Latest News - Page 413

Never mind Doom, can Grand Theft Auto run on a smartwatch? Most certainly, as an intrepid denizen of Reddit has just proved.

This feat was pulled off with a Galaxy Watch 5, albeit the device could only host an old GTA game (well, what did you expect?) namely Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (released way back in 2002).

How was this achieved? As TechRadar spotted, by installing a PSP emulator on the smartwatch, the Redditor (ZenonDesingk) was playing GTA: Vice City and the likes of God of War, or Need for Speed: Most Wanted on the device.

The Grand Theft Auto 6 community was set alight after an online store posted a release date for the highly anticipated game, followed by it being promptly removed, adding to the mystery of whether it was credible.

The online retailer is a Spanish store called XUruguay, which listed the release of Grand Theft Auto 6 on September 17, 2025. This date coincided with Rockstar Games' official release window for the title "Fall 2025," leading fans to speculate if the date could be true. Further validity was added to the conversation when fans realized the September 17 date was the same as the release of Grand Theft Auto 5. Then, illusive mystery flavored the conversation when the store randomly removed the date.

What gave more speculatory credibility to the date was a screenshot that stated the store obtained the date directly from PlayStation, but now the store has responded with its own statement about the recent fiasco it's created. According to XUruguay, the date was simply a placeholder as the store simply Googled "GTA release date and the results was (9/17) so we said ok lets start the preorder that day." The store goes on to apologize to the gaming community for the mistake and admits it didn't receive any official information about the release date of the game.

AMD's incoming X3D processors of the Ryzen 9 variety could arrive at the same time as its RX 9070 graphics cards, a new rumor suggests - and we might be seeing all this hardware turn up later in March, rather than sooner.

This is the word from French tech site Cowcotland, which has heard from a source (salt at the ready now) that the Ryzen 9950X3D and 9900X3D will arrive "by the end of March" (as VideoCardz highlighted).

That doesn't sound too optimistic for the prospect of RX 9070 graphics cards turning up earlier in March rather than later, either. So far, all AMD has told us about its RDNA 4 GPUs is that they'll be here in March, we don't know exactly when.

The fate of TikTok still remains undecided as talks about the future of the app operating in the United States are still underway.

TikTok was deemed a national security risk by the US government last year, and as a result, TikTok's owner ByteDance was given an ultimatum to either sell the app to a US government-verified source or be banned from both Apple and Google app marketplaces along with telecommunications networks across the US. The deadline for the ultimatum was January 19, and a deal wasn't reached, resulting in TikTok going dark for approximately 16 hours.

However, upon taking office the following day, President Trump issued an extension that enabled TikTok to be reinstated. The 75-day extension included TikTok being brought back as long as a new deal for its sale was on the table for discussion. With the deal discussion still being underway, Cloudflare Radar has issued new estimations regarding the number of users that have returned to TikTok after it was briefly removed from both app marketplaces.

A foldable Apple product only seems inevitable at this point, but officially, the device, or devices, have only been rumored.

However, with foldable devices being proven to be a viable form factor for smartphones, it seems like a no-brainer that Apple will release a foldable iPhone. But why hasn't the company done it already? In Apple fashion, the company is never early to a new market, and when it does finally jump in, it makes sure its version of an already established product has that Apple shine. In the instance of a foldable smartphone, Apple won't release that device until the dreaded crease problem in the display has completely been solved.

A new report from the Korean blog Yuex1122 states Apple is close to selecting the display supplier for its foldable display, and this supplier will need to "adhere to the technical requirements," which includes impact resistance and crease prevention. Moreover, previous reports indicate Apple is trying to make an extremely thin device that's half as thin as current iPhone models -- so when the device is folded it's the same thickness as a standard iPhone.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently stated during an interview that he can't rule out Starfield releasing on multiple platforms.

