Latest News - Page 256

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has responded to recent claims and comments about him and his company, reiterating his commitment to the United States, after President Trump said the Intel CEO was "highly CONFLICTED" and "must resign immediately".

In a new letter to Intel employees, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan addressed all of the recent claims, disclosing that there is a lot of misinformation against him and spreading around the internet about Intel. He said: "Let me start by saying this: The United States has been my home for more than 40 years. I love this country and am profoundly grateful for the opportunities it has given me. I also love this company".

He continued: "Leading Intel at this critical moment is not just a job - it's a privilege. This industry has given me so much, our company has played such a pivotal role, and it's the honor of my career to work with you all to restore Intel's strength and create the innovations of the future. Intel's success is essential to U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership, national security, and economic strength. This is what fuels our business around the world. It's what motivated me to join this team, and it's what drives me every day to advance the important work we're doing together to build a stronger future".

Intel's next-generation Nova Lake-S desktop CPUs won't be here until 2026, but we've got some new leaks to share on Nova Lake-S with its up to 52-core configuration.

In a new video posted by leaker Moore's Law is Dead, we're hearing that the new Intel Nova Lake-S processors will feature 52 cores and 52 threads in total, something we've heard in previous leaks, with "bLLC" or "Big Last Level Cache" that is Intel's current answer to AMD's innovative (and kick ass) 3D V-Cache technology. The bLLC will be on-die L3 in the middle of the ringbus.

There are reportedly five Tiles on Nova Lake-S, with 2 x bLLC dies = 8+16 Compute Tiles, with MLID noting that we should expect games to only really utilize one bLLC Tile. We should expect the flagship Nova Lake-S processor to be made on TSMC's bleeding-edge N2P process node, with 52 cores + 144MB of bLLC per CCD for a huge 288MB of L3 cache in total.

Rod Fergusson, the franchise lead that helped ship the highest-earning Diablo game of all time, has announced that he's leaving Microsoft and Blizzard.

Diablo IV earned $666 million in 5 days, becoming Blizzard's all-time fastest-selling game at launch. Diablo IV went on to break $1 billion in revenue more than a year later, with $150 million made from microtransactions. None of this would have happened without Rod Fergusson, an industry figure known as a "closer" who can step in to lead--in this case, lead Diablo IV's haphazard development.

Now Fergusson has revealed that he's leaving Blizzard and the Diablo franchise.

Fallout 4's Creation Club will soon become more refined and offer higher-quality mods, new reports suggest, potentially as part of a new Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition celebrating 10 years since the game's launch.

Bethesda's Creation Club initiative launched in 2017, adding controversial "paid mods" to Fallout 4 and Skyrim. The idea is simple: Gamers can create custom mods, including armors, weapons, and even entire questlines, and then sell them in a storefront. Creation Club uses its own premium currency, too. Bethesda could finally make money from mods, and users would get the opportunity to try out content that was more guaranteed to work.

The program received a lot of flak, especially from PC gamers, who had essentially kept Bethesda's games alive many years post-launch thanks to mod creation and support. Bethesda moved away from Creation Club, morphing the program into "Creations," meaning the content is much more curated and picked with care. That being said, there are still over 4,000 Starfield creations. Both Starfield and Skyrim have Creations pages, but Fallout 4 does not (users can still buy Creation Club mods with the special currency, however).

Sony management doesn't try to sugar-coat the state of PlayStation's live service roadmap, admitting the company has more work to do and lessons to learn.

Sony executives acknowledge the mistakes with PlayStation's live games, briefly mentioning the $400 million blunder Concord and discussing Marathon's delay. Multiple live games have been cancelled, including Naughty Dog's anticipated Last of Us online game; Sony originally wanted to release 12 live games by FY25 and a lot of these titles have been scrapped.

In a recent webcast with investors during Sony's Q1'25 earnings, company CFO Lin Tao says that there are "still issues, many issues" with the games-as-a-service plan. Despite the roadblocks, Sony has indeed seen success with Helldivers 2's gargantuan sales on PS5 and PC, and potentially even more when it drops on Xbox.

Some gamers with an Intel Arc A-Series graphics card - first-generation Alchemist models - are suffering from crashes when trying the Battlefield 6 beta.

Wccftech picked up on the fact that some PC gamers playing the Battlefield 6 open beta (which just kicked off) are reporting that they are being unceremoniously dumped out of gaming sessions, or that it's crashing on loading a map.

Intel has released a statement on its Gaming Forums which acknowledges these crashes and says that a fix is already in the works. Team Blue says:

The Battlefield 6 beta weekend is almost upon us, and with the highly anticipated game now opening up to the public, thousands of Call of Duty players will be flocking to servers to jump into the action. Here's what you need to know if you are a Call of Duty player who is about to experience their first Battlefield game.

Battlefield differs significantly from Call of Duty in its gameplay execution. While Call of Duty leans more toward a solo run-and-gun game, Battlefield is best experienced alongside teammates. It is possible to take on an entire enemy point by yourself in Conquest, cap it, and wait for teammates to spawn on you. However, first-time Call of Duty players are going to find that extremely difficult, considering enemies are also moving alongside their teammates.

