Latest News - Page 33

UPDATE: Microsoft has officially confirmed that Gears of War E-Day will be an Xbox console exclusive.

With the recent comments from new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, it seems like exclusivity is back on the menu at Xbox...and now evidence and new reports suggest that Gears of War could remain exclusive to the Xbox platform.

While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has "no love" for exclusive games, Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma apparently feels otherwise. Sharma has repeatedly said that exclusive content is critical and vital, and fans are buzzing about the possibilities. While no exact details have been revealed yet, new reports suggest that new Gears of War games could remain exclusive to Xbox.

A new Star Trek game is in development, and it looks like it'll be unlike any other kind of interactive experience in the franchise.

Today at IGN Live 2026, Paramount Games made a surprise announcement: a new Star Trek game is on the way, and it's an atmospheric survival game with psychedelic, mind-bending visuals. It's called Star Trek Shadow Frontier, and the horror masters at Bloober Team (Silent Hill 2, Layers of Fear) are at the helm.

Shadow Frontier stars Bajoran femme fatale Ro Laren from The Next Generation as she explores a very monster of the week style mystery straight out of the original series. Michelle Forbes, who played Ro in the 90s TV series, returns for the video game.

Synology used Computex 2026 to showcase its next-gen DSM (DiskStation Manager) software. It features a heavy focus on AI workflows and local AI agents. By using local inferencing, this approach mitigates privacy and confidentiality concerns that are associated with cloud providers.

As data custodians, Synology's DSM is a natural environment for leveraging agentic AI for collaboration and communication. Features include a DSM assistant that can automate administrative tasks and simplify workflows. We saw it used to search for a specific PowerPoint presentation, attach it to an email, highlight some of the important information and generate the email text itself, all from a simple one-line prompt. We also saw it perform translation duties. Such tasks are not new, but performing them locally is critical when sensitive information is involved.

DSM gives users a choice of models, with comprehensive controls on how the model is integrated, with a focus on compatibility with a variety of services and products, ranging from databases, virtual machines, server architectures, IaaS and SaaS services.

Though primarily known for its highly regarded air coolers, Noctua is branching out into other areas, including mice and liquid cooling. At Computex 2026, the company demonstrated its NL-LC1 AIO coolers. Though they've been shown before during the development phase, the coolers are finally ready for prime time, with a release set for later in June.

The NL-LC1 will be available in 420mm, 360mm and 240mm form factors. Its pump is based on the Asetek G8 V2 platform, though Noctua is incorporating tweaks to reduce noise levels. It includes 3-layer soundproofing and a tuned mass damper to reduce vibrations. Depending on the model, the radiator comes with up to three of Noctua's NF-A14x25 G2 or NF-A12x25 fans. These are Noctua's flagship fans.

The pump head can be fitted with an auxiliary 80mm fan, which comes in handy for cooling around the socket area, such as VRM or M.2 heatsinks.

Six years after the heyday of the Ampere GPU lineup, a desktop GeForce RTX 3050 Ti has shown up online, and it is a card NVIDIA never actually released. Leaked by X/Twitter user @GOKForFree, the mysterious sample confirms that a desktop version did exist during the Ampere era, it just never made it to retail shelves.

The card is reportedly an engineering sample, and it carries the GA106-200-A1 die, the same silicon used in the RTX 3060, but with 4 of its streaming multiprocessors disabled. That leaves 3,328 CUDA cores active, along with 104 TMUs and 48 ROPs, on a 192-bit memory bus. The specimen is labeled by an unfamiliar brand, "Robiny," with stickers identifying its specs. It runs a dual-fan, dual-slot design with a single 8-pin connector.

The unreleased card also shows up in GPU-Z, but the software labels it simply as "NVIDIA Graphics Device." Screenshots show a 1,410 MHz base clock and a 1,665 MHz boost clock, with GDDR6 memory running at 1,750 MHz for 336 GB/s of bandwidth. The power limits sit at 120W default, with a 100W minimum. The sample was apparently tested on old Ampere-era drivers from mid-2022, which tells you roughly how long this prototype has been sitting around.

Brave has launched Brave Origin, a paid version of its browser priced at a one-time fee of $59.99 that covers up to 10 devices. That price gets you a cleaner browser that strips out the features Brave has added over the years that many users never wanted in the first place.

