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Ubisoft has secured a hit with its latest Assassin's Creed remake as the company faces down an uncertain future.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is a multi-platinum sales success as Ubisoft confirms the pirate sim has now shipped over 2 million copies on all platforms. The milestone was achieved in a day's time, putting Black Flag Resynced up against the fastest-selling games of 2026.

These sales come at an important time for Ubisoft. The company recently restructured its business into five creative house subsidiaries, with the biggest one, Vantage Studios, being a joint venture between Ubisoft and Tencent. Black Flag's favorable performance will give Ubisoft momentum at a period when it needs it most, especially after layoffs, cost adjustments, and other market pressures force the group to make serious decisions about its future.

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 NZXT to give one lucky winner a major PC building bundle covering the case, CPU cooling, system airflow, and power supply.

There will be one winner in total, and the prize includes an NZXT H6 case in black, NZXT Ultra RGB fans in black, an NZXT Kraken Elite 360 RGB AIO liquid cooler, and an NZXT C Series Gold 1200W power supply.

The NZXT H6 provides the foundation for the bundle. It is a compact dual-chamber ATX case designed to combine strong airflow with a clean showcase appearance. Its panoramic tempered-glass design places the system's internal components on display while keeping the power supply and much of the cabling hidden in a separate chamber.

Ubisoft tells the critics of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced that the $85 worth of DLC is "never a requirement," and technically, they're not wrong. It's just that the optics of this DLC launch are downright terrible.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced launched on July 9 to a genuinely strong start. It reportedly sold over five times as many pre-launch Steam copies as AC Shadows, and the remake earned solid reviews from critics for its combat overhaul and visual upgrades. For a couple of days, it looked like Ubisoft had actually pulled off a comeback.

Then, players noticed the updated Steam store page. Alongside the $59.99 base game (which is already a hard sell for a remake) sits roughly $85 worth of day-one DLC, ranging from $5 map packs to $10 cosmetic and time-saving bundles. Even the $70 Deluxe Edition only covers two of those packs, which makes it look even worse.

NVIDIA is reportedly working on a new GPU called the GeForce RTX 5090 SE, according to a report from Russian outlet GameGPU. The card would supposedly slot between the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, possibly replacing an RTX 5080 Ti that never made it to market.

The leaked specs point to a cut-down GB202 die, with 110 of the 192 streaming multiprocessors enabled. That works out to 14,080 CUDA cores, roughly 31% more than the RTX 5080's 10,752 cores, but still well short of the RTX 5090's 21,760. Rumors also point to a 500W power draw, down from the 5090's 575W, but a big step up from the 5080's 360W. A 1,000W power supply would likely be needed either way.

Now we get to the confusing part. The leak claims 32GB of GDDR7 on a 384-bit bus, the same capacity as the RTX 5090 despite the narrower memory interface. That math doesn't really work with NVIDIA's standard memory configurations. A 384-bit bus paired with 2GB modules gets you 24GB, and 3GB modules would push it to 36GB. Hitting exactly 32GB would apparently require mixing chip densities, something NVIDIA has avoided in the past due to signal integrity and validation headaches, not to mention the GTX 970 controversy that mixed-pool memory caused years ago.

id Software is facing major layoffs, and the once-mighty FPS developer has been downsized as part of Xbox's restructuring. Original id co-founder John Carmack shares his thoughts and commiserates with the developers who lost their jobs.

Microsoft is laying off 3,200 people at Xbox, and half of those cuts occurred just a few days ago. The other half, which will see 1,600 more people lose their jobs, will take place from now until June 2027. id Software was hit hard by the layoffs, with Xbox shedding half of the studio while still somehow prioritizing id's Doom and Quake franchises.

The layoffs have captured attention from old guard veterans like John Carmack, one of the original founders of id and creators of Doom. On Twitter, Carmack shared his thoughts on id's current situation, lamenting the layoffs while also calling into question whether or not Xbox is actually a good steward for id and Doom moving forward.

New reports from Bloomberg say that Minecraft's profits helped fund other games in the Xbox software portfolio, indicating that proceeds from highly-profitable titles like Minecraft helped create other titles for Game Pass.

