Latest News - Page 370

File Explorer just got a big upgrade for Windows 11 users, with performance of the native app being increased following a new update rolled out by Microsoft.

Microsoft announced the performance hike in a new blog post where it explained the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27818 within the Canary Channel includes big improvements to File Explorer, particularly in the area of extracting zipped files.

More specifically, the performance increase will be felt when unzipping a large number of small files. The update to the Insider Build also includes various others fixes such as known problems with the Taskbar and System Tray, the removal of "Suggested Actions" when you have copied a phone number or future date, various crashes and more.

Assassin's Creed Shadows has finally been released, and the game has been received quite positively by both reviewers and the small number of users who have rated the game. While it's still very early to gauge the total perception of the title, preliminary results look quite promising for Ubisoft.

Above is the first hour of Shadows, and the following will be an explanation of my experience, quick takeaways, and overall thoughts. It should be noted these thoughts are after just an hour of playing the game, and aren't indicative of a full review of the title.

Let's start with the positives. This is the best-looking Assassin's Creed game Ubisoft has ever released, with environments and locations being particular graphical highlights. Character graphics are also great, with only some parts of the cinematics looking a little worse than others.

The MacBook Pro is the most popular Mac, and by some way, increasing its lead over Apple's other computers, or at least that's the story told by some fresh stats.

These statistics were compiled by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), and they show that over the course of 2024, over half the Macs sold by Apple were MacBook Pro models.

CIRP claims that MacBook Pro laptops represented no less than 53% of total Mac sales for Apple in 2024, which was up slightly from 51% the previous year.

The General of the US Space Force has warned foreign satellites appear to be practicing combat in space, according to statements released at the McAleese Defense Programs Conferences held in Washington.

The comments come from Vice Chief of Space Operations General Michael Guetlein, who said the US is currently developing new capabilities for warfare that's off-planet, with the goal being to assume "space superiority" over foreign nations such as China, Russia, and any other competing country. The main competitor here is China, as the general said officials have witnessed Chinese satellites performing maneuvers and displaying a level of control that is indicative of "dogfighting in space."

These maneuvers were first spotted by commercial satellites, and then the information was sent to Space Force. For quite some time, China has been expanding its presence in space with various satellites, and even the launch of a refueling station that was sent to geosynchronous orbit.

Last year saw the arrival of new motherboards, CPUs, and chipsets, alongside faster DDR5 memory that opened the door to impressive speeds - backed up with plenty of liquid nitrogen cooling. From October 2024 through January 2025, we've reported on the world record for DDR5 memory speed being broken no less than half a dozen times.

A recent report highlighted the efforts of renowned overclocker HiCookie, who set a new DDR5 world record using GIGABYTE's Z890 AORUS Tachyon Ice motherboard - hitting an impressive speed of 12,726 MT/s or DDR5-12726.

HiCookie is back with the same V-COLOR Manta XFinity RGB DDR5 memory, Z890 AORUS Tachyon Ice motherboard, and a new world record. With the latest flagship Intel Core Ultra 9 285K CPU, HiCookie achieved an impressive new world record speed of DDR5-12752 or 12,752 MT/s.

The former boss of Intel attended NVIDIA's AI-focused GTC 2025 conference in San Francisco, California. In a 'Live at NVIDIA GTC' video appearance, ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger shared some words about NVIDIA's meteoric rise in recent years, thanks to the current AI boom. Aimed at NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Geslinger says, "he got lucky with AI" - and it's not a dig.

The fortunes or fall of Intel under Pat Gelsinger's stewardship have been widely reported. In 2025, the once-dominant force in consumer and enterprise processor hardware is now playing catch-up to companies like NVIDIA and AMD. Regarding NVIDIA being the leader in AI, Pat Gelsinger also talked about Intel's failed Larrabee project, which attempted to bring GPU-like acceleration for things like AI to a traditional x86 CPU.

"The CPU was the king of the hill, and I applaud Jensen for his tenacity of just saying, 'No, I am not trying to build one of those'; I am trying to deliver against the workload starting in graphics," said Gelsinger.

MSI recently launched its second-generation PC gaming handhelds with the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and Claw 7 AI+, powered by the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor with integrated Arc 'Battlemage' graphics. The most significant difference between the two is screen size, with the Claw 8 offering an 8-inch 1080p 120 Hz VRR IPS display and the Claw 7 offering a 7-inch 120 Hz VRR IPS display.

Intel's second-generation Battlemage Arc graphics improve game performance compared to the original first-generation Arc Claw handheld. MSI's latest PC gaming handhelds also sport 32GB of memory and ample battery capacity. Hardware-wise, these are impressive-sounding options that stand out in the increasingly crowded Windows-based gaming handheld space.

With support for everything from Steam, Xbox, and Battle.net, MSI notes that the Claw 8 AI+ and Claw 7 AI+ also feature upgrades based directly on feedback it has gained from the PC gaming community based on the original Claw and PC gaming handhelds as a whole. Covering everything from quality-of-life stuff to richer sound, here's the breakdown.

