This week on The TT Show, Kosta spends an entire day with the flagship 85-inch Samsung QN900D Neo QLED 8K Smart TV in Sydney, testing how its new impressive NQ8 AI Gen3 Processor handles upscaling and gaming. Kosta also discusses his latest month-long home project: building the Ultimate Home Entertainment Server with an ASUSTOR NAS and Viper Gaming NVMe SSDs.

Moving on from thousands of movies, games, and music on a server, Jak and Kosta also discuss the latest controversy surrounding Intel's high-end 13th and 14th Gen Cire i9 CPU. With widespread reports of instability and motherboard makers issuing BIOS updates, Intel seemingly passes the blame while confirming it's still 'looking into the issue.'

The duo also talks about the recent decline in console sales and AMD's gaming revenue and what this means, as well as new reports seemingly confirming that AMD's upcoming RDNA 4 GPUs could feature a massive upgrade to ray-tracing performance, which will probably make its way into the PlayStation 5 Pro.

A new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets details the discovery of a Mars mineral that forms on Earth within a river, delta, or a shoreline of a ancient lake, leading researchers to thinking the Gale Crater on Mars was once home to water and oxygen.

The team explained that NASA's Curiosity rover discovered higher-than-usual amounts of manganese in rocks within the Gale Crater on Mars. Using the rovers ChemCam, an instrument that fires a laser into rocks, the rover collected data that researchers have now analyzed and published in a study.

Patrick Gasda, Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher and lead author of the study explained the formation of maganese happens all the time on Earth due to the high amounts of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life, "and from microbes that help catalyze those manganese oxidation reactions." However, Mars doesn't have any oxygen, and there is no evidence of life, despite researchers suspecting that ancient Mars may have had the right environment to host life.

In February, Microsoft confirmed that four first-party titles were making their way over to PlayStation, which was the company's first batch of tester titles, to see how Xbox games would perform on Sony's console.

Around this time, rumors suggested that Microsoft was going to lead with massive heavyweight, system-seller titles such as Gears of War, Starfield, and Halo, but it was later confirmed the first games to make it over to the PlayStation from Xbox would be Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Grounded, and Sea of Thieves. Xbox's Phil Spencer described the transfer as an experiment and said at the time it didn't mean that other first-party Xbox titles would be coming to PlayStation.

However, Spencer said, "I don't think we should, as an industry, ever rule out a game going to any other platform. We're focused on these four games and learning from the experience. I don't want to create a false expectation on those other platforms that this is somehow the first four to get over the dam and then the dam's going to open and everything else is coming. That's not the plan today."

Intel's Arrow Lake desktop processors might pitch up earlier than expected, or at least ahead of what the rumor mill seems to have been floating as the most likely arrival timeframe recently.

If you've been following the chatter around Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200), you won't have missed a certain amount of pessimism creeping in of late.

In the early days of leaks, there was talk of massive performance gains, and while that's still true to an extent, enthusiasm about Arrow Lake seems to have been waning somewhat with suggestions that Intel is struggling to finish the next-gen desktop silicon, and that it might even get pushed to 2025. (Or at least that volume production may not happen until next year, anyway).

Orcs Must Die 3 is a different spin on tower defense that ticks some boxes - including having a top-notch name - and if you've always been half-tempted to take the plunge, now you've got no excuse.

We express this possibility of temptation because it applies very definitely to us - we've been meaning to pick up this game for some time (before the third instalment came out, in fact). And now that it's free on the Epic Games Store, we'll be doing exactly that.

Actually, hang on. Back in a moment...

A Nintendo dataminer has discovered within the latest version of the NintendoWare Bezel Engine supports frame rates of up to 240 frames-per-second (FPS).

This engine is used by Nintendo and third parties in select games, and the discovery of gameplay supporting up to 240 FPS has led to some theorizing that Nintendo's next console will be able to achieve framerates above 60FPS, which is the maximum the current Nintendo Switch is capable of producing. Notably, the dataminer wrote "this only applies to games that enable the variable frame rate mode".

