Latest News - Page 28

The AI boom has pushed chip shortages well beyond GPUs and memory. According to a Reuters report citing two people familiar with the talks, Intel and AMD are now signing longer-term purchase commitments with Chinese server customers for data centre CPUs, as prices for some products have climbed more than 40% since the start of the year, with month-on-month increases still exceeding 10% for certain parts.

The agreements lock in purchase volumes rather than prices, leaving Chinese cloud providers and internet companies fully exposed to a market that has already added 40% to some CPU prices in under seven months. Most deals cover roughly a year of supply, though Intel and AMD have discussed commitments running to two years or longer with some customers.

This marks a meaningful shift for server CPUs, which have historically been far easier to obtain than AI accelerators or memory chips. Intel flagged the change as far back as February, when it warned Chinese customers that lead times for some Xeon server parts could stretch to six months. AMD was quoting eight to ten weeks around the same time. By late March, server manufacturers were reporting average CPU lead times had ballooned from the usual one to two weeks to eight to twelve weeks and beyond.

Sony's decision to stop producing new PlayStation discs from January 2028 has drawn widespread criticism across the gaming industry. Ubisoft, however, does not appear to share those concerns.

Speaking during the company's Q1 2026 earnings call, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot and CFO Frédérick Duguet both suggested the move would not meaningfully hurt the industry, with Guillemot pointing to the growth of PC gaming as his primary evidence.

"What we saw on the PC is that it helped to grow the market," Guillemot said when asked by an analyst whether the disc shutdown could create a demand headwind by eliminating the used game market. "There's also some pressure for the future on the cost of machines, and being able to be only digital will help to have a more accessible machine, I would say. There are pluses and minuses, but we think it will not disturb the industry too much."

Apple's App Store added approximately 560,000 new apps in the first half of 2026 alone, nearly matching the total for all of 2025. At the current pace, the platform is on track to surpass one million new app submissions by year's end, eclipsing the previous record of 890,000 set in 2016. The surge is being driven largely by vibe coding, an AI-assisted development approach that lets people build and publish apps with little to no programming experience.

Tools like Replit and Bolt.new can generate full-stack applications from natural language prompts. In contrast, agentic AI tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot are increasingly being used by both professional and hobbyist developers to accelerate their output. The result is a wave of app submissions from people who would never have entered the developer ecosystem before.

The problem is that downloads are not keeping pace. App Store downloads rose just 3% in 2025 and 2% in the first half of 2026, meaning app growth is far outstripping user demand. Most of what is flooding the platform is finding virtually no audience, and copycat apps, privacy-questionable clones, and apps that simply do not function as advertised are becoming more common. Former App Store chief Phillip Shoemaker, who ran the platform from 2009 to 2016, has warned that the surge could strain Apple's review resources and create openings for malicious actors.

Primate Labs has released Geekbench 7, the latest version of its popular cross-platform benchmarking tool, available now on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. The update brings new workloads, smarter multi-core scoring, expanded GPU testing, and refreshed datasets.

The biggest change to the CPU side is how multi-core scoring works. Rather than forcing every workload into a multi-threaded test, Geekbench 7 only runs a task in multi-core mode if the real application it models actually behaves that way. Web browsers are primarily single-threaded, so the HTML5 Browser test no longer contributes to the multi-core score. This should produce results that more accurately reflect real-world performance rather than artificially inflated numbers.

New workloads include a Game Physics test using the Jolt Physics engine, AV1 video encoding for screen sharing scenarios, Opus audio compression for podcast and voice recorder use cases, and live caption generation using OpenAI's Whisper model running alongside video decoding.

GTA 6's code-in-a-box approach to physical copies has apparently found a new way to frustrate players, this time in Japan. Rockstar's own support page for the game states that Japanese product codes will expire 170 days after the issuance date, citing "regional regulations" as the cause.

That math puts the cutoff at May 8, 2027. Anyone who buys an unopened boxed copy after that date could end up with a code that no longer works. The restriction appears to apply only to the PS5 version, since Xbox codes aren't region-locked the same way. Rockstar also notes that the code needs to be redeemed on a PlayStation account registered in Japan, and recommends buying from a retailer in the same region as the account to avoid activation issues.

