Latest News - Page 312

Insiders have been pointing to a new God of War project being in the works for many months now, with initial predictions pegging the project to be a remaster of the old God of War games, or even a prequel title that would take players back to the events that happened before God of War 2018.

Insiders Jeff Grubb and Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming have been discussing what they have been hearing about the God of War project for quite some time. Both of the insiders say they have been hearing similar things about the game's future.

Henderson, in particular, stated he was hearing rumors that the new God of War would take Kratos back to Greece, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore, as the reporter has recently stated that he has heard the scope for the new God of War project is much smaller than initially anticipated, and that it could actually be a 2.5/Metroidvania-style spinoff game.

If you're one of those people who's lamenting the loss of a super-streamlined text editor in Windows 11 - now Microsoft has binned WordPad, and turned Notepad into more of an approximation of that dead and buried app - there's an official alternative on the radar.

Microsoft has a new app in the pipeline simply called 'Edit' as Windows Latest highlighted, and we're told it will be inbound for Windows 11 soon enough.

This is a completely stripped-back text editor with only basic functionality that can be accessed via the command prompt (or PowerShell). Microsoft notes that the app "pays homage to the classic MS-DOS Editor, but with a modern interface and input controls similar to VS Code."

A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea in late 2024 has showcased how the nation is performing extensive levels of censorship across digital devices, or at the very least, just smartphones.

Residents of North Korea are unable to leave the country and are under constant supervision, along with suppression by the North Korean government. While most of that has been known for quite some time, we have just gotten a brief peek behind the curtain as a smartphone has been smuggled out of North Korea and made it back over to the West, where it was opened up to reveal the insane levels of control the government has over its citizens.

For example, the smartphone is completely localized to North Korea, meaning it doesn't have access to what we know as Google Search. Moreover, the smartphone is programmed to automatically replace words the government has banned with other words. An example of this is the South Korean word "oppa," which translates to "older brother".

The Witcher 4 has graced our screens once again, but this time in the form of a tech demo born out of a partnership between game developers CD Projekt Red and Epic Games.

The new footage was showcased at the State of Unreal event, and viewers should note that this is not actual gameplay, but a tech showcase, which is a specific build to demonstrate the capabilities of certain tech within the game engine. Tech demos are different from actual gameplay, but do give an idea of what players can expect in the upcoming release. However, they aren't 100% representations of what players will actually play. With that being said, let's break down what CD Projekt Red and Epic Games showcased.

The tech demo showcases big improvements to horseback riding compared to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which was one of the few weak points of that game, as it felt quite stiff. CD Projekt Red's improvements are demonstrated with Ciri, the main character, and her horse Kelpy. The first is Multi-character Motion Matching, which enables Ciri and Kelpy to synchronize perfectly when riding. Moreover, this new tech enables smooth mounting from any angle and speed.

CD Projekt Red and Epic Games have teamed up to showcase the technology powering The Witcher 4, the upcoming next installment in the critically acclaimed Witcher franchise.

The new tech showcase was debuted at the State of Unreal event and immediately took social media by storm with thousands of users sharing the footage, along with media publications. Unfortunately, some of those media publications incorrectly reported that what was showcased was official gameplay for The Witcher 4. That isn't the case. There is a difference between a tech demo and gameplay, and the difference is that a tech demo is purpose-built to showcase specific aspects of the game, such as the engine capabilities and technical features.

A tech demo demonstrates the capabilities of the engine powering the game, while a gameplay reveal, or showcase, shows off the actual game and what players will experience when they play it. This difference can mean tech demos can be very different from what players will actually experience, and in some instances, what players see in tech demos isn't even available to play/experience within the released game.

Fortnite on mobile is getting what should be a major performance boost courtesy of Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR), a take on temporal upscaling for Arm silicon.

Arm and Epic Games announced the partnership, as flagged up by VideoCardz, and you can check out the above YouTube clip to give you a flavor of what the end result will be like.

