the next major release from Sony Santa Monica. In the latest issue of Edge magazine #428, Straley commented on the wider games industry, ultimately saying that the AAA space needs new innovations, but specifically saying that AAA experiences are "boring" these days. Laufey, a game that already faced steep criticism, was cited shortly after.

Now the ex-Naughty Dog game director clarifies what he meant, saying that it was a mistake to mention Laufey when discussing the AAA space.

A Reddit user says Walmart sold them a fake Ryzen 7 9800X3D inside what looked like a sealed retail box. Posting on r/pcmasterrace as u/quadbow, they explain that they wanted a replacement for their existing 9800X3D, which had memory controller issues. A clerk pulled the sealed box from a display case, and they paid almost $500 for it. At home, the PC wouldn't power on with the new chip. Putting the old 9800X3D back in got it running again right away.

Walmart then refused a refund because the serial number printed on the chip didn't match the one on the box. They compared it with other 9800X3D chips in the display case, and it looked very different. Apparently, the PCB was "more blue," and the text on the lid sat in a different place. They also ran the chip's serial number through AMD's lookup page, which returned no match.

Even though the Redditor says they're pretty sure it's a fake, that's still unconfirmed as of the time of writing. It's one account backed by photos, and neither Walmart nor AMD seems to have commented so far. The post doesn't say what's under the heat spreader either.

Rockstar Games already has another major release on its slate beyond Grand Theft Auto 6, although it isn't an internally developed sequel to GTA or Red Dead Redemption.

Following GTA 6's confirmed November 19, 2026 launch, Rockstar is set to publish Remedy Entertainment's Max Payne 1 & 2 Remake. The project will rebuild both classic Max Payne games as a single title for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S using Remedy's in-house Northlight engine. Rockstar is financing development and will handle publishing and distribution.

Remedy currently lists the Max Payne remake as in development, with the project having entered full production in 2024. Unfortunately, no release date has been announced yet, so it isn't 100% confirmed that Max Payne will be Rockstar's first major release after GTA 6, albeit, given how long it takes to develop a fully fledged entry in either the Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption franchise, it's more than likely the Max Payne remake will be the next title to launch with Rockstar's name attached to it.

The new World of Warcraft Forever beta might be more popular than even Blizzard predicted.

World of Warcraft Forever is the latest gaming craze, and socials are filled with snapshots of starting towns like Deathknell and Shadowglen bristling with active players. The digital world is alive with curiosity and excitement as scores of players jump back in to see the classic MMORPG reborn with modern graphics.

Tons of gamers are jumping into the WoW Forever beta--so many that Blizzard seems to be surprised at the turnout. WoW Classic dev Josh Greenfield says the numbers are crazier than he's ever seen them. "Man, it was hard to sleep last night, I was so excited. Beta has been... crazy. The craziest numbers I've seen in 17 years working at Blizzard and almost 8 years on classic. We've got something really special here."

Generative AI has rapidly become a routine part of game production in Japan. A new industry survey shared at Tokyo Game Show 2026 found that 85.8% of Japanese game developers now use generative AI in their work, up sharply from 51% just a year earlier.

The figures come from a preview of the 2026 CESA Game Industry Report, presented at Tokyo Game Show. Of those surveyed, 63% said they use generative AI daily, while the remaining 22.8% use it only occasionally.

The 2025 survey, which sampled 54 Japanese companies, found that visual asset creation and game engine development were the most common uses of the technology at the time. Although the 2026 preview hasn't yet broken down current use cases in the same detail, developers cited "improved operational efficiency and productivity" as the most anticipated benefit of using generative AI, followed by shorter development cycles and reduced development and operational costs.

Early community tracking data for Valve's newly launched Steam Frame headset shows that securing one early is very difficult. According to the community-run tracker Steam Frame Out, over 40,000 people say they signed up for the Steam Frame, but fewer than 19,000 have confirmed a reservation.

This isn't due to a lack of interest among PC gaming enthusiasts. Instead, this comes from Valve's intentionally cautious approach to hardware manufacturing and initial distribution.

According to the tracking site, only around 19,000 prospective buyers reported receiving a purchase invite during the initial drop. The rest were immediately directed to the backorder queue. This staged rollout stems from Valve's randomized reservation system, which Valve says is designed to manage strict inventory allocation while preventing scalper bots from sweeping up early inventory.

According to Reuters, sources familiar with the matter say CXMT, China's largest DRAM manufacturer, is preparing to enter the NAND flash memory market. This would put CXMT in direct competition with global leaders like Samsung as well as domestic rival YMTC.

CXMT reportedly plans to establish a NAND flash memory research-and-development production line at its new plant in Beijing. The company has also set up a research institute in the Chinese capital, with NAND development listed among its ongoing projects. However, it's not yet clear when the R&D line will begin operating, or whether CXMT intends to move beyond research and trial production into full commercial manufacturing.

