Latest News - Page 34

Platform exclusives have been a hot topic in the industry lately. Xbox is reconsidering its multi-platform strategy, while PlayStation seems to be tightening its grip on exclusives and scaling back PC ports. However, now we have another player in the mix, and people are understandably curious about what Valve thinks about exclusives.

Valve has recently confirmed to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that it has no plans to put any exclusive games on the Steam Machine, including a new Half-Life. Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais said the company is much more interested in having the whole PC catalog as their so-called "launch exclusive," adding that restricting where people can play a game isn't a model that makes sense for them.

It's the same stance Valve has held since the original Steam Deck launched, and it fits with how Valve has approached the Steam Machine overall, treating it as a PC first and a console second. The problem is that this argument only really works because Valve's revenue doesn't depend on hardware sales.

NVIDIA's RTX Spark platform, known internally as N1X, has been one of the most anticipated Arm-based chips of the year. It debuted at Computex 2026, and now, its first real-world Cinebench numbers just surfaced.

According to a benchmark spotted on the TechPowerUp forums and shared on X by ExoticSpice101, an early Surface Laptop Ultra sample running the 20-core N1X scored 5,771 points in Cinebench 2026's multi-thread test and 540 in single-thread. It has been noted that the score came from a hidden "High Performance" profile that pushed the chip's power limits well past its default settings.

That result lands almost exactly where Apple's 14-core M3 Max sits, which typically scores around 5,722 points in the same test. NVIDIA's processor is about 4% slower than the M3 Max in single-threaded tasks, but almost matches it in multi-threaded workloads.

Extreme component shortages have driven up costs for games hardware, and this trend isn't expected to stop any time soon.

Months of unnecessary tariffs (that are getting refunded anyway) and worsening RAM/storage shortages have significantly impacted the games market. Hardware adoption has stalled due to higher prices, catching companies like Valve off guard. Unfortunately, this has led to both gamers and manufacturers effectively being squeezed out of the mainstream, as Valve has learned by having to launch its Steam Machine console at an astronomical $1,049 price tag.

Valve has learned a lot in its quest to sell Steam Machines and proliferate its proprietary SteamOS platform. Perhaps the biggest lesson is about production and manufacturing, and Valve learned the sobering realities of the hardware market: memory-makers call the shots, and you can either agree to inflated prices or miss your contract altogether. So Valve signed a deal, knowing it would drive up the price of the Steam Machines, not really being able to do anything else.

Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma apparently decided very early on that exclusives would be coming back.

After years of multi-million game sales and extracting value from its competitors, Xbox is once again returning to exclusivity. Xbox originally broke game exclusivity in February 2024 when it announced that only 4 Xbox games would cross over, culminating in the confusing "this is an Xbox" marketing campaign. Two years later, Xbox is changing plans as part of a big new company reset and re-embracing exclusives, although Microsoft's CEO hates this world (probably because of Sony's anti-Xbox publishing deals).

Interestingly enough, it's now been revealed that Xbox's shift towards exclusivity was among the earliest business models that new CEO Asha Sharma decided on when she took over for Phil Spencer earlier this year. According to Xbox CSO Matthew Ball, exclusivity is and always was important to Sharma: "This specific decision was made very early. Asha believes that to build a platform, you must have exclusive services and software--in this case, games. And so to return our platform to consistent growth, we need a reliable pipeline of exclusive games," Ball said in a recent interview with GamesRadar.

Xbox's new focus on exclusivity won't be limited to just singleplayer games, bringing to mind interesting questions about future games in the portfolio.

Xbox is committed to exclusive content moving forward, and has announced plans to release at least one exclusive game a year on consoles and PC. The games will be different each time, and they obviously won't always be singleplayer-oriented, considering Gears of War E-Day is the first major console exclusive under this strategy and that game has a big online 6-player mode.

Even still, this needed to be reiterated by Xbox's chief content officer Matt Booty, who tells GamesRadar that there is no hard mandate that the exclusives have to be singleplayer-focused. While Gears of War E-Day has multiplayer, the exclusive planned for 2027, inXile's Clockwork Revolution, does not. "I wouldn't overly fixate on single-player. I think that's a good rule of thumb, but it certainly isn't something that's carved in stone," the Xbox CCO said.

The much-anticipated Ubisoft remake, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, has sold more than 3 million copies in its first week, according to a post from the official Assassin's Creed account on X. The pirate remake launched July 9 with 2 million copies sold on day one, and it has kept climbing since. Ubisoft used the milestone to confirm that New Game+ is now in development, a feature fans have been asking for since launch.

