As promised a month ago, Microsoft's so-called "Xbox Mode" is now rolling out on more Windows 11 PCs, potentially giving users a look at what's on the horizon with the next-gen Project Helix system.

The final form of the Xbox brand is almost here. Project Helix represents a plan that's been more than a decade in the making; unifying Windows and Xbox consoles is something that happened first during the Xbox One era, and now Microsoft is pushing things to a new level with Project Helix, a device that can play both Windows PC and Xbox console games.

To ease into this convergence, Microsoft released the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE), which was basically a dedicated, console-like UI made specifically for gaming on Windows. The FSE, which was first launched on the Xbox Ally handhelds, is now called Xbox Mode and is coming to all Windows 11 devices.

Capcom and Sony have released a first-look teaser trailer for Zach Cregger's new Resident Evil movie, delivering what looks to be a mix of grisly madcap chaos with distinct body horror. Now the director shares how his earliest experiences with Resident Evil games helped shape his vision for the film.

The new Resident Evil film premieres exclusively in theaters on September 18, 2026, bringing a very return-to-roots horror take on the series' transmedia depictions. The new trailer is thrilling, with well-paced action shots and some shocking scenes reminiscent of a Raimi film.

On the heels of the new footage, Resident Evil movie director Zach Cregger has been touring in a press junket, and recently shared how the early iconic games from Capcom locked in the major themes for the adaptation.

We are about to get a closer look at Xbox's next-generation console, with a new reveal for Project Helix reportedly set for May as Microsoft continues to reshape what an Xbox actually is.

In its Spring 2026 Xbox Game Dev Update, Microsoft doubled down on its long term vision for Project Helix, highlighting a unified ecosystem where console and PC development are effectively merged. The next generation system is designed to run both Xbox and PC games natively, with developers building once for multiple platforms instead of maintaining separate versions.

This direction aligns directly with what we have already seen from Project Helix in recent months. Microsoft has consistently positioned the hardware as a hybrid console PC system, built in partnership with AMD and powered by next generation rendering technologies.

Samsung Electronics has just disclosed its Q1 2026 earnings, breaking all kinds of records and shattering estimates set by industry analysts. Amid the global semiconductor shortage and the relentless AI boom, Samsung reported an 8x year-over-year profit increase in the first quarter of 2026.

Per the earnings call, Samsung Electronics reported quarterly sales of 133.9 trillion Korean won ($89.96 billion), a 50.2% year-over-year increase from the 79.14 trillion Korean won it brought in last year. It is also higher than the 132.69 trillion won estimate from LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward more accurate analysts.

The quarterly profit saw a massive boom, going from 6.69 trillion won in Q1 2025 to 57.23 trillion won (or $38.54 billion) in Q1 2026. That is a staggering 755% year-over-year profit jump, and it is also (again) higher than analysts' estimate of 38.23 trillion won. Semiconductor (DS segment) sales rose 225% year-over-year, and semiconductor operating profit grew 48x, from 1.1 trillion won in Q1 2025 to 53.7 trillion won ($36.18 billion) in Q1 2026.

Japanese games company Koei Tecmo has enjoyed record-breaking success throughout FY25, leading to all-time net profits, strong operating income, and higher-than-ever game sales.

Koei Tecmo's full-year FY25 results show record-breaking game unit sales for the period, leading to new milestones for net profit and a high standing for operating profit earnings. The company released multiple new titles throughout FY25, leading to 14.1 million game sales throughout the timeline. That's a +84% year-over-year increase in total game unit sales.

The high volume sales were driven principally by huge hits like Pokopia, which was confirmed to have sold 2.2 million copies in just 4 days and was eyed as a potential system-seller by Wedbush Securities. The group also saw strong sales of first-party hit NiOh 3, which sold 1 million copies in 14 days.

ASRock is pushing aggressively into the gaming monitor market with a 400Hz QHD panel priced far below expectations, a move that could shake up the entire mid-tier display segment.

