Limited-timed modes, or LTMs, are headed to Call of Duty, and while fans of the franchise may be excited to hear of periodically switching gamemodes, they may not be as thrilled to learn they will be placed behind the Battle Pass paywall.

That is according to serial leaker TheGhostofHope, known for their accurate Call of Duty leaks. According to Hope, Call of Duty is revising its Battle Pass strategy and including LTMs within the upcoming Call of Duty game, but to make the Battle Pass that much more enticing for players these LTMs will be locked behind the paywall, meaning players wanting to enjoy them will need to fork out $20 to $30 for the Battle Pass to be granted access.

If these rumors pan out to be true it will undoubtedly cause an uproar among the community of players, who are already battling with rumors that the next Call of Duty will be one of Xbox's first $80 games. For those who are out of the loop, Xbox recently announced it was increasing the price of its first party titles from the marketwide standard of $70 to $80, citing the current economic climate amid the newly implemented US export tariffs.

It has barely been two weeks since overclockers broke the DDR5 memory frequency OC world record with 12772 MT/s, but now overclocker "bl4ackdot" has reached a new OC world record with an additional 2MHz frequency at 12774 MT/s using G.SKILL Trident Z DDR5 memory.

Overclocker "bl4ackdot" used an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor, 24GB of G.SKILL Trident Z memory, and an ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 APEX motherboard. The overclocker pushed the G.SKILL Trident Z memory to 6387MHz or 12774 MT/s speed, just 2MHz higher than the previous record from a couple of weeks ago.

LN2 cooling was used to hit the speeds and frequencies required for the new OC world record, and from here on out I don't think we're going to see huge strides in OC memory frequencies, as we're splitting hairs here with 2MHz (but every single MHz counts).

Valve has released its Steam Hardware Survey for the month, and something surprising is at the top of the GPU charts: the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU currently has 4.99% of PC gamers running a gaming laptop with NVIDIA's previous-gen laptop chip inside, while owning pretty much the rest of the entire GPUs used on Steam. NVIDIA has its GeForce RTX 3060 in second spot with 4.72% of users running one, and in third place the R TX 4060 with 4.51%.

If we look at these numbers in December 2024, the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU was only being used by 4.19% but it has slowly been gaining traction (except for the dip in February 2025) and now sits at 4.99%. NVIDIA has also had its GeForce RTX 4060 desktop graphics card slowly feeding more and more systems worldwide, with 4.04% of Steam gamers running one in December 2024, compared to 4.77% in April 2025.

The new WD_BLACK SN8100 Gen5 SSD isn't quite on the market yet, but it has been listed a little early on Amazon Germany with the 1TB Gen5 SSD variant costing around $225 and up to a blistering 14.9GB/sec read speeds.

We should expect a full unveiling of WD's new Gen5 SSDs at Computex 2025 in just a few weeks time, with a launch expected on May 30. Inside, Western Digital will use its in-house Gen5 SSD controller which uses BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC NAND and features up to 8-channel DRAM and 4-channel non-DRAM.

The company says its new Gen5 SSD will have up to 2TB capacity and twice the performance of its Gen4 SSDs, with a 55% efficiency uplift over Gen4 SSDs. The company also showed off its new Gen5 SSDs inside of laptops (mobile workstations) at FMS 2024, with WD's new Gen5 SSDs slowly getting ready for their big reveal, it seems.

Pre-orders for Ghost of Yōtei opened three days ago, during which the $69.99 Standard Edition, $79.99 Digital Deluxe Edition, and the whopping $249.99 Collector's Edition went live. Since then, fans have been quick to jump on the anticipated title, topping the charts in over a dozen major regions.

As shared by ZubyTech, Ghost of Yōtei currently holds the #1 pre-order spot across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific regions. The full list of countries, as sighted on the PlayStation Store, includes:

The game, which has been in development since 2020's Ghost of Tsushima, introduces a new protagonist, Atsu - who seeks vengeance across the northern regions of Japan. Set 300 years after its predecessor, the game aims to explore feudal Japan, specifically in the early Edo period.

