The expected performance level of the new consoles is a point of immense speculation in every console cycle. As we approach the end of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, rumors are emerging about the performance we can expect from the upcoming generation.

Popular leaker "Moore's Law Is Dead" has recently made a series of claims about the performance level of the upcoming consoles, particularly the PlayStation 6. The leaker's information apparently comes courtesy of "leaked internal documents" from AMD. Since AMD will power both the PlayStation 6 and the next-gen Xbox, it is plausible to estimate their performance based on this.

According to the leak, traditional rasterized performance is likely to triple compared to current-generation consoles. While this may sound like a big jump, it is actually quite modest compared to what previous generations offered. However, it seems rasterization isn't the main focus of next-generation consoles, since the leak mentions a 6x to 12x increase in ray tracing performance on the PS6 compared to the PS5.

AMD's newest addition to the Ryzen 9000 series, the 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, looks like an absolute juggernaut of a CPU. Since its official announcement, we have covered several rumors regarding its pricing, and it looks like AMD has settled on an $899 price tag. The 9950X3D2 features a unique dual 3D V-cache design, and it is the first of its kind from AMD.

Of course, pushing the boundaries of technology comes at a price, and in the case of CPUs, it's most often power consumption. AMD's official product page for the 9950X3D2 Dual Edition lists a 200W TDP, which is 30W higher than the standard 9950X3D2. However, that is not the only power consumption figure we know, since reliable leaker HXL (@9950pro) has recently posted more information about the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2's power envelope.

According to the leak, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 features a PPT of 250W, the highest among current AMD desktop CPUs. The PPT, or Package Power Tracking, is an AMD-specific power metric that defines the maximum power delivered to the CPU socket across all voltage rails. It is typically higher than the TDP (Thermal Design Power) to allow for temporary power boosts.

Kraken Express hits it big with their platinum-selling pirate sim Windrose, which has become the next big early access indie sensation on PC.

New pirate sim Windrose has maintained momentum after its initial early access release, amassing an impressive 1 million sales in just six days, the developers have confirmed. The game is currently on sale via both the Epic Games Store and Steam in a pre-release state, allowing gamers to help shape and mold the high seas-faring world with direct feedback.

Kraken Express shares their thoughts on the milestone: "While we keep working on the game, we read your reviews and comments, watch your videos and streams, and sometimes, honestly, shed a pirate-y tear of happiness, because now when the game is out you share our dream of swashbuckling adventure. And there are boars, too, we know, but whatever does not send you flying into the nearest tree, makes you stronger, right?"

Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden has been outspoken about Game Pass for quite some time, and his recent comments have caught the attention of current CEO Asha Sharma.

Despite thunderous $5 billion gross revenues, and assertions of profitability from management, Xbox Game Pass has been criticized by industry analysts and executives alike, including former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden. By including new AAA games day and date, the service seems to operate on a kind of deferred success subscription model that potentially devalues front-line pricing of big games in favor of the hopes of facilitating long-term subscriptions. This effect remains the principal criticism of the service.

Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma has recently called for a change in the Game Pass model, saying that it's too expensive in the short term and too inflexible in the long-term. This is quite topical, because former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden also recently shared a fiery comment on a LinkedIn post centered on Game Pass, saying: "They are trying so hard to will this into health, despite unfavorable diagnostics and a grim prognosis. A clarifying post mortem would do the entire industry some good."

Original Metro book series author Dmitry Glukhovsky reiterates the darker themes for the new Metro 2039 game, saying that the project aims to deliver a meaningful and impactful experience rather than just another FPS campaign.

4A Games recently revealed the first look at Metro 2039, the next game in the landmark franchise. Metro 2039 was promised to be a truly brutal and twisted game, tapping into the fear and steely resolve that the developers have faced while crafting the project during the ongoing Ukrainian War. The cinematic trailer for Metro 2039 amps up the franchise's psychological torment to new heights, depicting a protagonist that's tortured by their own memories while simultaneously being led by a faint flickering hope.

Leading up to the reveal, Dmitry Glukhovsky, the author behind the books that the games are based on, has hyped up the project with assertions that Metro 2039 is a more agonizing and distressing game, and now he's said that it's less of a game and more of an experience: "I don't think Metro 2039 should be called a game. It should be called an experience," Glukhovsky said on Twitter.

Capcom struck gold with Resident Evil Requiem, captivating fans through its signature horror-action gameplay, strong narrative, next-gen visuals, and the return of Leon S. Kennedy. With 70% of players on PS5 and PC having already rolled credits, the challenge for Capcom now is to give them a compelling reason to return.