Origin removes quite a lot. Leo AI, Brave Rewards, Brave Wallet, Brave News, the VPN, Tor integration, Talk, email aliases, Speedreader, sponsored images, and a handful of other additions are all gone. What stays is Brave Shields, the ad- and tracker-blocking that made Brave popular to begin with.

Origin is available as a standalone download or as an in-app upgrade for existing Brave users. For Linux users, Origin is free because many Linux distributions already include Brave with most of these extra features turned off by default. However, Linux users can still purchase a license to support the project.

As Intel's Nova Lake platform continues to take shape ahead of its launch, a new leak has surfaced revealing the first detailed specification sheet for a Q970 chipset motherboard. Spotted by @momomo_us, the listing confirms several details about the upcoming LGA 1954 socket platform, giving us a clear picture of what the workstation tier will look like.

The leaked board is a Micro-ATX design carrying the LGA 1954 socket and Intel Q970 PCH. It lists support for what it calls "Intel Core Ultra 300S series DT processors," though that is likely an outdated placeholder. Current Nova Lake information consistently points to Core Ultra 400S branding for Intel's next desktop CPUs, so the naming discrepancy is probably a documentation artifact rather than anything meaningful.

On the memory side, the board supports two DDR5 CUDIMM slots with up to 128GB capacity, reflecting the broader platform push toward CUDIMM as the standard for Nova Lake. Storage options include four SATA III ports, NVMe support via M.2 Key-M and Key-E slots, and two M.2 ports total. Only one M.2 appears to be for storage, suggesting this is an entry-level design within the Q970 tier. Expansion slots cover a PCIe Gen5 x16, a second x16 slot wired as x8 Gen5, a PCIe Gen5 x4, and a PCIe Gen4 x4.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis has had its PC system requirements revealed on Steam ahead of its February 12, 2027 launch. The listing also confirms the game will ship with Denuvo anti-tamper DRM. We have known about the game for a while, but a new trailer shown at Sony's State of Play and official requirements shared by Amazon Game Studios give us a clearer picture of what to expect.

The minimum specifications are reasonable for a 2027 release, requiring an Intel Core i5-8600 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16GB of RAM, and either a GTX 1070 8GB, RTX 2060 Super, or AMD RX 5700. The recommended tier steps up to an Intel Core i7-9700K or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, paired with an RTX 3080 or AMD RX 6800 XT. Both tiers require 80GB of storage.

One caveat worth flagging is that neither tier specifies a target resolution, graphics preset, or frame rate. Given that Legacy of Atlantis is built on Unreal Engine 5, an engine that leans heavily on upscaling, these specs likely assume DLSS or FSR rather than native rendering. That means the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT recommendations may not represent native 1080p or 1440p performance, and players on popular mainstream GPUs like the RTX 5060 could find things trickier than the specs suggest.

SEGA's new Virtua Fighter Crossroads marks the return of the franchise after 20 years, and the series has gotten a big revamp with innovative new designs.

The original Virtua Fighter made history as the first-ever 3D fighting game, and now SEGA is tapping into that pioneering spirit with the next game in the series. It's called Virtua Fighter Crossroads, with the title's first two letters stylized as the Roman numeral VI, an obvious nod to the game being the sixth installment in the franchise.

Crossroads marks a big evolution in how gamers will actually experience the combat, transforming what used to be just a stationary 2D view into a fully-fledged 3D environment (think of the transition between Tekken 3 and Tekken Force, and Crossroads' campaign mode is more like the latter). The combat in Virtua Fighter Crossroad's campaign takes a big cue from the Yakuza series of games, which makes sense because RGG Studio, the devs behind SEGA's best-selling gangster series, is also making Crossroads.

Intel has quietly added two new processors to its lineup, and they come with a twist. The Core 7 230H and Core 5 205H are both Raptor Lake chips officially released in 2026, carrying the Core 200-series naming that would normally suggest Arrow Lake. The missing "Ultra" tag gives it away, though. These are 13th/14th-gen Raptor Lake parts in disguise, and Intel has confirmed it directly in its own spec listings.

The Core 7 230H is a 10-core part built around a 6P+4E configuration with 16 threads. It boosts up to 5.2 GHz, packs 24 MB of L3 cache, and operates within a 45W base and 115W max turbo power envelope. That puts it squarely in the same territory as the Core 7 240H in terms of clocks and cache, though there is one notable difference. The 230H appears to top out at DDR5-5200 speeds, whereas the 240H can handle up to DDR5-6400. Whether that is a deliberate downgrade or a spec page error is not officially known.