The company has unveiled two new Phantom Gaming monitors, the PG27QFW2A and PG32QFT, expanding its lineup with a focus on high refresh rates and competitive pricing. The standout is the 27-inch PG27QFW2A, featuring a 400Hz IPS panel at QHD resolution, 1ms response time, and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro support. At an estimated $300, it lands well below where most 400Hz displays typically sit, which is usually closer to the $600 range or higher.

That pricing is where ASRock has really made things interesting. ASRock is clearly positioning itself to undercut established players in the gaming monitor market, while simultaneously continuing its push into providing affordable gaming monitors that aren't as feature-rich as some competitors, but make up for it with a nice price tag.

Microsoft today announced its Q3FY26 earnings, showing a big decline in total Xbox revenues.

Xbox's FYQ3'26 results for the January - March 2026 period are in, and all-told, the games division is said to have made $5.34 billion in the three-month season, showing a sizable -$380 million decline in gross revenues from the year prior.

The drop represents a -5% in content & services (games, subscriptions, etc) to $5.12 billion, with Xbox console hardware dropping -33% to a meager $221 million, a new all-time record low for the Xbox Series generation. Management also notes that first-party games performed better during this time last year than they did this year; in Q3'FY25, Microsoft released Age of Mythology Retold, as well as Avowed on Xbox, and then re-released that same game a year later on PS5. Xbox's Q4'26 will also face tough comparables because of the meteoric launch of Forza Horizon 5 in April 2025, which affects the prior Q4'25 period. Microsoft hopes to counter that with multiple releases like two ports of South of Midnight, Double Fine's new multiplayer game Kiln, and Forza Horizon 6's launch in May.

Intel and AMD have partnered to standardize a new x86 ISA extension to supercharge AI performance. Under the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group (EAG), AI Compute Extensions (ACE) are engineered to deliver a 16x increase in compute density over standard AVX10 instructions.

Traditional vectorized hardware (SIMD) and instructions, such as AVX, operate on one-dimensional data. Machine learning, powered by Matrix Multiplication and Accumulate (MMA), has created a demand for specialized hardware that runs in two dimensions. This need led to the rise of specialized Tensor Cores in GPUs, and now ACE brings that same logic to the x86 CPU.

ACE uses an outer-product algorithm and eight new 2D Tile Registers, each with 16x16 dimensions and 32-bit precision. Large AI datasets are split into sub-matrices, with the hardware consuming two 16x4 input matrices (at 8-bit precision) - the Blue and Yellow matrices. At each intersection on the 16x16 grid, the hardware computes an inner product between a 1x4 and a 4x1 vector.

Subnautica 2 has finally resurfaced with a firm early access date and a cinematic trailer, marking the end of a long silence that has only amplified anticipation for the sequel.

Developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment confirmed that Subnautica 2 will launch into early access on May 14, 2026, alongside a new cinematic trailer offering a fresh look at its alien ocean world. The sequel builds on the original survival formula with a new setting, expanded systems, and, for the first time in the series, multiplayer support.

Subnautica 2 has been part of an ongoing development story that includes delays from its original 2025 window and a highly publicized legal dispute involving publisher Krafton.

It's an end of an era: The video games industry's financial onslaught has led to the dismantling of another team, this time Spiders, a studio responsible for multiple mid-range AA games.

After nearly two decades, Spiders Studios is shutting down. The French game developer, a subsidiary of entertainment company Nacon, is being liquidated due to the financial troubles of its parent. Nacon attempted to find a new buyer for Spiders last month, but the deadline came and went without a prospective offer.

Now the studio has shared the bad news on Twitter, saying that Spiders is effectively no more. The Paris-based team that worked on games like Bound By Flame, Steelrising, and two Greedfall games--all set in the proprietary Silk engine--has closed shop.

A piece of SpaceX hardware is tracked to slam into the Moon at extreme speed this August, but despite the dramatic setup, you probably will not see it happen.

According to astronomer and well-known near-Earth object tracker Bill Gray, a Falcon 9 upper stage from a 2025 launch is now on a collision course with the lunar surface, with impact predicted for August 5 at roughly 6:44 UTC. The rocket stage, which completed its mission before drifting into a high orbit, has been tracked for months and is expected to strike near the Moon's limb, close to the Einstein crater.