The tweet itself leaned into the pirate theme, thanking players for "sharing tall tales about your Caribbean adventures" and promising to "keep the adventures going with New Game+ later on, mates." No release window was given for the mode, but it is expected to take cues from the New Game+ format Ubisoft shipped with Assassin's Creed Shadows.

This caps off a genuinely strong launch. Black Flag Resynced sold over five times more pre-launch copies on Steam than AC Shadows, landed Steam Deck Verified status right out of the gate, and Ubisoft says Steam user reviews have climbed to Very Positive following a run of post-launch quality-of-life patches and bug fixes. For a studio led by Ubisoft Singapore rebuilding a 2013 game from scratch on the Anvil engine, that is about as good a reception as a remake gets.

We know the GTA modding community to be ingenious and dedicated. For their latest trick, Modder DryxioGTA has pulled off one of the strangest GTA mod demonstrations in recent memory, running a fully playable copy of GTA III on a television texture inside GTA: San Andreas. This isn't a video overlay or a captured window pasted onto a screen prop. GTA III renders directly into the TV's live GPU texture while sharing the same Direct3D device as San Andreas itself.

In the clip, CJ sits facing a television in his yard while GTA III plays out on the screen in front of him, fully controllable. The player can swap between controlling CJ in the San Andreas world and Claude in GTA III, and the San Andreas world keeps running the whole time rather than pausing or handing off to a full-screen interface. It's a genuine case of one game engine instance rendering inside another, live, without any external capture software stitching the footage together.

This is a continuation of an earlier project from Dryxio, released back in February. That mod ported both GTA III (via the re3 project) and GTA Vice City (via reVC) to run as independent engines inside the San Andreas process, each with its own save data, story progress, and settings. Players could technically mod each game separately, since they're not sharing assets so much as sharing a host process. The mod itself is up on LibertyCity.net for anyone who wants to dig into how the trick works.

We have seen cooling mods before, but this one really pushes the boundaries. Australian YouTuber TrashBench, known for pushing GPU cooling mods into genuinely unhinged territory, just tried his most extreme RTX 3080 build yet. In his latest video, he strips the card down and surrounds it with eleven separate fans plus an AIO liquid cooler, all in an attempt to see how far thermal headroom can actually translate into real performance.

The results are, surprisingly, a mixture of both good and bad. Temperatures dropped by a massive 33°C compared to the stock cooler, which is a serious swing. This result is on par with what TrashBench pulled off in his earlier RTX 3080 project, where an Arctic WS360 workstation AIO dropped VRAM temps from 101.6°C to under 50°C. However, the payoff in frames this time was rather underwhelming. Despite this ridiculous setup, gaming performance only rose by around 4 FPS on average.

That gap between thermals and FPS is something to note. The RTX 3080 is a power-limited card, not really a thermal-limited one, once you get it below the low 80s Celsius. NVIDIA already tuned the Ampere boost algorithm to chase clocks within a fairly tight power envelope, so once a cooler gets temperatures comfortably low, extra cooling stops translating into extra clock speed.

Spotify removed more than 75 million AI-generated tracks from its platform in 2025 alone, according to Sam Duboff, the company's senior director. The company says the crackdown isn't aimed at AI music itself, but at low-effort, mass-produced uploads designed to manipulate royalty payments and recommendation algorithms.

Around 100,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day, and a growing share are created using AI tools like Suno or custom LLM-based workflows that can generate a finished track from a text prompt in seconds. In fact, industry analysis suggests roughly 44% of all music uploaded to streaming platforms is now AI-generated. According to Duboff, the tracks Spotify removed were largely low-effort "slop" uploaded in bulk to game royalty pools and recommendation algorithms.

Spotify still welcomes AI-generated music, provided creators hold the necessary commercial rights, avoid unauthorised voice cloning, and demonstrate genuine creative input. What the company is targeting is fraud. Networks of bots upload thousands of short ambient loops or similar tracks to siphon royalty payments that would otherwise go to legitimate artists. Spotify has also built systems to prevent AI companies from bulk-harvesting its catalogue for model training.

We previously reported that PlayStation's decision to end production of new physical game discs in 2028 was reportedly kept hidden even from many of Sony's own offices. Now, the company is facing another allegation. Popular YouTuber and industry insider Moore's Law Is Dead claims Sony has deployed social media bots to counter the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the announcement.

MLID says he had a hard time finding anyone truly defending PlayStation's digital-only choice online, and when he did, the accounts seemed suspicious. He looked into three in particular, all showing the same pattern: long periods of inactivity followed by sudden, strangely excited activity using formal, business-like language, interacting with accounts that were later deleted, promoting other likely bots, and profile pictures that looked like they were made by AI.

