Latest News - Page 30

NVIDIA has released a new hotfix driver to rectify bugs found in Halo: Campaign Evolved and Path of Exile 2. Driver 610.82 features a fix for stability issues in Halo: Campaign Evolved while running on RTX 50 series hardware that could occur using older 610.xx series drivers. There is also a performance fix for Path of Exile 2 where intermittent long pauses could occur after extended gameplay sessions using the DX12 API.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is an upcoming remake of Halo: Combat Evolved's campaign that updates the game's original story with modern graphics, updated cinematics, and some new missions. The game is designed around solo and 4-player online co-op, and features cross-play and cross-progression support. Path of Exile 2 is an RPG in early access that takes place in the land of Wraeclast, featuring up to six-player co-op. The game features a dedicated campaign with six acts, 100 distinct environments, 600 monsters, 100 bosses, and 12 classes to play.

Ironically, NVIDIA's latest hotfix driver packs more bug fixes than its outgoing WHQL driver 610.74 released on July 7th. 610.74 was launched primarily to support Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelations; however, it had virtually no bug fixes to speak of compared to previous drivers. The only bug fix it had surrounded a minor Smooth Motion bug where flickering might occur in Tencent Meeting if Smooth Motion was enabled globally in the NVIDIA App or NVIDIA Control Panel.

GTA 6 has been the reigning champ of trailer views and overall hype for a while now, but Marvel just knocked it down a spot. Avengers: Doomsday dropped its first full trailer this week and racked up a staggering 503 million views in 24 hours, which is enough to make it the second biggest trailer launch ever, and the biggest trailer Disney has ever put out.

For context, GTA 6's second trailer hit 475 million views across all platforms back in May 2025, a number that blew away the old Deadpool & Wolverine record at the time. Rockstar's first trailer only managed 90 million YouTube views in its opening day, which still broke records back in late 2023, but trailer culture has clearly moved fast since then. Even the second GTA 6 trailer's YouTube-only number sat around 75 million, well below its own combined-platform total once every site got counted.

That doesn't matter much now, because Doomsday just walked past both GTA 6 numbers in a single day. The Russo brothers are back directing, Robert Downey Jr. is playing Doctor Doom instead of Iron Man, and the movie is stacking basically every Marvel hero left standing plus the X-Men into one film. That kind of lineup was always going to pull a crowd, but 503 million views is still a wild number for a trailer that's just under three minutes long.

Jagex is using its instantly-recognizable MMO brand to reach players on console, but not with the mainline RuneScape experience.

RuneScape is one of the older MMORPGs that still has a healthy fanbase--Old School RuneScape is apparently doing so well that it has broken nearly all of Jagex's internal metrics. The studio is now expanding to console with a new RuneScape game, Dragonwilds, but it's a spin-off game and not the original RuneScape experience. Jagex is instead choosing to reach PS5, Xbox, and Switch 2 players with a separate game.

Jagex sees big opportunity for Dragonwilds. Not only is it a survival sim that mirrors popular games like Valheim, but it's also a RuneScape game, and the studio hopes that this will be enough to attract past RS players. In fact, Jagex thinks there are around 18 million console gamers who have played RuneScape in the past, so there's quite a bit of potential for adoption.

A new market analysis is putting a hard number on what Sony's disc decision could cost the used games ecosystem, and it's certainly not small change. Dataintelo pegs the global second-hand game platform market, which covers pre-owned games, consoles, accessories, and peripherals, at $7.2 billion in 2025, with a projected climb to $13.8 billion by 2034 at a 7.5% annual growth rate.

That forecast was published before Sony's July 1 announcement that it will stop producing physical PlayStation game discs starting January 2028, so the real trajectory for used games specifically looks a lot less rosy than the raw numbers suggest. While the used game platform market itself is expected to grow, the pre-owned games segment is expected to shrink significantly.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter told CNBC that roughly a third of games have historically sold used, and trade-ins gave gamers actual cash toward buying something new. He didn't mince words on where physical retail is headed, calling brick-and-mortar game stores "doomed."

Old school collectible card game Magic: The Gathering made history by raking in over half a billion dollars in sales in a single quarter.

More than 30 years of Magic hasn't diminished the brand--far from it. Wizards' iconic card game is more active than ever as it becomes a kind of Fortnite of CCGs thanks to its myriad of franchise crossovers. The plan is working exceptionally well, with skyrocketing sales for sets based on Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, and more recently, the Marvel superheroes. Having both a digital and material version of the game further propels its consistent sales.

Hasbro today revealed that Magic: The Gathering is now making more money than it ever has before, achieving a record-breaking $545 million in earnings throughout Q2 2026. To put that number into perspective, Magic made up over 71% of Hasbro's total quarterly gaming revenues.

