Latest News - Page 291

The iconic, or to some, infamous, Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crash notice on Windows PCs has officially been retired by Microsoft after 40 years.

Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death has been present on Windows systems since the first version of Windows in 1985, and it has undergone several iterations, but its core remains largely unchanged. For those who are unfamiliar, a BSOD screen appears when the PC encounters a critical error it cannot recover from, rendering the system unstable and ultimately unsafe to use. So Windows automatically stops all processes to prevent any damage and presents a diagnostic screen to determine what happened.

BSODs can appear for many different reasons, but the most common causes are as follows: faulty drivers, hardware issues, software conflicts or bugs, Windows System file corruption, overclocking, malware, and power-related problems such as a sudden loss of power or an unstable power supply. Microsoft has announced in a new Windows blog post that it will be retiring the BSOD screen for a new Black Screen of Death, which it calls a "simplified UI for unexpected restarts."

Yesterday, NVIDIA formally announced the new GeForce RTX 5050 desktop and laptop GPU, positioned as a successor to the GeForce RTX 3050 and an affordable entry-level option for PC gaming, backed by the latest DLSS 4 technology. Performance-wise, NVIDIA claims that the GeForce RTX 5050 is 60% faster than the RTX 3050, the last 50-class GPU. And that's without DLSS 4 or Multi Frame Generation being enabled.

Interestingly, this is one of those rare GeForce RTX GPUs where the desktop and laptop variants share the same core specifications, except for a couple of notable differences. Both feature the same CUDA, Tensor, and RT cores, as well as 8GB of memory capacity; however, the laptop variant's memory is the newer GDDR7, whereas the desktop variant's memory is GDDR6.

This makes the desktop GeForce RTX 5050 the only GPU in the GeForce RTX 50 Series lineup that uses older GDDR6 memory. As for why, NVIDIA's Director of Global PR for GeForce, Ben Berraondo, responded to this very question on social media.

The Steam Summer Sale 2025 is here, offering the latest discount frenzy on countless PC games, which is set to run from now until July 10 at 10:00 a.m. PT. With every genre and style of play covered, including significant discounts on some of the most notable releases in recent years, as the old saying goes, there's something for everyone.

And with that, we thought we'd take you through some of the notable deals that stood out to us, from new releases to deep discounts on classic titles. This includes games that are 90% off, which means you can pick them up for only a couple of bucks. The discounts can be even higher as Borderlands 3 is currently 95% off, and available for just $2.99 (down from $59.99). With the highly anticipated release of Borderlands 4 right around the corner, this deal will let you dust off those rusty looter shooter skills ahead of the main event for the price of something that only costs three bucks.

Brand-new titles are also being discounted for the first time, with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered currently 20% off. Here are our picks of the best Steam Summer Sale 2025 deals, broken down into different categories.

Chris Avellone is working on a new game, but it's not Fallout-related--it's a new fantasy RPG.

Fallout New Vegas writer Chris Avellone has returned to the games industry, and is working on a new RPG. Avellone has officially joined Republic Games, a new studio built by former Quantic Dream writer Adam Williams, to help design the narrative of a dark fantasy RPG.

The main focus for this new game, Williams says, is to "combine that golden-age of RPG design with a next-level interactive storytelling."

Apple's next-gen M5 processors will power the company's upcoming new iPad Pro models later this year, with both Samsung Display and LG Display reportedly kicking off mass production of the OLED panels in preparation for the new iPad Pros.

Apple's previous iPad Pro models debuted with OLED displays, where Samsung took care of the 11-inch panels for the company, while LG handled the 13-inch models. This year, the two South Korean manufacturers will share the supply for both panel sizes, which is most likely a result of Apple's continued efforts to diversify its supply chain.

Furthermore, the change to the supply chain is most likely because Apple needs to deepen its OLED adoption across its suppliers, as the company is expected to roll out OLED panels for the new iPad mini in 2026, and the iPad Air in 2027.