The first account praised the shutdown of the PS3 and PS Vita digital stores, a widely criticised decision at the time, and liked a post about The Odyssey film days before Insomniac Games confirmed its screenings would include a Marvel's Wolverine trailer. MLID described the timing as a "smoking gun."

Apple already has a packed hardware lineup expected this fall, headlined by the debut of its first foldable iPhone alongside the iPhone 18 series, as well as new Apple Watch and Mac models. Now, Apple fans may have another upgrade to look forward to, with Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reporting that the company is preparing to launch a new iPad mini with an OLED display as early as October.

It would be the most significant refresh the iPad mini has received since its full redesign in 2021, and the first time Apple brings OLED technology to its smallest tablet. OLED means richer colours, higher contrast, and true blacks compared to the LCD display on the current model.

The new iPad mini, codenamed J510, is said to feature an 8.4-inch LTPS panel with hybrid OLED, a slight increase in size over the current 8.3-inch screen. However, one thing it will not get is ProMotion, with other leaks suggesting the display will remain at a fixed 60Hz refresh rate. On the chip side, the new model is rumoured to run either an A19 Pro or A20, a significant jump from the A17 Pro in the current generation.

AMD recently re-released the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, giving gamers on the AM4 platform the option to upgrade to a highly performant CPU for gaming even by today's standards. However, for gamers looking to build a new rig, AM4 is substantially less appealing even with the 5800X3D being an option for $349. ComputerBase published an article revealing that the Ryzen 7 7700X3D is faster with one stick of RAM compared to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with two sticks.

The computer-focused outlet showed off its benchmarks of most of AMD's Ryzen X3D parts and showed that even with just one DDR5 DIMM, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D handily outperforms the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with two sticks. The memory configuration of both CPUs makes the performance results more impressive, with the Ryzen 7 7700X3D being paired to a rather slow DDR5-5200 CL26 memory stick, while the Ryzen 5 5800X3D was paired with two DDR4-3200 sticks at a very low CL14 latency. DDR4-3200 at CL14 is one of the lowest-latency memory configurations you can buy for DDR4.

At 720p, ComputerBase's benchmark results show the 7700X3D performing 14% better than the 5800X3D on just a single DDR5 stick. Adding another stick to the 7700X3D only improved performance by 5%.

We're continuing our TweakTown giveaways, rewarding our registered members and newsletter subscribers with top-tier hardware every week. For our latest giveaway, we've teamed up with ASRock to give one lucky winner a strong foundation for a modern AMD gaming PC, covering both the motherboard and power supply.

There will be one winner in total, and the prize includes an ASRock B850 Riptide WiFi motherboard and an ASRock Phantom Gaming PG-850G power supply.

The ASRock B850 Riptide WiFi provides the foundation for this week's prize bundle. Built around AMD's Socket AM5 platform, the motherboard supports Ryzen 9000, 8000, and 7000 Series processors, giving the winner a wide range of CPU options when planning a new gaming system. Its 14+2+1 phase power design uses 80A Dr.MOS components for the processor and system-on-chip power stages, supported by enlarged heatsinks and an eight-layer PCB. The board also includes four DDR5 memory slots, supporting up to 256GB of memory and DDR5-8000+ speeds via overclocking.

While the memory shortage shows no signs of easing for consumers, one company is quietly climbing the ranks of the DRAM industry. ChangXin Memory Technologies, better known as CXMT, is on track to nearly match Micron's production capacity by the end of 2026, according to new analysis from Citrini Research. In just six years, the Chinese memory maker is projected to grow from 40,000 wafer starts per month in 2020 to 350,000 by the end of this year, compared to Micron's estimated 375,000.

The company is building cleanrooms in roughly 12 months, compared to the 21 to 24 months typical for the rest of the DRAM industry. State-backed financing has also removed many of the funding constraints faced by Western competitors. The Chinese government is also actively encouraging CXMT to share its DRAM technology with other domestic manufacturers.

CXMT's current output is not cutting-edge by global standards. The company relies on older DUV lithography with multi-patterning techniques rather than EUV, since US export controls block access to advanced equipment. Its chips are not competitive with high-end DDR5 or HBM products.

The RTX 50 Super series has been swinging between rumoured cancellations and signs of life depending on which leak you believe. The latest update lands somewhere in between. According to VideoCardz, at least one NVIDIA board partner has already received physical RTX 50 Super graphics cards, meaning development is past the prototype stage. The catch is that NVIDIA has reportedly told its partners to hold off on the launch.

The reason is the cost of 3GB GDDR7 memory chips. The entire Super series is built around these higher-density modules, which allow NVIDIA to increase VRAM capacity without changing the number of chips or widening the memory bus. A single 3GB GDDR7 chip currently costs between $60 and $70 according to VideoCardz's sources. A standard 2GB GDDR7 chip costs around $20. That is three times the price for 50% more capacity, and across a card with six or eight modules, the difference amounts to hundreds of dollars in additional memory costs per GPU.

