Latest News - Page 20

Valve has silently updated its marketing for the Steam Machine to drop the 60 FPS nomenclature found in advertising material on the Steam Machine's product page. Steam Hardware Updates on X saw the update, showing that Valve changed one of its text blurbs from "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR,..." to "up to 4K gaming with FSR 4.1,...".

Whether or not this change was made due to community backlash remains to be seen. But it is no secret that Valve's newest console is not up to the task of running every single game in the Steam library at 4K at 60 FPS, at least without the help of frame generation. Extensive testing by multiple reviewers has confirmed that the console's combination of a mediocre Zen 4/Zen 4c CPU and RDNA 3 GPU is only good enough for sub-60 FPS gameplay at 4K resolution in the most demanding titles available in the Steam library. For instance, in Digital Foundry's coverage of the Steam Machine, they recorded a benchmark result of just 30 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p (not 4K) using ray tracing, despite using FSR 3 in performance mode and running at graphics settings comparable to the base PS5.

As a reminder, the Steam Machine packs modest specs that represent what an entry-level gaming PC might look like in 2026. The system is armed with a custom Zen 4 chip with two vanilla Zen 4 cores, four Zen 4c cores, and a custom RDNA 3 GPU with 28 CUs and 8GB of GDDR6. For perspective, the GPU in the Steam machine features nearly identical specs to the RX 6600 that launched almost five years ago, save for the fact that the RX 6600 runs on RDNA 2, not RDNA 3. Valve is also pairing some Steam Machine orders with a single stick of DDR5 memory due to memory shortages, further reducing its performance in memory-bound situations.

Some fresh GTA 6 gameplay info has been spilled courtesy of Amazon, including the apparent depth of the integrated social networks feature, which will allow you to "follow influencers" and view viral videos.

The leak, spotted by Vice, comes via the Amazon site in Brazil, where the product page for GTA 6 has gone live for pre-orders complete with said details.

Some of this we already know, but there are some interesting nuggets of info which are new, and some pretty cool stuff therein - assuming all this is genuine, of course (and there's some skepticism about that).

The new Razer Soma Chroma is a wireless RGB gaming chair, and if you're wondering what that is, well, it's pretty straightforward. Basically, you've got Razer Chroma RGB Reactive Game Lighting built into the headrest, which is a pair of RGB lighting strips that synchronize with your PC and react to the on-screen action in over 300 integrated Razer Chroma-supported games.

In addition, Razer Chroma RGB offers a range of presets and is fully customizable through the Razer Synapse app. The Razer Soma Chroma also includes touch controls integrated in the fabric on the top of the headrest, with the built-in Control Panel offering quick access to lighting modes, brightness settings, and switching between PC (2.4 GHz) and mobile (Bluetooth) modes.

Of course, the Razer Soma Chroma is also a premium gaming chair that features a reinforced steel frame and wheelbase for durability, up to 155 degrees of recline for relaxation and productivity, and a built-in ergonomic lumbar arch to support posture and reduce fatigue during long gaming sessions.

Browser-based gaming has come a long way, especially in enabling access to classic games that were once standalone desktop or console experiences. For example, DOS Zone is a repository of classic PC games from the MS-DOS era, and it's a browser-based, ad-free way to play classics like Duke Nukem 3D, Sim City 2000, and Prince of Persia. And now we can add Valve's iconic Half-Life 2 to the list of classic games that are fully playable in a browser tab.

Developed by Slqnt and 98006, this web-based port of the game reportedly took three months to develop, but it offers the complete game to play with only a few graphical issues. The most notable one is that the character's eyes aren't rendered with irises or pupils, so they kind of look like zombies. Still, it's an impressive feat to get one of the most impressive games from the 2000s to run in a browser with all of the gameplay intact.

And it's also a testament to just how far we've come, both hardware and internet-wise, where cutting-edge games from back in the day can be played in a browser without having to wait an hour or several hours for a game to download and install.

This week, developer Rockstar Games and publisher Take-Two opened up Pre-Orders for what is shaping up to be the biggest game release of all time, Grand Theft Auto VI. Launching on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19, the $80 USD standard edition includes 'One Month of GTA+.'

Like previous entries in the series, it's expected that GTA 6 will once again push the envelope regarding mature and controversial content. And even though the ESRB in North America hasn't given the game an official rating, GTA 5 was rated M (Mature, 17+); it's already looking like Grand Theft Auto VI might be banned in some countries. Or, at the very least the eventual next-gen GTA Online mode that will accompany the game at some point in the future.

As Sony is the key hardware and marketing partner for the game, the company is seemingly taking the lead for pre-orders. And it seems that because there's a free month of GTA+, the monthly premium subscription for Grand Theft Auto Online, Grand Theft Auto VI (or this one component) won't be available for purchase in the following countries.

