Latest News - Page 376

Sometimes gaming isn't about fast-paced, blood-pumping competitive titles, or even an RPG-esc story to sink your teeth into. Sometimes, it's simply about sitting back and relaxing.

PowerWash Simulator is probably the perfect example of that, and British studio FuturLab has announced a sequel to its popular title, PowerWash Simulator 2. The new trailer has been posted to the developer's YouTube channel and shows several improvements over the first game. PowerWash Simulator 2 will also come with four-player online co-op with shared progression, and a two-player local split-screen option.

Eurogamer reports the new title will come with a Central Homebase hub for players' power washing business, which will come with customization options so players can personalize their workplace with their own furnishings, rewards, and items. Moreover, PowerWash Simulator 2 will come with a new full campaign that will continue on from the first game's ending. PowerWash Simulator 2 also comes with a clear step up in the graphics department compared to the first game.

The scientist who was sentenced to spend three years in jail for gene-hacking babies has posted to his X account criticizing ethics for slowing down scientific progress.

He Jiankui, along with his two collaborators, were found guilty of "illegal medical practices" and were sentenced to three years in jail for assisting in the genetic modification of babies. It's now been nearly three years since Jiankui was released from jail, and the scientist seems to still believe his direction is the right one, with Jiankui recently taking to X, formerly Twitter, to criticize the ethics surrounding gene modification, saying, "ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress."

While Jiankui doesn't directly state what he is referencing, it appears the jailed biophysicist is pointing to the ethical standards that caused him to be thrown in jail. For those who don't know what happened, in 2018, Jiankui used CRISPR to edit the DNA of twin girls pseudonymously known as "Lulu" and "Nana" in an attempt to make them immune to HIV.

Nintendo has reportedly already made nearly half a million Nintendo Switch 2 units, and they have already been shipped to the US.

According to reports from Universo Nintendo, which cites recent statements from LiC on the Famiboards forums, which has been tracking shipments of cartons and instruction manuals, Nintendo has already completed 383,000 Nintendo Switch 2 units. These units have reportedly already been shipped to the US between January 17 and January 22, meaning they have likely already arrived on US soil. LiC goes on to claim these boxes were all tagged with US/Canada region code and were also accompanied by 41,598 units of the charging grip.

LiC states a Vietnamese manufacturer called HVBG that, was contracted by Nintendo, shipped these units, and the Switch 2's charging grip product code is BEE-A-ESSKA, which is similar to the Switch 1's charging grip's product code HAC-A-ESSKA. The info doesn't stop there as LiC states HVBG has already received 1.7 million units of the one-per-system parts, such as the System-on-Chip (SoC) and screen as of December last year, with 100% of those soon-to-be-completed systems expected to arrive in the US after completion.

When we got to go hands-on with the GeForce RTX 50 Series during NVIDIA's big reveal event earlier this year, we saw some of the fascinating new RTX technologies, such as RTX Neural Shaders, in action. These cutting-edge technologies, which include RTX Neural Radiance Cache, RTX Skin, and RTX Volumetrics, will be present in the Half-Life 2 RTX demo that will be released next week, giving gamers the chance to experience the future of game visuals in a mod/remaster/remake of one of the best PC games ever made.

RTX Neural Radiance Cache is a real-time neural network that runs on the GPU, analyzing the scene and environment as you play. What it does is, after partially tracing a ray for Path Tracing effects, the AI model then infers an infinite number of bounces, with the result being a more detailed ray-traced image and a performance boost.

During its GDC presentation to the media, NVIDIA announced a new piece of neural rendering developed to improve path-traced visuals and lighting. You will also be able to experience next week's Half-Life 2 RTX demo. RTX Volumetrics is about leveling up fog, smoke, and air effects by accurately simulating how a light source travels through fog or smoke.

At GDC 2025, NVIDIA announced that RTX Remix had exited beta and been officially released. RTX Remix is a toolkit developed by NVIDIA that leverages its expertise in AI and rendering alongside the power of the NVIDIA Omniverse to make it easier to remaster and mod classic games with RTX technologies. Naturally, this means Full Ray Tracing or Path Tracing in iconic titles like Portal, Half-Life 2, and more.

To non-developers, it works like magic. Modders can open compatible titles with fixed-function graphics pipelines (going back to DirectX 8) and then press a hotkey to capture a scene, making everything in there ready for enhancement. RTX Remix allows modders to replace objects, transform materials, replace animation, use AI to upscale textures, and tweak the lighting with cutting-edge modern ray-tracing effects.