The detail was first flagged by an X user, though the original post has since been taken down, and there's apparently some disagreement over whether the 170-day window applies to the base game or just to a pre-order DLC bonus. Rockstar hasn't clarified either way yet, so it's worth treating the exact scope with a bit of caution. Still, multiple outlets have read Rockstar's own FAQ wording as covering the base game code, not just an add-on.

It is well-known that Ubisoft has been struggling recently, and a big portion of its struggle seems to be centered around identity. However, Ubisoft appears to have found a formula it likes a lot more than expected. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced beat the publisher's full-year sales target in just two weeks, and that performance is apparently nudging Ubisoft to rethink its stance on remakes versus brand new games.

On Ubisoft's Q1 FY2027 earnings call, CFO Frederic Duguet was asked about the profit margins on a game like Black Flag Resynced. His response was blunt:

AMD is reportedly working on a new gaming laptop CPU, the Ryzen 7 9800HX3D, and it breaks from how the company has approached mobile X3D chips so far. Every 3D V-Cache laptop CPU AMD has shipped, including the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, has used a 16-core design. The 9800HX3D would apparently be the first to drop down to 8 cores.

The information comes from Weibo leaker Golden Pig Upgrade Pack, who says the chip was previously floating around under the Ryzen 7 9755HX3D name before AMD settled on branding that lines up with the desktop Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Specs reportedly include 8 cores, 16 threads, a 5.1 GHz boost clock, and 96MB of L3 cache split between 32MB of native cache and a 64MB 3D V-Cache stack. That matches the desktop 9800X3D's cache setup, just 100MHz slower.

As a recap, 3D V-Cache works by stacking an extra cache die directly on top of the CCD, connected through dense vertical interconnects. It keeps more data close to the cores, cutting memory latency in a way that tends to matter more for games than raw core count does. AMD already pushed the concept further this year with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, its first CPU with 3D V-Cache stacked on both CCDs. The 9800HX3D takes the opposite route, a single small CCD built for laptops rather than workstations.

Blizzard has fired a World of Warcraft GM (game master) for abusing their powers to help out a friend in a punishing endgame dungeon.

In the MMORPG World of Warcraft, game masters are these kind of omnipotent, god-like beings that oversee the in-game world. They tackle things like rules enforcement, support, and will also investigate cheating and do basic things like teleporting stuck players. They can even insta-kill enemies with a special death touch ability. There's one thing GMs aren't supposed to do, though, and that's using their powers to help out a buddy.

Blizzard has recently let go of one such GM who used their bestowed powers to insta-kill an enemy in a Mythic+ 23 dungeon, an extremely difficult endgame activity. "I go to my GM friend and I'm like bro, can you please do a me solid? This thing has 20 million HP, bro please can you just one-shot it? Personally, I think it's harmless. I didn't expect him to do it. In hindsight, he shouldn't have done it. He was just doing me a solid," the affected WoW player said on stream.

GIGABYTE has added support for memory chips from a Chinese DDR5 manufacturer with its AM5 motherboards to give customers more options amid the ongoing memory crisis. GIGABYTE reports that with the release of AMD's AGESA 1.3.0.1c microcode, its 800 and 600 series motherboards now support CXMT memory at speeds of up to 8200 MT/s.

GIGABYTE's AM5 motherboards support 16Gb and 24Gb versions of CXMT's chips, matching support with more well-known memory brands such as Samsung and Micron. 24Gb is a new chip capacity introduced with DDR5 that provides customers with 24GB DIMM options. GIGABYTE also claims that the 8200MT/s limit introduced with AGESA 1.3.0.1c breaks the previous speed limit AM5 was capable of running with CXMT chips. (The previous limit was 6800 MT/s.)

CXMT has grown massively over the past few years and is now the fourth-largest DRAM manufacturer in the world, right behind Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung. The Chinese DRAM manufacturer has gained a lot of attention as of late from system manufacturers due to the company's growing size and its plans to potentially break into the US market. There are no signs of CXMT slowing down, with the DRAM maker reportedly projected to produce 350,000 wafers per month, matching Micron's production capabilities.

Microsoft is bringing classic Xbox games to PC for the first time through backwards compatibility, but the technology isn't actually new.

