Latest News - Page 28

A renowned gaming industry insider recently shared some information about the release date for Grand Theft Auto VI, and if Take-Two's recent statements weren't enough to elicit some faith in Rockstar making it to the finish line without a delay, perhaps these comments from NateTheHate will.

In a recent X post, NateTheHate responded to an X user suggesting there is some reason to believe that GTA 6 won't release this year, meaning Rockstar will shift the current November 19 release date to sometime in 2027. In response to this, NateTheHate wrote, "Unless something unexpected & catastrophically goes wrong with GTA6 in the immediate future... it'll hit in November as planned."

This insider statement aligns with recent statements from Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Take-Two recently stated that marketing for the upcoming game will begin "this summer", and that marketing timelines ahead of GTA 6's release will be short. So, that means when Take-Two begins marketing GTA 6, the release will be right around the corner. If marketing for GTA 6 is expected to begin "this summer," it means we will get the first wave between now and August.

CD Projekt Red already has a lot on its plate with The Witcher 4, a remake of the original game, The Witcher 3 DLC titled Songs of the Past, and the previously announced multiplayer spin-off Project Sirius. According to a new report from MP1st, there may be yet another unannounced project in the works.

The leaked title is described as a free-to-play co-op action RPG currently in development for PC and mobile, with no console release confirmed. Set in 1230, well before the main Witcher timeline, it features Geralt as a young witcher. Instead of playing as Geralt or Ciri, players will create their own customizable witchers, with typical online multiplayer character options like gender and appearance.

Gameplay centers on accepting contracts to hunt monsters in familiar series environments: dark forests, bustling villages, and deserted ruins. Combat is built around a skill-based system that lets players choose abilities from various witcher schools, craft potions, and use signs, rewarding well-timed blocks, dodges, parries, and executions. In that sense, it sounds closer to the franchise's action-focused side than to its narrative-driven entries.

Google is reportedly in talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture part of its next-generation AI processor. According to The Information, citing people familiar with the matter, the chip in question is Google's 10th-generation Tensor Processing Unit, codenamed "Icefish", with mass production potentially beginning as early as 2028.

The arrangement under discussion would split manufacturing between two foundries. TSMC would handle the main compute die on its 1.4nm process, while Samsung would produce the memory I/O die using its 2nm technology. Google is co-developing Icefish with MediaTek, and the chip is still under development.

The Information noted that Samsung's deep understanding of memory characteristics, including HBM, appears to have been a key factor in Google's consideration, and Samsung's ability to handle memory production, foundry work, and advanced packaging under one roof gives it a compelling integrated pitch.

AMD's Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform has gone on sale in the US through Micro Center for $3,999. First unveiled at CES 2026, the compact AI mini PC is available in two variants that are identical in hardware but ship with different operating systems, one with Windows 11 Pro and one with Linux, both at the same price.

Micro Center is listing the system as in-store pickup only, with local availability expected by July 10, 2026. Online shipping is not currently available. A follow-up variant using the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495, which supports up to 192GB of memory and 300-billion-parameter models, is expected in Q3 2026, with pricing not yet confirmed.

The Ryzen AI Halo is built around the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, AMD's flagship Strix Halo SoC. That means 16 Zen 5 cores and 32 threads, a 3GHz base clock and 5.1GHz max boost, 16MB of L2 cache and 64MB of L3 cache, onboard Radeon 8060S integrated graphics with 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, and a dedicated XDNA 2 NPU rated at 50 TOPS. It comes with 128GB LPDDR5X-8000 memory, 2TB PCIe 4 SSD, 10GbE LAN, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, four USB-C ports, HDMI 2.1b, and an aluminum chassis measuring 149 x 149 x 43mm.

Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery has officially left the Xbox Insider program and is now available through the Xbox PC app. The update also brings a significant expansion of AMD GPU support, with coverage now extending all the way back to RDNA 1, meaning every Radeon GPU since the RX 5000 series in 2019 is supported.