Three Super models are affected: the RTX 5070 Super with 18GB, the RTX 5070 Ti Super with 24GB, and the RTX 5080 Super with 24GB. The RTX 5050 9GB is also on hold for the same reason. Without these 3GB chips, the Super series loses its entire identity, as the RTX 5070 Ti Super and RTX 5080 Super carry the same CUDA core counts as their standard counterparts. Only the RTX 5070 Super gets a minor 4% bump in CUDA cores.

Amazon's God of War TV series has suffered a major setback after an on-set injury forced a recast of Kratos. Ryan Hurst, who had been cast in the lead role, tore a bicep while performing a stunt in late June and required surgery. With recovery expected to take four to six months, delaying production until 2027 was reportedly not an option for Amazon and Sony Pictures Television.

As a result, the decision has now been made to recast Kratos, with production targeting a mid-October restart. According to Deadline, four episodes had already been completed and will now need to be largely reshot with Hurst's replacement. The actor had reportedly gained 40 pounds of muscle for the physically demanding role and had spent months filming in Vancouver before the injury.

Callum Vinson, who plays Kratos' son Atreus, is just 12 years old, and the series was originally set to film two seasons back-to-back to avoid visible growth spurts between seasons, an issue that has affected productions like Stranger Things. With filming now delayed, reshooting the four completed episodes is reportedly considered necessary to maintain continuity.

GameStop has uniquely insulated its business against disruptions in the retail software sales chain by necessity, and Sony's recent business decision to cut physical PlayStation game disc production has no real effect on GameStop's operations, current CEO Ryan Cohen says.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen wants to buy eBay for $56 billion and create an ultra-synergized e-commerce marketplace. The idea is to combine the strengths of eBay and GameStop together to sell games, collectibles, merch, and even establish an in-game digital store.

With GameStop having moved away from actual game software sales some time ago, instead embracing the highly-profitable world of collectibles like Funko Pops and Magic and Pokemon cards, Sony's recent decision to kill off PlayStation game discs won't cause anything but small chip damage to GameStop's armor rating. The retailer once relied on second-hand game sales to stay afloat, but those days are long gone.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen explains why he wants to buy eBay in basic terms, and shares a vision for what could end up being a digital microtransaction depot for in-game items should GameStop and eBay join forces.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen discussed his unsolicited $56 billion buyout offer for eBay. Cohen believes there are enormous synergies between the two companies in terms of e-commerce, but the CEO also mentioned plans for an in-game digital marketplace if eBay is purchased.

Exact details of what it is Cohen was referring to remain unknown, but it's possible he is referring to GameStop's current store where it sells codes for digital games directly to consumers.

Microsoft has reportedly paused the rollout of its latest Windows Update on certain Dell PCs as a result of a driver conflict causing the affected Dell PCs to shut down unexpectedly. BleepingComputer reports that KB5101650, released this Tuesday for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, is causing a driver conflict that is responsible for the shutdown issue.

Microsoft states that affected Dell PCs will show a yellow exclamation point in Device Manager next to the Intel Innovation Platform Framework Processor Participant driver, making it easy for users to identify if their system is affected (and has the latest Windows Update installed). The issue is specifically caused by an alleged incompatibility between the aforementioned Intel driver and Windows 11's new Windows USB-C connection Manager interface that was introduced with KB5095093 last month. The new Type-C connection manager is part of Microsoft's Type-C connector system software interface (UCSI) driver that is responsible for handling Type-C and Thunderbolt ports on a machine.

Microsoft is planning to release a resolution that will reportedly arrive in the next several days. Again, affected users need not worry about the update as Microsoft has already halted KB5101650's rollout to affected users.

Exclusives are back at Xbox, but will big heavy-hitters like Elder Scrolls and Fallout be among them? Bethesda isn't ready to say just yet.

Xbox is embracing exclusive games to add more value to the core Xbox brand--console and Windows. Microsoft's current exclusive strategy includes two games, and the lineup seems to lack the must-have starpower required to really make a difference...however that could change if high-profile games like The Elder Scrolls VI or even Fallout 5 are made exclusive. Or, perhaps, a Fallout spin-off?

While nothing has been confirmed, Bethesda just released a new studio update that briefly discussed future games. The group says that four new Fallout games are in development, including Fallout 5, remasters of both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and a joint collaboration project with Obsidian. Then in a recent interview with Windows Central, Bethesda's Todd Howard was asked about TESVI and FO5 going Xbox exclusive, and he replied that it was too early to comment.