To address this, it appears Capcom is already working on a solution by developing a Mercenaries mode similar to the RE4 remake. A fresh datamine has uncovered previously unheard music tracks in the game's files, and everything points to the wave-based assault minigame coming.

Discovered by dataminer SYRKOV on X, the 10 unused short tracks don't seem to follow any specific naming convention, but their sounds have players excited. Datamined tracks 7 and 9 lean hard into the high-octane sounds you would expect from a Mercenaries mode. The standouts, though, are Tracks 3 and 4, both backed by a constant ticking noise, suggesting they could be tied to the kind of time-based pressure the mode is known for.

Blizzard has sent cease and desists to another private World of Warcraft Classic server as the studio takes aim at unsanctioned alternatives that impact its official player counts.

The games industry is under intense pressure right now and studios are squeezing operations as tightly as possible in an effort to stabilize against rising costs. This also means some aspects of competition are being shut down wherever possible, including unsanctioned mods and private servers that act as alternatives to official paid experiences.

That's what's happening on the World of Warcraft front, as Blizzard has now sent out cease and desists against two major private servers. Blizzard first took on the TurtleWoW private servers, suing the group for "egregious copyright infringement" and calling TurtleWoW a "pirated software product." It's since been revealed that TurtleWoW will end operations and shut down on May 14, 2026 as a result of the lawsuit.

Rockstar Games is celebrating 4/20 with a number of GTA Online activities, including the hilarious Stoner Survival game type where players smoke ganja and take down hallucinatory enemies in psychedelic gunfights.

4/20 is tomorrow and GTA Online has players covered with its annual 420 Event, offering a challenging 7-round Stoner Survival mode where players shoot a variety of baddies like wrench-wielding clowns, aliens, and even life sized action figures. Stoner Survival is only available in the 4-hour window between 4:20pm and 8:20pm, so you might only get 1 attempt per in-game day, with the mode providing moderate challenge.

For a different kind of trip, Rockstar even added mind-altering peyote plants to the game. There are 76 peyote plants littered throughout GTA Online in Los Santos, and they transform you into different animals for hilarious results. These perception-shifting cacti can be found in the ocean as well as on the foothills of the Tataviam Mountains.

A Reddit user has bagged a brand-new, sealed RTX 4060 Ti, a card that normally retails for $400, for just $12. That's equivalent to 3% of the GPU's retail price. The user managed this feat after a deep dive into a local bin store's bulk inventory, which turned up a factory-sealed unit. While these liquidation outlets are famous for their "no returns" policies, the user confirmed the card is in perfect working order.

Last month, a similar story surfaced with the RTX 5060 Ti, where a Reddit user scored the GPU for $80. At the time, that seemed unbeatable, but it seems we already have a new winner. The specific model in question is the PNY RTX 4060 Ti Dual Fan edition. While it's the well-known 8GB variant, it's hard to pass up for just $12.

You'd wonder how the user even managed to land a brand-new GPU for the price of a sandwich? The answer is a Goodwill Outlet, also known locally as a bin store. Unlike a typical Goodwill retail store, where items are sorted on racks and shelves, and everything has a specific price tag, Goodwill outlets sell unsold items from retail stores by the pound, offering extreme discounts.

After possible delays with the Steam Machine, Frame, and Controller, Valve recently updated its release status to "coming soon" without providing an official date. The original plan pointed to early 2026, but the first quarter is nearly over, and nothing has been confirmed. But it seems we are not the only ones tired of waiting.

The developer behind EmuDeck, the popular retro emulator tool, has decided to build its own Steam Machine-style console called the Playnix. A similar project, EmuDeck Machines, debuted in August 2024 but never got off the ground. Its spiritual successor, however, is available for global order, with shipments from Spain.

The Playnix is a PC-console hybrid that draws its hardware from the PC world while taking design cues from the Xbox Series S, though it is slightly bulkier at 320x246x64mm compared to the Series S at 275x151x65mm. That extra room packs in a solid punch of gaming hardware.

Hardware enthusiast Jaykihn on X (formerly Twitter) has shared several details about Intel's upcoming Nova Lake CPUs. The leaker highlights major changes to the cache hierarchy, including a shared L2 cache, as well as the debut of the 'D' and 'DX' lineups for enthusiasts.

