Latest News - Page 222

Analyst firm Ampere Analysis implies that Game Pass has changed consumer habits--Xbox users play more games on average, but are less likely to play for longer periods of time.

Since 2017, there's a dynamic that's been happening among the Big 3: Nintendo and PlayStation preserve the status quo while Xbox disrupts the market with its all-you-can-play Game Pass subscription service. Over the past few years, we've seen Nintendo and PlayStation follow Game Pass with their own service, but with different aims in mind. Game Pass puts heavy emphasis on value to attract users, and the gambit has worked. Microsoft has apparently successfully changed how its own console users access and consume content.

According to findings from Ampere Analysis analyst Louise Wooldridge, Xbox gamers are playing more games on average than PlayStation or Steam users. The trend has been consistent for the past 3 years, Wooldridge notes.

We've caught a first impression of the GPD Win 5 and the seriously pricey handheld has proved to be seriously powerful to match its costly nature.

This comes to us courtesy of The Phawx on YouTube who has the flagship GPD Win 5, which has the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (top-tier Strix Halo) chip as its engine. (A lesser version of the GPD Win 5 runs with the Ryzen 385 SoC, but the YouTuber wasn't sent that model sadly).

As Tom's Hardware reports, The Phawx compared the Max+ 395-toting handheld to a rival with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 inside, and found there was a big difference in terms of performance, with the integrated Strix Halo GPU really flexing its muscles.

Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra speaks out on Microsoft's recent price hike, suggesting it's essentially a cash grab that passes the costs down to consumers.

No one's happy about raising console prices, especially Microsoft. Despite popular belief, the company does still want to grow its console presence--it's just not happening, and some of that can be attributed to the confusing 'This is an Xbox' marketing campaigns. Global economic volatility has forced everyone to raise prices, and Microsoft isn't immune: They announced the second Xbox console price hike of 2025, exposing a sticker-shock $800 price tag for the 2TB Galaxy Black Xbox Series X.

The move was incredibly unpopular, and some stores, like the world's third-largest retailer Costco, are removing Xbox products from their online and in-store inventory. It feels like bad news for Xbox, at least the traditional Xbox console environment, and everyone's taking notice--even former executives that worked closely with Microsoft's gaming brand.

Sony announced earlier in the week that it would be hosting a State of Play event, and now the event has been locked in with start times.

Sony's PlayStation State of Play will be broadcast to PlayStation's official social media channels and will begin on September 24 at various times around the world. It will be a live event, and viewers can expect new looks at anticipated third-party and indie titles, along with updates on other titles currently in development under PlayStation Studios' banner.

More specifically, Sony has confirmed the event will include an extended look at Saros, the new game from developer Housemarque, the creators of Returnal and Resogun. As for Saros, that title stars Rahul Kohli and will be a sci-fi action game that features a haunting story of a lost off-world colony under an ominous eclipse. According to game director Gregory Louden, players will be stepping into the shoes of Arjun Devraj, a powerful Soltari Enforcer.

One of the big parts of GTA 5 is the roleplaying gamers get up to, and if you were wondering if that will be available in GTA 6, it will be, as Rockstar has just confirmed it.

Rockstar Games took to its official social channels to announce that it will support the NoPixel team, the creators of the GTA 5 roleplay server running on the FiveM platform, which allows modded multiplayer servers. If you are completely out of the loop with GTA roleplaying, here's how it works.

Gamers join these roleplaying servers and step into the shoes of specific characters, such as criminals, thieves, etc, and roleplay as them in the GTA 5 world by carrying out the activities that the character would do. Police pull speeding players over.

NVIDIA's RTX 5060 Ti is a tempting pick out of the Blackwell line-up, in the 16GB flavor of course - and we've seen a new low in pricing for this model.

Tom's Hardware picked up on Walmart in the US offering the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Epic-X variant - a compact model that's suitable for a small form-factor PC - at a hefty discount.

You can buy this RTX 5060 Ti for $379 at the time of writing, which is considerably less than the launch price - the original MSRP was $429. Indeed, it's the lowest we've seen this graphics card at, equalling the launch price you'd pay for the 8GB model of the RTX 5060 Ti (if you were unfortunate enough to grab one of those).

Logitech has launched a new keyboard that is powered only by light. Yes, that is correct. A solar-powered keyboard that will convert solar or even artificial light, say from your overhead light in your bedroom, into charge.

The Signature Slim Solar Plus K980 is a $99.99 keyboard that doesn't feature any swappable batteries or even a USB port for faster charging; instead, it converts a minimum of 200 lux of illuminance into charge. Logitech says the battery within the K980 will last for up to 10 years, and once fully charged, the keyboard can be used in complete darkness for up to four months.