Microsoft's next wave of layoffs may permanently alter the Xbox business with studio closures, and reports indicate potentially over 1,000 employees could be let go.

Reports say that Microsoft plans to hold a third round of layoffs in its Xbox games division, and these cuts have been described as substantial and significant. While Microsoft hasn't confirmed the layoffs, the tightly-knit games industry is anxiously buzzing behind the scenes as developers share rumors of impending demise.

3D Realms co-founder George Broussard heard that entire video game studios may be shut down by the new Xbox layoffs. Following the merger with Activision, Microsoft now has three major parent groups that oversee dozens of development studios and teams across the globe (Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax/Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard King).

Intel's former CEO Pat Gelsinger has said that the decision to step down from the company was a difficult one and that he wanted to finish what he started, but wasn't given the chance... leading us to believe his decision to leave was made by higher powers.

In a new report from PC Watch, Gelsinger said: "The decision to step down from Intel was an extremely difficult one. I wanted to finish what I started, but as you know, I was not given the opportunity".

As the outlet points out, normally when a CEO leaves a company or retires, there's an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) signed, which stops especially important staff from explaining the happenings from behind the scenes. No matter if they're good or bad, the NDA stops this from coming out.

DeepSeek was meant to unleash its next-gen AI model known as R2 in May, but the release has been pushed back since US export restrictions have made it much harder for the company to get R2 onto the market.

In a new report from The Information, we're hearing that DeepSeek engineers have been working on refining the new R2 model until DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng gives the green light for release. However, the US government has continued to tighten US export restrictions and it has had a negative impact on the release of DeepSeek's upcoming R2 model.

The report says that the fast adoption of the Chinese company's new R2 model would overwhelm Chinese cloud providers, who are in dire need of NVIDIA's advanced AI chips in order to run the more powerful R2 models. DeepSeek has reportedly been in communication with some of these Chinese cloud companies, providing them with technical specifications to help their plans for hosting and distributing some of these models from their servers.

We are proud to announce the launch of TweakTown newsletter subscriber-exclusive giveaways, rewarding our most loyal readers with the chance to win top-tier hardware every single week. We're kicking things off with a high-performance motherboard built for creators, gamers, and PC enthusiasts - the ASRock B860 LiveMixer WiFi. Worth $190 and with support for 14th and 13th Gen Intel Core processors, high-speed DDR5 memory, and robust connectivity, including WiFi 6E, this motherboard is ready to power your next build.

But this giveaway isn't open to the public. It's only available to subscribers of the TweakTown daily newsletter, and anyone in the world, no matter your location.

Each daily newsletter includes the current giveaway link, and we rotate to a new prize every week, giving our readers a fresh opportunity to win exciting tech gear on a regular basis.

NVIDIA has just reached another all-time record high market cap of $3.77 trillion, with analysts predicting a $6 trillion market cap in the near future.

Loop Capital has raised its price target for NVIDIA to a whopping $250 per share, which would see the company with a mind-boggling $6 trillion valuation. In a new report, Loop Capital analyst Ananda Baruah said according to Loop's research: "we are entering the next 'Golden Wave' of Gen AI adoption" and that NVIDIA has positioned itself "at the front-end of another material leg of stronger-than-anticipated demand".

Furthermore, Loop Capital supply chain analyst John Donovan says that hyperscale and AI factory (Sovereign, Neocloud, and Enterprise) Gen AI and AI accelerator compute spending ALONE could increase to around $ 2 trillion by 2028 using current compute economics. The analyst firm also suggests a huge $6 trillion market cap for NVIDIA in the near future.

Peak, the new cooperative survival climbing game, has seen major success since it launched on June 17, with the developers only recently announcing it sold 1 million copies in just 6 days.

Peak has climbed its way up Steam's Most Played games ranks, capping out at a staggering 102,799 concurrent players on June 22, 2025. The title is developed by Landcrab and published by Aggro Crab and Landfall, who are now celebrating the success of Peak in a new Steam blog post where they reveal they have sold two million copies of Peak in just 9 days. The developers and publisher thanked the community for their support and revealed what is coming next for Peak in future updates.