While the idea of a rocket hitting the Moon sounds like a major event, the reality is more subtle. Traveling at around 8700 kilometers per hour, the object will hit without atmospheric resistance, but the resulting impact is expected to be too small to observe from Earth. This is not the first time space junk has made contact either.

Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced lets you ditch the HUD entirely, hiding health bars and ammo counters. By baking critical combat cues into enemy behavior, such as pirates losing their hats when defense breaks, Ubisoft has opened up Resynced for a mechanic-focused combat experience.

The overhaul, confirmed via a Reddit post by Ubisoft and IGN, reframes Black Flag as a stealth-action title rather than an RPG. Enemies now signal vulnerabilities through posture shifts, weapon swaps, and, yes, missing headgear. This mirrors some modern design trends prioritizing immersion over cluttered interfaces, though average players may shake their head at losing traditional informative metrics.

The move reflects a broader industry push toward "invisible" UI, seen in titles like The Last of Us Part II and Death Stranding. For Black Flag, it's an interesting bet: players must read animations to survive, deepening engagement but raising the skill ceiling. Ubisoft's confidence in this approach underscores the acknowledgment that some players like the game's raw mechanics, and having this feature now opens the gameplay up to these limit-testing players.

News has emerged about Intel's next-generation manufacturing node, named 18A-P. The company has reportedly marked it "ready" after testing and publishing results that show impressive improvement over the current-gen 18A node. As a refresher, Intel Foundry is currently using the 18A process node to build the Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake processor lineups, with some external components from TSMC.

Now, the news comes from the preview tip sheet being circulated ahead of the Intel VLSI 2026 symposium, to be held in June. At the said symposium in Honolulu, Hawaii, Intel will unveil the full capabilities of the upcoming 18A-P node. However, the preview paper gives us a good idea of the kinds of improvements we can expect from the new node compared to the current 18A process.

The 18A-P node can reportedly deliver a 9% performance improvement over the 18A at the same power level. Flipping the equation, the new node can consume 18% less power than the 18A while delivering the same performance. This translates into a significant efficiency improvement, rare for a node refresh such as this. Usually, one would expect such an efficiency bump from a smaller node, such as the jump from 18A to 14A.

Microsoft has released a preview of Shader Model 6.10 in the new AgilitySDK 1.720-preview build. The update brings several changes, including tweaks to shared shader memory management and ray tracing, but the headline addition is a new Matrix feature.

According to the developer blog, Shader Model 6.10 introduces a streamlined matrix algebra API through the linalg::Matrix class, exposing a full set of matrix operations across GPUs from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. Modern GPUs already include dedicated hardware for AI workloads, such as NVIDIA's Tensor cores, Intel's XMX units, and similar accelerators on AMD hardware. However, DirectX support for these capabilities has been limited until now.

With this update, developers can access those matrix units through a unified API, rather than relying on vendor-specific implementations. This allows neural rendering operations to be executed across multiple GPUs with a single programming effort, rather than as a proprietary feature that developers must implement separately for each graphics card family. Microsoft is essentially trying to make matrix math a standard part of the DirectX API, making neural rendering a core DirectX feature rather than something bolted on by individual GPU makers.

Apple's upcoming A20 chip, set to power the base iPhone 18, is reportedly skipping TSMC's advanced WMCM (Wafer-Level Chiplet Multi-Chip) packaging technology due to persistent DRAM shortages.

This shift underscores how supply chain constraints stemming from AI companies' supply squeezes are forcing even industry leaders like Apple to scale back ambitious hardware plans. Previously, the A20 was expected to transition from TSMC's InFO (Integrated Fan-Out) packaging to WMCM, a modular approach enabling flexible CPU/GPU core configurations.

WMCM allows chiplets, smaller, specialized components to be combined in varying ratios, optimizing performance and power efficiency for different device tiers. For example, high-end iPhone models could feature more GPU cores, while budget variants prioritize CPU efficiency. However, reports from WCCFTech, citing an X post from tipster Jukun, suggest Apple will retain InFO for the A20 to mitigate risks tied to DRAM scarcity, which has disrupted global electronics manufacturing.