And we stress the word flavor, because you'll likely notice that the image quality dips somewhat with the upscaled graphics here, but VideoCardz notes that this footage is provided for 'demonstration' purposes only - so presumably this is a demo that's not quite representative of what the finished result will be.

The launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 is only a matter of hours away, and Nintendo has shared a new video on its official YouTube channel that features NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang.

In a surprise appearance, NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, has briefly taken over the Nintendo of America YouTube channel, where he discussed the chip within the Nintendo Switch 2. What is surprising about this appearance is Nintendo isn't known to shine any light on the hardware within their consoles, but it seems like that has changed, perhaps it was after the NVIDIA-powered original Nintendo Switch sold 150 million units that the relationship between the two companies prospered to the point where Nintendo agreed to give NVIDIA a brief moment in the spotlight.

Yes, that is right, NVIDIA designed the processor within the original Nintendo Switch, and if you didn't know that, don't worry, because no one did until the console was launched and cracked open by the public to see what was running under the hood. Additionally, Nintendo didn't publicly recognize that NVIDIA created and provided the chip for the immensely popular console, but now things have changed with the Switch 2.

Windows 11 is suddenly going backwards with its market share according to the latest figures for desktop operating systems from one analytics firm.

Statcounter just produced its report for May 2025 (hat tip to Neowin) which shows that Windows 11 has dropped to 43.22%, after hitting 43.72% in April, representing a slide of 0.5%. On the other hand, Windows 10 has gained 0.25% to move up to 53.19%, so it's almost back to 10% ahead of Microsoft's newest OS.

Should Microsoft be concerned here? We'll come back to that shortly, but obviously we have to take any individual set of figures with some seasoning, and differences in the sample of Windows PCs the stats are drawn from may come into play here too. However, there's no doubting that it's surprising to see Windows 11 dropping in this way.

We're days away from the June 5 launch of the Radeon RX 9060 XT, which is set to arrive in two flavors - 8GB starting from $299 and 16GB starting from $349. With benchmarks and even a full review already leaking ahead of the launch, alongside AMD's internal performance it shared during the GPU's Computex 2025 reveal, it's pretty clear that the Radeon RX 9060 XT will go head-to-head with the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti.

However, for those looking for a mainstream or more affordable GPU to tweak and overclock, the Radeon RX 9060 XT could be the ticket. A Redditor named 'uesato_hinata' actually got their hands on an XFX Swift Radeon RX 9060 XT OC White Triple Fan Gaming Edition early and played around with its settings using a beta Radeon driver.

This is XFX's premium 9060 XT, so it's probably the perfect candidate for overclocking. With OC models like this and others already shipping with a 3320 MHz Boost Clock, one of the highest we've seen on a desktop gaming GPU, it looks like the Radeon RX 9060 XT clock speed can be pushed up to 3.5 GHz (3,474 MHz) with a 199W power draw.

AMD's mainstream RDNA 4 GPU, the Radeon RX 9060 XT, is set to launch later this week, which means reviews will probably start appearing online on the day or a few hours prior. However, a video review from eTeknix inadvertently (and briefly) went online before the embargo date/time.

With the internet being the internet, the review was spotted before it was taken down, with Redditor 'BasedDaemonTargaryen' and GPU news outlet Videocardz snapping screenshots of the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB GPU's overall 10-game 1080p and 1440p average performance.

Looking at the average FPS, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is around 3.7% faster at 1080p and 6% faster at 1440p. However, regarding 1% lows, which indicate how smooth the overall performance is, the Radeon RX 9060 XT pulls ahead by 3.5% at 1080p and 7.8% at 1440p.

The Steam Hardware and Software Survey results for May 2025 are in, and on the GPU front, NVIDIA's latest GeForce RTX 50 Series is starting to gain some serious momentum. The mid-range GeForce RTX 5070 is the most popular option, followed by the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti. In fact, the RTX 5070's share has almost doubled in a month, which shows us that it's currently the GPU of choice for new builds and upgrades.

