Latest News - Page 255

Apple is reportedly working on a low-cost MacBook that would be priced as low as $599, which is $400 cheaper than its MacBook Air that retails for $999.

The biggest difference between the purported new $599 MacBook and the $999 MacBook Air will be in the size of the laptop, with the new $599 MacBook said to sport a 12.9-inch display, compared to the 13.6-inch panel on the MacBook Air. Apple is reportedly looking at $599 to $699 pricing, with the new MacBook said to feature the A18 Pro chip, the same SoC that's inside of the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max smartphones.

Apple is reportedly looking at launching its new low-cost MacBook sometime in Q4 2025 or Q1 2026, and it could make quite the splash if and when it does arrive. The $599 pricing will be a huge deal for students and Apple fans that don't want to shell out close to, or over $1000 on a new laptop.

The flagship ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 BTF graphics card is now available in Europe, with the ASUS Germany online store listing the new flagship BTF card for €3083.90.

What makes this card stand out from the rest is that it sports ASUS's in-house GC-HPWR power connector, which delivers power directly from compatible (BTF) motherboards, into the ROG Astral RTX 5090 BTF graphics card. The included adapter means it'll work with regular motherboards, with the GC-HPWR power connector handling up to 1000W of power delivery.

ASUS's new flagship ROG Astral RTX 5090 BTF OC graphics card features a quad-fan cooling system with a patented vapor chamber, milled heat spreader, and a phase-change GPU thermal pad for improved heat transfer. ASUS says that airflow and pressure are boosted by up to 20% compared to standard RTX 5090 designs, with a chunky 3.8-slot cooler featuring a full-metal die-cast housing, backplate, and GPU Guard mounting reinforcement for stability and durability.

Ubisoft is reportedly developing a live action TV series based on the Far Cry series, new reports indicate.

Remember those epic Far Cry 3 shorts starring Michael Mando as Vaas? While Ubisoft used those live action snippets to advertise Far Cry 3 years ago, it sounds like the studio wants to do the same thing again. Only this time it'll be a big-budget TV show that advertises the entire Far Cry franchise.

Two days ago, Ubisoft accidentally posted up the Far Cry TV show announcement on their site. While we couldn't find an archived version of the page, descriptions of the TV show popped up online, revealing that the Far Cry series will be an anthology show with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia creator Rob Mac (former McElhenney) at the helm.

NVIDIA's new tweaked-for-China GeForce RTX 5090 D V2 graphics card reportedly launches in China tomorrow, with rumors that the RTX 5090 D V2 -- even with its cut-down 24GB of VRAM -- will be priced at the same price as the RTX 5090 D with 32GB of VRAM.

In a new post on X by leaker MEGAsizeGPU, we're hearing that the real MSRP for NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090 D V2 is the same as the original RTX 5090 D. Considering the new RTX 5090 D V2 graphics card has gimped VRAM down to 24GB from 32GB on the RTX 5090 D, that's not good news for gamers in China.

Recent reports had the new RTX 5090 D V2 card being $830 less than the RTX 5090 D, but the "real" MSRP will be much closer to the RTX 5090 D says the leaker. A Chinese retailer has the new RTX 5090 D V2 listed at 20,699 RMB, compared to 21,899 RMB for the RTX 5090 D from the same store, while the most expensive custom RTX 5090 D V2 cards at the same store are priced at up to 20,999 RMB.

NVIDIA has just opened up pre-orders for its new Jetson AGX Thor Developer Kit, a new mini AI supercomputer packing industry-leading performance ready for humanoid robots, for $3499. Check it out:

Inside, the new NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor Dev Kit features an NVIDIA Jetson T5000 with Blackwell GPU, featuring 2070 FP4 TFLOPS of AI compute power, with a 14-core Arm Neoverse-V3AE 64-bit CPU, and 128GB of LPDDR5 memory on a 256-bit memory bus with up to 273GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

The overall design resembles NVIDIA's in-house GeForce RTX series Founders Edition graphics cards, with a heatsink and fan keeping the Jetson T5000 with Blackwell GPU cool, a 1TB NVMe SSD + Wi-Fi 6e module, and rich I/O that includes an HDMI 2.1 connector, DisplayPort connector, super-fast 5GbE ethernet port, 2 x USB-C and 2 x USB-A ports.

PCI-SIG has announced the new PCIe 8.0 specification will once again double the data throughput of PCIe 7.0 to 256 GT/s, planned for release to its members in 2028.

The new PCIe 8.0 standard will provide 256 GT/s of raw bit rate and up to 1TB/sec bi-directionally through a next-gen PCIe 8.0 x16 configuration, with the new PCIe 8.0 specification aimed at supporting emerging applications like AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning).

PCI-SIG says the next-gen PCIe 8.0 standard will also be aimed at high-speed networking, Edge computing, quantum computing, and other data-intensive markets like automotive, hyperscale data centers, high-performance computing (HPC) and military/aerospace.

Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan is meeting with US President Donald Trump on Monday morning, following Trump's demands for the Intel CEO to resign from his position immediately.