Elon Musk purchased X, formerly Twitter, from its shareholders in 2022 for $44 billion. Following the purchase of the social media platform, there was an exodus of advertisers, dramatically reducing the valuation of now-X. That valuation has now reached the price at which Musk purchased the platform.

Shortly after Musk purchased X, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO went on to make some major changes, such as how content appears on the timeline for users and what content is served next to ads. These changes, combined with Musk's opening up of the X content guidelines, which enabled a wider variety of content to appear on the platform, resulted in many advertisers being concerned their ads would appear next to potentially offensive content. These concerns resulted in the exodus of advertisers we saw in the months that followed the acquisition.

In response to the spiraling of advertisers propping up the social media platform, Musk proceeded to run intense cost-cutting measures, which saw approximately 90% of then-Twitter staff being let go. Twitter staff dropped from about 7,500 employees to just 1,500. According to a recent report from Bloomberg, Musk has since raised close to $1 billion in new equity from investors, which values the company at approximately $32 billion. The report states Musk himself participated in the equity raise, along with Darsana Capital Partners, which bought some of X's debt earlier this year.

GeForce Game Ready Driver 572.83 is available now, and it's a big one. In addition to providing optimized day-one support for the Half-Life 2 RTX Demo (check out our hands-on here), Assassin's Creed Shadows, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, and Control's recent surprise updates, it also adds support for a trio of new GPUs.

GeForce Game Ready Driver 572.83 supports the new GeForce RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti laptops powered by RTX Blackwell hardware. Pre-orders for GeForce RTX 50 Series laptops with these GPUs have been open for a few weeks now, with stock expected to hit retail in the coming weeks or sometime in April 2025. With better battery life, efficiency, faster video editing, and support for new tech like Multi Frame Generation, these laptops will probably be in as high demand as the desktop GeForce RTX 50 GPUs we've seen this year.

For those rocking a new GeForce RTX 50 Series GPU, the latest driver fixes the "black screen" issue gamers have reported. Plus, it adds DLSS 4 support to 61 games via the DLSS 'Override' settings in the NVIDIA App.

Assassins Creed Shadows reviews are out, and so far, the title is being praised not only for its exciting gameplay, but its push towards visual fidelity - particularly on the PS5 Pro.

In a recent X post, Ubisoft Montreal technical architect Nicolas Lopez, responded to the praise, reiterating the team's commitment to delivering meaningful improvements on the PS5 Pro Hardware.

As per Digital Foundry, Assassins Creed Shadows on the PS5 Pro delivers 'one of the most substantial upgrades' seen on Sony's enhanced consoles. An analysis from ElAnalistaDeBits also determined it to be 'the best optimized open world Ubisoft has created in years'.

Ahead of the release of Assassin's Creed Shadows, Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, has discussed the contents of the title in parliament, raising the question with other top government officials on how to respond to some of the contents seen within the title.

For those who don't know, Assassin's Creed Shadows is based in fueduel Japan, and leading up to the release of the title, the game has been put under the microscope following Ubisoft officials saying it was based on historical fact.

The depictions of real-world locations and what players can do within those locations have now made their way to Japan's government, with Japan's Prime Minister now responding to a question posed by a member of the House of Councillors of Japan, Hiroyuki Kada, who pointed to the segment of the game where players can attack and destroy the contents of religious sites such as the Itatehyouzu Shrine.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 will be receiving unofficial VR support, thanks to the work of Luke Ross, a well-known VR modder who has developed a series of ports allowing players to experience popular AAA games in Virtual Reality.

His mods are often referred to as "R.E.A.L VR," with a lineup of ports that include GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Horizon Zero Dawn -which have gained significant popularity and are available through his Patreon page.

Ross recently teased the mod release for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, with footage showing off the highly acclaimed title running in VR. It's not expected that the mod will include motion controls, as Ross has highlighted in a previous blog post. But at the very least, players will be able to jump into the world of Kingdom Come with a full six degrees of freedom (the ability to physically move and turn your head in the virtual space).

Despite its release onto Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft's new first-party RPG Avowed managed to break into the top 20 best-earning games of February 2025 by revenue.

The latest market research report from analyst firm Newzoo outlines the trends and developments made during last month, including estimated revenue for new and existing game releases. The list contains your usual live service suspects like Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Minecraft. New breakout hits like Monster Hunter Wilds, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and Avowed.

We've heard publishers talk about the success of these previous games--Capcom confirmed Monster Hunter Wilds sold 8 million copies in 3 days, whereas Warhorse confirmed 2 million copies sold of KCD2 shortly after launch. But what about Avowed? Neither Xbox nor Obsidian have really spoken about the game's success, although Obsidian did confirm a roadmap of sorts was on the way.

Former Call of Duty zombies director Jason Blundell is leading a mysterious new first-party game studio for Sony's PlayStation division.