A single button then compiles everything into a playable mod with Full Ray Tracing and DLSS 4 technologies including Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Multi Frame Generation.

KIOXIA, the inventor of flash memory and pioneer in storage solutions, has announced its new LC9 Series NVMe SSD, available in the popular 2.5-inch form factor. With a storage capacity of a whopping 122.88 Terabytes (TBs), it's also the first SSD from the company to have been built with the latest eighth-generation BiCS FLASH technology with a 2 Tb QLC die and CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology.

Personally, when I see 122.88 TBs on a single SSD, my mind immediately wanders to being able to install every game in my Steam library, which I accumulated after a decade of seasonal sales. Of course, high-capacity drives are a critical component of building AI systems, training large language models (LLMs), retrieving data for inference, and designing generative AI applications that will drive the future of local and cloud computing.

The KIOXIA LC9 Series NVMe 122.88 TB SSD is an enterprise-class product compliant with the PCIe 5.0 specification, NVMe 2.0, and NVMe-MI. As a high-capacity QLC-based SSD, it's ideal for deploying in a hybrid cloud or AI server. It's also perfect for pairing with KIOXIA's groundbreaking AiSAQ, which uses SSDs instead of RAM to dramatically improve RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) performance.

Take your pick of any recent GPU launch, and you'll probably find that the majority of cards sold were premium partner cards with enhanced cooling and overclocked settings. This has been a thing in the GPU space for years, where PC gamers spend a little extra for that premium build or stylish model with fancy cooling and LED lighting. The only problem is that premium GeForce RTX 5080 and Radeon RX 9070 XT cards are currently being sold at prices that are 40% higher than the MSRP set by NVIDIA and AMD.

This massive discrepancy is a recent phenomenon and has been a hot topic among the enthusiast PC gaming community for several reasons. One, if you're unable to buy, say, buy a GeForce RTX 5070 or RTX 5070 Ti at the MSRP set by NVIDIA ($549 and $749 respectively), then the next model up might carry a 20-30% higher price which diminishes a chunk of the card's value. In the worst examples it also means that you could end up paying more for a GeForce RTX 5070 than the MSRP of the more powerful GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

During a recent media pre-brief with NVIDIA, covering the company's latest GeForce RTX and AI announcements as GDC kicks off, we asked about MSRP pricing as a current issue and hot topic.

"Demand for the RTX 50 Series has been off the charts," NVIDIA's Jason Paul said during a recent media briefing event for the company's GeForce RTX and AI announcements for GDC.

With the Game Developers Conference kicking off next week in San Francisco, NVIDIA is announcing several exciting things for developers and gamers alike, from RTX Neural Shaders coming to DirectX to Half-Life 2: An RTX Remix Project getting a playable demo that anyone with a GeForce RTX GPU can experience. There's a lot to get through so stay tuned to TweakTown for all the news.

With the GeForce RTX 50 Series launch, four new models - the GeForce RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 - arrived within six weeks. One key problem with the launch, from the perspective of PC gamers looking to upgrade or put together a new build, is availability.

"100 games in 1.5 months is the fastest ramp up of new technology we've ever seen," NVIDIA's Jason Paul tells us during a recent media pre-brief. "That's 16X faster than DLSS 3. So with the RTX 50 Series and DLSS 4 both GPU and technology adoption are ramping up super fast."

NVIDIA continues to work hard to bring more GeForce RTX 50 cards to market, and shipments are already ramping up. From a gaming perspective, one of the reasons they're selling out the moment they hit shelves is DLSS 4. With the new transformer AI model for Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Multi-Frame Generation, DLSS 4 has been a game changer for image quality, smoothness, motion clarity, and performance.

NVIDIA notes that GeForce RTX 50 Series owners (which covers the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and the recently launched RTX 5070) are all in on DLSS 4 and RTX technologies. 92% enable DLSS while gaming, 90% enable ray-tracing where it's available, and 96% enable NVIDIA's fantastic Reflex latency reduction technology.

It's one of the most celebrated and acclaimed PC games ever made, and in 2025, Valve's Half-Life 2 is still a stone-cold classic. Half-Life 2 RTX, from Orbifold Studios, is one of the most ambitious and impressive mod projects for a PC gamer we've ever seen. The 100+ strong team of talented developers at Orbifold are using NVIDIA's groundbreaking RTX Remix toolkit to transform the iconic release. And a playable demo is dropping, next week, on March 18.