Microsoft brings backwards compatibility to PC, paving the way for its next-gen Project Helix hybrid console.

Xbox's backwards compatibility program has expanded to PC, where Microsoft is bringing original Xbox console games over to the platform. This is an important step that could lay out the framework for Project Helix, the new Xbox console that is expected to also play Windows PC games.

Four original Xbox games will now be playable on PC as a result of this initiative, which occurs during Xbox's 25th anniversary: the iconic party classic Fuzion Frenzy, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Blinx: The Time Scrapper, and Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge. If you already own the games, you'll get a free copy to play on PC, similar to Play Anywhere. This sees Microsoft granting users more cross-generational licensing for specific titles, which is also an important step for Project Helix's gradual rollout.

The Steam Deck has been one of the most popular handheld gaming consoles over the past few years. Although other handhelds do exist and the market is growing rapidly, the Steam Deck is arguably the most crucial proponent of handheld PC gaming going mainstream.

Well, that was until Valve jacked up the prices in late May 2026. Originally, the Steam Deck cost around $549 for the 512GB OLED model, while the 1TB model was sitting at $649. In one fell swoop, Valve implemented a ~45% price increase, pushing the 512GB model to $789, and the 1TB model to an eye-watering $949. The initial Steam Deck price was already a tad high, but these new prices were too difficult to stomach.

It turns out Valve did not get away with its price increase, despite its reasoning being solid. Boiling Steam estimated Steam Deck sales by extrapolating Valve's Top Sellers chart data, and it looks like there has been a monumental decline in Steam Deck sales following the price hikes. The analysis states that the Steam Deck slipped from 5th place in the Top Sellers list all the way down to 14th, a drop that can represent a sales decline of a whopping 82% in weekly figures.

Nintendo seeks tariff refunds from the US government, but has no plans to give any of it to consumers to compensate for price hikes.

Following the US Supreme Court's ruling that Trump's tariffs were illegal, Nintendo wants a refund for the tariffs that it paid earlier in the year. Shortly after Nintendo sued the US government for its tariff refunds, Nintendo was in turn sued in a class action lawsuit (Hoffert et al v. Nintendo of America Inc, Case 2:26-cv-01360-RAJ) that claims consumers should also be refunded.

After all, Nintendo did raise the price of certain products--including the Switch 1--as a potential response to the tariffs, and the lawsuit argues that Nintendo should refund consumers the difference. Nintendo is now calling for the courts to dismiss the case, and its lawyers use stark language in the 27-page filing. In various parts, legal counsel says things like consumers were "never promised" rebates by Nintendo, and that buyers "received exactly what they bargained for." It's technical legalese wording, but it still stands out.

If you know your GPUs, the GTX 750 series only ever came in 1GB and 2GB variants at launch with 4GB models rolled out later by various AIB partners. However, according to YouTuber Budget-Builds Official, China has been repurposing old GTX 750 series graphics cards for the Chinese market, and modding them with 8GB of memory. The YouTuber managed to grab one of these cards for testing purposes and found the makeshift 750 Ti 8GB can technically play modern titles at above 30 FPS thanks to the extra memory capacity.

The card itself is made by a no-name third party, with a generic single-fan cooler and a GM107 Maxwell die transplanted onto a new PCB with eight GDDR5 memory modules running in clamshell mode. Despite being called a GTX 750 Ti, the card more closely aligns with the lower-end GTX 750 featuring 512 cores, and monitoring software identifies the GPU as a vanilla GTX 750. The only aspect of the card that matches the GTX 750 Ti is its clock speed.

Armed with 8GB of VRAM, the card reportedly achieved surprisingly playable frame rates in some of the more demanding games made over the past few years, including Cyberpunk 2077. The YouTuber was also able to crank texture quality to their maximum in the games they tested without sacrificing performance. In Cyberpunk 2077, the makeshift GTX 750 Ti 8GB achieved 34 FPS average with 1% lows of 26 FPS running at 720p and using FSR upscaling set to balanced.

A California judge has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors, marking the largest copyright payout in U.S. history and a case that will likely be used as a precedent in future copyright cases involving AI. The settlement resolves a class-action lawsuit over Anthropic's use of pirated books to train its models without the consent of the authors.

The case, which began in 2024, alleged Anthropic trained its AI on millions of copyrighted works sourced from sites like Books3 and LibGen without permission from the authors. Anthropic downloaded more than 7 million pirated books from shadow libraries, which were then used to train popular models such as Claude. The judge called the settlement "fair," as it covers 482,460 qualifying books downloaded by Anthropic, which the court estimated equates to $3,000 per eligible work in damages paid to the authors, without taking into account any publishing or rights agreements the authors have with their work.