Advanced Shader Delivery delivers precompiled shaders with the game download, rather than forcing the CPU to compile them locally at launch or during gameplay. This eliminates the long initial load times and traversal stutters that have plagued PC gaming for years. Microsoft's showcase example is Forza Horizon 6, which now loads in around 4 seconds compared to nearly 1.5 minutes without the feature, a reduction of roughly 95%.

To use Advanced Shader Delivery, users need Windows 11 24H2 or newer, Xbox Gaming Services version 37.113.11003.0 or newer, and AMD Adrenalin driver 26.6.1 or newer. The feature currently supports a substantial list of titles, including:

Microsoft needs Xbox to become more innovative, because, as CEO Satya Nadella says, some platforms are monetizing Xbox's own games better than the group itself. It just so happens Microsoft may be prepping a solution for this

Faced with growing costs and shrinking margins, Xbox's path in the road has forked and it has to choose where to go. The games division doesn't have an earnings problem, far from it; our data indicates Xbox has generated over $92 billion throughout the last five years (excluding FY26) of the Xbox Series generation. It's not the money that's an issue, but how Xbox is utilizing it, often spending in a way that simply doesn't work out.

In a New York Times event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently commented on Xbox's woes and seems to indicate that more monetization options are on the way. An important distinction is that Nadella is referring here to monetization like YouTube's ads, not something like microtransactions. Xbox's new strategy lead Matthew Ball has publicly mentioned how ads could expand reach, and that ties into what Nadella says here.

Apple's first touchscreen MacBook is now "100% confirmed," according to Instant Digital, a Chinese leaker with a strong track record on Apple supply chain rumors. Posted on Weibo via MacRumors, this claim is the most definitive statement yet on a feature Apple has dismissed for over a decade.

Touchscreen rumors for the Mac started back in January 2023 when Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said an OLED MacBook Pro with touch support would be Apple's first touchscreen Mac, originally slated for 2025. That timeline slipped, but the rumors never really went away.

In September 2025, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said the first touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro would enter mass production sometime in 2026. Gurman has since repeated that the next 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models will get touchscreens, with a launch window of late 2026 to early 2027.

AMD has agreed to replace a damaged Ryzen 9 7950X3D after initially rejecting the warranty claim. The change in decisions came only after Hardware Unboxed publicly called out the company on X. The case was first reported by Reddit user VINCENT199411, who said their system shut down with a loud pop while idle on April 28, 2026.

The user added that the PC would no longer boot after the incident, and inspection revealed visible swelling on the back of the CPU's substrate. The system used a GIGABYTE X670E AORUS MASTER motherboard, Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-6000 memory, and a be quiet! Dark Power 13 1000W Titanium power supply. EXPO was enabled, but no manual CPU overclocking or SoC voltage tuning had been applied.

Both the motherboard and power supply were cleared of faults. GIGABYTE reflashed a corrupted BIOS, adjusted the CPU socket pin alignment, and the board passed over 64 hours of stress testing. Be quiet! ran the PSU through 12V, load, dynamic, and burn-in testing with no issues found. With both components cleared, the CPU was the only remaining candidate.

ASUS launched the ROG Equalizer cable this year as a premium solution for 16-pin connector-burning issues that have plagued high-end NVIDIA GPUs since the RTX 4090 era. Priced at $50, it promised balanced power delivery, lower cable temperatures, and more load capacity than standard 12V-2x6 cables. Now, it appears the cable that was supposed to prevent your components from burning has burned itself.

Posted on Chiphell Forums and picked up by UNIKO's Hardware on X, a photo shows a chat log with a user holding a burned ROG Equalizer cable with its distinctive purple connector tint and ROG-branded cable comb. At least three of the 12 primary pins show clear burn marks, with the top-right pin in the worst condition, with the plastic housing fully melted around the connector.

The ROG Equalizer's design had already drawn criticism before this, with hardware tester Der8auer concluding that it actually performed worse than a standard 12V-2x6 connector. Specifically, his tests showed significant current variance between pins, up to 4A on an RTX 5080, meaning some pins were being asked to carry disproportionately more current than others. That kind of imbalance is exactly the mechanism that causes connectors to burn in the first place.