The Core 5 205H is an 8-core chip with a 4P+4E layout, 12 threads, a 4.8 GHz boost clock, and 12 MB of L3 cache. It shares the same 45-115W TDP range as its bigger sibling. Both chips have one notable limitation: integrated graphics are fully disabled on both processors. That makes them purely for systems paired with a discrete GPU.

Square Enix has officially revealed new details about the third and final game in the FF7 Remake series at Summer Game Fest 2026, confirming the game's subtitle as Revelation.

Final Fantasy VII Revelation will launch Spring 2027, with a simultaneous cross-platform release on consoles and PC, including Xbox and even the Nintendo Switch 2. Square Enix says that Revelation will be the ultimate entry in the series, with the new hybrid battle design being "perfected" at the trilogy's end alongside new features like the FITS system.

"The central theme of this title is resolve. Cloud and his companions each confront their own destinies and find the resolve to march towards the final battle," game director Naoki Hamaguchi said on stage.

Both The Witcher and God of War are having quite a week. Sony just revealed God of War: Laufey at its State of Play on June 2, putting Santa Monica Studio back in the spotlight. And over at CD Projekt Red, the studio is gearing up to launch three Witcher games in six years. It turns out the two franchises now share more than just a good week's worth of headlines.

It looks like Jacqueline Kate Salsman, a former senior combat designer at Santa Monica Studio, has joined CDPR as an Expert Gameplay Designer and is currently working on The Witcher 4. The hire was spotted through her LinkedIn profile and is generating buzz for an obvious reason: combat has long been the soft underbelly of the Witcher series.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is rightly considered one of the greatest open-world games ever made. The world, the writing, and the side quests are all legendary and have gathered critical acclaim. However, ask any honest fan about the combat, and you'll get a polite grimace. Geralt's swordplay felt clunky and shallow compared to everything else the game did brilliantly. CDPR clearly knows this, and it looks like they're finally doing something about it.

At Computex 2026 in Taipei, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won confirmed that the company plans to double its total wafer production capacity within five years, driven by AI demand that he expects to keep memory supply tight through 2030.

"We are going to double the whole capacity over the next five years. There are a lot of obstacles and hurdles, but we will get over them and expand," Chey told reporters. He added that the company would provide whatever funding was required to support the expansion, saying simply, "Whatever we need, we'll provide it."

According to Bloomberg, SK Hynix currently produces around 550,000 DRAM wafers per month, including approximately 200,000 from its Wuxi fab in China. The target is to reach roughly 1 million wafers per month by 2030 to 2031.

AMD has hit an all-time high in overall x86 CPU market share, reaching 32.6% in Q1 2026, according to Mercury Research. A year ago, that number was 27.1%, meaning AMD has gained nearly 6 percentage points in a single year. Intel still leads with 67.4%, but that figure is down from 72.9% a year ago and down sequentially from 68.6% last quarter.

The server market is where AMD's momentum is most visible. The company now holds 33.2% of x86 server CPU shipments, up from 27.2% a year ago and 30% last quarter, meaning AMD now controls roughly a third of a market Intel has long dominated. Overall server CPU unit shipments were more than 10% higher year-on-year, driven almost entirely by AI data center demand. Intel's server shipments remained relatively flat both sequentially and year-on-year. A separate Mercury Research report previously showed that AMD's EPYC CPUs accounted for 46.2% of total server CPU spending in Q1 2026.

AMD's unit shipments increased by nearly 17% year over year, while Intel's declined by more than 10%, a gap that explains the five-and-a-half-point swing in overall share over the same period. Last year, Intel decided to allocate more production capacity to server chips, which had a knock-on effect on other product lines, and AMD benefited. Across the entire x86 processor market, AMD also secured close to a third of all shipments. Worth noting is that this figure includes console SoCs, where AMD has a near-monopoly. Stripping those out, AMD's share of the broader CPU market stood at 30%, still up from 29.3% in the previous quarter and 24.4% year on year.

SEGA is making a new gangster game, and has conscripted two of the most iconic OGs to make it happen.

