Latest News - Page 197

Samsung has just announced it will begin mass production of its new 1c DRAM-based next-gen HBM4 memory, as well as new 24Gb GDDR7 memory dies, and 128GB+ DDR5 products in 2026.

The company announced its recent Q3 2025 earnings, with a 15.4% increase in revenue over Q2 2025, with a new all-time high in quarterly sales from its Memory business, thanks to strong demand for HBM3E memory and server SSDs in the continuing wave of AI demand.

Samsung recently showed off its new HBM4 memory, offering up to 11Gbps bandwidth per IC, and should be featured inside of the next-generation of AI hardware from NVIDIA and AMD in the upcoming Rubin and Instinct MI400 series AI GPUs.

Microsoft has released its Q1 2026 earnings, noting that Xbox hardware revenue is down 29% year over year. Xbox hardware revenue, which covers the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles, has been in steady decline for a couple of years now, so this isn't all that surprising for those who have been following or keeping track of behind-the-scenes Xbox news.

What is alarming, at least from an Xbox console perspective, is that this 29% decline in revenue is identical to Microsoft's Q1 2025 earnings, which showed Xbox hardware revenue dropping by the same amount compared to 2024. And with Microsoft recently increasing the price of its Xbox Series X|S hardware to the point that the consoles are no longer competitive with Sony's PlayStation 5 lineup, the expectation is that this downward trend will continue. And possibly, accelerate.

However, it's worth noting that Microsoft's Xbox strategy has moved beyond Xbox hardware for some time. Its current marketing slogan for the brand, 'This is an Xbox,' emphasizes that every device can be an Xbox through Windows 11, Game Pass, and cloud gaming. For Q1 2026, Xbox content and services revenue was up 1%, which includes revenue from Game Pass and publishing first-party titles on PC, Xbox, PS5, and Switch - a better result and more reflective of the Xbox brand shift.

Rockstar has just updated its website with a slick new look, also teasing a new Grand Theft Auto 6 logo, which hopefully means we'll see GTA 6's third trailer ahead of the holidays.

We had Trailer 2 for GTA 6 earlier this year, but the year has flown past and we haven't had anything new from Rockstar regarding Grand Theft Auto 6, and now the developer has a flashy new website. It would be good to see this new website design from Rockstar lead into a new promotion of GTA 6 in the coming days and weeks ahead as we slide into the holidays and the end of the year.

Rockstar unleashed the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 in December 2023, following it up with the second trailer earlier this year with a promise of releasing GTA 6 on May 26, 2026. We're in the final two months of 2025, so to hype up the biggest release of all time on any medium -- movies, TV shows, games, etc -- Grand Theft Auto 6's third trailer releasing soon makes sense.

Duke Nukem was massive in the 1990s, thanks to the success of Duke Nukem 3D on PC and consoles. In addition to starring in one of the defining first-person shooters of the decade, Duke's other outings were limited to the Nintendo 64 and the original PlayStation consoles. Yes, PC gamers missed out on what is widely considered to be one of the best Duke games from the era, the Nintendo 64-exclusive Duke Nukem: Zero Hour.

The third-person shooter saw Duke travel back in time to the Old West and Victorian London to save the world from a new alien threat, with the game being best known for adding a more nuanced plot to the franchise's trademark over-the-top tone. This included a depiction of post-apocalyptic New York, ravaged by nuclear war, as well as taking down Jack the Ripper.

Duke Nukem Zero Hour: Recompiled is an unofficial PC port of the game that adds native support for widescreen displays, higher frame rates, and the ability to remap and configure controls. There are even plans to add ray tracing to the game, as seen in other N64 ports for PC (Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) that decompile and recompile the game's source code to run on PC.

Although Valve and Steam dominate the PC gaming landscape, GOG is still widely considered the most consumer-friendly platform. Not only does the service continue to offer DRM-free games that can be backed up, installed, and played without a launcher or online access, but it's also committed to preserving gaming history through the GOG Preservation Program.

GOG, which stands for Good Old Game, is living up to its namesake with the Preservation Program. Basically, it's GOG's commitment to keep the games in the program up to date and compatible with modern PC hardware. This means that these classic PC games will run on Windows 12 and whatever the next Xbox console PC hybrid is, without issues.

