Latest News - Page 23

A proposed Linux kernel patch could reduce frame hitches on the Steam Deck and other AMD-based gaming hardware running Linux. In early testing using Civilization VI's benchmark, the patch improved 1% low frame rates by 31.8% and frame generation times at the 99th percentile by 4.1%, without affecting average FPS at all.

The patch comes from David Vernet, a Linux kernel developer at Meta, and targets a specific inefficiency in how AMD's P-State driver handles EPP mode during gaming workloads. When a game's main or render thread pauses briefly while waiting for the GPU, the current driver can misread that short sleep as reduced CPU demand and begin lowering the core's clock speed. When the thread wakes up, it starts back at a lower frequency than it actually needs, causing momentary frame time inflation that shows up as stutters and 1% low spikes.

Switching the processor to full performance mode eliminates the issue. Still, it kills the power efficiency that EPP mode is designed to provide, which is concerning on a handheld where the CPU and GPU share a power budget. Simply raising the minimum performance target permanently also backfires by interfering with the shared CPU and GPU boost management on Steam Deck hardware.

One word that every PC gamer who has spent enough time browsing Reddit threads or YouTube tutorials eventually runs into is "modding." As synonymous as it has become with PC gaming, installing mods is rarely the simple drag-and-drop experience you'd hope for. Nexus Mods' new owner, Victor Foledinho Folmann, has outlined an ambitious plan to fundamentally change how mods are built, shared, and installed on the platform.

"For going on 25 years now, this platform has been modeling mods as files," Folmann wrote. "Mods are not files. Mods are systems. With dependencies, with conflicts, with load orders, with versioning, with environments, all that complexity. Everything that has been making you angry over the years can be attributed to one factor: the platform models your mods as files."

The plan is to fix that at the infrastructure level. Rather than leaving users to manually manage dependencies, resolve conflicts, and spend hours on Reddit hunting for why a Skyrim mod refuses to load, Nexus Mods wants to handle those difficult parts itself. The goal is for a mod to be a repeatable, reliable experience for everyone who installs it, not just the person who made it.

Despite reports to the contrary, BioWare's co-founder believes the studio could technically bring Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age II back for a remastered duology...but it wouldn't be easy.

Following the reception of Veilguard, EA seems unlikely to resurrect the Dragon Age franchise any time soon, but former BioWare dev and executive producer Mark Darrah says EA probably couldn't do it even if they wanted to. The reason? No one currently at BioWare has enough experience with Dragon Age's old Aurora-based Eclipse Engine to make the project actually happen.

However, BioWare co-founder Trent Oster is optimistic on Dragon Age remasters. "I've seen a fair bit of chatter about the impossibility of remastering Dragon Age. I like to think of myself as someone who talks a bit, but more often lets my work speak for me. In my opinion, it is possible, but by no means a trivial exercise," Oster said on Twitter.

The European Commission is considering placing ChatGPT and Roblox under the Digital Services Act's strictest regulatory tier, according to a Bloomberg report, with the designation potentially arriving as early as August.

ChatGPT's search function would be classed as a Very Large Online Search Engine. At the same time, Roblox would become a Very Large Online Platform, joining a list that already includes Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X, WhatsApp, and Amazon.

The DSA applies its heaviest obligations to services with more than 45 million monthly users in the EU. Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told Reuters the designation was "definitely possible" and could "come sooner or later." OpenAI said it continues to engage positively with Brussels, while Roblox did not comment.

The classic GPU swap scam is becoming an all-too-familiar sight, with buyers opening supposedly sealed RTX boxes only to find everything from rocks to bags of grain instead of the graphics card they paid for. Now, another buyer has fallen victim to the same trick.

A customer in Moscow ordered a GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5070 Ti from Russian online retailer Wildberries for 90,000 rubles, around $1,125, only to find a two-liter plastic bottle of water inside the factory-sealed box.

Fortunately, the buyer had the foresight to film the entire unboxing with store employees present. The video, shared on X by @oldValkyrie, shows a Wildberries employee handing the package directly to him. Before opening anything, he holds the box up to the camera to show the serial number label and outer plastic wrap, both of which appear completely intact.

As part of a series of updates to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform, LinkedIn has introduced a button that lets users flag posts as "seems like AI slop." This makes it one of the first major social platforms to give users a direct tool to push back against AI-generated content.