Interestingly, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, launched in mid-April with an 8GB and 16GB variant, has made its Steam Hardware and Software Survey debut this month, toward the bottom of the chart. As one of the most affordable RTX 50 Series cards, the RTX 5060 Ti will likely continue to climb Steam's 'most popular gaming GPU' chart in the coming months.

Surprisingly, AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT, which was received positively by gamers and reviewers, is still nowhere to be found. According to the results, AMD's most popular discrete graphics cards are the Radeon RX 6600, followed by the Radeon RX 580 and Radeon RX 6700 XT.

NVIDIA is preparing a new AI GPU for China with new reports suggesting the new chip will be called the B30, meeting US export restrictions for the Chinese market, and is already getting major attention from Chinese cloud giants including TikTok parent company ByteDance, as well as Alibaba and Tencent.

The new NVIDIA B30 AI GPU is expected to shift away from HBM memory to GDDR7 memory, and will see NVIDIA counter-attacking the Chinese market that has been shifting to using in-house AI chip designs, with the B30 chip being fabbed by TSMC, it will also give Taiwanese supply chain partners to work directly with Chinese cloud companies.

In a new report from The Information, the new NVIDIA B30 AI GPU will allow customers to connect multiple B30 chips together to act as a single high-performance AI computing cluster. This means that even if the B30 is slower than homegrown AI chips in China, the fact that you can connect multiple one of them to act as one single high-perf computing cluster is a big, big deal.

NVIDIA has reportedly told its OEM partners to begin shipping its DGX Spark AI supercomputers in July, with AIB partners to jump head-first into the new business opportunity according to the latest reports.

In a new report from UDN, we're hearing that NVIDIA's new DGX Spark system will be joined by the company's other personal AI supercomputer -- the DGX Station -- to be launched later this year. UDN says that analysts are "optimistic" that NVIDIA's personal AI supercomputers are going to be launched one after another, which will help boost Q3 2025 performance of the related suppliers.

These new AI systems enable AI developers, researchers, data scientists, and students to prototype, fine-tune, and inference large models on desktops. NVIDIA says that users can run these models locally or deploy them on NVIDIA DGX Cloud or any other accelerated cloud or data center infrastructure.

NVIDIA and MediaTek's new Arm-based AI PC processor might be closer to release than we think, where it might have avoided an announcement at Computex 2025, the new APU will be released this year and it should appear inside of a new Alienware gaming laptop.

We've been hearing about NVIDIA x MediaTek and its new AI PC processor, which will offer up Arm-based CPU cores mixed with GeForce RTX series GPU cores, ready to take the fight to AMD and Intel and their respective Copilot+ AI laptops. In a new post by Taiwan Economic Daily, we're to expect NVIDIA and MediaTek to launch a new dedicated APU for new gaming laptops, with the first appearance being inside one of Dell's upcoming Alienware gaming laptops.

Originally, we heard it would be a desktop-based AI PC processor... but it looks like plans have changed, where the new chip will be an APU that would be unleashed in Q4 2025 or in Q1 2026. We should expect the new APU to feature Arm-based CPU cores, and Blackwell-based GPU cores making for a big shift in the APU market.

Those of you planning on buying a Switch 2 this week should be aware that much like the Switch OLED before it, the handheld comes with a layer of film on top of the screen, and Nintendo warns that you shouldn't pull this off.

The Verge spotted fan site NintendoSoup pointing out that the Switch 2's European safety manual contains the advice not to peel off said film layer which is "designed to prevent fragments scattering in the event of damage."

Some folks call this layer a screen protector, which it isn't, but rather, as Nintendo makes clear, it's actually part of the display - the topmost part which is designed to stop fragments of glass flying around (and potentially ending up in an eye, say) if the screen is smashed.