According to the blog post, the developers are prioritizing optimization and stability first, and warned that content updates aren't around the corner just yet. But, the creators of Peak can confirm that "localization is coming soon!". The developers also state that they are currently unsure of the number of major updates planned for Peak, but will continue to update the community as the ideas are further developed.

NVIDIA has just reached yet another record-high market cap reaching $3.77 trillion, with its stock price hitting $154.31 at the close of trading, up from its previous closing high of $149.43 earlier this year on January 6, 2025.

With the new NVIDIA market cap of $3.77 trillion, it passes both Microsoft and Apple at ease, with Microsoft enjoying a $3.66 trillion market cap, and Apple in third position at $3.01 trillion. NVIDIA has been riding the AI wave for a few years now, and without its AI GPUs, I don't think we'd be where we are with AI (generative AI, and more) and neither would NVIDIA's financials.

The company has faced constantly changing US export restrictions, stopping its AI chips from entering China, and seeing the company hurt with $8 billion lost in sales to China, writing off over $4.5 billion in AI chip inventory. This has led NVIDIA to stop counting any sales from China, with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang saying last month that "the $50 billion China market is effectively closed to US industry".

The gaming handheld landscape is certainly heating up with Xbox jumping into the fray with the newly announced ROG Ally and a big push into Windows 11 being the predominant operating system on handheld devices. However, one thing stands in Microsoft's way: Valve, and, particularly, SteamOS.

Microsoft knows that SteamOS is its biggest competitor when it comes to PC gaming handheld devices, with the company recently canning work on its own first-party handheld device to pursue optimizations for Windows 11 on already established handheld devices such as the Xbox ROG Ally. But how far behind is Windows 11 compared to SteamOS? Well, Ars Technica has pitted the operating systems against each other in a new string of tests using the Lenovo Legion Go S.

The publication conducted performance benchmarks on five high-end 3D games: Returnal, Borderlands 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Homeworld 3, and DOOM: The Dark Ages. Each of these games was tested on SteamOS and then on Windows 11 using the Legion Go S as the testing platform. The results were very interesting, as Windows 11 lost to SteamOS in almost every single test they conducted, and in some instances, SteamOS was significantly better than the Microsoft alternative.

PlayStation Plus turns 15 this month, and Sony is celebrating with a heavy-hitting game freebie and a bunch of promos.

Blizzard's Diablo IV will be the free monthly PS Plus game for July, Sony has announced, as it prepares for the big PS Plus birthday party. The service will turn 15 years old on June 29, and while Diablo IV isn't technically timed to correspond with the anniversary, a freebie of such a marquee heavy-hitting game is suspiciously close to the milestone.

Diablo IV is one of Blizzard's best-earning video games with over $1 billion earned as of 2024, and more importantly, it made $150 million in microtransactions from launch until that time. Sony makes most of its PlayStation revenues from in-game purchases, so a well-timed Diablo IV freebie could help catalyze digital spending on mTX.

Dbrand has been caught up in a controversy over its Killswitch Joy-Con 2 grip, with the accessory maker now issuing an apology to owners and a promise to ship replacements free of charge.

Dbrand issued a lengthy apology to owners of the Killswitch Joy-Con 2 grip who reported that their controllers were disconnecting when using Dbrand's accessory. Initially, Dbrand blamed the Killswitch owners for the disconnecting issues, claiming they were holding the Joy-Con 2 controller incorrectly. They stated that they had tested the Killswitch internally and externally and found no issues. Dbrand said users experiencing the disconnecting issues were holding the console by only one Joy-Con, stressing 87% of the weight on the hinge.

However, the pushback from the community was immense, resulting in Dbrand backtracking on its past statements, issuing an apology, and promising to replace all Killswitch units completely free of charge. Dbrand wrote it's going to "try out a new communication strategy where we both say fewer words and devote less of them to blaming you."