And this month, GOG is expanding the Preservation Program with 16 new titles, including several well-known PC classics like the original Hitman and Splinter Cell, and some obscure titles like Clive Barker's Undying that would have otherwise been lost to time. Here's the full list.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick is already discussing future installments in the Grand Theft Auto franchise and how artificial intelligence will play a role in development.

One of the hottest topics in the gaming industry is how developers will adopt artificial intelligence into their workflow, and if the power of AI will be used as a tool to speed up game development without compromising the end product, and ultimately, making thousands of game developers obsolete in the process. In a recent interview with CNBC, the CEO of Grand Theft Auto's publisher, Take-Two Interactive, Strauss Zelnick, was asked if AI would play a role in the development of titles under Take-Two's banner.

Zelnick said that while he isn't a "naysayer" when it comes to integrating AI into video game development, he remains skeptical about its use, for several reasons. The first being intellectual property rights, and how creating any IP with AI automatically makes it unprotected. This point echoes a popular ongoing debate between AI companies, Hollywood, musicians, and other creative industries, as many AI models have gained the ability to create "unique" content by absorbing intellectual property.

AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 for Radeon graphics cards is here, with the company adding new game support for Battlefield 6 and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. However, it seems that, with this new driver, New Game Support will be limited to "Radeon RX 7000 and 9000 series graphics products" going forward, even though the driver is compatible with Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 Series graphics cards.

'Expanded Vulkan Extensions Support' in the driver is also limited to RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 products, suggesting AMD is ending RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 PC gaming support. However, in the Known Issues for Battlefield 6 on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs, the latest driver lists crashes and timeouts when playing on Ryzen AI chips, as well as issues with streaming the game on Radeon hardware.

On the plus side, this new driver fixes a long list of issues across a wide range of games. So, if you've got a Radeon graphics card or Ryzen APU with integrated graphics and are playing The Last of Us Part II, FBC: Firebreak, GTFO, NBA 2K25, or Baldur's Gate 3, be sure to grab the latest Adrenalin Edition here.

Ex-PlayStation Worldwide Studios boss Shawn Layden cautions game developers to be careful about entering the live service arena, warning that the games industry is basically built on the bones of Fortnite contenders.

Breaking into the live service market is so hard that some companies just buy their way into it--Microsoft comes to mind with its Mojang and Activision acquisitions, so does Sony with its Bungie buyout. Here at TweakTown, we've been talking about live games for years and put together an Engagement Cycle that we think developers have to achieve and maintain to break into the market. It's an exhaustive list of things that a game must perpetually keep in motion, and for most companies, that's unsustainable. This is the message around ex-PlayStation boss Shawn Layden's recent interviews--that live games come with pitfalls.

"The highway is littered with people wanting to take on Fortnite, with people trying to do Overwatch with different skins," Layden said in a recent interview with Inverse.

NVIDIA has just announced a large partnership with Nokia on next-gen 6G connectivity, where the power of AI will be used through NVIDIA Grace CPUs and Blackwell GPUs.

The new partnership kicks off the AI-native wireless era, providing the foundation to support AI-powered customer experiences and enterprises at the edge. NVIDIA and Nokia are also laying the strategic infrastructure and opening a new high-growth frontier for telecom providers by delivering distributed edge AI inference at scale.

NVIDIA's new family of products for this new venture are called ARC (Aerial RAN Computer), which is reportedly platform ready for 6G computing by embedding RAN software into the CUDA stack, boosting performance. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed that ARC will feature Grace CPUs and Blackwell GPUs, making it the first time where telecom infrastructure will have huge performance capabilities ready to go. The ARC ecosystem will be integrated into Nokia's existing RAN buildout, enabling customers to make the easy switch to 6G.

NVIDIA has just announced a huge partnership with Uber, to use its NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 reference system, providing self-driving fleets, with Uber combining human riders and robot drivers in a worldwide ride-hailing network powered by DRIVE AGX Hyperion-ready vehicles.