It hasn't taken long for modders to unify around Oblivion: Remastered. Despite the absence of official mod tools, the team from Skyrim Together has done it again, introducing a new "soapstone" mechanic that allows players to leave messages similar to Dark Souls and Death Stranding.

Ghosts of Tamriel, which released May 1, allows players to "Share wisdom in game with other players via interactable messages and pay respect to adventurers who sadly died". The mod requires an online connection to share messages, and operates by allowing you to type up messages, which appear in the world as floating blue stones.

Messages left behind will display your character's name, in addition to your message of choice. The blue lodestones that appear, while perhaps not an obvious choice for Oblivion, add a nice level of interactivity in the game world. Players can warn each other of deadly bosses, share observations about the game world, or simply bask in some friendly banter.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 players are racking up the number of in-game items they have stolen, with developer Warhorse Studios putting the playerbase on blast by revealing a hilarious statistic.

Warhorse Studios is currently celebrating Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 reaching three million copies sold within just three months of being released, with the developer recently taking to the social media platform X to share some interesting statistics about what players are doing within the open-world RPG. Warhorse reveals that players have killed 489,136,12 humans, with the three most-used weapons being the long sword with 207 million kills, the normal sword 102 million, and 40 million dagger kills.

As for enemies being killed at range, Warhorse has revealed 55,088,512 enemies have been killed at range, with 19.8 million with a bow, 6.2 million with a pistole, and 29.1 million with a crossbow. Notably, 1 in 7 ranged kills are headshots. Here's where it gets funny. Warhorse reveals players have picked a total of 194,719,132 locks, with a staggering 38.51 billion items stolen valued at 2.43 trillion Groschen. Players have also pickpocketed 132.31 million items for a total value of 107.94 billion Groschen.

Halo Studios has confirmed that Operation: Last Stand, the first of three planned summer updates for Halo Infinite, is launching May 6.

As revealed in a community live stream, the latest update follows the Operation format introduced in Winter 2024. Halo Infinite's "Operations" are essentially limited-time battle passes, ranging from 20 to 50 tiers, offering cosmetic rewards and new content for players jumping into the game.

Among the headline additions is the Mutilator, a "double-barreled powerhouse" of a shotgun that sports a gravity hammer at the end. It allows players to fire shell-by-shell, utilize an alt-fire that fires off both shells simultaneously, and devastate enemies with its melee attack.

The Steam Hardware and Software Survey results for April 2025 are in, and when it comes to the most popular gaming GPUs out there, several GeForce RTX 50 Series models have finally made the list. So far, the two most popular cards of the RTX Blackwell generation are the GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5070, followed by the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

Both the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti are new to the list this month, and the GeForce RTX 5070 has quickly gained 0.36% since launching in early March 2025. Interestingly, AMD's new Radeon RX 9070 XT, also launched in early March 2025, has yet to appear on the list, even though the flagship RDNA 4 GPU's launch is widely viewed as a success.

Yes, according to Steam's latest data, there are many more GeForce RTX 5070 GPUs out there; however, as it's still early days for the GeForce RTX 50 Series and Radeon RX 9000 Series, we expect to see a lot more movement in the coming months, especially as more mainstream models hit the market.

AMD is hard at work right now porting its FSR 4 upscaling to its previous-gen RDNA 3 architecture according to the latest rumors, something we should expect later this year to better battle NVIDIA and its DLSS upscaling technology.

In his new video, leaker Moore's Law is Dead reports from an anonymous source at AMD: "I (AMD) was hoping to have more updates for you about efforts to port FSR to RDNA 3, but unfortunately the people I know working on it had nothing new to say last time I talked to them".

MLID's source continued: "The only thing I heard was 'we are taking our time to port FSR 4 to RDNA 3 because we realize how important it is that we get this right' ... so, hey at least that confirms they are doing it!"

ASUS has just launched a flurry of new gaming laptops powered by NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU, including new ROG Strix and TUF Gaming models. Check them out:

Starting with the new ASUS ROG Strix G18 and G16 gaming laptops, which feature up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, and up to NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU. ASUS packs in up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM, with its advanced Tri-Fan technology, full-width heatsink, and full-surround vents keeping the Intel CPU and NVI DIA GPU as cool as possible.