To prepare for its new Project Helix console, Microsoft is taking a more universal approach to game access, aiming to create a kind of convergence of console generations and software. Original Xbox games are coming to PC for the first time via a new backwards compatibility initiative that seems well-timed to coincide with Positron, Microsoft's rumored disc-to-digital conversion program.

To pull off BC on PC, Microsoft is using old tech. The Xbox app uses the Xenon Fusion (aka XeFu) emulator that was first implemented in the Xbox 360. Interestingly enough, Windows PCs will load up an Xbox 360 environment first, and then run XeFu to emulate the original 2001 Xbox. There's basically an Xbox inception going on here as layers of emulation are taking place.

Ubisoft reiterates how successful the latest Assassin's Creed remake is, saying that the game has vastly exceeded internal sales forecasts.

Black Flag Resynced is significantly outperforming Ubisoft's original sales targets for the game. In the publisher's latest Q1'27 results, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot comments that the new AC remake has already beaten the company's full-year goal in just a matter of weeks.

"Strong launch of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced in July with 3.5 million copies sold-in to date, exceeding annual expectations within its first 14 days," the press release reads.

Whether it's for television or the cinema, video game adaptations have come a long way in regards to quality. From Fallout to The Last of Us to Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog, making the jump from pixels to live action or animation can not only work but live up to fan expectations. Naturally, this means that we're going to get a lot more video game adaptations in the years ahead, with perhaps the strangest being a new deal between Atari and Universal Pictures.

And we say strange because we're talking about the project adapting a bunch of video games from an era that few modern gamers remember, let alone grew up during, the 1970s. The classic Atari franchises and games reportedly include Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong, and Yars' Revenge. And they'll all be represented in a single movie.

The report over at Deadline, which broke the story, says that the movie will be based on all of these Atari IPs, produced by Entertainment 360, from a screenplay by Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe. Yeah, it's hard to imagine what it might look like other than it featuring some sort of homage to these classic retro games which don't feature much in the way of story.

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows installations include what is called a Global Device ID (GDID), a persistent, unremovable identifier that links a user to a specific Windows installation. This so-called GDID was a revelation that emerged as a byproduct of Microsoft assisting authorities in catching a cybercriminal, as Microsoft provided the GDID to authorities to help identify a suspect.

The GDID is assigned during setup or sign-in to a Microsoft account, remains even after updates, and cannot be edited or changed. It is stored in the Windows registry and on Microsoft's server side, and Microsoft has shown it's capable of identifying a user based purely on the GDID activity it can see on its server side.

For example, the cybercriminal was a 19-year-old who arrived at Helsinki airport in April 2026, where he was trying to board a plane to Japan. Before he could board the flight, he was stopped by Finnish police, and US prosecutors later revealed he was Peter Stokes, an alleged member of the Scattered Spider hacking group responsible for an $8 million ransom. Microsoft assisted the FBI in tracing Stokes, providing the authorities with a means of tracking Stokes' Windows PC across VPNs, proxy servers, and three countries - GDID.

On the heels of multiple investigations that revealed LG monitors were silently installing adware on Windows 11 machines through Windows Update, Microsoft has now stepped in to stop LG.

The issue came to light after Gamers Nexus and several other tech experts published videos showing that when LG monitors were plugged into a freshly installed Windows 11 system, it would trigger an automatic software install that occurs silently during the monitor setup process. This silent software install piggybacks off Windows Update, meaning when users go to update their system, the adware is also downloaded without the user knowing. The pop-ups appeared at boot, often featuring a 30-day free trial for McAfee antivirus, and were reported to be impossible to disable without manually uninstalling the app.

Microsoft confirmed that LG has agreed to remove the McAfee pop-up from the app, according to a statement from Pavan Davuluri, EVP of Windows and devices. Despite this win, deeper concerns remain. The LG Monitor App Installer has been installing itself on systems for years without user permission, and LG's app description in the Microsoft Store grants it access to system resources and personal data, raising concerns from many users about why a monitor needs this level of permission to function.

With the memory crisis seemingly taking a turn for the worse, with no end in sight, it looks like GeForce RTX pricing is set to increase. According to a new report over at BenchLife (via VideoCardz), NVIDIA has reportedly contacted its various partners, or AIBs, to inform them that the prices for GeForce RTX GPU kits are set to increase.