RTX Remix, a modding tool that allows older titles to be remastered (or remixed) with new art, models, and full ray-traced visuals, is a game changer for the modding community. The result is Half-Life 2 reimagined with fully ray-traced visuals, groundbreaking RTX Neural Shaders, physically-based textures, new high-poly models of characters, enemies, and objects, and a whole lot more. Technically it's a remaster, but it looks like a built-from-the-ground-up remake.

The demo includes the survival-horror-like Ravenholm chapter from the game alongside the action-packed Nova Prospekt chapter. The build will fully support DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation and NVIDIA Reflex, and the GeForce RTX 5090 delivers 265.7 FPS and the GeForce RTX 5080 delivers 163 FPS in 4K with DLSS 4. At 1440p, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti delivers 200.1 FPS and the GeForce RTX 5070 delivers 154.7 FPS with DLSS 4.

Tesla has suffered unprecedented market losses to start 2025, with nearly half of the company's value wiped out in just a few months.

As reported by Business Insider, Tesla was valued at $1.54 trillion in December 2024, but as of March 2025, that number has dropped to $777 billion - a staggering 49% decline.

JPMorgan analysts call it one of the largest and fastest stock crashes in automotive history, saying they struggle to find a comparable event in terms of both scale and speed. The closest examples, they note, were Japanese and Korean automakers losing sales in 2012 and 2017 due to diplomatic disputes with China. However, they highlighted that Tesla's decline is global, not confined to a single market.

If you have tried to cast to your Chromecast and it's not working, it's not your fault, it's Google's as the company has recently acknowledge a widespread outage.

The company has confirmed the widespread outage is a software-related issue and not an intentional phase-out of the devices. For those who aren't affected by the outage, reports indicate it's mostly affecting older Chromecast models, such as the 2nd-gen Chromecast released in 2015 and Chromecast Audio. Currently, Google hasn't revealed the cause of the outage but has warned users not to factory reset their devices as a means of troubleshooting, as it could permanently lock them out of the system.

Reports are now surfacing citing software engineers that have dug into the problem, with The Register speaking to Tom Hebb, a former Meta software engineer and Chromecast hacker, who published a detailed analysis about the outage. According to Hebb, the fix could take more than a month to be rolled out, and the problem stems directly from an expired device authentication certificate.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is only a week away and Ubisoft has just confirmed the title will be launching with Steam Deck support.

The announcement has come as quite a surprise to gamers, including myself, as the PC requirements for the title are quite heavy, leading many to believe that handheld support wasn't going to be possible. Contrary to popular belief, Ubisoft has taken to its Assassin's Creed X account to confirm Shadows will launch with Steam Deck support, and it is currently waiting for the level of classification from Valve.

At the time of writing, Valve hasn't released the classification for Assassin's Creed Shadows on the Steam Deck, but with Ubisoft's recent statement, we can assume there will be some optimizations that come with the Steam Deck version. Ubisoft has yet to announce Shadows has gone gold and the game releases in just seven days on March 20. If you are interested in checking out the PC specifications for Asassin's Creed Shadows, they can be found below, or you can visit the official Steam listing for the title here.

In a breakthrough for archaeology, scientists are using artificial intelligence and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to uncover traces of 5,000-year-old civilizations in Dubai and medieval sites in Mongolia, revealing lost histories buried beneath desert sands.

As reported by Daily Galaxy, AI and SAR imaging have revealed 5,000-year-old settlements and pathways in Dubai, providing insight into how early civilizations thrived in harsh desert conditions. Similarly, in Mongolia, the same technology uncovered thousands of potential medieval sites along the historic Silk Road - one of the most significant trade networks in human history.

The most notable aspect of these developments is uncovering ancient settlements without excavation. Detecting entire lost civilizations beneath the desert without traditional digging is a game-changer for archaeology.

A shareholder in Ubisoft is currently attempting to organize a protest out in front of the company's HQ in Paris, as Ubisoft has been accused of failing to disclose talks it has engaged in with Microsoft and Electronic Arts (EA), along with other publishers about acquiring Ubisoft franchises.

