The Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 development team at Treyarch has posted a lengthy article on the game's audio. The article covers the technology being used and how it enhances the 3D spatial sound in the game compared to previous entries. As highlighted in the piece, every weapon and sound in the game has been redesigned or re-captured - nothing is being reused.

With Black Ops 6, the audio team has focused on what it calls the 'adaptive battlefield,' where a changing environment and directional audio play an essential role in giving players the information they need without 'the clutter of extraneous noise.'

Part of this has come from collaborating with Microsoft's Project Acoustics to enhance and make sound propagation throughout an environment sound natural. "Gunshots and grenades will realistically fill the space around them," Expert Audio Engineer William Cornell said. "Footsteps will echo down long hallways, and the sound of rain and crickets chirping will come in through open windows and holes in the wall."

If you had any doubts about Apple's intention to launch a bunch of new M4 Macs by the end of October - as strongly rumored for ages - cast those doubts aside now, as the firm has confirmed new devices are coming next week.

Apple's marketing bigwig, Greg Joswiak, announced this on X with a cheeky little pun that we should 'Mac' our calendars for an "exciting week of announcements ahead" starting on Monday morning, October 28.

So, from that we can gather that there isn't going to be a big press event, although when the invites failed to emerge earlier this month, that became clear enough anyway.

NVIDIA's latest Game Ready Driver comes with the usual features, including support for some major new PC games - Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is one of them - but it packs a sting in the tail for those with Corsair peripherals that sport RGB lighting.

Mainly because NVIDIA's driver v566.03 has a conflict with Corsair's iCUE tool, used for controlling its RGB lighting (and other functionality besides).

Tom's Hardware pointed out the problem (acknowledged by Corsair as you can see above, in its post on X) whereby CPU usage is spiking not just with iCUE, but also Bluestacks, the popular Android emulator for PC.

For the first time ever, a mainline Call of Duty game is launching natively within the cloud.

Tomorrow marks an important day for Xbox. The release of Black Ops 6 will be an interesting watershed moment for Microsoft's games division as the numbers will go lengths in proving whether or not Xbox Game Pass is a viable substitute for millions of game sales.

For months now we've known that Call of Duty Black Ops 6 will release day one on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It's also been confirmed that Black Ops 6 can be streamed via both Xbox's game streaming service, Microsoft Cloud gaming, and NVIDIA's GeForce Now. The latter requires a full game purchase, though, whereas users don't have to buy the game in order to play it on Game Pass Ultimate.

Microsoft has taken to its blog to announce the release of a suite of autonomous artificial intelligence agents that will serve businesses as virtual employees.

Redmond states in its blog post that it's announcing new capabilities that will enable customers to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio, along with ten new autonomous agents in Dynamic 365. Microsoft writes that agents should be thought of as the "new apps for an AI-powered world" and that it believes one day, every organization will have a "constellation of agents" that will range from simply prompt and response bots to bots that are completely autonomous.

Copilot will be how customers interact with these agents, and their capabilities will range from sales, supplier communications, customer intent, and customer knowledge management agents. Microsoft states in its blog post that its AI agents will be able to increase the productivity of a business and is an example of how artificial intelligence can increase the output generated by a worker per hour. As for custom agents, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said that Copilot Studio is built as a "no-code way for you to be able to build agents," which means users won't need any prior programming knowledge to create a custom agent successfully.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 is still in active development, Ubisoft has officially told Eurogamer.

Recent reports from Insider Gaming have prompted Ubisoft to deliver a statement on specific games, including Beyond Good and Evil 2. Sources told IG that the Prince of Persia devteam has been disbanded, with multiple team members moving over to other projects, such as a new Rayman game.

One of these projects is also apparently Beyond Good and Evil 2, which has remained in development for quite some time; Ubisoft showed off BG&E2's first gameplay footage half a decade ago with a cinematic trailer also releasing in 2018. Now the French games-maker has once again commented on the sci-fi sequel.

Windows 11 24H2 brings in a bunch of new features, and one of them is faster ('checkpoint') cumulative updates, with Microsoft outlining just how much nippier such upgrades have got with the new version of its desktop OS.

In a blog post, Steve DiAcetis, Principal Program Manager Lead at Microsoft, explains that version 24H2 brings in both quicker installation of updates, and swifter post-installation reboots, alongside reductions in CPU resource usage during an upgrade.

How much of a speed boost are we looking at? Microsoft demonstrates a test scenario of a Windows 11 24H2 PC on the February 2024 security base image being upgraded to the March security update.

AMD Ryzen 9800X3D leaks just keep on springing - the chip is like a watering can at this point - but the latest one gives us all the juicy details we've been speculating about, performance-wise, in theory straight from the mouth of Team Red.

VideoCardz has turned up a marketing slide from AMD which describes the key points of the Ryzen 9800X3D and that includes the generational gaming boost we'll get, clock speed info, and more.