A recent Bloomberg article has caused a bit of a stir for Microsoft; the coverage says that profits from Minecraft were used to fund other games at Xbox. There's a lot to unpack here, especially since Minecraft is a huge driver for the Xbox business. In fact, when it comes down to it, Minecraft and Call of Duty are the most valuable properties insofar as sales and engagement--Minecraft is the second best-selling game of all time with 300 million copies sold.

It was also revealed that Minecraft was the highest-earning Xbox game pre-ABK, and that it makes significant profits. "Minecraft is one of the most profitable, if not the most profitable first-party game," Xbox CFO Tim Stuart said during the FTC v Microsoft trial of 2023.

Ubisoft's latest Assassin's Creed game has $84 worth of DLC available on day one, yet the game is being sold for $59.99 on all major storefronts.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is out now, and Ubisoft has launched the title with heavy monetization in tow. Like previous games in the series, Black Flag Resynced features a range of microtransaction options across multiple packs. The DLC ranges from $5 for the cheapest time-saving microtransaction, the map pack option, to a variety of $10 packs that include big visual and cosmetic overhauls to Edward Kenway's outfit and ship appearances.

Altogether, the DLC costs $84 when purchased separately, but you can get two of the $10 packs included in the $70 deluxe edition. While all of these things are optional, and gamers can flat out ignore the vanity items, the inclusion does underline a long-running part of Ubisoft's business model. Some time ago, Ubisoft opted to inject live service elements into all of its games, leading to singleplayer games with native microtransactions built right into the experience.

Fans of EA's racing franchises are in for some disappointment--the Need for Speed and Burnout series are apparently stuck in the impound lot.

Electronic Arts will soon be under new ownership, and that means some changes are happening behind the scenes--or in the case of Need for Speed, the changes were made previously and are now becoming more permanent. It's been revealed that Criterion is now exclusively on Battlefield and will lend its vehicular mastery to the FPS warfighter moving forward.

"We are solely focused on Battlefield," Battlefield studios Europe exec Rebecka Coutaz recently told IGN. When pressed on the future of Burnout and Need for Speed, Coutaz apparently said: "We're not here to talk about the past."

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced launched this week to some of the best numbers Ubisoft has seen in years. However, it looks like Ubisoft still isn't content with its workforce, as 51 people just lost their jobs.

According to Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson, Ubisoft Barcelona has been disbanded, with 51 employees let go days after the studio finished its work on the remake. Many of them had spent years on the project. Sources told Henderson the layoffs felt planned well in advance and were going to happen no matter how the game performed.

Apparently, Ubisoft typically lines up a new project for a team before their current one wraps, sometimes a year ahead of time. The Barcelona team reportedly raised concerns as far back as summer 2025 that no new assignment had come through, and nothing ever did. The studio's launch celebration was also reportedly downgraded to a small in-office gathering instead of a proper event.

AMD has just added 11 new processors to its Ryzen 200 and Ryzen 100 APU lineups, which have further complicated an already confusing product stack. If you're already confused about which chip is which, you're not alone.

The bigger addition lands in the Ryzen 200 series, where AMD has added seven new SKUs: Ryzen 3 205, Ryzen 5 216, Ryzen 5 224, Ryzen 5 225, Ryzen 7 217, Ryzen 7 249, and Ryzen 7 253. These use Zen 4 cores, some paired with Zen 4c in hybrid configurations, alongside RDNA 3 graphics. AMD teased this naming shift back in 2024, rebranding its existing Hawk Point silicon under the Ryzen 200 badge to clear out inventory while it focused marketing on the AI-branded Ryzen AI 300 chips.

The Ryzen 100 series is where things get even more messy. AMD added four new chips here, the Ryzen 9 180, Ryzen 7 165, Ryzen 7 155, and Ryzen 5 125. The existing Ryzen 100 lineup is built on Rembrandt, a 6nm Zen 3+ design with RDNA 2 graphics, first detailed years ago in what eventually became the Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" launch.

Open-source Windows alternative ReactOS has finally reached a state where the operating system can play games. Discovered by Phoronix, a ReactOS user uploaded footage on YouTube of Half-Life 2 running on ReactOS at 1440p using a GTX 960 graphics card running on legacy NVIDIA 368.61 graphics drivers.