This settlement sets a major precedent for the AI industry, reinforcing that large-scale data scraping of copyrighted material, especially since Anthropic not only has to pay out those it has wronged, but also destroy the original files, along with any derivatives, it illegally obtained from the piracy websites. Other AI firms now face a clearer path for being held accountable if it's discovered they are using copyrighted data, particularly books from authors.

We have been hearing quite a bit about PS5 emulation on PC recently, with it only being a few days ago that an open-source project called KytyPS5 made it all the way to the Grand Theft Auto 5 menus. Now, another PS5 emulator for PC called SharpEmu has made progress.

SharpEmu, a new PlayStation 5 emulator for PC, has now advanced to the point where it can run Demon's Souls Remake all the way to the character creation screen. This marks a major leap for the project, as just one week earlier it was only able to boot the game, crashing shortly after.

The new emulator is still in its very early development stages, meaning it isn't capable of running any new PS5 games, or any PS5 games for that matter. SharpEmu can technically boot a handful of PS5 games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially manage kernel operations, but cannot play a single PS5 game. Demon's Souls Remake is the only substantial PS5 title it can load and advance into menus. While the emulator remains experimental, the progress shows it's on a strong trajectory.

OpenAI and Hugging Face have joined forces to address a security incident in which an autonomous AI agent breached Hugging Face's testing infrastructure, effectively hopping the perimeter fence on which it was being tested in an effort to make it to the internet, and it did make it.

The breach, first identified and contained, funnily enough, using AI tools, involved a malicious dataset the models- GPT 5.6 Sol and an unreleased AI model- detected and then exploited code-execution paths to gain deeper access to the platform's systems. OpenAI explains the models honed in on a zero-day vulnerability that OpenAI has since patched.

From here, the models performed a series of privilege escalation and later movement actions within OpenAI and Hugging Face's testing infrastructure until they finally reached a node with internet access. According to Hugging Face's blog post, the unauthorized access was limited but significant.

A controller disguised as a console helped Nintendo legally enter China's once-banned gaming market, and now the unique console didn't have a very high total number of units produced.

The console is called the iQue Player, and it was Nintendo's first official console sold in China. Its existence is unique compared to traditional consoles, as its design was a clever engineering solution to what was, at the time, a widespread ban on gaming consoles by the Chinese government.

Instead of selling a traditional console, Nintendo and partner iQue developed a plug-and-play controller that housed a full Nintendo 64 system inside. The controller-console functioned similarly to a traditional console, as it could be plugged into TVs and used flash memory cards for games. These design decisions, among others, including its shape, sidestepped China's legal restrictions.

As far as military-themed shooters and action games go, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series of games from Ubisoft used to be a mainstay. From the very first Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon game in 2001 through to the open-world Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint in 2019, the release cadence meant we got a new Ghost Recon game every year or so. However, since 2019, the series has been dormant. Until now.

And that's because, like a sleeper agent waiting for their next mission, it's finally looking like Ubisoft is ready to dust off Ghost Recon for another military-themed set of missions. "It's been a while Ghosts!," a new announcement on the official Ghost Recon account on social media platform X begins.

Adding, "We know some of you saw some updates, we'll have more to say on the 6th of August when we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Ghost Recon. Intel coming soon." Setting aside the ongoing troubles at Ubisoft when it comes to releasing games and achieving sales targets, it's definitely a promising sign of a potential game reveal or some form of announcement that Ubisoft is planning to bring back the series with a remaster or collection of remasters for some of the more classic entries.

After showcasing the sheer power of modding through running a fully playable copy of GTA III on a television texture inside GTA: San Andreas, the modder Dryxio has demonstrated another feat in GTA modding: portals between GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas.

If you thought the playable versions of GTA inside GTA were impressive, this will certainly raise your eyebrows, as Dryxio shared the above clip to his personal X account and showed three portals, each leading to different GTA games.

Dryxio demonstrates he is able to run directly through the portal and pick up playing as their character in that nested GTA game, and then move back through the portal. Additionally, Dryxio showcases he is able to shoot through a portal at NPCs, and the bullets hit the target in real-time, meaning Dryxio is able to shoot across a GTA game at a target. Could this be a world first?

"We forecast that next year will be the worst year in the industry's history from the supply perspective," SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung told Reuters in a recent interview. Yes, it seems that even with wafer supply and manufacturing expected to grow by around 12% in 2027, it's still nowhere near enough to meet the growing demand.

Especially when it comes to non-HBM DRAM, the memory that finds its way into consumer tech like laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. Most of the growth is expected to be driven by increased HBM production for AI and data centers, as demand for DRAM is expected to surge to new heights. Basically, an already dire situation for the consumer technology market is expected to get worse. And to make matters worse, 2028 isn't looking any better.