Nova Lake will succeed Intel's current Arrow Lake family and is set to arrive next year. The flagship features a dual-compute tile layout, reaching a massive 52 cores (16P+32E+4LPE). Alongside these high-core-count CPUs, Intel is expected to introduce specialized 'bLLC' models with up to 288MB of L3 cache. This move aims to rival AMD's X3D offerings.

For the first time in 17 years, Intel is reportedly moving away from its private L2 cache design, which has defined its CPUs since Nehalem. Clustering two P-cores with a shared 4MB L2 cache can cut ring bus stops and improve core-to-core communication within a cluster. There are downsides to this approach, but the goal is to raise core counts without letting bus latency spiral out of control. Notably, this shared cache is lower than the private 3MB L2 cache per P-core in Arrow Lake.

AMD's Zen 6 architecture has not yet been officially released, yet we are already seeing leaks about Zen 7, codenamed "Prometheus". Well-known leaker "Moore's Law Is Dead" recently published a huge leak about the Zen 7 architecture, its internal layout, expected performance, and the products it will likely be featured in.

According to the leak, all "Prometheus" Zen 7 classic cores (spanning EPYC, laptop, and desktop segments) will reportedly be manufactured on TSMC's A14 process node, featuring 2MB of L2 cache per core, 4MB of L3 per core, FP512 support, and built-in AI acceleration within the CCDs themselves.

Perhaps most headline-worthy is the claimed IPC performance. The leak asserts that Zen 7 should deliver a 15-25% IPC uplift over the yet unreleased Zen 6, with approximately 8% of that gain attributed to cache design changes alone, not yet accounting for improvements to floating point and integer performance. Internal benchmarks reportedly simulated a 16-20% average per-core uplift for Desktop Zen 7 over Desktop Zen 6 in non-gaming workloads.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been quite bullish on TeraFab since its March 2026 announcement. We also recently covered Tesla's successful tape-out of its AI5 AI chip, developed in collaboration with Samsung and TSMC. Now, it looks like Tesla may not need manufacturing partners in the near future, as work on TeraFab is advancing rapidly under Musk's direction.

According to a report by Bloomberg, the team tasked with bringing Terafab to life has been hard at work lately, aggressively tapping suppliers to secure pricing and delivery times. The report states that Musk's team has already approached Applied Materials Inc., Tokyo Electron Ltd., Lam Research Corp., and Samsung Electronics Co. Apparently, Elon Musk wants this phase of the plan completed at "light speed".

It has been reported that the TeraFab team is not providing specifics about what they are planning to build, but they are demanding speedy responses from the contacted companies. Under Musk's direction, the team apparently contacted a company during a Friday holiday. It demanded that the estimate be delivered the following Monday, which gives us an idea of the pace the CEO wants to set.

We recently covered ASRock's partnership with Intel and TeamGroup on a budget memory standard called HUDIMM. Now, following that announcement, an ASUS ROG motherboard engineer has shown the one-sub-channel HUDIMM concept working on a ROG Maximus Z890 Apex board.

Bing Lin, a member of the ASUS ROG motherboard R&D team, posted the feat on Facebook, in which he used two modified 24GB DDR5 modules, each set to a single sub-channel. Lin taped part of a module and disabled half the channels in BIOS. As a result, the total DRAM capacity appears as 24 GB (12 GB x 2) instead of 48 GB (24 GB x 2), since both DIMMs use one sub-channel mode.

Lin also gained access to a TeamGroup HUDIMM module with 8GB capacity. It uses one sub-channel and has half the DRAM banks populated with 4 ICs instead of the usual 8. The module booted without issues in BIOS and is rated at 4800 MT/s, the baseline speed for DDR5.

Xbox's chief content officer Matt Booty shares interesting behind-the-scenes stories on how Microsoft's gaming teams collaborate across all of its divisions--from Obsidian iterating on Undead Labs' shared worlds tech to Blizzard helping out with Fable's cinematics.

One thing that struck me about the new Fable reboot is how impressive the cinematics look. Xbox debuted the game with some high-res visuals that aren't usually associated with the Fable franchise, which has traditionally been more cartoonish. Now it looks like a fully-fledged medieval fantasy befit of something like Lord of the Rings or maybe Elder Scrolls. As it turns out, Blizzard is helping Playground Games with Fable's visual sequences--if you've ever played a Blizzard game, then you know their cinematics are next-level.

Now in a recent Xbox Podcast episode, Microsoft games exec Matt Booty outlines some of the different ways that Xbox's first-party teams are collaborating on a number of projects. We don't often get info like this, so the candid take expresses an appreciative look at how Microsoft's video games empire is able to release new content at a regular cadence through the power of multidisciplinary organizational teamwork that sometimes spans the world.