The debacle between Intel's CEO and the Trump administration came to fruition when Republican Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel's board regarding Tan's investment in various Chinese companies. The letter raised concerns about Tan's investments, which then Trump caught wind of and responded to in a Truth Social post, writing Tan was "highly conflicted" and that he must resign from his position as Intel's CEO immediately.

Tan recently responded to this criticism in a statement that reaffirmed his commitment to the United States, writing the US has been his "home for more than 40 years. I love this country and am profoundly grateful for the opportunities it has given me."

NVIDIA and AMD have both agreed to pay the US government 15% of all revenue generated from the sale of AI chips to China, according to a new report from Reuters.

The new agreement follows the Trump administration's prevention of sales of NVIDIA's H20 chips to China in April, which was then followed up with an announcement last month that sales were going to proceed under a new agreement and that deliveries would begin soon.

Notably, on Friday the Commerce Department began issuing licenses for the sale of H20 chips to China, and when asked about the reentry into China an NVIDIA spokesperson told Reuters, "While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide."

SK hynix president says the HBM memory market will grow at 30% per year through to 2030, with leading AI GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD using the best HBM they can get, and the AI market isn't slowing down any time soon.

The upbeat projection for global growth of HBM used in AI chips brushes off any concerns in rising price pressures in a sector that, for decades, has been treated like commodities such as oil or coal, reports Reuters. US cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI servers, which is very healthy for one of the key ingredients: HBM.

SK hynix's Choi Joon-yong, the head of HBM business planning at SK hynix, said: "AI demand from the end user is pretty much, very firm and strong".

Former Bungie CEO Harold Ryan shares his thoughts on live services and how companies have to chase experiences, not business models.

Harold Ryan oversaw Bungie through Destiny's launch, a pivotal MMO-FPS mashup that transformed gaming. Ryan also technically ran Bungie when microtransactions were introduced in Destiny 1, permanently changing the game's funding model (although he did leave shortly after in January of the next year).

We don't often hear from Harold Ryan or Bungie CEOs in general, but this has changed thanks to a recent GamesIndustry.biz interview. The once-CEO of Bungie says that publishers and developers should be careful about the games they choose to make. Games-as-a-service, aka one of the most diabolically competitive models on the market, isn't one size fits all.

Sony's gaming profitability has improved as the company pays down the $3.7 billion Bungie acquisition, reduces SG&A costs, and enjoys boosted earnings from third-party games and network services like PS Plus.

PlayStation's profit margins are now back to pre-pandemic levels. The company's latest Q1'25 results saw PlayStation deliver a hefty 16% profit margin throughout the period, with operating income up +127% year-over-year to over $1 billion, which is a second all-time record high for a Q1 period. This is the first quarter to deliver such high margins since Q1-Q2'FY20, which delivered a significant 20-21% margin on an astronomical $1.152 billion in operating income, all during the height of the pandemic.

More importantly, though, Sony has telegraphed that it has re-stabilized its PlayStation business after COVID-19's radical disruption. The last time PlayStation specifically had a 16% margin was during Q1'2019, which predates the pandemic.

PlayStation profits are up +127% year-over-year to $1 billion, the highest point since 2020.

Sony just released its Q1'25 earnings report, and the results are stellar for the PlayStation brand. In total, PlayStation made $1.024 billion in operating profit during the quarter ending June 30, 2025, up significantly from last quarter's $607 million.

Company CFO Lin Tao explains that this surge in operating income was the result of better earnings from third-party software, as well as high earnings performance from the network services segment, which includes PlayStation Plus. Another major contributor is that Sony is winding down payments for the $3.7 billion Bungie acquisition (side note: Bungie is now slowly being absorbed by PlayStation Studios).

Battlefield 6 has some of the best destruction in a game so far, giving me some serious Battlefield: Bad Company 2 + The Finals vibes, but in this new side-by-side comparison between Battlefield 6 and Battlefield 2042, we get to really see what the team has pulled off with BF6. Check it out:

In a new comparison video from ElAnalistaDeBits on YouTube, a huge highlight was put on the destruction mechanics and physics of Battlefield 6 with some comparisons against Battlefield 2042. You can see the massive improvements in destruction and physics between the two games, where Battlefield 6 feels far, far more realistic and features a massive amount more (realistic) destruction than BF2042.

This is all still in its beta state as well, where I'm sure the developers will tinker around until things are even better for the final release of Battlefield 6. All of this destruction doesn't just pull down your performance either, where the team has said you just need an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB graphics card to hit 1440p 60FPS+ in Battlefield 6, damn good stuff.

Thermalright's new HR-10 2280 PRO Digital is out in the wild, with the active M.2 SSD cooler featuring an ARGB segment display for some real-time monitoring.

The company designed its new active M.2 SSD cooler for high-speed SSDs like Gen4 and Gen5 SSDs where read speeds can hit 14GB/sec+ where sustained use of the drive can heat things up rather quickly. Thermalright's new HR-10 2280 PRO Digital SSD cooler measures 51mm in height, with four 5mm copper heatpipes that are connected to an aluminum fin stack.