Spencer responded to a direct question about the title in a recent interview on Save State Plus with Destin Lagarie, who asked the Microsoft gaming head if he could confirm if Starfield will remain an exclusive Xbox/PC title. Spencer replied with, "No," and went on to reiterate a sentiment that has long been held by himself and Xbox as a whole.

The Department of Justice has announced the FBI has seized two infamous hacking forums that created 17 million American victims.

The two hacking forums that are now in possession of the US government are Cracked.io and Nulled.to, which are known hubs for cybercriminal activity, with their main focus being password theft, cracked software sharing, credential theft, hacking tools, and data breaches. According to the press release from the DOJ, the domains for each of the forums were seized under Operation Talent, a multinational law enforcement operation that included authorities from the following countries: the United States, Italy, Spain, Europe, France, Greece, Australia, and Romania.

Banners have now been placed on both of the websites, stating the domains have been seized by international law enforcement partners. Cracked.io staff initially published an announcement on their Telegram channel where they wrote the problems users were reporting with the website, such as error messages being presented when loading was attempted, was related to a data center issue. However, an update from Cracked.io staff confirmed, "Cracked.io has been seized under operation talent with specific reasons being undisclosed."

Newegg sold out of its entire inventory of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards in under 20 minutes, with most of them flying out the door within 5 minutes.

The US retailer issued a press release explaining the situation, experiencing "an overwhelming response" to the highly anticipated launch of NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" GPUs. Newegg explains that gaming enthusiasts, content creators, system integrators, and PC builders "rushed to secure the first batch of the latest AI-powered graphics technology, driving demand to unprecedented levels and cementing the RTX 50 Series as one of the most sought-after GPU launches in history".

Jim Tseng, VP of Product Management at Newegg, said: "The response to the NVIDIA RTX 50 Series has been extraordinary. The overwhelming demand reaffirms the gaming and PC community's enthusiasm for the very best technology".

OpenAI has just released its new o3-mini, its newest, most cost-efficient model in its reasoning series, to both ChatGPT and API today... just as DeepSeek has come in changing the AI landscape.

In a new post on its website, the ChatGPT creator says that its new o3-mini is its most powerful, and fastest model that "advances the boundaries of what small models can achieve, delivering exceptional STEM capabilities -- with particular strenth in science, math, and coding -- all while maintaining the low cost and reduced latency of OpenAI o1-mini".

OpenAI explains on its website: "OpenAI o3-mini is our first small reasoning model that supports highly requested developer features including function calling⁠(opens in a new window), Structured Outputs⁠(opens in a new window), and developer messages⁠(opens in a new window), making it production-ready out of the gate. Like OpenAI o1-mini and OpenAI o1-preview, o3-mini will support streaming⁠(opens in a new window). Also, developers can choose between three reasoning effort⁠(opens in a new window) options-low, medium, and high-to optimize for their specific use cases".

With the GeForce RTX 50 Series, NVIDIA is introducing a suite of groundbreaking new RTX Neural Rendering technologies designed to enhance in-game ray-traced visuals and performance. RTX Mega Geometry is one of these new bits of technology, and it has arrived in Alan Wake 2 - boosting the game's Path Tracing and Ray Tracing performance for all GeForce RTX gamers.

RTX Mega Geometry accelerates rendering complex, highly detailed scenes with many ray tracing effects enabled. According to NVIDIA, "RTX Mega Geometry accelerates BVH building, making it possible to ray trace up to 100x more triangles than today's standard." What this means for gamers is that path tracing performance is improved with RTX Mega Geometry, and there's now no limit to how detailed and intricate environments, characters, and objects in a scene can become.

As part of Alan Wake 2's new Update 1.2.8, which adds full DLSS 4 support to the game, including the impressive new Transformer AI models for DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS Ray Reconstruction, it's also the first game to implement RTX Mega Geometry.

Apple has reportedly axed plans to build advanced AR glasses that would've paired with the iPhone and Mac, adding another notch to the company's headset failures in a post-Vision Pro headset world.