Battlefield 6 is split into four classes, with each offering unique abilities and mechanics. While not every map calls for every squad to have one of each class, it's more often than not that a team will have different percentages of the same class.

A modding and repairs workshop based in the US has managed to successfully upgrade a Steam Deck OLED to 32GB of memory.

This is SlickBuys Mods and Repairs, based in California, which offers mail-in repairs or upgrades and specializes in consoles and gaming handhelds.

VideoCardz spotted the above YouTube video which shows how SlickBuys has managed to give the Steam Deck OLED an upgrade to 32GB of RAM - but there are significant caveats here.

Chromebook gamers who used Steam won't be able to do so for much longer, as Google has officially canned support for Valve's platform on ChromeOS.

The Steam for Chromebook Beta kicked off a few years back, in 2022, but it isn't going to make it past the end of this year.

9 to 5 Google reports that if you fire up the installation of Steam under ChromeOS now, you receive the following warning:

Earlier this week, we heard some chatter about a new high-end (200W) 16-core AMD Ryzen 9000 3D V-Cache processor with two banks of cache, one per chiplet - and apparently this rumor is a fake.

This comes from another leaker - so obviously, we need to take a debunking like this with appropriate seasoning, as we did with the original rumor - but 'wjm47196' on the Chiphell forums (in China) seems pretty certain this is fakery.

As flagged by HXL on X (see the above post, noticed by Wccftech), the Chiphell leaker (who is well-known) wrote: "Fake, there is no such thing." They then elaborated that there may be a new X3D chip for the Zen 5 generation in the works, though.

The latest freebies from the Epic Games Store for this week are Road Redemption and 112 Operator.

Cast your mind back to 1991 and you may recall Road Rash, a game where you zipped along on a motorbike, swerving between other bikers and then hitting them with miscellaneous weapons to dispatch them from the race.

Road Redemption is the spiritual successor to the chaotic racing which defined that EA classic, and it came out in 2017 (see the 'Road Rash' timeline in the above YouTube clip for the full story).

The beta for Battlefield 6 multiplayer has gone live, and I have already played 14 hours of it since it was made available. Here's what I have learned exclusively from playing Conquest.

There are three maps available in the BF6 beta for the Conquest game mode, two are similar, and one is pretty different, at least in terms of how you want to play it. For example, Siege of Cairo is a close-quarters map where players will mostly be rocking with SMG and AR weapons, possibly even shotguns, depending on how good you are at positioning.

Iberian Offensive is similar in size to the Siege of Cairo, but features more vehicles and a no-man's land located in the center. Liberation Peak is the larger of the two maps, or at least in terms of it being more visibly open. This map is where the Recon class can really cause havoc.

South Korea has confirmed that its big tech powerhouse companies -- Samsung and SK hynix -- are exempt from President Trump's 100% tariffs on semiconductors. Taiwan has also said TSMC is exempt from the tariffs, too.

The Trump administration unveiled punitive sectoral tariffs for the semiconductor industry yesterday, removing the sting of the levy by exempting companies that are already either in the middle of building, or have committed to building semiconductor facilities on American soil.

President Trump then confirmed that there would be levy-exempt status stamped onto Apple and NVIDIA, as the two US-based tech companies have hundreds of billions of dollars of investments inside of the US.

LG has just teased its bleeding-edge high refresh rate OLED panel designed for gaming monitors, with a new 27-inch 1440p OLED panel with a blistering 540Hz refresh rate (at native) and an even higher 720Hz mode (at 1080p).

LG's new 27-inch OLED panel runs at 2560 x 1440 @ 540Hz in native mode while at 1920 x 1080 it'll crank up to an insane 720Hz using Dynamic Frequency & Resolution (DFR) technology. LG's new OLED panel is based on the 4th Gen Tandem OLED technology, delivering 99.5% of the DCI-P3 coverage, and up to 1500 nits of peak brightness according to LG.

LG explains on its website: "In addition, it is unveiling the world's fastest OLED monitor panel for the first time. LG Display's 540Hz 27-inch OLED panel (QHD) applies Dynamic Frequency & Resolution (DFR) technology to achieve an ultra-high refresh rate of up to 720Hz (HD) depending on the user's needs. Combined with fourth-generation OLED technology, it boasts the highest level of picture quality among OLED monitor panels, with 99.5% DCI-P3 color reproduction and a maximum brightness of 1,500 nits".

Microsoft's Gaming Copilot is described as the "ultimate gaming sidekick," an AI assistant designed to help you out when you get stuck in a game as it "knows what you're playing and understands your Xbox activity." Gaming Copilot (Beta) is now available as part of the Game Bar for Windows PC for Xbox Insiders, with Microsoft confirming that optimizations are on the way for the upcoming launch of the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X handhelds.