On the active cooling side of Thermalright's new HR-10 2280 PRO Digital we have a 3010-class high-speed fan that will spin at between 3500 RPM and a rather loud 6500 RPM, where it pushes air directly over the heatsink to keep your SSD as cool as it can under heavy loads.

LG Display has just unveiled the industry's first Primary RGB Tandem technology, which stacks the three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue) as independent layers.

The new technology was shown off at LG Display's booth at the K-Display 2025 event at COEX in Seoul, South Korea, with the company showcasing innovative technologies and products ranging from large, medium, and small-sized panels to automotive displays.

At the booth's entrance, visitors were welcomed to LG Display's mammoth 83-inch OLED panel featuring fourth-generation OLED technology, which the company unveiled earlier this year. The new fourth-generation OLED achieves a maximum brightness of 4000 nits based on the new Primary RGB Tandem technology.

The Battlefield 6 open beta has reached the mainstream with the first weekend attracting more players than the all-time player record for the Call of Duty franchise on Steam. With that intense popularity, EA has revealed how many players have attempted to cheat and have now been banned.

In a recent forums post, EA has shared a message from its SPEAR Anti-Cheat Team where it said that since the launch of the Open Beta its Javelin software has prevented a staggering 330,000 attempts to cheat or tamper with anti-cheat controls. Moreover, the Anti-Cheat team has said Open Beta players have filed 44,000 claims of potential cheaters in their lobbies just on the first day, while another 60,000 reports were lodged on the following day.

330,000 attempts at cheating are a staggering number of attempts, and that number is likely higher as the message from AntiCheatWard was from a few days ago and before the Open Beta reached its new height of 500,000+ concurrent players on Steam. Notably, Battlefield 6's anti-cheat software on PC requires Secure Boot, which provides the anti-cheat team with deep access to a machine and what the team says are the necessary tools to leverage against the various cheating techniques.

Another day, another fake RTX 5090 out in the wild with a Redditor ordering an MSI GeForce RTX 5090 VENTUS 3X graphics card from Amazon France, sold and shipped by Amazon (not a third-party seller) but once it arrived, he noticed that the GPU and VRAM chips were missing from the PCB.

The user said that at first "everything seemed normal", the Amazon box and tape were "perfectly sealed", but the moment he opened the GPU box and tried to check the back of the GPU, he said he noticed "no tamper seal". All four screws on the back of the GPU core had "clearly been taken out before" and that "two of them were almost completely stripped" and "that's when I realized: something's seriously off".

The Redditor then checked the gold finger which he said looked dull and used, at this point he said he was thinking "this is NOT a new GPU", so he hooked it up to his PC just to be sure... no fan spin, no display output, totally dead. He took a closer look and the memory chips under the thermal pads were missing. He used a flashlight to look inside and found the GPU core itself was missing.

Thermal Grizzly has officially launched its new "der8enchtable" which is a joint design between renowned overclockers Roman "der8auer" Hartung at Thermal Grizzly and Jon "elmor" Sandstrom at ElmorLabs. Check it out:

The new der8enchtable was crafted to improve test bench rigs and to make hardware testing both faster, and easier, built around a black anodized aluminum frame sporting an integrated PCB. The new der8enchtable support both air and AIO coolers, rocking mounts for radiators and power supplies, and can be used without the frame by setting the PCB on short standoffs.

On the storage side of things, the der8enchtable supports multiple USB ports, two SATA slots, and a microSD card slot for loading operating systems, drivers, and a BIOS directly. This makes it easier to switch out hardware faster, without requiring constant re-installs.

Sony's latest Q1'25 financials offer an interesting update on the PlayStation business, showing that the cross-platform initiative is helping a new games segment beat physical game sales.

Inside PlayStation's walls, physical game sales revenues have been outstripped by a relatively new classification: Other Software, which includes first-party game sales/microtransactions made on non-PlayStation hardware. Essentially, what we are seeing is that on the PlayStation platform, physical software is now being more heavily stressed by the combined effect of digital sales made both on PC and PS5. This skew towards digital saw holiday 2024 physical game revenue drop to just $291 million, a low point for this kind of period.

In Q1'25, which included Death Stranding 2's launch, PlayStation made $157 million from physical game sales, compared to $175 million from Other Software. This discrepancy makes sense considering that PC is almost fully digital at this point, but it's worth considering that Other Software technically includes the Lego Horizon Adventures game that PlayStation Studios published on the Nintendo Switch.

Battlefield is back and better than ever, pulling in the interest of hundreds of thousands of gamers worldwide.

The Battlefield 6 open beta is here, and has already broken one of its competitor's major player records. Just 4 hours ago, the Battlefield 6 open beta saw an all-time peak of 521,079 players, beating the Call of Duty launcher's all-time peak by nearly 30,000 users. The Call of Duty launcher hit a peak of 491,000 players quite some time ago in 2022.

Remember that these numbers are only on Steam, and do not include the EA App or those playing on consoles--the actual player base could be significantly higher, especially since the PS5 just hit 80.3 million shipments.