CXMT has already discussed its NAND ambitions with potential customers, including a newly established startup that intends to buy CXMT's NAND chips for storage products used in AI systems and supercomputers, according to one source.

YouTube channel Trashbench, known for its unorthodox experiments with PC hardware, has published a new video showing him strapping an RTX 4090 cooler to an RTX 3060 to boost the RTX 3060's GPU performance. The video shows how the YouTuber was able to modify a GIGABYTE RTX 4090 graphics card cooler to make it work with a GIGABYTE RTX 3060.

To do this Trashbench had to saw off and pry off numerous parts of the RTX 4090 cooler's mounting solution, cooling fins, and heat spreaders for the power delivery system to make the RTX 3060's PCB compatible with the cooler without any of the components interfering with the heatsink. Despite the redneck engineering involved, the end result looked clean enough to fool someone into thinking the RTX 4090 cooler was made for the RTX 3060.

However, the cooling performance of the RTX 3060 with its oversized RTX 4090 cooler showed a negligible improvement in performance. Temperatures with the RTX 4090 cooler dropped by 9C from 59C stock to 51C, and performance improved by a virtually indistinguishable amount from the temperature drop alone.

A new leak has added fresh detail to Sony's rumored PS6 handheld, codenamed Project Canis, suggesting the device will lean heavily on upscaling technology. The leak comes from PC hardware outlet GameGPU, which refers to the device as the "PSP 3" in its reporting, though that name appears to be a placeholder rather than anything official.

According to the report, Project Canis is built around a custom 3-nanometer AMD chip featuring six Zen 6 CPU cores, split between four standard Zen 6c cores and two power-saving Zen 6 LP cores. That's paired with 24GB of shared LPDDR5X memory on a 192-bit bus, and strict power limits ranging from 15W to 25W depending on mode. The graphics side uses 16 Compute Units built on the newer RDNA 5 architecture, with support for Dual-Issue FP32 instructions.

In portable mode, the chip reportedly runs at 1.2GHz for 4.91 TFLOPS of compute. Docked, clocks rise to 1.65GHz for a peak of 6.75 TFLOPS. On paper, that puts Project Canis well below the PS5 Pro's 16.7 TFLOPS. But according to the leak, the handheld's real selling point isn't raw hardware, it's PSSR 3.0, Sony's next-generation upscaling and frame generation technology.

Thirteen years ago, PlayStation scored one of gaming's most memorable PR wins with a 22-second video mocking Microsoft's restrictive Xbox One DRM plans. Now, the two executives behind that moment have recreated it at Tokyo Game Show, and this time they appear to have nothing to share.

The original "Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video" showed then-president of first-party studios Shuhei Yoshida handing a physical copy of Killzone: Shadow Fall to head of third-party relations Adam Boyes. That was the entire video. Step one, hand over the disc. Step two, there was no step two. It was a simple, spur-of-the-moment jab at Xbox One's planned DRM checks for used games, and it's racked up more than 21 million views since, becoming one of the defining moments of the PS4's launch.

At Tokyo Game Show 2026, Yoshida shared that he'd reunited with Boyes and posted a photo of the pair recreating their famous pose. "Met with a best friend," he wrote. This time, though, they're swapping nothing but air. "This is how you share games with your friends in 2028," one user replied, referencing the year Sony's physical game production winds down.

NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR upscaling technologies are becoming increasingly mandatory, especially for AAA games. Control Resonant is an ambitious sequel to the original Control, both in visual fidelity and overall scale, with an almost sandbox-like setting.

The game incorporates global illumination and built-in Path Tracing across all ray tracing presets, which is obviously quite demanding. According to TechPowerUp's testing at native 4K with medium ray tracing and no upscaling, the RTX 5090 manages only 48 FPS. The RTX 5080, on the other hand, drops below 30 FPS in the same test.

This means that if you truly want to enjoy Remedy's newest title at 4K with max settings and Path Tracing, upscaling and NVIDIA's Multi Frame Generation appear crucial. As for ray tracing at 1080p Ultra settings, you would need at least an RTX 4070 to get close to 60 FPS without upscaling.

Marvel's Wolverine is a big hit for Sony with nearly 2 million copies sold days after release, according to the latest calculations from analyst firm Alinea Analytics.

Wolverine is apparently a hit insofar as sales, where the game has amassed an estimated 1.9 million copies sold on PlayStation 5. This milestone is in spite of the recent backlash against the game; Wolverine has been ridiculed in enthusiast gaming social media circles for specific UI and design choices and some cutscene animations.

Alinea Analytics' Rhys Elliott notes that Wolverine is currently the PS5's #1 first-party game of 2026, and has even beaten Death Stranding 2's lifetime sales.

CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michal Nowakowski says the studio's move from REDengine to Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4 was not a response to Cyberpunk 2077's rocky launch. Speaking on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast, he was asked whether the launch issues were the main reason for the switch. His answer was "yes and no," but he called the idea "a bit of a false assumption" because apparently the issue with Cyberpunk was not really REDengine itself.