Sony has a new unannounced first-party game studio that's working behind the scenes on a enigmatic project. The studio is called Dark Outlaw Games, and it's being led by Treyarch and Call of Duty veteran developer Jason Blundell, who is serving as studio head and director of the game. Blundell's past experience gives an indication that Dark Outlaw could be working on a shooter game.

The news was confirmed by Blundell himself in a recent interview with former Giant Bomb member Jeff Gerstmann. What makes the news even more interesting is that Sony has been cancelling games and closing down studios left and right, and that Jason Blundell had previous experience working with Sony on a PlayStation project outside of Treyarch. Years ago, Blundell worked at Deviation Games, a studio that was contracted for a PlayStation project. Blundell left in 2022, and Deviation shut down in 2024 amid blistering layoffs and rising costs.

AMD's next-generation Zen 6-based APUs will not be using RDNA 4 GPU cores, and instead will rely on RDNA 3.5 GPU that is used inside of the Zen 5-based Strix Point and just-released Strix Halo APUs.

The news is coming from AMD GPUOpen Drivers code on GitHib with the device ID "Gfxlp12" for RDNA 4 being exclusively reserved for discrete GPUs like the just-released Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards. AMD's current fleet of Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards will be the exclusive use of RDNA 4, while next-gen Medusa Point and Medusa Halo APUs using RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

AMD's next-gen Zen 6 "Medusa Point" and "Medusa Halo" APUs will feature next-gen Zen 6 cores, with Medusa Strix APUs expected to debut with between 12 CUs and 32 CUs of RDNA 3.X GPU, while Medusa Halo APUs will bump the RDNA 3.5 GPU core count up to 48 CUs. Zen 6-based Medusa Point and Medusa Halo APUs will also reportedly have a 384-bit memory bus that's expected to drive performance up 30-50% over the new Strix Halo APU.

Various firsts for AI are inevitably going to emerge, and here's a new one: the world's first newspaper written by an AI.

Yes, it's happened, courtesy of an Italian newspaper, Il Foglio, which has produced an AI-generated edition as highlighted by The Guardian.

Certainly as far as we're aware, this is a first of its kind, but this isn't a case of the paper's owners letting AI write the entire thing. Rather, it's a four-page supplement which is written by AI.

AMD recently hosted an AI PC summit in Beijing, with local media reporting that the company said its initial stock off Radeon RX 9070 series "RDNA 4" GPUs had almost sold out, with over 200,000 graphics cards shipped.

The amount of graphics cards shipped doesn't mean graphics cards sold, but AMD did say that the global supply of around 200,000 units of Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards had almost sold out.

Benchlife was at the event, reporting that AMD said: "Recently, on March 66th, the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070, based on the new RDNA 4 GPU architecture, were released. The initial global supply of over 200,000 units of these graphics cards was almost sold out. Following this, on March 12th, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D were released, offering gamers and multimedia enthusiasts a more balanced and comphrehensive performance boost".

Assassin's Creed: Shadows is catching some flak for its performance levels on PC in reviews - and feedback online in general - but not everything is negative in this regard.

While a lot of the controversy is disappointment around how the game (which is released tomorrow) runs on beefy gaming PCs (often at weighty 4K settings), it seems that Assassin's Creed: Shadows fares much better on more modest hardware, namely gaming handhelds.

TechRadar was on the case here, spotting several YouTubers putting Shadows through its paces on the Steam Deck and the ASUS ROG Ally, finding that it can generally hold a solid 30 FPS on low and medium details. Although as you'd expect, upscaling trickery has a hand in making the gameplay smoother.

ASUS has just introduced its new Ascent GX10, its new groundbreaking AI supercomputer, powered by NVIDIA's new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. An AI supercomputer, on your desk, and it can almost fit into the palm of your hand.... check it out:

ASUS's new Ascent GX10 places an incredible amount of AI power at your fingertips, and directly onto the desks of developers, AI researchers, and data centers across the planet.

The new ASUS Ascent GX10 delivers up to 1000 TOPS of AI performance, with 128GB of unified system memory, developers can experiment, fine-tune or inference the latest generation of reasoning AI models with up to 200 billion parameters.

SK hynix has started sampling its next-gen 12-Hi HBM4 memory modules to customers -- namely NVIDIA, which will be using HBM4 on its new Rubin AI GPUs -- the world's first HBM4.

During NVIDIA's recent GTC 2025 event, AI memory partner SK hynix announced it was unveiling its new 12-Hi HBM4, 12-Hi HBM3E (for NVIDIA's new GB300 AI GPU), and new SOCAMM memory modules.

SK hynix's' new HBM4 memory uses its Advanced MR-MUF process, pushing capacities up to 36GB which makes it the highest amongst 12-Hi HBM products. We know that NVIDIA's new Rubin and Rubin Ultra AI GPU platforms will use HBM4 memory, thanks to its high speeds we have up to 2TB/sec for the first time, a 60% performance jump over HBM3E