The feature is part of a broader set of measures LinkedIn is rolling out to address what its chief product officer Hari Srinivasan called a "top priority." AI detection company Pangram found that more than 40% of long-form LinkedIn posts were flagged as fully AI-generated, with LinkedIn described as the most AI-saturated social media platform.

Nearly two-thirds of all AI-generated long-form social media posts were found on LinkedIn specifically. With the new update, whenever a user clicks the new button, the flagged post disappears from their feed. LinkedIn will also privately notify posters through their account dashboard that their content may have come across as inauthentic. Srinivasan said that the goal is not to judge content but to give creators feedback from real humans rather than relying solely on automated AI detectors.

Xbox's layoffs have impacted the team behind Bethesda's popular The Elder Scrolls Online, but the game will continue onward for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, the team has delayed a few features originally planned with The Thieves Guild release into 2027.

Microsoft recently laid off 1,600 workers across all divisions of Xbox, including ZeniMax/Bethesda. The team behind The Elder Scrolls Online was hit hard, with a substantial portion of staff let go, including senior management and studio leaders. There were rumblings that the team had been reduced so much that those that remained were reportedly unsure how they'd deliver new content.

Now that the dust has settled a little bit, ZeniMax has issued a statement on what's next for ESO after the disruptive layoffs. "ESO is here to stay, and our team is dedicated to the future of this game. Our focus hasn't changed. It is continuing to grow The Elder Scrolls Online and build upon the world millions of players call home," new ZOS studio head Nick Giacomini said. He also affirms that ZOS will focus on "quality experiences over calendar dates."

After promising FSR 4.1 support several weeks ago, Valve has officially introduced AMD's latest upscaling technology to the Steam Machine. In a Steam blog post, Valve states that FSR 4.1 is now available for Steam Machine owners to take advantage of in compatible games with the introduction of FSR 4.1 to the experimental branch of its Proton compatibility layer. Valve has also introduced a CAD file featuring the Steam Machine's external geometry for users who want to make their own accessories for the console.

Valve also provided an update on the Steam Machine's reservations and Waitlist, noting that they are fulfilling orders on a daily basis. Valve also expects everyone in the reservation queue to have the option to purchase a Steam Machine by the end of this year.

FSR 4.1 is AMD's latest upscaling technology that was originally aimed at RDNA 4 GPUs, but several weeks ago AMD finally announced official FSR 4.1 compatibility with RDNA 3 GPUs, with RDNA 2 support debuting in 2027. Around this time period, Valve also announced collaboration with AMD to bring FSR 4.1 support to the Steam Machine.

Microsoft has made a big U-turn on its path to exclusive games and now sees them as a major growth indicator for Xbox.

Microsoft recently posted its FY26 results, showing a $1 billion+ decline in Xbox earnings. The drop in gaming was driven by softening demand for Xbox hardware, increased costs and an overall reduction in subscription and sales. Microsoft's SEC filings also give some clues into how the group is now thinking about Xbox.

Following instrumental shifts from new CEO Asha Sharma, the games division is no longer referred to as "Gaming" in Microsoft's earnings reports, and is now simply called "Xbox." There's also a new definition of how growth will actually be determined at Xbox and exclusive games are quizzically a part of this metric.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that Xbox is expected to "return to growth" in FY27, but what does that actually mean?

Microsoft has pulled all the levers to ensure Xbox has a clear runway for growth. The group has held mass layoffs (Xbox let go of over 1,600 people in FY26 alone), cancelled projects, and divested studios, all while laying out new targets to help measure and quantify this so-called growth.

These drastic calls are expected to start paying off this fiscal year, company CEO Satya Nadella says: "When it comes to XBOX, we are making the necessary decisions required across our content portfolio, platform, and operations to reset the business for long-term growth. We have the best IP in the industry, and talented studios around the world, and believe we can bring these strengths together and expect to return the business to growth in fiscal 2027."

Today, KIOXIA has announced its new CM10 Series SSDs, which represent its first PCIe 6.0 enterprise SSDs built for demanding AI workloads like inference and Key Value (KV) cache. The KIOXIA CM10 Series also sports the company's latest BiCS FLASH generation 10 TLC flash memory technology that achieves the highest bit density and smallest chip size for 1Tb products, delivering 332 stacked layers with power-efficient performance.