According to Nowakowski, what actually got the studio's attention was Epic's The Matrix Awakens tech demo. He said CD Projekt Red got an early look at it and asked whether UE5 was ready to ship a game like theirs. The answer was no, at least not at the entry level, but he said a relationship with Epic and some targeted work on the engine could make it viable. That turned into a strategic collaboration between the two, and it is the same partnership behind the UE5 tech demo for The Witcher 4 shown at State of Unreal last year.

He also said the studio never wanted to be a tech company. "The dream of the company was actually never to make technology," Nowakowski explained. He thinks CD Projekt Red is now the only team outside of Epic working inside the engine's "black box," which he believes will let the studio make more games without building the tech from scratch.

Palit has introduced a special-edition GeForce RTX 5060 Ti built around RiTONA, the company's anime-style digital mascot. The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB RiTONA OC combines NVIDIA's Blackwell-based GPU with a white dual-fan cooler, customizable ARGB lighting, and a full-color RiTONA backplate. This marks the character's first appearance on a retail Palit graphics card.

RiTONA isn't new to Palit. The company introduced her as its digital brand ambassador in Japan in 2022. Palit later redesigned the character for a wider global audience, and the new RTX 5060 Ti marks one of the most direct ways the company has brought its mascot into its PC hardware lineup.

Underneath the anime-themed exterior, the RiTONA edition remains a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti powered by 4,608 CUDA cores, 8GB of GDDR7 memory running at 28 Gbps for 488 GB/s of bandwidth, along with a 2,407MHz base clock and a 2,587MHz boost clock.

Apple Intelligence can now require up to 14GB of on-device storage on certain newer iPhones running iOS 27, nearly double the 8GB requirement that applies to most supported models running Apple's currently available Apple Intelligence features.

Apple's updated support documentation lists the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air as requiring up to 14GB of storage for the latest Apple Intelligence features. Other compatible iPhones require up to 8GB. 9to5Mac reports that the newer iPhone 18 Pro lineup and iPhone Duo also fall into the higher-storage category because they support the same advanced on-device AI capabilities.

The larger storage requirement is tied to two features available on Apple's most recent generations, and these features require more capable on-device models to run: Siri AI voice customization, which allows users to adjust expressiveness and speaking pace, and improved dictation accuracy. These capabilities require a more powerful local AI model, increasing the storage Apple reserves for Intelligence.

Dark Souls 3 is receiving a major visual overhaul through a fan-made mod that adds path tracing and NVIDIA DLSS 5, giving FromSoftware's 2016 action RPG a dramatically more modern look.

Modder Ganaboy is bringing the same Lighting Engine technology previously developed for Dark Souls 2 to Dark Souls 3. A new showcase set in the Crucifixion Woods demonstrates the game's redesigned path-traced lighting alongside NVIDIA DLSS 5, applied before Super Resolution to reduce performance cost while enhancing the rendered image. The end result is quite impressive, especially considering this is a fan mod and not an actual studio-level graphical overhaul.

The project, known as DS3LE, uses NRD-SH as its primary denoiser. According to Ganaboy, the technique delivers image quality comparable to NVIDIA's Ray Reconstruction while being less demanding on RTX 20- and RTX 30-series GPUs, where Ray Reconstruction is quite heavy on both GPU generations.

A massive 192GB collection of GTA 5 and GTA 6 development material has surfaced online, revealing canceled expansions, cut missions, and early map assets that can be traced back to Rockstar Games' infamous 2022 data breach, widely cited as the first major leaked look at the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6.

According to Insider Gaming, the files aren't from a new Rockstar hack. Instead, they were reportedly obtained during the same 2022 breach that resulted in around 90 GTA 6 development videos appearing online. The additional data had apparently circulated among a small number of people before spreading more widely in recent months, and people are still digging through the files even now, hence these recent discoveries.

Among the discoveries is data pointing toward Rockstar's canceled Liberty City expansion for GTA 5. Files imported into the CodeWalker map editor reveal an outline of a potential Liberty City map that appears larger than the version in GTA 4, along with terrain-testing data.

Sources tell The Verge's Tom Warren that Microsoft had experimented with innovative digital game library concepts as early as 2011, years before the Xbox One's release.

In an ironic twist, gamers now seem ready to accept Xbox One's original vision. The system that tanked Microsoft's gaming presence may end up buttressing Xbox as the industry moves into an all-digital future. After all, the disc-to-digital program is only possible thanks to decisions made in the Xbox One era.

New info has surfaced that reveals more of the strategic experiments that Microsoft was conducting. As early as 2011, Microsoft is said to have outlined plans for the digital-oriented future, and that the platform's serialized discs--required for modern disc-to-digital--were to be traded in to retailers for digital versions of games. Other concepts of so-called "true digital ownership" include things like being able to recycle digital games, as well as share them with friends.