So, the big one - how much better is the Ryzen 9800X3D going to be compared to the Ryzen 7800X3D for gaming? If this marketing material is genuine, AMD says the new 9800X3D will be 8% faster in PC games (though we don't get to hear the extent of the benchmarking that led to this figure, this is just a headline summary).

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the US government agency designed to protect American consumers against illegal business practices, has changed its guidelines to target AI-generated content.

Since the rise of AI-generation tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, or simple image-generation tools such as DALLE, internet users have been enduring the rise of AI-generated content. While this is typically fine, as most of the content is interesting images or videos on social media timelines, there is a real problem when it comes to posting a review for a product or service when AI created it. The FTC's new guidelines are designed to protect consumers against businesses intentionally trying to mislead consumers.

An example of this would be a business that uses AI tools to create fake reviews or testimonials for products. These AI-generated reviews would then be published all over the listing for the product and would mislead potential buyers into thinking the product is more reliable than it actually might be. More specifically, the new FTC guidelines list fake reviews attributed to people who don't exist or someone that overstates their level of experience with the product as a particularly egregious offence.

Ubisoft is reportedly moving developers over to begin work on a Rayman Remake, according to a new report from Insider Gaming.

The news of a potential Rayman Remake comes only a day after another Insider Gaming report claimed Ubisoft had disbanded the Ubisoft Montpellier team following Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown failing to meet internal sales predictions. Yesterday's report stated that Ubisoft decided to disband the team only a few weeks after The Lost Crown launched. Insider Gaming states that at least some Montpellier team members have moved across to the Rayman project.

According to sources "close to the situation" the new Rayman Remake is codenamed "Project Steambot" and is being developed mostly by a team at Ubisoft Milan. Furthermore, the publication states that Michel Ancel, the creator of Rayman, is on board with the project as a consultant, which has some fans of the franchise worried, considering the controversy he was in back in 2020. As for the developers of The Lost Crown, the publication writes that at least twelve of them have moved over to work on the Rayman Remake.

Most gamers only really care about how many frames per second their graphics card can push at what graphical settings, but what GPUs and the impressive number-crunching technology insider is capable of much more than just hitting maximum frame rates in games.

Perhaps a more unusual example of the power of a GPU comes from a former NVIDIA engineer who has decided to use a NVIDIA A100 GPU to discover what is now considered to be the largest prime number. According to a new report from The Register, the new prime number has been named "M136279841," and it's equal to the monstrous number that is 2 to the power of 136,279,841 - 1. For those interested, the Great Internet Mesrsenne Prime (GIMPS) Search has a ZIP file containing a text file that has every single one of the 41,024,320 digits.

The download size of the file, or the largest prime number ever discovered, is just shy of 20MB at 18.3MB, which is substantially large for a text file. Former NVIDIA engineer Luke Durant has spotted what is called the 52nd Mersenne prime, which is a prime number that equals 2n - 1. According to the report, the last time a Mersenne prime was discovered was by Patrick Laroche more than five years ago, who found it by running the free GIMPS software on a four-core Intel Core i5-4590T processor over 12 days.

Fallout: London is a fan-made expansion-sized mod for Fallout 4 that shifts the action to post-apocalyptic London, England. With new locations, factions, weapons, and a fully-voiced campaign, it's a project we've been following alongside countless Fallout fans for some time.

Well, maybe not countless, as the ambitious mod and single-player game from Team FOLON has surpassed the 1 million player milestone, making it one of the most successful mod releases ever. Not only that, but due to the size and complexity of the mod, releasing it exclusively via GOG has also made it one of the platform's most successful releases in terms of reach.

Fallout: London is exclusive to PC, but its success highlights the franchise's popularity. There hasn't been a mainline single-player Fallout game since 2015, and with Bethesda focused on Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6, it could be several years before we see another official game in the franchise.

The HBM memory business is expected to continue to explode throughout 2025, with experts predicting the HBM market will grow 156% in 2025 to reach $46.7 billion... a market worth just $18.2 billion in 2024.

At the TrendForce Roadshow Korea held in Seoul last week, senior vice president of research operations at TrendForce, Avril Wu, said she expects to see the global HBM memory chip business to expand by 156% next year to $46.7 billion, up from $18.2 billion this year. HBM memory chip share of the overall DRAM market is expected to rise up to 34% in 2025, up from 20% in 2024.

NVIDIA's new Blackwell AI chips are the driving force behind ultra-fast HBM memory, with TrendForce noting that major AI solution providers will witness a "significant shift" in HBM specification requirements towards HBM3E, with the boost to HBM3E 12-Hi stack products, and will increase the HBM capacity per chip.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook responded to the lukewarm response to the company's Vision Pro mixed reality headset and how the $3,499 price (for the base model with 256GB of storage) has impacted the device's appeal.