In a new report from Mark Gurman on Bloomberg, Apple shuttered the program this week, with the "now-canceled product would have looked like normal glasses but include built-in displays and require a connection to a Mac, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work wasn't public. An Apple representative declined to comment".

Apple launched its expensive, controversial Vision Pro headset for $3499 to not-so-great headlines, hoping to make a headset that everyday users could use, with a cheaper price tag. Meta has been selling its Ray-Ban smart glasses, with the company moving into a version that adds AR (augmented reality) and will reportedly have AR glasses on the market by 2027, which is when Apple had expected to launch its codenamed N107 headset.

NVIDIA's RTX Video Super Resolution is like DLSS for watching videos on YouTube or a streaming service like Netflix on your PC; it uses an AI model and the Tensor Core hardware on GeForce RTX cards to upscale and improve image fidelity from a lower-resolution source. For those with 4K displays, a 1080p video will become sharper with more detail restored.

Video Super Resolution (VSR), designed to remove compression artifacts and other issues from streaming videos with heavy compression, is an option all GeForce RTX owners can enable in the NVIDIA App. In addition, Video HDR uses AI to tone map SDR videos to HDR - with some awe-inspiring results.

With the launch of the GeForce RTX 50 Series and the arrival of the new GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, NVIDIA has brought several new features to gamers - from DLSS 4 to NVIDIA Broadcast updates for creators. As part of these updates, NVIDIA has confirmed that RTX Video Super Resolution is running on a more efficient AI model.

Intel has announced that its next-generation Panther Lake CPUs are coming in the second half of 2025, which wil be the company's lead product on its new in-house Intel 18A process node.

During its recent Q4 2024 earnings call, Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus said its next-gen Panther Lake CPUs will enter mass production in 2H 2025, with the new processors launching later this year. The company wasn't clear on whether we'll see Panther Lake on the desktop, we should have more on that in the near future.

Holthaus said: "Looking ahead to the rest of the year, we will strengthen our client roadmap with the launch of Panther Lake, our lead product on Intel 18A, in the second half of 2025. As the first volume customer of Intel 18A, I see the progress that Intel Foundry is making on performance and yields. And I look forward to being in production in the second half as we demonstrate the benefits of our world-class design and process technology capabilities".

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 hasn't even been available for 48 hours, and PC gamers are already taking to the Steam listing to post negative reviews.

The Steam listing for Sony's latest PC port of an exclusive PlayStation title is being bombarded with negative reviews citing performance issues with the title. These negative reviews have resulted in the title's Steam rating currently sitting at "Mixed," with nearly half of the approximately 2,100 user reviews reporting in-game bugs, stabilization problems, crashes, low FPS, audio desyncing, freezing, stuttering, and a myriad of other performance-related issues.

Unfortunately, it's not just negative users leaving negative reviews, as some players that left positive reviews even cautioned other players about the title's performance. With one player writing, the game crashes "every 20 minutes or so if you have turned ON the Frame Generation (which, guess what, is turned ON by default)." Additionally, this same player reported a critical bug that prevented them from being able to start a new game unless their old game save was deleted. The player managed to work around this problem by disabling Steam Cloud and then manually deleting their save.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will reportedly meet with President Trump at the White House today, to discuss all things about the United States and continued dominance in the AI industry, flying into the face of China and its game-changing DeepSeek R1 model.

In a new report from the Financial Times, we're learning that "NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang is set to meet US President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person said the meeting had been planned before Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley this week with advances apparently achieved using less computing power than US tech groups".

We should expect the two to discuss how the US government and freshly-minted Trump administration will frame its policies around AI, to ensure that the United States continues with its AI dominance. The entry of DeepSeek into the market has changed the game, wiping a huge $2 trillion in market capitalization in the process.

Samsung has reportedly received approval to supply NVIDIA with its HBM memory chips, with its 8-layer HBM3E destined for NVIDIA after rumors that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said he can't trust Samsung's HBM products or engineers, and wouldn't do business with them.