Micron has teased that it's well-positioned with its GDDR7 memory, which is designed to deliver ultra-fast performance with pin speeds exceeding 40Gbps.

NVIDIA's current GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" gaming GPUs ship with GDDR7 memory with speeds of 28Gbps to 30Gbps, but in its recent earnings call, Micron confirmed it has 40Gbps+ GDDR7 memory ready. The company has been working in close collaboration with NVIDIA on pioneering the adoption of LPDRAM for servers, and now that NVIDIA's launched its LPDRAM in their GB (Grace Blackwell) AI server family, Micron has been the sole supplier of LPDRAM in the data center.

Micron President & CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said: "In close collaboration with NVIDIA, Micron has pioneered the adoption of LPDRAM for servers, and since NVIDIA's launch of LPDRAM in their GB product family, Micron has been the sole supplier of LPDRAM in the data center. In addition to our leadership in HBM and LP5, Micron is also well-positioned with our GDDR7 products, which are designed to deliver ultra-fast performance with pin speeds exceeding 40 Gbps, along with best-in-class power efficiency to address needs of certain future AI systems".

Microsoft is experimenting with a totally different way to cool AI chips by using microfluidics to deliver liquid directly inside of the silicon. Check it out:

Unlike using regular cold plates that are positioned on top of the chip and are blocked by packaging layers, Microsoft's new approach cuts tiny channels into the silicon itself, where coolant flows through the grooves and drags heat away from the source.

Microsoft says that in its tests, the use of microfluidics removed heat up to 3x more effectively than cold plates, and that it also sliced the maximum GPU temperature rise by 65%, depending on the workload and the chip type. AI models were also used to map hotspots on the chip, and to direct the coolant with increased precision.

US-based memory manufacturer Origin Code has just unveiled its new VORTEX DDR5 memory modules, with a high-capacity 256GB kit that features an active triple-fan cooler. Check it out:

Origin Code says its new VORTEX DDR5 memory redefines what high-end memory can be by infusing cutting-edge features with a sleek design, a breakthrough in thermal management, and a "fresh approach" to how components work together inside of today's most powerful systems. The company has its new VORTEX DDR5 memory available in four different flavors:

Unreal Engine 5.7 Preview is now available with production-ready Procedural Content Generation Framework (PCG) with nearly twice the performance compared to UE5.5.

Epic Games says that it has added GPU parameter overrides, scaling improvements, and better multiplatform support, as well as FastGeo. There's a new PCG editor that introduces spline drawing, volume creation, and painting, while PCG Graphs are now capable of running in standalone mode.

The developer adds that there's a new Procedural Vegetation Editor inside of the new experimental plugin, which will allow developers direct creation and customization of Nanite-ready foliage inside of the Unreal Editor, and it will let users grow and shape trees, tweak leaves and branches, and export meshes without the need of third-party tools.

Google has announced in a new blog post that Android users will now be able to edit their images in Google Photos by simply using their words.

The company explains the feature was first introduced on the Pixel 10, but has now been rolled out to all Android users in the US. The idea is that users will now be able to make the edits they want without having to change between editing tools within Google Photos. Instead, users can simply describe the edits they want to make either through text via the chat box or with their voice, which will write out what they say in the chat box.

Here's how it works. Users can tap "Help me edit" and describe the change they want to make to their image, and after some processing time, Photos will attempt to make the requested changes through the power of Google's Gemini. Notably, users don't have to be super specific with their image-altering requests, as Google writes that a user can simply say, "Make it better," and the AI will do the rest.

Micron has confirmed it has started shipping the industry's fastest 11Gbps HBM4 DRAM to its customers, while teasing it will partner with TSMC for its next-gen HBM4E memory.

In its recent earnings call for Q4 and FY2025, the US-based company teased some key developments in its DRAM and NAND flash businesses. Firstly, Micron posted $11.32 billion in revenue compared to $9.3 billion in the previous quarter, while full-year revenues grew to $37.38 billion up from $25.11 billion.

Micron announced it had produced and shipped its first samples of its bleeding-edge HBM4 memory, with over 11Gbps pin speed and up to 2.8TB/sec of bandwidth. The company says its new HBM4 memory should outperform all of the competition -- SK hynix and Samsung, really -- in terms of performance and efficiency.

Intel has announced it will be moving away from providing driver support for several CPU families, and instead focus on solely providing critical security updates.

Intel announced the news via a new blog post, where it explained it will be moving 11th - 14th Gen Intel Processor Graphics and related Intel Atom, Pentium, and Celeron processor graphics to a legacy software support model. This means Intel will only provide software support for affected products on critical fixes and security vulnerabilities, not additional driver support such as day 0 game support.