The partnership will see the scale up of the world's largest level 4-ready mobility network, using Uber's next-generation robotaxi and autonomous delivery fleets using the new NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 autonomous vehicle (AV) development platform, and NVIDIA DRIVE AV software purpose-built for L4 autonomy.

On the tech side of things, NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 specs and features: NVIDIA has two performance-packed DRIVE AGX Thor in-vehicle platforms, which are based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. Each of the platforms can deliver over 2000 FP4 teraflops (1000 TOPS in INT8) of real-time compute, with NVIDIA AGX Thor fusing 360-degree sensor inputs and is optimized for transformer -- vision language action (VLA) models and generative AI workloads -- which provides safe, level 4 autonomous driving backed by industry-leading safety certifications and cybersecurity standards.

A new version of the NVIDIA App is out and it comes with optimized settings for Battlefield 6 among other games - and some fresh additions for DLSS override support, but there's an annoying bug in the mix, too.

This is version 11.0.5.420 of the NVIDIA App (flagged by VideoCardz) and it provides optimal settings for seven new games as follows:

On top of that, there are 11 games which are now catered for with DLSS override:

Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer says that Forza Motorsport hasn't been sent to the junkyard for scrap--that franchise will continue, but even Spencer doesn't know when.

Xbox has two racing franchises that have been operating in parallel with one another for years now: Forza Motorsport, which is Xbox's answer to Gran Turismo, and Forza Horizon, an offshoot series focused more on recreational racing and exploration. The latter, Horizon, is much more popular than the former, solidifying Microsoft's focus and taking away attention from the Forza Motorsport series. This is only temporary, and the Forza Motorsport franchise will continue out, but there's no optics on the next release.

Microsoft recently downsized its Xbox games unit, eliminating key positions and significantly reducing the staff at Turn10, the developers behind Forza Motorsport, with priority given to the more profitable Forza Horizon. This repositioning is happening for a number of reasons: Microsoft is merging Xbox consoles with Windows PCs in a radical transformational business strategy, and the company is also facing the rigors of tariff-choked economics. Both of these things are financially sensitive and require careful accounting. Also, Microsoft's board of directors, CFO, and CEO are currently pressing Xbox management to deliver a steep 30% profit margin--on this topic, CEO Satya Nadella recently said the "best way to innovate in gaming is to improve margins."

History could have been very different if Konami had greenlit a Hideo Kojima-directed Matrix game.

Decades ago during the PS2 era of the early 2000s, the Wachowski sisters expressed interest in having Hideo Kojima make a game based on the Matrix series, which was mega-hot at the time. This little tidbit of retro gaming lore was unearthed by nostalgia news blog Time Extension, which followed up on a 25-year-old rumor. In an interview with former Konami executive Christopher Bergstresser, it was revealed that the Wachowskis approached Konami about the idea, but it ultimately died on the vine.

The project was essentially nipped in the bud and shut down before it could even really be mulled over, with then-CEO of Konami Kasumi Kitaue scrapping the idea. Kojima was just too invaluable to the Metal Gear series (ironically, the opposite would be true some 15 years later).

Halo Studios developers have a practical take on artificial intelligence, saying that it's a "tool in a toolbox" but ultimately the humans are the creators.

Days ago, a report from Rebs Gaming stated that generative AI was being heavily used in the development of new Halo games, including the new Halo CE remake. Windows Central's Jez Corden stepped in to clarify this isn't the case, and now Halo Studios developers are once again speaking on the controversial technology.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, two Halo Studios devs spoke about how AI can help games production, indicating that it may be being used for new Halo games, but not in the capacity of letting generative AI call the shots.

Microsoft's servers have hit trouble (again), as a major Azure outage has left Minecraft players frustrated, Xbox services down, and more besides.

Update (14:35 CDT): Microsoft has said that customers might now see the first signs of recovery. The company just posted on its Azure dashboard: "We initiated the deployment of our 'last known good' configuration, which has now successfully been completed. Customers may have begun to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes, and as we make progress in this workstream, customers will continue to see improvement."