Juraj Krúpa, the CEO of AJ Investments, has claimed Ubisoft hasn't been transparent with shareholders about its internal decision-making and, more specifically, has accused the company of deliberately "hiding information" about an Assassin's Creed Mirage DLC partnership it has engaged in with the Saudi investment firm Savvy Group. Krúpa, a shareholder in Ubisoft, claims the company is "horribly mismanaged by current management" and is requesting senior Ubisoft staff provide a "clear roadmap for recovery" in order to address the plummeting value of Ubisoft stock.

The minority shareholder also pointed to a recent article by business investment platform MergerMarket, which claimed Ubisoft engaged in discussion with "Microsoft, EA, and others that are interested in acquiring IPs from Ubisoft." Adding, "Management did not inform public about these steps either," said Krúpa.

A collaboration between Tusk and ShiftCam has spawned the Cinema Series, which is described as the world's first commercial-grade mobile lens and filter system.

The Tusk Cinema Series is aimed at filmmakers that want the portability of their smartphone but also want the quality of professional-grade lens and filters. According to the announcement, the Tusk Cinema Series kit states it will provide Hollywood-level cinematography for the iPhone 14 Pro to 16 Pro, but is particularly aimed at the latest iPhone models, so the iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Pro Max.

The kit is launching on Kickstarter and offers seven lenses and eight magnetic filters. The Kickstarter had a funding goal of $10,295 with 43 days of donation time time to go. However, the project has already blown past that goal by a wide margin, as at the time of writing, it has reached $80,000 with only 66 backers. So, what's in the kit? Buyers will get a 8mm 200° fisheye, 25mm 10x macro, 16mm wide-angle, 15mm 1.55x anamorphic, 18mm 1.33x anamorphic, 75mm long-range macro, and 60mm telephoto.

The Pokémon franchise has attempted to branch into 3D gaming experiences over the last few years, led by developers Game Freak. However, the results have been shaky, with previous titles like Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Pokémon: Scarlet & Violet criticized for lackluster visuals and uninspired gameplay.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A appears to continue that trend, with the most recent gameplay trailer showcasing visuals that, as fans have pointed out, seem more reminiscent of the GameCube or PS2 era than a 2025 first-party title. Nintendo's former leads aren't impressed either.

As reported by TheGamer, Nintendo's former director of marketing and content, Kit Ellis, commented, "It doesn't look great. It's not high-end, pushing the performance of the Switch." Nintendo's former senior manager of creator relations, Krysta Yang, shared this sentiment, stating, "It looks pretty rough. Environments look pretty rough."

As announced by developers Pocketpair, Palworld's crossplay update will be arriving in late March. While an exact date was not specified, players will be pleased to hear that it's only a few weeks until they can take advantage of the feature.

Crossplay will allow players to play multiplayer across all released platforms, including Steam, Xbox, PS5, and Mac. The update will also allow players to transfer Pals between worlds - another highly requested improvement. A range of additional fixes and improvements will also be deployed, with full patch notes made available upon the update's launch.

The crossplay update comes part of a broader roadmap, which includes the above features, an end-game scenario, and a range of new content additions. Notably, the developers plan to establish collaborations with games like Terraria - presumably in the form of new mechanics, skins or exclusive events.

Intel stocks have had a resurgence, trending 12% since the company's new chief executive Lip-Bu Tan was appointed. The move follows the retirement of former CEO Pat Gelsinger in December 2024, who was later found to have been pushed out.

As detailed in a company press release, Tan will be stepping into the CEO role March 18th, taking over from interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus. Zinser will retain an executive role as Intel's CFO, and Holthaus will remain the CEO of Intel products.

The company outlined Tan's experience as a technology investor and widely respected executive in the sector. Tan has over 20 years of experience with semiconductors and software, and has established relationships across the ecosystem that the company believes to be beneficial.

Rumors regarding the remake of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion have resurfaced, with reputable leaker NateTheHate suggesting that we might get our hands on the title as soon as May this year.

When asked on X if he had any news regarding the remake, NateTheHate responded, stating that more news will be on the way over the next two months, with a potential release window before June. It's possible we'll see an announcement trailer later this month or in April.

Bethesda has expressed a preference to leave game announcements until close to release, as Todd Howard highlighted when discussing Fallout 4. On that basis, it wouldn't be surprising to see the studio drop a surprise launch a few months out. Ideally, a potential announcement would come with some news about The Elder Scrolls VI, which was first announced back in 2018. However, at this stage, anything would be better than nothing.