The Steam Summer Sale for 2026 has begun, and with thousands of games on sale, there are so many great deals that it's hard to keep track of them all. And if you're one of the many PC gamers out there who has uttered the phrase, "I'll wait for the Steam sale," then you're in luck because some of the biggest and most acclaimed releases from the last couple of years have been given their first major discount.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, the historically accurate and award-winning story-driven action RPG from last year, is 60% off, bringing its price down from $59.99 to $23.99. Also released last year, DOOM: The Dark Ages is 67% off and available for only $23.09. And if you've been sitting on the fence when it comes to Battlefield 6, EA's latest entry in the popular series is 50% off, bringing the price down to $34.99, just in time for Season 3's last big update.

And if you're one of the millions that have been glued to their screens watching all of the World Cup action, EA's premier soccer/football game, EA SPORTS FC 26, is currently 80% off and available for $13.99. And if you're looking for deep discounts like this, with games that are 90% off and available for under $10, you've come to the right place. Here are some of the best Steam Summer Sale 2026 deals for under $5 and $10.

Anthropic has accused Chinese tech giant Alibaba of carrying out the largest known distillation attack on the company to date. In a letter dated June 10 and sent to US Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, Anthropic alleged that operators affiliated with Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April 22 and June 5, 2026.

A distillation attack, also known as a model extraction attack, involves querying a rival AI model at an industrial scale and using its outputs to train a smaller, less capable model. The attacker interacts with the target system like an ordinary user but with millions of carefully crafted prompts designed to extract its most valuable capabilities. Crucially, this does not mean Alibaba obtained Claude's source code, model weights, or original training data. The alleged campaign instead involved collecting Claude's responses at scale and using them as training material.

According to Anthropic, the campaign was specifically designed to help Alibaba's Qwen model approach the capabilities of Anthropic's frontier Mythos Preview model, which focuses on advanced coding, multi-step reasoning, and cybersecurity tasks. Anthropic alleged that the Chinese government was complicit in the effort and described distillation attacks as turning hundreds of billions of dollars in American AI investment into a subsidy for geopolitical competitors.

IBM has announced what it calls the world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology, unveiling a new 0.7nm process built around an entirely new transistor architecture called nanostack. The result is a chip the size of a human fingernail that packs nearly 100 billion transistors, almost double the density of IBM's previous 2nm chip from 2021.

IBM says the architecture could deliver either 50% higher performance or 70% greater energy efficiency compared to its predecessor, and it represents what the company believes is a viable path for chip scaling for at least the next decade. Before going ahead, it is worth clarifying what "sub-1 nanometer" actually means here.

Modern process node names have not corresponded to literal physical dimensions for decades. IBM's 0.7nm designation, which it also calls the 7 angstrom node, refers to a generation of manufacturing capability rather than a physical transistor size. What matters practically is that the architecture delivers the density and efficiency improvements that such a node implies.

It was only a matter of time. Apple has raised prices across its Mac and iPad lineups, effective immediately. The MacBook Neo now starts at $699, up from $599, while the MacBook Air jumped from $1,099 to $1,299. The MacBook Pro saw the largest increase among the laptops, rising by $300 to start at $1,999.

The Mac Studio also took a significant hit, with the M4 Max version now starting at $2,499, up from $1,999. The M3 Ultra version of the Mac Studio went up from $3,000 to $5,299, the largest single price hike in this round.

On the tablet side, the base iPad now starts at $449 (up from $349), the iPad Air jumped from $599 to $749, and the iPad Pro rose from $999 to $1,199. The iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods, and accessories are the only product lines left untouched, for now. The average price increase across affected products sits at $246.67.

Apple is reportedly making a significant change to its Apple Silicon roadmap. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the company has canceled plans for M6 Pro and M6 Max chips, making the M6 the first Apple Silicon generation since 2020 to ship without higher-end variants. Instead of following the usual cadence, Apple is jumping straight to the M7, which is being designed primarily around on-device AI performance.

The base M6 chip is still on track for late 2026 and will appear in entry-level MacBook Pro models, the Mac mini, iMac, and potentially upcoming iPad Pro and iPad Air models. It brings meaningful improvements over the M5, including memory bandwidth up to 200GB/s compared to 153GB/s on the M5, an updated Neural Engine, a redesigned GPU with up to 12 cores, up from 10, and performance improvements across all processor cores. Prior rumors have also suggested that the M6 will be built on Apple's new 2nm process to reduce manufacturing costs.