The discovery of 240FPS support doesn't mean all future Nintendo games will be able to achieve 240FPS in gameplay; in fact, it's incredibly unlikely that Nintendo's next console will even have the horsepower to hit such a framerate unless at an expensive cost of resolution - likely far below 720p. However, what it does mean is there is room for the possibility of 40FPS, or even 120Hz modes that have already been seen in other consoles such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Windows 11 just made quite a leap in adoption levels with PC gamers, or at least those that use Steam.

Valve's popular gaming platform conducts a monthly hardware survey, as you're doubtless aware, and that includes the operating system gamers are running as well as hardware components.

For the month of April, the hardware survey shows that Windows 11 adoption rose to reach 45.15%, which represented an increase of 3.54% on the previous month.

Helldivers 2 publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment announced that all new Helldivers 2 players will need to connect their Steam account to a PlayStation Network account to access the game.

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) took to the Helldivers 2 Steam blog with an update explaining that a technical issue at the game's launch forced SIE into making linking Steam and a PSN account optional, but that will now change. As of May 6, new Helldivers 2 players on Steam will be forced to link to a PSN account, and if they don't have one, they will be required to make one. Helldivers 2 won't be accessible if they don't.

According to SIE, linking a Steam and PSN account "plays a critical role in protecting our players and upholding the values of safety and security provided on PlayStation and PlayStation Studios games." Additionally, SIE wrote that linking the two accounts is the main way to "protect players from griefing and abuse" by banning players that are participating in that kind of behavior. Additionally, banned players will be able to appeal.

When Apple releases the iPhone 16 family of devices later this year there could be a new OLED display driver inside, according to a new report. While Apple has yet to confirm the news, it's thought that Novatek has picked up a new order for drivers ahead of the iPhone 16 manufacturing run.

The news, which comes via a paywalled DigiTimes report that was spotted by 9to5Mac, notes that a big increase in Novatek's orders of OLED Display Driver ICs (DDI) has been observed, with Apple being the customer in question.

Novatek is no stranger to Apple's supply chain so this move isn't a particularly surprising one, but it's another indication that Apple is readying the supply chain for its next generation of iPhones. It might also suggest that Apple is keen to diversify production, ensuring that there is less chance for a bottleneck further down the line.

Google and the US government are presenting their closing arguments to Judge Amit Mehta regarding the antitrust lawsuit that may result in Google being penalized for its dominance in the search engine market.

The US government has accused Google of violating anticompetitive laws with its Google Search engine, which is easily the most popular search engine in the world. The lawsuit alleges Google paid electronics vendors and developers billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine on the device, which created a monopoly within the market where other search engines are unable to compete.

Google revealed last year that it spent $26.3 billion in 2021 on deals for its search engine to be default on various internet browsers. Apple received between $18 billion and $20 billion to keep Google the default search engine on Safari. As you can probably imagine, Google doesn't believe it has a monopoly on the market, or broken any anti-compete laws and that its dominance on the market is a result of its product simply being the best.

Apple is holding a streamed event on July 7 and it's looking increasingly likely that the company will finally unveil the fabled OLED iPad Pro. We've been hearing rumors about this table for months, and the expected release date for it has continually been pushed back amid concerns about delays. Now, a new report has sought to add some context as to why those delays might have cropped up.

According to a paywalled DigiTimes report, picked up by 9to5Mac, Apple's requirement for a new type of OLED display has continually caused issues for suppliers. The report notes that the new iPad's OLED panels use a hybrid substrate that combines the glass substrate with polyimide materials. It's thought that this combines the advantages of both flexible plastic substrates and rigid glass substrates, all the while eliminating the issues associated with both. Essentially, buyers get the best of both worlds.

Apple is also set to use two-stack tandem technology for these displays, a first for the company. DigiTimes explains that this means that two OLED layers are stacked, as the name suggests, playing a high refractive index charge generation layer (CGL) in between them to connect the two organic light-emitting layers. The upshot? Making these displays is harder than making the other OLED displays Apple has used in the past.