The first PassMark results for Intel's Core Ultra 7 251HX have surfaced. On paper, the chip technically sits below its siblings, but the results are surprisingly on par with them. Spotted by leaker x86deadandback, the 18-core Arrow Lake-HX processor is putting up numbers that land it remarkably close to, and in some cases ahead of, the 20-core Core Ultra 7 255HX and 265HX.

PassMark currently lists the 251HX at 48,713 points in multi-thread and 4,666 points in single-thread. That single-thread score puts it 2 to 3% ahead of both the 255HX and 265HX, while the multi-thread result also edges out both 20-core chips slightly.

Now, this is based on only two submitted samples so far, and PassMark itself flags the result as having a high margin of error given the limited sample size. The 255HX and 265HX have far larger result pools behind their averages. With all that in mind, treat this as an early signal rather than a settled comparison.

Elon Musk has officially become the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX stock began trading on the Nasdaq at $150 per share, valuing the company at over $2 trillion.

Forbes reported that, based on SpaceX's stock price, Elon Musk's net worth has now exceeded $1.1 trillion as of Friday morning. Musk made a substantial jump on Thursday evening when the SpaceX IPO went live at $135 per share, which caused Musk's net worth to rise from $188 billion to $982 billion. Yes, $794 billion in a single evening.

Musk's wealth is divided between shares and stock options, with Musk owning 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX, worth $715 billion, and an additional 350 million stock options, worth $50 billion. In total, Musk's ownership of SpaceX sits at 38%.

The US government has banned the use of Anthropic's latest AI models, Fable and Mythos 5, forcing the company to disable access effective immediately.

Only a matter of days after Anthropic released Fable, the company's first publicly released Mythos-level model, which is a cut-down version of the original Mythos model that Anthropic said couldn't be released to the public due to the number of cybersecurity vulnerabilities it detected, which could be used nefariously if placed in the wrong hands. Fable is a somewhat cut-down version of that original model, including safety guardrails that prevent users from using the model on topics and along specific lines of conversation.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei informing him that Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models will now be subject to export controls to any location outside of the US, and to all foreign persons within the US. Essentially, the US government has banned the use of Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models by anyone who isn't an American living in the US.

Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma wants to speed up The Elder Scrolls VI's development and plans to invest in other big franchises as part of a company reset.

Following a string of sales duds, Xbox needs more hit software at the ready. The group's new CEO Asha Sharma plans to make that a reality by advancing the production of games in key franchises, including The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Halo, sources tell The Information.

Focusing on these key properties is said to be part of Sharma's plan to revive Xbox. Right now, the Xbox brand has ownership of 20 video game franchises that have each made at least $1 billion in gross revenue--oftentimes much more.

Microsoft's gaming execs offer clarifications on the future of Xbox and how ads could be involved.

Xbox's new strategy exec Matthew Ball discussed how ads could open a new frontier for games, sending mixed messages on what's actually coming to the platform. These freeform discussions can treacherous for business executives because everyone is watching Xbox right now, and there are thousands of influencers that are sharing info with fans, often with their own interpretations of the stories that don't always adequately reflect the facts.

Ball has now issued clarifying statements to put players at ease--there's no plans to start interrupting gameplay with interstitial ads. What Ball is describing is more like NVIDIA's GeForce Now streaming offers, free access in exchange for ad viewing.

An engineering sample of a reported GeForce RTX 2080 "Ti Super" has emerged, confirming that NVIDIA was toying with the idea of refreshing its entire RTX 20 series lineup with a Super model (not just the RTX 2080, 2070 and 2060). Discovered by Videocardz, a Redditor bought a working engineering sample of an RTX 2080 Ti Super on eBay and shared images of the card to prove its legitimacy.

The card features the same Founders Edition design as all other RTX 20 series (Founders Edition) models, but the color scheme on the Ti Super variant is noticeably different from all other RTX 20 series Super variants, featuring a black color scheme, with a mirror-like finish in between the card's twin fans.

One oddity with the card's exterior is the badging, which only says "RTX 2080 Super" and is missing the Ti nomenclature. If you want to dive into the weeds, this could mean NVIDIA was thinking about giving the RTX 2080 Super RTX Titan-like specs, but likely NVIDIA opted to use an RTX 2080 Super's middle piece for its engineering samples to save time.