The M7 is expected to arrive in relatively quick succession, with the base chip targeting the first half of 2027. The M7 Pro and M7 Max are slated for the end of 2027, with the M7 Ultra following in 2028. Bloomberg reports that the M7 line is designed primarily around major advancements in on-device AI processing, with the base M7 expected to support around 240 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The RAMpocalypse reached a new milestone in Q2 2026. According to market research firm SigmaIntel, consumer memory prices rose sharply in the second quarter as supply-demand imbalances persisted across the industry. These are quarter-over-quarter figures, meaning prices didn't just climb versus last year; they also jumped relative to the already elevated Q1 2026 levels.

The LPDDR segment took the worst hit. LPDDR4X 4GB ICs rose 75%, going from $26.2 to $45.9, while 96Gb (12GB) LPDDR5X modules surged 89%, climbing from $77.1 to a whopping $145.9. This is the single biggest price jump in DRAM across any segment.

On the standard DDR side, a 16GB DDR4 stick now costs $207.1 versus last quarter's $137, a 51% increase, while a basic 16Gb (2GB) DDR module jumped from $19.2 to $28.5, up 49%. It is important to note that DDR5 pricing wasn't even included in SigmaIntel's report, and we've already documented how brutally expensive DDR5 has become.

Sony has confirmed layoffs at Bungie, and reports say that half of the studio--some 400 people--could be let go.

Disaster strikes at Bungie today with major layoffs affecting its development teams. PlayStation studios head Hermen Hulst released a memo that revealed the extent of the layoffs. Most of the Destiny team is being let go, as well as groups at SIE that are technically outside of Bungie but assist with Destiny and Marathon. Even some of the Marathon group will be let go as Sony and Bungie drastically downsize the workforce.

"We have made the decision to reduce Bungie's workforce, affecting a significant number of employees, including most of the Destiny team and some Marathon team members. There are also reductions across SIE teams that support Bungie's operations," Hulst said.

AMD has issued a hotfix driver for Windows 10 users to fix a problem preventing Radeon gamers from running Adrenalin driver 26.6.2 - AMD's first driver with FSR 4.1 enablement for RDNA 3 GPUs, on Windows 10. AMD announced the new hotfix driver on X, version 26.6.3, and further elaborated that the hotfix will only be needed for a week, as the team gets ready to push the Windows 10 installation fix to an upcoming WHQL update next week.

Adrenalin driver 26.6.2 was one of the most important driver updates AMD has released this year, featuring FSR 4.1 upscaling support for previous-generation RX 7000 series GPUs and RDNA 3.x integrated graphics chips. After the driver's release, gamers quickly discovered that the update was broken on Windows 10, forcing Windows 10 users to switch back to an older revision. The issue specifically relates to a conflict with the driver and AMD's control panel software, which spits out an error message telling the user that the control panel version is incompatible with the driver. The issue is widespread, affecting a broad range of hardware, including Ryzen 9000 series CPUs and RX 9000 series GPUs. Windows 11 users are apparently not affected for unknown reasons.

AMD could have waited a week to get this fix out to everyone, but demand for AMD to extend FSR 4 support to older RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 GPUs has been significant over the past year on social media and comments on various AMD YouTube videos. Likely incentivizing AMD to push out a hotfix driver to fill in the gap. It's worth mentioning that hotfix drivers do not represent the most stable releases, so if you value driver stability, you might want to skip this update. But, for those who want FSR 4.1 support right now and are running an RX 7000 GPU and Windows 10, AMD's latest hotfix driver is the best option.

UPDATE: Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter, a largely credible magazine, that Rockstar currently has no plans to release GTA 6 on disc any time soon--especially not for the holidays.

New reports say GTA 6 will have a disc version after all...but this true physical SKU may not be available until a full month after launch.

GTA 6 is digital-only at launch, but it might not stay that way forever. New reports say that Rockstar could release a proper physical version of GTA 6 sometime in December. This version would of course come with a disc in the box, not just a download code, and may even have extras like a map and manual.

Xbox consoles are getting another price hike, Microsoft today announced.

Gaming is getting more expensive. GTA 6 will cost $80, but most people are buying the $100 version. Valve's new Steam Machine will launch at $1,049, and consoles are more expensive than they've ever been. Now gaming hardware is getting more expensive, at least at Microsoft.

Xbox today announced another price hike to its hardware lineup that affects all variants. The 2TB Series X Galaxy Black is also being taken out of production. "Effective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide. The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model."

Shortly after Computex earlier this month, Lexar was kind enough to offer journalists a tour of their headquarters and manufacturing facilities in China. It was an eye-opening experience. Not just for the beauty and cultural experience of China, but for witnessing Lexar's space-age manufacturing, quality control measures, and compatibility testing. Lexar takes pride in being a provider of storage and memory solutions.