And with direct-cold-plate liquid cooling, the KIOXIA CM10 Series is built for the next generation of AI infrastructure and systems. The PCIe 6.0 SSDs also support NVIDIA CMX context memory storage, expanding GPU memory on NVIDIA Rubin for AI inference. Compared to the previous-generation CM9 Series, which leverages PCIe 5.0 NVMe technology, the KIOXIA CM10 Series reportedly delivers 92% higher sequential read performance and approximately 85% higher random read performance.

These are impressive stats, as the KIOXIA CM9 Series of SSDs is still considered cutting-edge as far as enterprise storage goes. That said, with the complexity of AI systems growing, with millions of tokens, the demand for high-performance KV (Key Value) cache storage is rising. And this is where the KIOXIA CM10 Series fits in, leveraging the company's latest BiCS FLASH technology and PCIe 6.0 to deliver a solution for large-scale AI.

Fans of Grand Theft Auto VI are convinced that Rockstar Games is about to drop the next trailer - and the evidence is piling up. Internet sleuths discovered recent activity on the official GTA VI website and the Rockstar Instagram account, sparking a frenzy among fans that GTA 6 marketing season and the highly anticipated next trailer are arriving in the coming weeks.

X user Videotech discovered the GTA VI site was updated with font and layout changes, the first such update in over a month. Then, Rockstar's Instagram account began following new profiles, which some see as an early step in prepping for a large-scale reveal. Industry insider Tom Henderson predicted the trailer will land around August 6, likely tied to Take-Two's investor call schedule and the need for a final marketing push before the November 19 launch.

It was recently confirmed Take-Two will be holding its shareholders' meeting on September 17, which it will hopefully use as an opportunity to showcase how successful the ongoing marketing for GTA 6 is going, and perhaps some pre-order numbers.

Xbox earnings were down -7% year-over-year, representing a decrease of around $1.7 billion as the Xbox Series records its worst sales revenue of the generation.

Microsoft has reportedly its full-year revenues, showing sharp declines in Xbox earnings. Based on company data, Xbox made an estimated $21.76 billion in FY26, compared to $23.45 billion the previous year. Increased costs and a topline revenue reduction were the major culprits.

According to our estimates, FY26 wasn't just the lowest annual earnings for the gen 9 Xbox Series console generation. FY26 represents the lowest year of Xbox console revenues in more than a decade. The last all-time yearly low for Xbox hardware sales was in FY20 with $1.66 billion earned, and in FY26, Microsoft made an estimated $1.51 billion from Xbox Series sales.

Hackers known as ExfilSquad have stolen over 740,000 records from the UK Department for Education (DfE) and a police legal database, including personal and professional contact details of thousands of individuals.

The breach, as reported by The Guardian, involves 607,000 lines of data from the DfE's help-desk portal and 135,000 records from the Police National Legal Database. The stolen data includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, and job titles of parents, staff, government officials, university workers, and police officers. Additionally, another 135,000 pieces of data were extracted from the police national legal database (PNLD).

The cybercriminals are demanding ransom from the DfE and other victims to prevent the full release of the data. "Be smart and just pay," the hackers wrote in a message seen by Sophos, a cybersecurity company that provided the screenshots to The Guardian, adding that the payment would be a "rounding error" compared to the financial cost of litigation.

The new COLORFUL Rimbook L1 Plus is a lightweight, portable, and powerful new laptop built for creators, everyday users, and students. It's powered by the 8-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS processor, which features clock speeds of up to 4.75 GHz, and integrated Radeon 680M graphics. As a lightweight 16-inch laptop weighing just 1.4kg and measuring 16.65 mm thin, the Rimbook L1 Plus is all about portability for those looking for an on-the-go solution.

In addition to the Ryzen CPU, the Rimbook L1 Plus ships with 16GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory and a 512GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD. It's also equipped with two SSD slots so users can expand the internal storage as needed. Rounding out the hardware, the Rimbook L1 Plus also sports a large 16-inch IPS display with a 120 Hz refresh rate, 100% sRGB color gamut rating, and 300 nits of peak brightness.

It also sports a 2560x1600 (2.5K) resolution, which COLORFUL notes makes the Rimbook L1 Plus a device for creators and professionals. And on that note, in addition to coming with Windows 11 pre-installed, it also ships with WPS Office for quick access to a wide range of productivity tools like word processing and spreadsheet creation.