"This companion makes gaming with Xbox more seamless and personalized, helping you get to gameplay faster, sharpening your skills, and being there when you need it and out of the way when you don't," Xbox's Taylor O'Malley writes. Gaming Copilot appears as one of the widgets on the Xbox Game Bar, and it fully supports voice interaction with a dedicated Voice Mode.

Apparently, this will let you engage and talk to the Gaming Copilot AI assistant while you're playing a game, so you'll be able to get tips and hints "without breaking away from gameplay."

A new GPU startup has just been born in Silicon Valley, one of the first in the last 25 years or so, with the ex-RTG boss announcing his new startup -- Oxmiq Labs -- and they've got world-class architects to make AI GPUs.

Koduri retired from Intel as its Chief GPU architect close to two years ago, previously working for AMD as the Senior VP and Chief GPU Architect of its graphics department -- Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) -- but is now building AI GPUs from scratch with Oxmiq Labs.

Oxmiq Labs will represent 500+ years of collective experience and will use hundreds of patents to design new AI hardware, with the company not just tweaking current GPU designs, but rather will be rebuilding the GPU ecosystem from the ground up with an "Atoms to Atoms" mindset. This will see the development of low-level hardware and bring transistor-level innovation to create high-end AI systems.

If you're jumping into the Battlefield 6 Open Beta with an Intel Arc graphics card like the latest Intel Arc B580, or an Intel CPU with integrated Arc Graphics, be sure to grab the latest Intel Graphics Driver 32.0.101.6987 (WHQL Certified). This new driver adds support and optimizations for FPS of the moment, alongside day one support for Mafia: The Old Country.

This new driver release also includes performance improvements for DOOM: The Dark Ages with an up to 6% average FPS uplift when playing at 1080p with Path Tracing enabled. Rounding out the game-specific updates, there's also a fix for Naraka Bladepoint that stops the game from freezing when Intel XeSS upscaling is selected on a Battlemage GPU.

Outside of game support, the latest Intel Graphics Driver also adds Shared GPU Memory Override control for select Intel Core Ultra Processors, and power management optimization for Intel Core Ultra 200H series devices.

Battlefield 6 is still months away from release, but hundreds of thousands of gamers have jumped into the open beta, which has already broken the concurrent player count of Battlefield 2042, which just... wasn't good at all.

The Battlefield 6 Open Beta has had a huge all-time peak of 334,549 gamers play the game on Steam, beating out Battlefield 2042 and its all-time peak from nearly two years ago with 107,376 players according to SteamDB. This is an amazing achievement for Battlefield 6, showing that just like John Wick... yeah... Battlefield is back.

This weekend is the Battlefield 6 Early Access and Open Beta weekend, where early access was granted to those who pre-ordered, while the open beta was open to anyone who simply streamed more than 30 minutes of the game through Twitch. I did that last night and put some time into Battlefield 6 and my early impressions are very high, I need some more time on it, but it gives me some crazy Bad Company 2 + Battlefield 4 vibes, which were my favorite entries in the franchise.

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud gaming library is expanding this week thanks to the launch of Mafia: The Old Country, the surprise Early Access release of Titan Quest 2, the Assassin's Creed Mirage PC Game Pass debut, and the highly anticipated 1.0 update for RTS game Stormgate.

Even though you're probably reading this while waiting in the Battlefield 6 Open Beta queue, this weekend's big release is the latest installment in 2K's long-running Mafia crime series. With the action taking place in 1900s Sicily, this is also the latest Unreal Engine 5 release that demands some serious hardware to render its cinematic visuals. This is good news for GeForce NOW gamers as you'll be able to play the game on an RTX-powered rig in the cloud with access to DLSS and other features like G-Sync.

This week also saw the surprise release of Titan Quest 2 in Early Access, which is the long-awaited sequel to the iconic Diablo-meets-Greek Myth action-RPG from 2004. Published by THQ Nordic, the Early Access version of the game features the first chapter of the story with the ability to create and customize your character build as you take on mythical beasts and monsters in Ancient Greece.

When id Software released Doom in 1993, it forever changed the PC gaming landscape as it ushered in a new era of fast-paced first-person shooters. The following year, in 1994, id would partner with developer Raven Software (a studio that is still around, working on Call of Duty) to publish Heretic. Instead of wielding guns in the distant future, fending off a demonic invasion from Hell, Heretic presented the FPS action of Doom in a rich fantasy world with magic, spells, monsters, and flaming swords.

Heretic quickly became a cult classic, alongside its follow-up Hexen: Beyond Heretic, which Raven also developed and released with id Software. With QuakeCon 2025 kicking off this week, Bethesda, id Software, and Nightdive Studios have been working behind the scenes to shadow drop Heretic + Hexen, a definitive remastered version of both games, for PC and console.

With native 4K 120 FPS action on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, PC gamers also benefit from the modernized update, which supports multiple resolutions and aspect ratios. It doesn't stop there, as this re-release also includes two brand-new campaigns or episodes in the form of Heretic: Faith Renewed and Hexen: Vestiges of Grandeur, online cross-platform co-op, a remastered soundtrack, and multiplayer Deathmatch for up to 16 players with 120 maps to choose from.