It's taken a few years, but real-time ray-tracing is now common in modern AAA games. Path Tracing or Full Ray-Tracing is set to be the next game-changer for in-game visuals - as seen in Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, Indian Jones and the Great Circle, and others. Path Tracing is only possible thanks to technologies like DLSS Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Frame Generation, as it just requires a lot of raw GPU horsepower to run.

As seen with the arrival of the GeForce RTX 50 Series, the next step toward making Path Tracing a reality will arrive through new rendering technologies that include Neural Rendering. So far, we've seen what this can do in titles like Alan Wake 2 and Half-Life 2 RTX, where Neural Shaders and other tech can boost Path Tracing performance.

The good news is that this isn't limited to NVIDIA hardware. Microsoft has also partnered with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to develop DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2, which can boost Path Tracing performance by up to 2.3X through the deployment of Opacity Micromaps (OMMs).

Ubisoft has taken to X to tease something Splinter Cell, with an image of the series' protagonist, Sam Fisher, alongside a simple #SplinterCell hashtag. With Summer Game Fest around the corner, a week of conferences and live streams where we get a lot of new game announcements and first looks, we could be getting our first look at a new Splinter Cell game in a matter of days.

It remains to be seen what form Sam Fisher's return to the digital landscape will take - will it be something new or the return of a classic? In December 2021, the publisher announced that it was remaking the original Splinter Cell for a "modern-day audience" and would "keep the spirit and themes of the original game while exploring our characters and the world to make them more authentic and believable."

However, that was years ago, and without any significant updates since, the status of Ubisoft Toronto's Splinter Cell Remake remains unclear. The good news is that Ubisoft and industry insider Tom Henderson recently posted to social media that the remake "looks genuinely impressive," and we might hear about it sooner rather than later.

Elon Musk has just announced an all-new XChat is launching within X, which will be rolling out with encryption, vanishing messages, audio and video calls, and more.

XChat is built on Rust with (Bitcoin-style) encryption, with the Tesla and SpaceX boss saying that XChat has a "whole new architecture". Not only do we have encryption and vanishing messages, but XChat will let users send any file of kind, while audio and video calls can be made without a phone number on all platforms.

The new XChat system when compared to competing platforms like Signal and Telegram, differ in both features and security. Telegram has support for large groups and bots, but only its built-in Secret Chats are encrypted, with concerns surrounding metadata collection. Signal has end-to-end encryption by default, with minimal data collection that has people worried about privacy handles, but it's not feature-laden.

The MMO or MOBA mouse is an acquired taste because its design involves cramming as many buttons onto the input device as possible. Corsair's Scimitar series has been popular in this space for several years, and the new Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless SE is set to be the most impressive version to date.

Underneath the hood, the new Scimitar Elite Wireless SE features Corsair's latest 33K DPI Marksman S sensor with an impressive 750 IPS tracking speed, support for the company's ultra-low latency 'SLIPSTREAM WIRELESS' technology, and a longer-lasting battery so you can game for longer between charges.

With 16 programmable buttons, including 12 on the left side, the Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless SE is once again being positioned as the ultimate mouse for MMO and MOBA gamers. But thanks to Elgato Stream Deck integrations, it's also the ideal mouse for streamers and content creators.

Hell is Us, a new single-player sci-fi open-world action game set in an alternate world and timeline, was announced and showcased earlier this year during one of Sony's big State of Play events for PlayStation. From developer Rogue Factor and publisher Nacon, the game will launch on September 5 and come to PC.

The PS5-focused trailer above shows that the game features a dark and moody atmosphere and impressive Unreal Engine 5-powered environments and characters. That said, outside of the PC version, nothing we can see would explain the PC specs and hardware requirements for Hell is Us on PC other than adding a Full Ray Tracing or Path Tracing mode. It sounds like the game is set to become the new Crysis.

The developer posted the specs to the game's Steam page, where it states that to play the game with 'Ultra' quality settings at 4K at 30 FPS, you'll need either a GeForce RTX 4090 24GB or a Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB GPU. And even then, that's with DLSS and FSR enabled, just to hit 30 FPS.