It has been said that storage is the foundation of civilization. That's not some throwaway cheesy line. Think about it. Almost everything we know of ancient history and antiquity comes from tablets and scrolls, artifacts, books, and documents. Moving forward, we have punch cards, typewriters, drums, floppy disks, and hard drives. These days we have DRAM, SD cards, and SSDs. Who knows where we'll go next. DNA storage? Holographics?

Storage is more important than ever. In an online world, nearly everyone has a digital footprint. That's saying nothing about the insatiable demands that come from AI. All those 1s and 0s need to be stored somewhere, whether it's in memory or persistent storage. Without storage, well, we'd be screwed to put it mildly.

A couple of months ago, Blizzard released the second major expansion for its premier action-RPG with Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred. And based on the response from media, gamers, and fans alike, it delivered the best version of the game to date, thanks to its massive endgame overhaul, redesigned Skill Trees, improved itemization, new and surprisingly deep crafting system, and several Quality of Life updates. That, and it offers a satisfying, cinematic conclusion to the story laid out in the initial release.

And with Diablo IV: Season 14 'Season of Death Awakening' being the first proper seasonal update for the new Lord of Hatred, it introduces a new storyline and seasonal mechanic in the form of Pandemonium Ruptures born from Dark Rituals. These can appear throughout Sanctuary, where players can close them for loot and reputation, and take the fight to the new Seasonal Lair Boss.

But perhaps the biggest update coming with Diablo IV: Season 14 'Season of Death Awakening,' is something Blizzard is calling Mythic Uniques 3.0, where "every Unique can be Mythic."

AMD has released the FSR SDK v2.3.0 for game developers, which allows them to integrate AMD's FSR technologies into their projects natively. This is a notable update because it includes the DLL for the latest version of FSR Upscaling 4.1.1, which adds support for Radeon RX 7000 Series (RDNA 3) discrete GPUs. AMD has already released FSR Upscaling 4.1.1 as part of the latest Adrenalin drivers for Radeon GPUs, allowing RDNA 3 gamers to use the FSR 4 driver override feature, so this is more for future game releases and updates.

Perhaps the biggest addition to FSR SDK v2.3.0 is the arrival of AMD FSR Ray Regeneration 1.2.0. FSR Ray Regeneration is the company's answer to DLSS Ray Reconstruction, as it leverages AI and machine learning to denoise ray-traced lighting effects. The technology is still relatively fresh on the scene and only available in a handful of titles like Call of Duty and Crimson Desert, with the overall effect being an improvement compared to non-AI denoisers, but still a step or two behind DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction when it comes to image quality and detail that's restored.

With FSR Ray Regeneration 1.2.0, AMD notes that this update features "quality improvements," which is great to see, alongside expanding the technology to cover ambient and specular occlusion denoising. These new optional add-ons should bring noticeable improvements to FSR Ray Regeneration's image quality, so it will be interesting to see how they look in-game.

Valve has made it pretty clear that, with the success of the original Steam Deck, it was working on a follow-up. However, its position has always been that, for them to release a Steam Deck 2, the handheld would need to deliver a notable generational leap in performance rather than an incremental one. It needs to feel like a new console generation, and not the incremental updates seen in PC hardware and gaming.

With previous word from the company being that it's "hard at work" on creating the Steam Deck 2, and credible leakers stating that the company is targeting a 2028 release window (assuming hardware prices normalize by then), we've now got a small but definitely worthwhile update thanks to the recent launch of the Steam Machine.

Speaking with IGN, Valve has provided a quick update on the Steam Deck 2's development, and it sounds like the hardware is getting pretty close to being locked in.

When it comes to PC audio, especially for gaming, there's a lot of attention paid to headsets. And for good reason: there are many gaming headset options, and their mix of portability, versatility, and microphones makes them a go-to choice for multiplayer gaming and social interaction. That said, dedicated speakers will always have a place in any setup, and if you're looking for a more compact option, you might want to check out the new Creative XF1 Desktop Speakers.

The physical design here, available in black or white, is traditional bookshelf in that you've got a pair of woofers and tweeters in a design that hasn't really changed all that much in decades. However, the Creative XF1 Desktop Speakers are definitely modern as the built-in DAC supports high-resolution audio across Bluetooth 6.0, USB-C audio, and AUX input. On the wireless front, it supports the lossless LDAC codec for premium sound.

Now, when it comes to overall audio presence, larger speakers/woofers are important. As compact speakers, the Creative XF1 can output 72W of room-filling sound with its 3-inch FEA-optimized woofers. There's also bi-amplification with dedicated amps for both high and low frequencies, delivering cleaner, more balanced sound. As for the high-resolution playback, they support up to 40 kHz via USB Audio and analog line-in.