Like AMD, when it comes to supplying companies like ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, and others, with GPU hardware so they can assemble and ship their custom models, NVIDIA supplies kits that pair the GPU dies for various discrete GeForce RTX cards alongside GDDR7 and GDDR6 memory.

According to the report, the price increase covers both GDDR7 and GDDR6 products, which would refer to the GeForce RTX 50 Series as well as the resurgence of the GeForce RTX 3060, which utilizes the older memory technology. Now, a price increase for kits doesn't necessarily translate to a higher retail price, but with the cost of everything going up, that's looking likely.

Yet another person has successfully paired an RTX 4060 to an ARM-powered laptop with the help of NVIDIA's RTX Spark development driver. Spotted by VideoCardz, YouTuber "Chaowanke" showcased an RTX 4060 running off a Snapdragon X Elite laptop with fully functioning driver support. The RTX 4060 was running off a Razer Thunderbolt 5 dock hooked up to one of the laptop's USB4 ports.

This officially unsupported configuration was made possible by using NVIDIA's recently released RTX Spark development driver, which includes a graphics driver that supports the ARM version of Windows 11. The driver reportedly won't install the traditional way due to a hardware incompatibility error; however, the YouTuber discovered a workaround by extracting the ARM64 driver manually through Device Manager. This workaround bypasses NVIDIA's installation wizard and prevents the installer from stopping the driver installation.

The YouTuber ran the ARM-powered RTX 4060 setup through Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon 6's benchmark, proving the setup's functionality with the RTX Spark driver. In Cyberpunk 2077, the setup achieved 44.6 FPS, and in Forza Horizon 6 around 53 FPS.

Sony's decision to end physical PlayStation disc production by January 2028 has been public for about three weeks now, and according to a former Santa Monica Studio developer, no amount of pushback is going to change the outcome.

Alanah Pearce, who worked on God of War Ragnarok before leaving Sony, laid out the case in a recent video. According to Pearce, Sony already knew this would upset people, and made the call anyway because leadership believes it's the right long-term move for the brand.

She pointed out that most players have already shifted to digital purchases, even if the loudest voices online suggest otherwise. She also compared the moment to Microsoft's infamous Xbox One E3 backlash a decade ago, where consumer anger didn't actually stop the underlying industry trend from happening.

Sony has been cooking up something new for its next-gen PlayStation controller. A newly published Sony patent suggests the PlayStation 6 controller might ditch the physical potentiometers responsible for years of DualSense stick drift complaints, swapping them out for magnetic sensors instead.

As spotted by Cheat Happens and confirmed via WIPO's patent database, the filing describes an operating stick assembly that uses a non-contact tilting sensor to detect stick movement, paired with spring-based return mechanics and stabilization structures meant to keep the stick centered over time.

Since there's no physical contact point left to wear down, the design should, in theory, hold up far longer than the sticks currently packed into Sony's DualSense controller, which have been a source of persistent stick drift complaints since the PS5 launched back in 2020. Stick drift is notoriously hard to prevent and fix, so a design that eliminates contact altogether is the best bet to work around it.

Xbox has confirmed a new way to access and play games--in exchange for watching ads.

Microsoft has officially announced its new gaming monetization strategy that brings console games to other platforms. The company today confirmed that it will offer an ad-supported version of cloud game streaming that allows users to watch short pre-roll advertisements in exchange for 1 hour of free cloud streaming. No subscription is required for Xbox's free streaming ad tier, and it will function similarly to NVIDIA's GeForce Now streaming service.

The feature went into public testing in the Xbox Insiders program today (anyone can sign up) and testers can stream select games that they already own for free.

Why doesn't Bloodborne have a PS5 version yet? It's a good question, and one that has an ex-PlayStation boss scratching his head.

Wccftech reports that Shuhei Yoshida, who was previously President of Worldwide Studios for Sony Interactive Entertainment (before departing in 2019), talked about Bloodborne in a keynote session at CEDEC 2026.

Yoshida said: "This title has a massive fan base all over the world. However, a PS5 version hasn't been released, right? People point out that PlayStation's first-party teams keep pumping out remasters, so why haven't they released this one? Or why hasn't a PC version come out? I get asked 'Why hasn't it been released?' all the time myself, but well... that remains a mystery."