Both the new ASUS ROG Strix G18 and G16 gaming laptops feature dual Gen4 SSD slots and have been designed for tool-less access, with the Intel models featuring support for new Gen5 SSDs in one of the slots for Strix G for seamless storage upgrades.

TSMC's next-gen 2nm process node (N2) is progressing smoothly, with defect density (D0) matching its 5nm process, and surpassing its 3nm and 7nm nodes at similar stages of development.

We can expect mass production of TSMC's new 2nm process node in Q4 2025 according to the latest reports from Taiwanese media outlet Ctee, with AMD's new EPYC "Venice" CPU being the first to complete tape-out on 2nm, and Apple's next-gen iPhone 18 expected to use 2nm chips. Intel is also reportedly using TSMC's new 2nm process node for the compute tiles on its next-gen Nova Lake CPUs.

TSMC's list of 2nm clients includes Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, MediaTek, and Broadcom. NVIDIA's next-gen Rubin AI GPU family will arrive on 3nm at first in 2026, with a refresh possibly hitting 2nm in the future. TSMC chairman C.C. Wei recently emphasized that demand for 2nm is "unprecedented" and far exceeds the demand of 3nm.

AMD's next-generation GPU architecture after RDNA 4 is pointing towards UDNA, or maybe even dubbed UDNA 5 in new leaks, and will bring huge RT performance gains, and more -- and it's not all for PC gamers, but Sony's next-gen PlayStation 6 console plays a huge part in AMD's future with UDNA GPUs.

In a new post on Reddit by @MrMPFR, who has summarized AMD's plants on RT-focused improvements by reading over patent filings from the company from the last two years. AMD's huge focus on RT (ray tracing) improvements aren't just for PC gamers, but Sony's family of PlayStation consoles, and more especially, the next-generation PS6.

The Redditor says that AMD's focus on ray tracing with UDNA 5 could see them ready performance parity in RT gaming with NVIDIA's current-gen GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" GPUs and calls it a "Maxwell moment" for AMD. One of the pieces of the puzzle put together from the patent filings is AMD's approach to BVH (Bounding VolumeHhierarchy) management, which firstly uses the compression of delta instances.

NVIDIA is celebrating May 4th with a wicked giveaway, a custom GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card with either Star Trek or Star Wars theming, asking gamers to choose between the two gigantic cultural phenomenons.

The tweaked GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards up for giveaway have a sticker applied to them -- it would've been nice for something like the old school NVIDIA TITAN Xp Star Wars Collector's Edition from back in 2017 -- but the custom RTX 5090 Star Wars and RTX 5090 Star Trek graphics cards can be won by simply replying to the post on the official post on X above.

NVIDIA's two custom GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics cards arrive with the X-Wing from Star Wars or the legendary Enterprise NCC-1701 from Star Trek. All you have to do is choose Star Wars OR Star Trek and use #RTXON to win... pretty simple, and you can win the fastest graphics card on the planet.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has mentioned its next-gen Unreal Engine 6 technology, saying it is still 2-3 years away from seeding out UE6 previews to game developers.

In the latest episode of the Lex Friedman podcast, Epic CEO Tim Seeney said that the company is currently cooking up its next-gen Unreal Engine 6 technology, and that it will unify the parallel development threads the developer is currently working on. We should expect plenty of upgrades under the hood of UE6, with a big upgrade to multi-threaded performance and removing core limitations that have been inside Unreal Engine for multiple generations now.

I can see a world where Unreal Engine 6 is shown off in a big new Fortnite 2.0 update, as well as UE6-powered games of the future on next-gen console platforms like Sony's next-generation PlayStation 6 console that should be available by the time Unreal Engine 6 hits the market.

Nintendo first introduced the new $80 baseline standard for AAA video games, and Microsoft followed with its own price hike. But is this sustainable, and which companies can pull it off? One analyst weighs in.