Eerie Guest Studios and tinyBuild Games have launched the pre-alpha test for the highly anticipated survival horror stealth sequel Hello Neighbor 3. This marks the third entry in the survival-horror stealth franchise, which began with the 2017 installment. The latest entry also brings back series creator Nikita Kolesnikov, who is hopefully taking things in an even darker direction. The pre-alpha test is currently live on Steam, where players can request access to jump into an early build to discover what Raven Brooks has in store this time around.

The Hello Neighbor 3 pre-alpha introduces a new corporate mission set in Raven Brooks, the series' signature cozy yet half-abandoned ghost town with sinister undertones. Players are tasked with tracking down a missing employee who holds the location of an important report, but soon uncover a much larger mystery tied to the town's ongoing disappearances.

The pre-alpha introduces a new objective system that guides players through the narrative while retaining the series' free roam spirit. Loop-based progression frees players from speed-running, with loops ending seamlessly and objectives and collected knowledge carrying over.

Take-Two Interactive has a unique answer to subscriptions--mingling its games in a cross-publisher catalog as part of Rockstar's popular GTA+ service.

A few of gaming's biggest companies all have their own multi-subscription services; The Big 3 with Nintendo Switch Online, Xbox Game Pass, and PlayStation Plus, alongside publisher-specific offerings like Ubisoft+ and EA Play. But what about big players like Take-Two Interactive?

Instead of making a brand new subscription service to host catalog games, Take-Two apparently wants to rotate sports games into Rockstar's already-popular GTA+ subscription. This is something that I actually missed until now, but 2K Games/Take-Two have included NBA 2K26 as part of GTA+ for a bit now, yet the game is set to leave the service entirely on April 20. That's similar to how content rotates out of Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass subscription, albeit at a much faster rate.

Following earlier reports of melting power cables, ASUS recently introduced the ROG Equalizer, a new 12V-2x6 PCIe power cable designed to improve power delivery stability for modern GPUs. Now, a user has their hands on the cable, and the strong claims ASUS made about it appear to be holding up.

These findings come from Chiphell Forums via Uniko's Hardware, where a user received the ROG Equalizer bundled with a newer batch of the ROG Strix 1200W Platinum PSU. The user tested a GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5090D AORUS Master ICE under a 600W FurMark load, comparing the ROG Thor 1200W II using its stock cable against the new ROG Equalizer.

The results were apparent almost immediately under a thermal imager. The stock cable ran at 59.8°C while the ROG Equalizer cable came in at just 50.7°C, a notable 9°C gap under the same load. As intended, the ROG Equalizer distributes power more evenly across all wires, reducing the risk of hotspots caused by uneven load distribution. This design also helps keep the cable within the 105°C threshold, reducing the risk of current imbalance when a 16-pin cable isn't properly connected or is used under sustained stress.

Valve's latest Proton 11.0-beta1 is here, bringing broader game compatibility and improved performance for Steam Deck and Linux users. The release also lays the groundwork for further improvements expected in the near future.

The biggest highlights include expanded support for classic and newer titles. Several games that previously required Proton Experimental now run officially, including classics like Resident Evil 1 and 2, Dino Crisis 1 and 2, SHOGUN: Total War, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Metal Gear Survive, and DCS World Steam Edition.

Valve has also massively expanded the playable library, adding new titles, including Gothic 1 Classic, X-Plane 12, Breath of Fire IV, Deadly Premonition, and Unknown Faces. Additional fixes cover other classic titles, including Chrono Trigger, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Call of Duty 2.

The retro maestros at Plaion Replai are working their magic again to bring yet another faithful recreation to life, this time with the NeoGeo AES+. Pre-orders for the console are now open ahead of its November 12th release, and the best part is that players won't have to pay an arm and a leg to get their hands on it.

The NeoGeo AES was SNK's home console version of its arcade hardware, bringing its arcade library into living rooms. The hardware was far closer to the arcade experience than what most consoles offered at the time. But the console was expensive and niche, and the price made the Neo Geo more of a premium enthusiast console than a mainstream one. Now that a modern version of the hit 90s console is on the way, the company is clearly not looking to repeat that mistake.

The NeoGeo AES+ keeps the original design while adding modern features, including low-latency HDMI output, 1080p output, on-system DIP switches for language selection, overclocking support, display mode selection, and permanent high-score saves via a separate memory card. AV input ports are also included for those who want to pair it with a CRT TV and chase that 90s vibe.