Microsoft could reset Xbox by spinning off the games unit into a separate company, sources tell The Information.

Xbox is stealing headlines lately. Profit margins are down to a dismal 3%, Game Pass has lost millions of subscribers, and revenue has been down $500 million across the last five years despite $20 billion invested into the ecosystem. Games are underperforming, and more layoffs are expected as Xbox right-sizes its spending and plans for a leaner future.

New reports from The Information indicate that Microsoft may spin out Xbox as its own group. Xbox belongs to More Personal Computing, the same segment as Windows, and this is by design--the Xbox gaming platform has included both Windows PCs and consoles for over a decade now.

Microsoft is reportedly cutting hundreds of jobs within its Azure cloud business in China, marking at least the third round of downsizing the company has carried out in the country over the past two years. According to the South China Morning Post, between 200 and 400 employees are expected to be affected. Those impacted are set to leave Azure on July 6 and receive severance packages based on tenure plus up to seven months of salary.

Five affected employees cited by the report said Azure staff in Beijing and Shanghai received emails last week informing them their roles would be terminated. Some employees have also been offered the option to relocate to Canada. A Microsoft representative told the South China Morning Post that the company had shared an optional internal transfer opportunity with eligible employees, adding that Microsoft remains focused on serving customers and growing globally.

The layoffs come as both Washington and Beijing tighten oversight of cross-border data flows. The US Department of Justice implemented its Data Security Program last year, restricting American organizations from transferring certain datasets to employees, vendors, and investors in countries of concern, including China. Meanwhile, Beijing has continued to strengthen its data governance framework following the introduction of the Data Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law in 2021.

After its website reportedly leaked customer data, the Trump Mobile T1 is now facing another controversy after the gold-painted device was torn down. According to a detailed teardown by iFixit, working with NBC's media sample unit, the T1 is almost component-for-component identical to HTC's U24 Pro, a Taiwanese-branded phone from 2024.

The internal layout, chip placement, and even screw patterns matched between the two phones. To prove the point, the folks at iFixit swapped the motherboards between the T1 and the U24 Pro, and both phones booted up and ran fine in each other's bodies. Both run on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, paired with matching 6.8-inch curved displays.

The biggest change is that Trump Mobile's version comes with a different battery. The T1 uses a 19.35Wh cell manufactured in the Philippines, compared to the U24 Pro's 17.23Wh China-made battery. Despite the larger capacity, the T1's battery charges more slowly, capping at 30W compared to the U24 Pro's 60W.

Microsoft is apparently subsidizing multiple parts of its Xbox games division right now, including hardware and other initiatives.

New reports from Windows Central illustrate how badly Microsoft was affected by the recent Game Pass subscriber drop. The unpopular 50% price hike led to a mass exodus and Game Pass lost millions of paid users. This caused a cascade of negative effects that rippled throughout the entire organization.

Xbox's business model is layered, with divisions subsidizing various initiatives and programs. Hardware is subsidized, meaning Microsoft sells Xbox consoles cheaper than it costs to produce them. Xbox then makes its money back (and hopefully more) from games and content. Game Pass is one of the key money makers for Microsoft (nearly $5 billion in FY25), and new reports say that Game Pass in particular has also been subsidizing parts of Xbox that aren't profitable, putting extra stress and weight on the service.

Framework has confirmed that shipments of its first Laptop 13 Pro units, originally planned for late June, are now delayed by about a month. Deliveries are now expected to begin in late July, with some potentially not arriving until early August. The company notified pre-order customers directly via email, and importantly, this delay has nothing to do with the ongoing DRAM and memory shortage.

Framework says it found two issues before the mass-production ramp. One with the new haptic touchpad and another with the custom display. Framework's email says that the haptic trackpad has undergone a dozen internal firmware releases, but an electrical grounding issue was found in its circuit board design, causing the trackpad to reset after repeated clicks.

The company worked with suppliers Lite-On and Boréas to diagnose the problem and determined that a new board design is needed. Framework is now running validation testing, including a 200,000-click endurance test, and the new modules are expected to reach the final assembly factory by mid-July.