In a new report from Bloomberg, we're learning that Samsung's less-advanced 8-layer HBM3E -- and not the newer 12-layer HBM3E -- was "cleared by NVIDIA in December" according to "people who asked not to be named as the information is private". These new Samsung HBM3E memory chips would be used in NVIDIA's less powerful AI GPUs destined for China.

Meanwhile, fellow South Korean memory company SK hynix has been NVIDIA's main partner for HBM memory, providing the company with bleeding-edge 12-layer HBM3E, and being asked by NVIDIA CEO to pull up the release of its next-gen HBM4 memory that will find its way into the company's next-gen Rubin R100 AI GPU.

Microsoft is using its competitors to sell games and re-invest in its burgeoning video games empire.

During the FTC v Microsoft case of 2023, Xbox's Phil Spencer said something very interesting about PlayStation's exclusivity practices, going so far as to call Sony a hostile competitor. "Every time we ship a game on PlayStation, going back to the 70-30 split, Sony captures 30% of revenue that we do on their platform. And then they use that money among other revenue to do things to try to reduce Xbox's survival on the market," Spencer had said at the time.

Microsoft, however, has a different tact: Rather than keep games off its platforms, it wants to open the floodgates and release as many of its popular games to as many platforms as possible. The rationale is simple. Xbox wants to sell more games, make more money, and further cement itself as a vital partner to its competitors. Every sale on a competitor's platform is more money that can then be reinvested into Xbox.

DeepSeek has come in like a wrecking ball in the AI industry, knocking down OpenAI and its leading ChatGPT, and now Apple CEO Tim Cook has had some comments about the Chinese company.

In Apple's recent investors call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the disruptive new AI model is a positive development for the iPhone giant. During the call, analyst Ben Reitzes from Melius asked Cook about how the arrival of DeepSeek is viewed by Apple. DeepSeek is far cheaper in development costs for training advanced AI models, as well as the running costs of these AI models.

Reitzes asked: "Hey, Tim. I wanted to ask you, you knew this one was coming, but there's a perception that you're a big beneficiary of lower cost compute, and I was wondering of your worldly perspective here on the deep situation, and if you are going to, if anything's happened to change your views in terms of the tailwind to margin and your ability to execute, even due to the potential for cost to come down due to that development and probably what's going to happen that happened anyway, but I love your perspective on that".

Intel has nixxed its upcoming Falcon Shores AI accelerator, shifting its efforts into the next-generation Jaguar Shores as a complete rack-scale solution in its attempt to make a mark on the AI industry.

Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus has explained that the company has stopped development on Falcon Shores, shifting its focus into its next-gen Jaguar Shores generation. Until now, we were expecting the Falcon Shores XPU on TSMC's newer 3nm process node and CoWoS-R advanced packaging, with a huge 1500W TDP.

Intel told CRN: "Many of you heard me temper expectations on Falcon Shores last month. Based on industry feedback, we have decided to leverage Falcon Shores as an internal test chip".

While gamers (and sometimes developers) lament the Xbox Series S parity clause, Microsoft sees it as a major advantage in its fight for future competition in the games industry.

The Xbox Series S is substantially weaker than the Series X, but it's also $200 cheaper. The Series S was meant to grow the Xbox userbase with a lower-cost option that's locked to the digital ecosystem, furthering Microsoft's high-value target goals. This power difference has caused headaches for some developers who are bound by a strict parity clause (all Gen 9 Xbox games have to run on both Series S and Series X in order to get released) that forces them to scale down their games to run on the much-weaker Series S.

Overall, though, this is a good move. At least that's what Microsoft thinks. The rationale is that developers could use the Series S spec profile of their games onto other lower-power devices. This is especially true with first-party games like Minecraft, which has been carefully scaled to run on both consoles and on the Nintendo Switch handheld (Minecraft is wildly popular on the Switch and makes far more money on Switch than it does on Xbox).