It was only last week that the Trump Organization announced the T1 Phone, touting that the device was "made in the USA." And now, just a week later, that descriptive language has been retracted from the website.

Following the announcement of the T1 Phone 8002, a gold smartphone that was priced at $499, I speculated the Trump Organization would be unable to achieve this price point without having to outsource components for the device beyond the boundaries of the United States.

Moreover, I stated that if the T1 Phone were to be released at this price point, it would also have to be manufactured outside of the US, simply because the US doesn't have the facilities or the knowledge of smartphone manufacturing lines to create and release a device at such a price point.

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl's mod software was just released onto the Epic Games Store with a massive 700GB file size. Predictably, this drew attention and grabbed headlines, but the explanation is pretty ordinary.

Mods are a big part of PC gaming and can be powerful to elongate a game's lifespan--heavily-modded titles like Skyrim still thrive today nearly 14 years after release. Developers also like to release these tools to see what unique creations the community can cook up, but these programs can be pretty spec-intensive and demanding. The mod tools are, after all, creating a dev environment for gamers to experiment with.

That's the case with Stalker 2's new Zone Kit, which clocks in at an astronomical 700GB. GSC has a simple explanation for the size: the Zone Kit uses uncompressed assets. So gamers are getting raw access to full resolution textures and assets that were used to build Stalker 2. The devs also say that this is just phase 1 of the ZoneKit SDK, and updates will come in the future, including one that potentially shrinks the file size.

MindsEye has become the latest in broken video game releases, which has resulted in the studio behind the title, Build A Rocket Boy, beginning the layoff process of employees. Now, the lead actor of the recently released game has responded to the broken release.

Build A Rocket Boy, a studio with roughly 300 employees and helmed by former GTA producer Leslie Benzies, has started laying off employees two weeks after the disastrous launch of MindsEye. The layoffs are expected to impact more than 100 employees.

Now, Alex Hernandez, who voices Jacob Diaz in MindsEye, has sat down for an interview with Check It TV to discuss the release of the game, his relationship with Build A Rocket Boy, and the fallout of MindsEye's release in such a dismal state.

The new COLORFUL SMART 900 AI Mini PC boasts a sleek industrial design and features a 4-liter form factor, making it a Mini PC with some seriously impressive hardware and capabilities. Powered by the new Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, with 16 cores, 32 threads, and clock speeds hitting 5.1 GHz, the APU also features a powerful NPU and Radeon 8060S graphics.

The NPU is capable of delivering up to 50 TOPS of AI performance for generative workloads, which is why COLORFUL is marketing the device toward students and professionals. The unit's size might be small, but you're looking at desktop-class performance in a compact form factor.

The integrated Radeon 8060S graphics, based on the RDNA 3.5 architecture, features 40 Compute Units, a higher CU count than discrete GPUs like the new Radeon RX 9060 XT. The GPU performance of the COLORFUL SMART 900 AI Mini PC will rival that of discrete mobile graphics, making it a powerful yet compact PC gaming device that is smaller than a console.

PlayStation's vice president of global services has said that PlayStation Plus subscribers won't get free first-party PlayStation games.

The news comes from a recent interview with Game File's Stephen Totilo. PlayStation vice president of global services Nick Maguire said Sony currently has a policy of waiting at least a year before adding first-party PlayStation games to PS Plus, and that strategy is performing adequately. So, what is the value of PS Plus? Sony prefers to add indie titles to PS Plus over its first-party games, as the company believes they "complement" its current strategy around when it adds first-party titles.

According to Maguire, that strategy is "working really well across the platform." Additionally, Maguire said that Sony was willing to consider adding more titles to PS Plus, depending on whether PlayStation feels that it's warranted. Notably, some indie titles have released day one on PS Plus, with an example being FBC: Firebreak developed by Remedy Entertainment, Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, Animwell, Sea of Stars, and others.