In a forum post titled 'I've Spent A Month With NVIDIA's RTX Spark in Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra,' a TechPowerUp forum user by the name of Fouquin details how they've been in possession of an RTX Spark-powered Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra laptop for about a month. With that, they're ready to share their "review" of the device, albeit with benchmarks and analysis based on the recent RTX Spark 616.00 preview driver NVIDIA released for developers, which added CUDA 13.4, OpenGL, and Vulkan support.

Formally announced at Computex 2026, RTX Spark refers to NVIDIA's N1X Arm-based CPU and RTX Blackwell GPU all-in-one chip that's set to power a new wave of powerful AI-ready premium Windows on Arm laptops and mini PCs on track for release later this year. With an optimized version of Windows, up to 128GB of unified memory, and powerful graphics reportedly on par with a desktop GeForce RTX 4070, there's a lot of hype surrounding the arrival of these RTX Spark devices.

This makes this early "review" notable; however, Fouquin notes in their post that they're not an AI person. Even so, they attempted to run the Phoronix AI test suite, albeit with some issues due to the pre-release nature of the software and drivers - with the Phoronix CUDA tests failing. That said, for the tests that did work, performance was in the range of the desktop GeForce RTX 4070.

One of the biggest advances in the AI space over the past year has come from its ability to speed up development and programming, to the point where "vibe coding" means people can create apps and software without any formal coding experience or background. This is why we've got a story like this, where a developer (Kahris) was able to port the Nintendo 64 classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to iOS and iPadOS.

And it's a native port, too, which means support for touch controls, high-resolution widescreen display, and a smooth 60FPS. Compared to the N64 original's 240p resolution and 20FPS or so gameplay, it's a massive improvement. With porting duties handled by Codex 5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship GPT-5.6 model, it's an impressive feat, but also one that sits on the shoulders of existing work by talented human coders.

Although Codex 5.6 Sol impressively rebuilt the game for iOS as a native ARM64 app, rendered by Metal, it's based on the decompiled Ship of Harkinian source port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, written in the programming language C.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has admitted that the platform added over 200 million new players in fiscal year 2026, but despite this increase in players, its business did not grow proportionally.

In a statement posted to X, Sharma acknowledged there is a widening gap between new Xbox users and revenue generation. "We need to close that gap by investing in what players value," she said. "That will take time, but we expect to return to growth by the end of FY27." This statement from Sharma comes on the heels of Xbox publishing its financial results, where it was revealed its earnings are down 10% in FY2026.

The numbers highlight a growing challenge for Microsoft and Xbox: attracting users is one thing - monetizing them is another. Though the platform continues to expand its reach, internal metrics suggest a disconnect between player base growth and financial performance.

According to a new report from 404 Media, AI companies are not only using books to build and train powerful AI models, but they're also destroying them. Yes, to digitize millions of books in a way that saves them time and money, AI companies are removing spines and individual pages to make the whole process faster.

It's a system referred to as 'destructive scanning,' where the source material is effectively destroyed. This process came to light a year ago, when Anthropic's "Project Panama" initiative was taken to court in the United States for this very reason. Even though the court ruled in favor of Anthropic because it legally purchased these books to turn them into digital copies, it led to widespread backlash because it meant that millions of books were destroyed, everything from paperbacks to rare prints and editions.

Even though destructive scanning is viewed as 'fair use' by federal courts, AI companies are now looking to shield themselves from criticism by working with intermediaries to acquire books at scale on their behalf.

SK hynix is one of the big three when it comes to memory, so it's no surprise that the company's latest earnings report for Q2 2026 reflects a record-high operating profit thanks to the demand for HBM and other high-performance memory. With KRW 60.5 trillion in profit, this represents a 557% increase year-over-year; however, even this astronomically high figure failed to meet expectations.

Throw in overall revenue of KRW 79.3 trillion, a 257% increase from a year ago, and SK hynix's share price still managed to drop by over 9% on Wednesday. One reason the company's Q2 performance fell short is continued DRAM price increases and SK hynix's inability to pass them on because it has long-term supply agreements (LTAs) with key customers already in place. Reporting indicates approximately 50% of the company's total sales were made via these long-term contracts.

But these lower prices are temporary, with several of these contracts concluding. And with SK hynix beginning to mass produce and ship next-gen HBM4 memory, it's expected that demand from the AI and data center markets will continue to increase as next-gen systems like NVIDIA's Vera Rubin begin to roll out in volume. HBM4 memory is widely viewed as a critical component in this next generation of AI hardware, with all of the big three (SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron) on board to supply HBM4 to NVIDIA.