Back in 2020, the 9th console generation kicked off with a price jump. Games had been $60 for decades, but in 2020, a consortium of major publishers and platform-holders started charging $70 for games. Now less than five years later, game prices are increasing yet again from $70 to $80, with "economic conditions" (i.e. a volatile combination of inflation and tariffs) being the justification.

There's some skepticism that gamers will bite on $80 games, but Circana analyst Mat Piscatella notes that consumers are already paying more than $80 for the deluxe editions of games--some of which cost up to $100 and offer 3-4 days early access. Other companies and publishers may not be able to sell their games at $80, Piscatella says, likely due to demand and high competition from other high-profile $80 games.

The gaming industry is steadily pushing toward a digital-only landscape, and while that reality is still many years away, it's undeniable that's where it's heading. However, until that day comes when we can't go out and buy physical copies of our beloved games, there will be massive physical sale success stories, and one of the most recent ones was Black Myth: Wukong.

Black Myth: Wukong was a massive success when it launched digitally before getting a physical release. By that time, it was already a massive commercial success, and now, according to its physical publisher, PM Studios, the release of the game physically has not only proven successful for the creators of the game but also the businesses selling it.

PM Studios CEO Mike Yum spoke with The Gamer and said that even now, the physical sales of the game are "healthy," with Yum adding that he received many calls during Christmas and after New Year's thanking the publisher as the physical release of Black Myth: Wukong "saved their business."

MSI has unveiled another QD-OLED gaming monitor it can add to its seemingly never-ending line-up of QD-OLED offerings, and while it's similar to a gaming monitor that has been on the market for some time, it's got two key differences.

MSI is one of the leading brands when it comes to gaming monitors, particularly in the QD-OLED pixel technology department, and now the company has unveiled what will be its latest edition to its growing line-up. Introducing the MAG 272UP X24, a 27-inch 4K 240Hz QD-OLED gaming monitor that is incredibly similar to the MAG 272URX QD-OLED, which I have reviewed and praised highly for its impeccable image clarity.

The specifications for the MAG 272UP X24 are extremely similar to the MAG 272URX, with there only being two big differences: USB-C charging port, and DisplayPort. The MAG 272UP X24 comes with a 3840 x 2160 (4K) resolution panel capable of hitting 240Hz refresh rate, which has been beautifully paired with a 0.03ms (GtG) response time. The display has a typical 250 nits of brightness in SDR mode and can reach up to 450 nits in HDR mode.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney thinks that Fortnite's re-introduction onto mobile will lead to a "big shift" in its business as the game reaches many millions more people.

US courts recently levied scathing punishment on Apple for its non-compliance in the Epic v Apple trial. After courts found that the iOS App Store's fee structure was anticompetitive, Apple had been ordered via injunction to allow apps to link to third-party payment systems from iOS (instead of buying in-app, you'd buy from Epic via a web browser). Apple responded by throwing up multi-screen roadblocks in an attempt to deter users, even charging developers extra 27% fees in the process.

Now that the courts have intervened, finding that Apple willfully went against the court order, Sweeney says that Fortnite is coming back to iOS sometime next week. In a recent interview with CNBC, Sweeney says that he's confident that Fortnite will be able to capture part of the $92.5 billion mobile market to the extent that Epic's business will see "shift a lot."

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5080 SUPER with 24GB and RTX 5070 SUPER with 18GB have been rumored for a while, with the new SUPER variants prepped many months ago, and will increase the heat against RDNA 4 later this year.

In a new video from leaker Moore's Law is Dead, we're hearing from AIBs that they've had RTX 5080 SUPER 24GB and RTX 5070 SUPER 18GB graphics cards ready in labs since 2024. MLID's source explains: "We've (AIB) had 24GB 5080 and 18GB 5070 configurations in labs since 2024. In fact, those leaked 5080 boxes from a few months ago with "24GB" on them were connected to those projects. Basically, NVIDIA's been telling us to "put those variants on hold" while they wait for high capacity GDDR7 to become cheap enough to be worth it for gamers".

"However, this week we were told that the SUPER series is likely happening in 2025, and that we should be prepared to finalize highly overclocked variants of GB203 and GB205 as the 5080 SUPER 24GB and 5070 SUPER 18GB".