Intel points this out directly in its FAQ, stating that it will not offer Day 0 Game support for the processors listed below. It is worth noting that Intel's newer Core Ultra series, which includes Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and Arrow Lake, will continue to receive Day 0 Game support through monthly Graphics Driver updates. Moreover, this transition to legacy software updates won't affect the majority of gamers, as most are running a dedicated GPU and not using their integrated graphics on their Intel CPU.

The Snapdragon Summit 2025 is currently underway in scenic Maui, where I've been invited to attend as a Snapdragon Insider. Although the latest Snapdragon hardware announcements are scheduled for tomorrow, which Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano R. Amon teased as being a game-changer for the AI era during his opening keynote address, there was one surprise reveal when he brought the Senior Vice President of Devices & Services at Google on stage.

During an informal fireside chat, where the two discussed the long history between Qualcomm and Google (they even brought the first, and still working, Android phone on stage), they teased and announced an exciting new project currently in development. And that is a new line of computers or PCs that will be Android-driven for the AI era.

Now, these won't be Chromebooks (which run on ChromeOS), but instead full PCs that bring the Android ecosystem, Gemini AI, and next-generation Snapdragon chips together in a way that has made Android one of the most popular operating systems for smartphones. Yes, these will be Android PCs.

YouTube has announced it will be rolling back channels that were deleted over producing COVID-19 and election misinformation in 2020, with the video platform's owner, Alphabet, having sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, claiming the Biden administration pressured the company to remove user-generated COVID-19 and election content despite it not violating the platform's terms of service.

The letter states that the "political atmosphere" had forced the company's hand to initiate the bans on channels producing what at the time was being deemed misinformation, with Alphabet's lawyers writing, "It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content."

Notably, during 2020, YouTube rolled out a "medical misinformation policy" that banned content that contained conspiracy theories about the pandemic, which resulted in many channels being banned from the platform.

OpenAI and NVIDIA have a new $100B+ deal that requires up to 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA AI systems and up to 5 million GPUs for a single project, alongside its Stargate AI supercomputer project.

During a recent interview with CNBC between NVIDIA and OpenAI, we get some greater insight into the $100 billion deal and upwards of 4-5 million AI GPUs. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang explained: "This new project we're talking about, 10-gigawatts, or roughly, 4 million or 5 million GPUs, that's approximately, in one project, what we shipped all year this year, and twice as much as last year, twice as much as the year before that... This is a giant project".

There was a DeepSeek moment that the world hasn't felt yet according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said that the models at this point are "actually quite capable for things far beyond what most people use them for in ChatGPT" and that the world is "just catching up with that".

After reiterating that it will continue to compete in the discrete GPU market, hints have been dropped that Intel is working on its own version of Multi-Frame Generation.

It was only recently that NVIDIA and Intel announced a huge $5 billion deal that involves NVIDIA supplying RTX GPU chiplets for Intel to use on its CPUs, which caused many to think the end was near for Intel's Arc GPU line-up. However, that isn't the case. An Intel spokesperson said the company will continue to compete in the discrete GPU market.

Intel's Battlemage GPU is currently still in development, and to really compete with other GPUs on the market, the company will need to release its own form of multi-frame generation, or at least that is what recently changed driver files are suggesting.

Borderlands 4 released with shaky performance at best on PC, but now reports indicate that PC isn't the only platform suffering from performance problems; both consoles are as well.

The tech experts over at Digital Foundry discovered that Borderlands 4's performance dwindles over time on all consoles, particularly in the 60FPS performance modes. By comparison, the Quality modes, which restrict the game to 30FPS, hold up better for continuous play, but are still at risk of the performance decline if the game is played for long enough.

What is happening exactly? Digital Foundry found that when in Performance mode, Borderlands 4's performance begins to decline over the course of about one hour, which, when exceeded, will result in the average FPS dropping from the target 60FPS down to the mid-40s. Why does this happen? Currently, there isn't any official explanation as to why performance declines over time, but Digital Foundry's leading theory is that there is some kind of memory leak that becomes more prominent over time.

The DDR5 memory OC frequency world record has been broken yet again, with overclocker "SaltyCroissant" reaching over an incredible 13,000 MT/s on the GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Tachyon ICE motherboard.

The Canadian overclocker used Corsair DDR5 Vengeance memory and an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K processor, with the new DDR5 RAM OC world record having other renowned overclockers like GIGABYTE's HiCookie, Corsair's Sofo, and Splave involved in the new record.

The entire top part of the GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Tachyon ICE motherboard -- including the CPU socket and DDR5 DIMM slots -- were put under dedicated LN2 pots. The overclockers specifically chose the GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Tachyon ICE motherboard as it's an overclocking board ready with just two DDR5 DIMM slots, with the motherboard previously used to reach a record DDR5 OC to 12,726 MT/s earlier this year.