The game reportedly ran "basically perfectly" with 6x MSAA and 16x anisotropic filtering. Judging by the gameplay footage, the game appears to be running at 60 FPS or better with no apparent frame drops that we could count. Granted, we did not scrub through all 10 hours of the uploaded gameplay footage.

Playing a game that initially came out in 2004 might not sound significant, but it's a big deal for this specific OS. ReactOS is a 30-year-old project that has been written entirely from scratch as an open-source alternative to running Windows apps. Progress has been slow, but recent work has been done to get display driver support more aligned with modern versions of Windows by adding WDDM support to the OS. WDDM support has enabled ReactOS to run older GPU drivers designed for Windows, which is a key factor for getting games to run on the open-source operating system.

NVIDIA, despite being known as the AI juggernaut it is today, will always have its roots in gaming graphics. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of its first partnership with Sega, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang is set to travel to Japan to attend an event with Japanese gamers. He will also (re)launch the RTX Spark. The event is set to take place at GiGO Akihabara, Tokyo on July the 15th.

NVIDIA has a lot to thank Sega for, so it's great to see Jensen giving some thanks back to the company that gave NVIDIA the lifeline it needed to go on to produce the RIVA 128, the GeForce 256, and so on.

In its earliest days, the company was tapped by Sega to build the graphics chip for its then upcoming Dreamcast console. However, at the time, NVIDIA lacked the technical ability to deliver what Sega needed, but without the money Sega was to pay for the contract, NVIDIA couldn't survive. After admitting that NVIDIA couldn't give Sega the chip it needed, Jensen went to Sega's management and asked for the money as an investment in NVIDIA. Somehow, NVIDIA managed to stay in business. And the rest is history.

AMD's unannounced "Ryzen 7 4700LE" has been making the rounds for weeks, but we now have official confirmation of its existence. Yes, indeed, AMD has revived Zen 2, an architecture from 2019, and released a new desktop chip, the Ryzen 7 4700LE.

The mysterious Ryzen 7 4700LE has surfaced in a prebuilt gaming desktop on Amazon, sold by system integrator Qehi under the AIGAMEPC brand. The build pairs the CPU with an RTX 3050, 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory, and a 512GB NVMe SSD, all for $799.99, down from an $849.99 list price. It's not a flashy machine, and the other parts are run-of-the-mill, but the CPU inside is the real story.

AMD added the Ryzen 7 4700LE to its product stack on March 25, 2026, without any real announcement. It's based on Renoir, the same silicon behind the old Ryzen 4000G desktop APUs, but strips out the integrated graphics entirely. You get 8 cores, 16 threads, a 3.6GHz base clock, boost up to 4.2GHz, 12MB of combined cache, and a 65W TDP.

The ongoing memory shortage is filtering through to global PC shipments. According to new analysis from the International Data Corporation (IDC), global PC shipments declined by 4.9% year-on-year. It is the first drop after 9 consecutive quarters of growth. The top three vendors, Lenovo, HP and Dell all saw declines. ASUS saw a small uptick, while Apple recorded a particularly impressive 10.1% increase in sales, likely due to the March introduction of its MacBook Neo.

PC shipments for the second quarter of 2026 totaled 68.2 million units. Unsurprisingly, the cause has been attributed to the skyrocketing costs of memory and storage, while ongoing geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainties also contributed.

Apple's performance was a bright spot among the data. It shipped 6.7 million Mac variants, an increase of 10.1% year-on-year. This growth can be attributed to the introduction of the $599 MacBook Neo. Such a price level was previously unthinkable for a MacBook, but the Neo has created a new market among students, and users invested in the iPhone ecosystem. These users suddenly had an affordable MacBook option, whereas most MacBooks were previously priced at levels considered to be out-of-reach.

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro Max is on track to cost significantly more to build than the current iPhone 17 Pro Max, with component costs expected to rise by nearly $300. Counterpoint Research has published a detailed breakdown of the next iPhone's bill of materials, highlighting a sharp increase in key parts, and the cause of the price increase is the demand from AI companies.