"At $3,500, it's not a mass-market product," said Cook. "Right now, it's an early-adopter product. People who want to have tomorrow's technology today - that's who it's for." Although enthusiasts with $3,500 to burn on an impressive mixed-reality headset picked one up on day one, sales for the Vision Pro have fallen below expectations.

The headset not only failed to ship 100,000 units in the first three months of its release, but sales have continued to slow. Apple's not backing out of the headset market, as several rumors are pointing to Apple developing a more affordable Vision Pro for 2025. However, a new report over at The Information (via Mac Rumors) is now saying Apple is winding down production on its first-gen Vision Pro - and production could stop completely before the end of 2024.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has addressed the issues surrounding its latest Blackwell AI chip, admitting that there was a design flaw that was "100% NVIDIA's fault" and that TSMC helped them through the tough Blackwell AI GPU launch.

NVIDIA initially unveiled its new Blackwell chips at GTC 2024 earlier this year in March, expected to ship in Q2 2024 but were delayed (as you can see in the stories below) which could've affected big-paying customers like Meta, Microsoft, and Google.

Huang said: "We had a design flaw in Blackwell. It was functional, but the design flaw caused the yield to be low. It was 100% NVIDIA's fault. In order to make a Blackwell computer work, seven different types of chips were designed from scratch and had to be ramped into production at the same time".

Well, that's one way to put it... "Copilot+ is a flop" and that Microsoft rebranding Copilot as "agents" is the company in "panic mode" says the CEO of Salesforce.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff posted some fightin' words on X just now, where he said: "Microsoft rebranding Copilot as 'agents'? That's panic mode. Let's be real-Copilot's a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence. That is why Copilot is inaccurate, spills corporate data, and forces customers to build their own LLMs. Clippy 2.0, anyone? Meanwhile, Agentforce is transforming businesses now".

I mean, he's not wrong. I've had a bunch of Copilot+ laptops come through my lab in the last couple of months, and I've been brutally honest: NPUs are virtually useless. They're wasted space of silicon when we could have more Performance cores, more 3D V-Cache, more cache in general, just something... useful.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU is rumored to be 45% to 65% faster than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU according to new leaks.

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, sources told him that the GB203 GPU that will find its way into the GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU should feature 8000+ CUDA cores and 16GB of next-gen GDDR7 memory. Don't worry, that's not the fastest mobile Blackwell GPU... that'd be the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU that should rock (an insane) 24GB of GDDR7.

The purported RTX 5080 Laptop GPU being leaked here is based on a heavily cut-down GB203 GPU, but MLID expects the RTX 5080 Laptop GPU to be "way stronger" than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU. We're looking at the next-gen RTX 5080 Laptop GPU being 45% to 65% faster than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU, which is a huge deal for 2025 gaming laptops.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, isn't happy with the state of PC hardware right now: calling out "buggy hardware" from tech giants Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD.

In a new post on kernel.org, Torvalds said: "Honestly, I'm pretty damn fed up with buggy hardware and completely theoretical attacks that have never actually shown themselves to be used in practice. So I think this time we push back on the hardware people and tell them it's *THEIR* damn problem, and if they can't even be bothered to say yay-or-nay, we just sit tight".

He added: "Because dammit, let's put the onus on where the blame lies, and not just take any random "...." from bad hardware and say "oh, but it *might* be a problem".

Arm has reportedly canceled a licensing agreement with Qualcomm that gives the company the ability to design chips on the Arm chip standard, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The specific licensing agreement is called the architecture license agreement (ALA), and it's a key component of an ongoing legal battle between the two tech giants. Reports indicate that Arm's cancelation of the agreement could significantly impact Qualcomm's business, especially considering the recent expansion the company has made into AI-powered laptops and if Arm forces Qualcomm to halt all development of chips based on its architecture. Bloomberg's report states Arm issued a 60-day notice to Qualcomm as legally required.

The legal battle between Arm and Qualcomm began when Arm accused Qualcomm and Nuvia of violating licensing agreements and infringing on its trademark after Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in 2021. Arm alleges the violation occurred when Qualcomm didn't renegotiate its agreements with Arm after it took over Nuvia and that Nuvia designs created before the merger should have been destroyed. However, Qualcomm argues that its existing agreement with Arm covers any developments made by Nuvia.

Google's future-gen Pixel 11 family of smartphones will use a next-gen Tensor G6 processor built on TSMC's new 2nm process node, with the Tensor G6 codenamed "Malibu".

Spotted by Android Authority contributor Mishaal Rahman, who spotted the codenames of the Tensor G5 and Tensor G6 processors. Tensor G4 powers the Pixel 9 family of smartphones, right up to the Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, while the next-gen Tensor G5 chip will power next year's Pixel 10 family, up to the Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro Fold.

After that, Google will unleash its future-gen Tensor G6 processor that will be inside of the Pixel 11 smartphones, up to the next-gen Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro Fold smartphones. Google will have its new Tensor G6 chip made by TSMC on its new 2nm process node, which will provide performance improvements and improved energy efficiency.