Microsoft 365 services are affected by the downtime as well as Minecraft, with the game showing a strong upsurge of reports on Down Detector in the last hour and a half (since approximately 10:30am CDT). Xbox servers and the official website have been hit, too.

MSI Afterburner has a fresh version in the works and apparently it'll support a new class of hardware.

The developer, Alexey Nicolaychuk, has let us know that version 4.6.7 of the GPU overclocking tool (which can do more besides) is now in development with the initial beta expected soon- and it'll come with the mentioned additional support.

VideoCardz noticed that Uniko's Hardware on X flagged up Nicolaychuk's Guru of 3D forum post, where the developer tells us: "New engineering sample just arrived and it is ... not GPU. With the next MSI Afterburner beta (a) new class of MSI hardware products will be natively supported in MSI Afterburner's hardware monitoring module. That's all I can share now. Stay tuned!"

NVIDIA has become the first publicly traded company on Earth to reach a $5 trillion valuation, and it was only three months ago that it was worth $4 trillion.

According to data provided by the World Bank, the value of NVIDIA exceeds the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of every country on Earth besides the United States and China, following the company's share price on Wednesday opening up by more than 3%. NVIDIA's skyrocketing valuation can be attributed to the booming AI market, with tech companies around the world looking to invest as much as possible into the emerging software, and to achieve a sophisticated AI, companies need the infrastructure to operate it. That is where NVIDIA comes in.

NVIDIA's AI GPUs have become such a sought-after product that they have become the subject of international trade restrictions, geopolitical footballs between competing countries, and even spawned a black market where the GPUs are banned from being sold. All of this is part of the greater race between countries and companies to create the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the world's most sophisticated AI software.

PNY's new CS3250 M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen5 x4 SSD not only delivers cutting-edge Gen5 speeds across its 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, but also offers an affordable price point. With impressive sequential read and write speeds of 14,900 MB/s and 14,000 MB/s, respectively, the 1TB is available now for $125.99 USD, with the 2TB model priced at $219.99 USD.

PNY notes that the 4TB version is "coming soon," so we'll have to wait and see what the pricing is for the larger capacity variant. That said, it's great to know that we're now in the era where high-speed enthusiast-grade PCIe Gen5 storage is becoming increasingly affordable. And with that, PNY notes that the CS3250 is designed for AI applications, content creation tools, and PC gaming.

The PNY CS3250 M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen5 is also a modern Gen5 SSD that doesn't require active cooling, thanks to its "advanced thermal-coated controller," which helps keep operating temperatures down and extends the SSD's lifespan.

Jumping into a vehicle and putting on the radio to listen to popular music has been a thing ever since cars and radios were combined. However, in the world of video games, it's something we associate with Grand Theft Auto-style open-world games, where hopping into a random car will start playing one of several random in-game curated radio stations as you drive to your next mission or simply roam the streets looking to make your own fun.

In-vehicle radio and music are not something we usually associate with multiplayer games like EA's Battlefield 6, which is why the "first-ever official Battlefield playlist for Battlefield 6" is noteworthy. In addition to being a Spotify playlist that you can stream, the Battlefield playlist is also an actual GTA-style in-game radio.

Yes, jumping into a vehicle while playing one of the game's various multiplayer modes will turn on the radio and start playing "tracks from legendary artists" covering a wider range of genres.

If you've been PC gaming ever since the days of MS-DOS and Windows 95, then you're probably aware of Sound Blaster, Creative's brand for its line-up of dedicated sound cards for PCs. Yes, once upon a time, to get digital sound from a pair of PC speakers, you needed a sound card, with Sound Blaster one of the most dominant names in the space.

Of course, in 2025, motherboards include dedicated sound chips and hardware directly on the board, relegating the sound card market to a niche for audio and music producers. As for Sound Blaster? Well, it's back with Creative announcing the new Sound Blaster Re:Imagine modular audio hub with AI-powered apps and features.

According to the company, the Sound Blaster Re:Imagine takes the core DNA of classic Sound Blaster hardware and evolves it into a "modern, modular platform designed for creators, gamers, and anyone who lives at the intersection of work and play." Its features and capabilities certainly sound impressive (in more ways than one), so here's a quick summary.