NAND and DRAM price hikes are the primary cost drivers. Counterpoint notes that the costs for these memory components alone could nearly equal the total bill of materials of the current model. Both NAND and DRAM industries are currently in a crisis as demand cannot keep up with supply, and current supply is being directed toward the AI industry, driving up the cost of the components.

Another factor contributing to the expected price increase is the new 2nm SoC and advanced packaging. Display and other parts are expected to see cost reductions, but camera costs will rise due to the new variable-aperture Main camera.

Meta is reportedly developing smart glasses that continuously record audio and snap photos, and users might not even see the data.

The company describes this device internally as "super sensing", and according to a recent report from The Verge, the device could capture audio and images every few seconds. Unlike the current Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which use a status LED to signal recording, the new design may eliminate that indicator entirely, according to reports.

The twist? Users wouldn't directly access the raw footage or audio. Instead, the system would rely on metadata and AI to answer questions about the captured content. That means the glasses could act as a real-time, always-on sensor, processing data without storing it and making it available to the wearer. In other words, you'd be wearing a device that monitors everything you do through vision (images) and audio. Additionally, it will be monitoring the people around you, and you won't be able to access the data generated during the monitoring.

AMD is set to unveil its Zen 6 'Venice' EPYC server CPU lineup at its Advancing AI event in San Francisco on July 22 and 23.

According to an interview with The CUBE, AMD Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Mark Papermaster, confirmed that 6th Generation Zen CPUs will be introduced at the event. Venice is designed to enhance traditional enterprise x86 workloads, while also forming the backbone of Helios AI racks, paired with AMD MI455X GPUs.

Zen 6 EPYC processors have been in full production for some time. They're built with TSMC's 2nm process. It's believed to be the first high-performance product to enter production. Venice can scale up to 256 cores, with up to 1.6 TB/s of per-socket bandwidth. It brings PCIe 6.0 and 16-channel DDR5 support. It also introduces new AVX and VNNI extensions, making them well-suited to AI workloads.

id Software was reportedly developing concepts for a John Wick-inspired "Gun Fu" game, a new Perfect Dark title, and a Western robot-driven survival shooter, all of which are now likely dead due to recent Xbox layoffs and instructions from Xbox management that big studios, such as id Software and Bethesda, need to concentrate on their mainline titles.

The studio, best known for its DOOM series, was exploring a variety of original and licensed IP, including an action game called Fury, which was described as being heavily inspired by the John Wick movies, a potential Perfect Dark sequel, and a concept inspired by the movie Westworld.

These ideas were detailed in a new GamesBeat report, but with over half of id's team laid off as part of Microsoft's broader "Xbox reset," which resulted in as many as 3,200 roles being cut, and the four studios being divested, these projects are unlikely to see the light of day, as they will be deemed too financially risky to pursue.

A single GPU card can cost thousands, but one YouTuber built his own for a fraction of the price, using 8,192 RISC-V microcontrollers.

bitluni, real name Matthias Balwierz, constructed a DIY GPU using CH570 RISC-V microcontrollers sourced from AliExpress. The cluster delivers a QVGA resolution of 320x200, with each MCU responsible for a single pixel. Despite the project nearly driving him "mad," bitluni pushed through, refining the PCB design and scaling the build to 8,192 chips.

The project began as an experiment in parallel computing but evolved into much more, and, at some cost, bitluni noted that prior GPU builds had already strained his sanity. This iteration, while visually modest, demonstrates the potential of microcontroller clusters for tasks beyond basic graphics.

NASA just beamed 4K video from the Moon to 25 million screens, but your 4K Netflix stream and YouTube videos still buffer. Or at least for some people, that is the case.

Thanks to AWS and NASA's Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System, the first-ever lunar 4K livestream hit 260Mbps via laser, far outpacing the 15-20Mbps most media services demand. The transmission covered more than 250,000 miles, with data received at Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia and routed through NASA's White Sands Complex.

This wasn't just a one-off stunt or demonstration. The Laser-based optical communications offer significantly higher bandwidth than traditional radio, allowing NASA to send not just video, but mission-critical data, telemetry, and voice communications in real time.