SEGA dropped one of the biggest surprises at this year's Summer Game Fest, revealing that the likeness of iconic rapper Tupac Shakur will star in RGG Studio's new gangster drama Stranger Than Heaven. The game is a colorful and gritty period crime drama set across five time periods and locations in Japan, from 1915 in Fukuoka to 1965 in Tokyo.

At the SGF event, Snoop Dogg, who is already starring in Stranger Than Heaven, worked closely with Tupac Shakur's estate (run by industry music executive Tom Whalley) bring him into the game: "The Tupac estate and my son and myself, we work very closely together. So it just made sense to put him in this game, because his likeness and his spirit still lives on, I just felt like it was so connected to what we're doing."

Capcom has announced a new Resident Evil Code Veronica remake set to launch in 2027, and it could be out before March.

Resident Evil Veronica was announced at this year's Summer Game Fest, confirming recent rumors and reports. While Capcom didn't share specific details on the new project, the short 3-minute trailer showcased the graphical fidelity and prowess of the RE Engine, dramatically overhauling the original Dreamcast SD game to a 4K-ready thriller.

Capcom recently confirmed it had more unannounced projects to launch in its FY26 timeline, and Resident Evil Veronica is a big one. There's a chance that Veronica could slip outside of the fiscal, but if it doesn't, the game should launch between January and March 2027. This is a favored launch timing for Capcom and the company routinely releases big games during the early calendar year months.

Maxsun has become the first PC manufacturer to bring Intel's Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake mobile processors to desktop motherboards, unveiling two new MoDT (Mobile on Desktop) designs at Computex 2026. These chips are already available on laptops and Mini PCs, but the Chinese board maker is the first to start making Mobile-on-Desktop motherboards with them.

First reported by Wccftech, the more capable of the two boards is the SK-PTLNAS, built around Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake platform. While the board is designed for NAS systems, it follows the ATX standard and can be installed in any regular desktop case.

The unit shown on the Computex floor was running a Core Ultra 7 356H, an 8-core, 8-thread chip with 4Xe3 integrated GPU cores, though Maxsun confirmed the board can scale up to the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H. TDP is maintained at 65W with power delivered through a single 8-pin connector.

Intel's discrete desktop GPU ambitions are alive, at least according to one of its top executives. At a media Q&A during Computex 2026 in Taiwan, Intel EVP and GM of Client Computing Alex Katouzian was asked directly by Tweakers about the future of Arc desktop graphics cards.

He said that desktop GPUs remain a "super important" part of the company's PC lineup, pointing to gaming as a major revenue driver across both mobile and desktop. He also said Intel is seeing good traction with its GPU cores, and that gamers and game engine developers are actively working with the company.

Despite Alex's optimism, the comments come at an awkward time. The Battlemage generation only produced two gaming desktop cards, the Arc B580 and B570, and the long-rumored "Big Battlemage" Arc B770 has still not materialized. The B770 was expected to drop this year, but Intel chose to limit that SKU to the professional and workstation market.

Capcom's newly-published Q&A with investors shows the company is thinking about turning Pragmata into a fully-fledged franchise, and that there are multiple mystery games in the pipeline for this year.

Any games company that needs a crash course on maximizing game sales should pay close attention to Capcom. The Japanese publisher has enjoyed years of continued profit growth thanks to its exceptional new-to-catalog conversion process. Capcom is one of the most adept publishers in the industry at maintaining and carefully curating its catalog content, and as new games release, they are rotated into this sales-acceleration model, which is often driven by steep discounts across digital stores to move a high volume of units--over 59 million in FY25.

In a recent Q&A with investors, Capcom says that it has more games than Pragmata and Onimusha: Way of the Sword planned for this fiscal year. That makes sense, because the firm has to always keep the momentum of releases going year after year, and launching new titles is the first step before the games rotate into the lucrative, business-driving software catalog.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma plans to reset the business in the next 100 days, right-sizing investments, re-evaluating game exclusivity, and focusing on affordable content and hardware.

Asha Sharma just passed her first 100 days leading Xbox. In that time, Sharma has roused excitement around the brand, made some hefty promises about the future of consoles and even discussed the return of exclusivity, and made radical changes to Game Pass. But it's the next quarter that will bring the most change at Xbox.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg Technology, Sharma spoke about 'resetting' the future of Xbox, giving fans an idea of what to expect moving forward. It sounds like Xbox will change what it spends money on, including which games get greenlit, and start focusing more intently on "making affordable products" in the days of the RAMpocalypse.