"Our customer demand continues to go up, while our capacity has limitations," Kwak Noh-Jung added. "We still forecast that customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030. But we are doing our best to solve the problem."

NVIDIA's Vera CPU is built for the agentic AI era, and this week the company has lifted the lid on its internal performance data. And there's a lot to get through with performance data covering memory bandwidth and latency, application-specific performance, IPC performance for Vera's Olympus cores, as well as agentic AI performance. Most comparisons pit Vera against AMD's EPYC Turin 'Zen 5' x86 CPU, with Vera convincingly coming out on top.

As for the Arm-based Vera CPU's specs, here's a quick refresher of its impressive architecture. The monolithic die features 88 custom Olympus cores with 176 threads and 164MB of L3 Cache. This is paired with a whopping 1.5TB of SOCAMM LPDDR5X 9600 MT/s memory with 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth. And when you add in low-latency comms between CPU clusters, shared cache, NVLink-C2C integration for 1.8 TB/s of CPU-to-GPU bandwidth, and high-bandwidth memory, it's an impressive engineering feat.

When it comes to the Vera CPU's performance, NVIDIA notes that the monolithic design and custom architecture are two reasons why it can achieve a level of performance not possible on current chiplet-based x86 chips. And when it comes to one of the most notable CPU benchmarks, IPC (Instructions Per Cycle), Vera offers up to a 1.9X improvement over AMD EPYC Turin when testing various AI workflows.

With performance gains chiefly driven by AMD's advanced Ryzen Z2 and Z2 Extreme APUs with onboard Radeon graphics, portable PC gaming handhelds have become increasingly popular in recent years. This year, the debut of Intel's Panther Lake architecture with next-gen Arc graphics has seen performance increase even further, with new Intel Arc G3 Extreme delivering impressive 1080p 60 FPS gameplay with High in-game graphics settings when running on the integrated Arc B390 GPU.

However, with the current component crisis affecting memory, storage, and even processor pricing, these powerful PC gaming handhelds are arriving with price tags that make them feel more like luxury items than something everyday PC gamers can pick up. At Computex 2026, we got the chance to go hands-on with the impressive Predator Atlas 8 handheld from Acer, which pairs the Intel Arc G3 and G3 Extreme processors with an 8-inch 120Hz touchscreen display and premium controls.

With the official release of the Atlas 8 on track for later this year, sometime between September and December, Acer's UK site is now letting potential buyers register their interest with pricing for the various models. And with the entry-level Predator Atlas 8 with an Intel Arc G3 non-Extreme processor, 16GB of LPDDR5X memory, and 512GB of storage priced at £999.99 (around $1,300 USD), it's definitely a sign of the times we're currently in.

"Vera Rubin NVL72 production is ramping up with racks running at partners CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure," NVIDIA confirms as its rack-scale Vera Rubin platform rolls out to multiple sites in 30 countries. And when it comes to performance, we've got CoreWeave's first benchmark on DeepSeek-R1.

And yes, a 10X improvement over Grace Blackwell NVL72 definitely falls into the "order-of-magnitude performance leap" that NVIDIA attributes to it, with this number referring to tokens per second per megawatt. As an efficiency and power-budget-based metric, it directly correlates to how effectively AI infrastructure built with Vera Rubin scales when dealing with the same power budget and workload as Grace Blackwell systems.

This 10X figure comes from CoreWeave running the same DeepSeek-R1 benchmark on both Vera Rubin NVL72 and Grace Blackwell NVL72. A key part of the 10X improvement and impressive evolution is how Vera Rubin leverages NVIDIA Spectrum-X to deal with bandwidth bottlenecks. We're talking about a jaw-dropping 1.64 Pb/s per rack.

The new Razer Seiren V3 Chroma 32-Bit DSP is similar to the recent Razer Seiren V3 Pro in that it supports professional-grade recording with 24/32-bit depth and 48/96 kHz sample rates. And it does so via a simple plug-and-play USB-C to USB-A setup that works out of the box without any drivers, while being optimized for and compatible with popular apps like Discord and OBS.

Of course, the big difference here is the Chroma side of the microphone, with Razer Chroma RGB lighting being a core part of the physical design. When paired with Razer Synapse and the Streamer Companion App, the lighting can react to interactions, alerts, and in-game events, making it a vibrant visual microphone option for streamers with the bonus of broadcast and pro-grade vocal clarity.

Inside the Razer Seiren V3 Chroma 32-Bit DSP, you've got a 16mm supercardioid condenser capsule that works alongside built-in AI noise reduction to minimize keyboard and mouse click sounds. As an all-in-one USB solution, there's also automatic EQ, compression, and limiting that all work on device, plus controls for lighting effects and audio settings, making it a no-fuss plug-and-play solution.