Google Photos is evolving beyond photo storage with an AI-powered wardrobe feature that lets users catalog, mix, and virtually try on outfits.

The tool analyzes past photos to identify clothing items, building a digital wardrobe users can browse and combine. Whether you're reimagining a past outfit or experimenting with screenshots of apparel from social media or shopping sites, the feature overlays selections onto your body using augmented reality (AR).

The virtual try-on functionality leverages pose estimation and background removal to align clothes naturally with the user's body. The idea is to reduce the annoying amount of time spent trying on different outfits before leaving the house. The idea is that users now won't have to hunt through physical closets or manually search for matching pieces; they can simply try on what they have in their virtual dressing room.

Grand Theft Auto VI could become the first game in years that has players calling in sick on launch day, and it might also be the one that finally pushes AAA pricing past its current limits.

Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has recently expressed confidence in the game's reported November 19 release window, while also addressing the company's pricing and value approach. Although no official price was confirmed during the interview, Zelnick's comments about delivering more value than the price paid have reignited speculation that GTA VI could launch at a price above the standard $70.

This fits into a broader pattern that has been building for months, with rumors pointing to GTA 6 being the first game to hit the $100 price point. However, past comments from Zelnick have alluded to the contrary, as the Take-Two CEO referred to the $70/$80 price tag when describing AAA games, which GTA 6 absolutely will be.

Elon Musk has taken the stand in the escalating legal battle surrounding OpenAI, accusing the company of straying from its original mission and effectively "looting a charity."

Testifying in court, Musk kept to his long-standing argument that OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit focused on benefiting humanity, but, as it grew and he left as one of the founders, it has since shifted toward a profit-driven model that prioritizes commercial success. His comments come as part of a broader legal dispute tied to his AI company xAI, which has already filed lawsuits alleging anti-competitive behavior and misuse of trade secrets involving OpenAI and its partners.

The testimony adds fuel to an ongoing and heated conflict between Musk and OpenAI leadership, specifically CEO Sam Altman. Musk has repeatedly criticized the company's transformation into a capped-profit structure and its deep ties with major tech players like Microsoft, using both as examples of how OpenAI has strayed from its original mission statement.

Choosing the right mouse can be a difficult process, as, beyond performance, build quality, and features, there's a big part of comfort and grip that's very personal. And in the era of online shopping, getting to go hands-on with a wide range of gaming mice isn't as readily accessible as it once was.

EloShapes, which has been around for a while, offers a visual look at popular mice, giving gamers and potential buyers the option to compare brands, makes, and models. Basically, with 1400+ mice represented, you can compare your current mouse with a potential replacement to get a better idea of how it looks. However, until now, the comparisons have been 2D, so this week's big 3D update is a massive upgrade for the site and service.

The 3D models are actual scans of real-world mice, and even though not every mouse has a 3D model, that's expected to change in the coming weeks and months as more are added. On the plus side, for competitive gamers serious about their gear, you can already compare the 3D shapes of some of the newest options - including the Razer Viper V4 Pro and the Logitech G PRO X2 SUPERSTRIKE.

Yesterday, we got the shocking news that GALAX was exiting the gaming GPU business, with Palit taking over the brand and existing products. The implication, at least on paper, was that this meant that we'd no longer be getting new GALAX GPUs - and that the company was no more. Turns out that what actually has happened is that GALAX, which has been a part of the Palit Group for several years, is now fully under the Palit umbrella.

This isn't to say that GALAX employees in various regions haven't been let go, as Palit's official statement calls it an internal transition. "The recent internal transitions are part of a pre-planned global initiative to integrate brand management for enhanced operational efficiency and cross-departmental synergy," Palit says.

Adding, "GALAX is not ceasing operations. We remain fully committed to the development, production, and support of our high-performance hardware. Our product roadmap continues as planned, and our commitment to delivering cutting-edge technology to gamers and creators remains our top priority."