HP's upcoming Omen 35L is the first desktop gaming PC with Intel's new Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake-S" desktop CPUs, with up to the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K.

The company has confirmed that its upcoming Omen 35L will feature up to the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor with 24 cores and 24 threads (no Hyper-Threading). The Core Ultra 9 285K will run with a boost clock of up to 5.7GHz and feature 36MB of cache.

HP's new Omen 35L can be configured with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor, up to NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, up to Kingston FURY 64GB DDR5-4000 (DDR5-4000 feels like an error, we'll see if HP updates it) "plus AI features" that will make HP's new OMEN components make it powerful, as well as easy to upgrade and customize.

Amazon is planning on increasing the amount of money it makes on its Prime Video streaming service by increasing the number of available advertisement slots, meaning users will be blessed with even more ads than they are already consuming.

Notably, current Prime Video users consume between 2 and 3.5 minutes of advertisements every hour. According to a recent Financial Times interview with Kelly Day, Amazon's Vice President of Prime Video International, currently, standard-tier Prime Video users don't receive ads in the middle of content, but that could change in 2025 with Amazon's plan to revise its advertising structure across its platform.

The FT article also revealed Amazon's plan to roll out different forms of ads on Prime Video, such as shoppable ads, carousel ads, intermissions ads, and brand quiz ads. Currently, advertisements on Prime come in two forms; a trailer for Amazon's next upcoming big piece of content (movie/TV show), and then additional slotted ads from brands that have purchased these slots.

Apple is expected to release its highly anticipated foray into artificial intelligence, but just in Apple fashion they have rebranded the emerging software as "Apple Intelligence".

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who wrote in his recent Power On newsletter, Apple is slated to roll out iOS 18.1 on October 28, and within that OS update will be Apple Intelligence. For those that don't know, Apple Intelligence will be coming to the iPhone 15 Pro/Max and the entire iPhone 16 line-up. Unfortunately, devices older than that don't have the necessary hardware to process AI tasks at a speed that Apple is comfortable with releasing.

Apple Intelligence, or the complete lack of it, has been a point of criticism in the recent launch of the iPhone 16 lineup, as much of Apple's marketing for the new generation of iPhone showed Apple Intelligence features that weren't available at launch. Apple clarified when the features will be released, saying Apple Intelligence will be rolled out in stages. As for iOS 18.1, according to reports, developers with early access to the operating system version have found it to be quite unstable, leading to app crashes and excessive battery drain.

Fortnite has just broken its concurrent player count record it set back in December 2023, as nearly six million gamers flocked to the popular battle royale shooter to help take down Marvel's Doctor Doom.

According to a new report from Insider Gaming, Fortnite attracted 5.6 million gamers to its end-of-season finale, which spawned a 150-foot-tall Doctor Doom onto the map that, in natural boss fashion, began destroying environments and attacking players. Reports indicate the 5.6 million concurrent users battled against Doctor Doom's global health pool, which took approximately an hour to deplete.

The spawning in of Doctor Doom as the season finale concludes Fortnite's Marvel-themed season and ties directly into Marvel's upcoming projects. For those that don't know, it was only earlier this year that Robert Downey Jr revealed will be playing Doctor Doom in an upcoming Marvel project. As for Fortnite, events such as this are a testament to the effort put in by the developers over at Epic Games. Global events such as this one are why Fortnite remains one of the most popular games on the market.

The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is the new flagship in Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPU line-up, which is expected to be announced and unveiled this week. As part of the company's Core Ultra Series 2 lineup, the Core Ultra 9 285K is essentially the Core i9-15900K.

Although you need several benchmarks carried out across a range of workloads to gauge CPU performance, that hasn't stopped the official PassMark Software account from taking to X to announce that the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is now the single-thread CPU performance leader after posting a score that is 8.2% higher than the unlocked Core i9-14900KS and around 11% higher than the Core i9-14900K and AMD Ryzen 9950X.

The post mentions that the result "might" come from a pre-release engineering sample, so the results could be higher once the new Intel flagship is released and in the hands of reviewers.

AMD has added a new feature to its tools for game developers using the Radeon Developer Tools suite. It's called Driver Experiments, and it gives developers low-level control of AMD's graphics driver to improve troubleshooting and assist with optimizing games for PC.

With a Radeon RX 5000, 6000, or 7000 Series GPU, Windows, and a recent version of AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, developers can access graphics settings at the driver level to identify bugs or areas that require additional work to improve performance.

For example, developers can disable individual settings such as ray-tracing support, mesh shaders, GPU work graphs, shader caches, vertical sync, and more. "Driver Experiments expose lower-level controls of the graphics driver that may influence the behavior, performance, or even stability of an application," AMD writes. "So they should be only used carefully and consciously by graphics programmers."

NVIDIA's share price recently reached a point where it became the biggest company in the world - with growth driven by the AI boom and the seemingly insatiable hunger or thirst for NVIDIA's most powerful GPUs. Even though NVIDIA's share price has fallen, it's still one of the largest companies in the world, alongside Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google.

One company not included in that list and one that finds itself in a rather precarious spot is Intel. Even though Intel is debuting new chips for mobile and desktop, controversies, foundry delays, and a few years of losing market share to the competition have seen its stock price fall, and its market cap hit $97 billion in recent days.

As pointed out by many, this figure now sits considerably lower than NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's worth. A remarkable stat is driven by the fact that NVIDIA has added just about 20 times Intel's market cap to its value in a year. So, valued at $109 billion, Jensen Huang could theoretically buy Intel for himself - and still have plenty left to pick up a few mansions and super yachts.

Ubisoft is going through one of its most challenging times in recent memory, with the company recently announcing the official delay of the upcoming next installment in the Assassin's Creed franchise, Assassin's Creed Shadows amid controversial development choices, and following the internally admitted disappointing release of Star Wars Outlaws.

The turmoil at Ubisoft has been reflected in the company's plummeting stock price, which has dropped by around 50% in just the last two months. Ubisoft's stock price reached as low as 9.89 EURO at the end of September, which is down from the 22 EURO it was in July. The stock price recently saw a bump of 31% due to reports of Tencent and Guillemot Family reportedly mulling over a buyout.

With all this turmoil, we are now seeing some Ubisoft executives jump ship, with a new report from Insider Gaming claiming that the vice president of Rainbow Six Siege, Cameron Lee, has left the franchise and Ubisoft altogether. Notably, Lee joined the Rainbox Six Siege team in April 2022 and was brought on to be "responsible for creating the long-term brand strategy for the Rainbow Six franchise and aligning and collaborating with all internal partners."

Apple is rumored to be on the verge of releasing its new M4 MacBook Pro line-up, with industry insider and Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman recently teasing that Apple will announce the first Macs with M4 chips sometime in late October.

However, it appears that an M4 MacBook Pro has already made it out into the wild, and while I cannot confirm the authenticity of the supposed leak, and neither can other publications, it appears to be very real. Gurman wrote in an X post the complete unboxing of an M4 MacBook Pro by a Russian YouTube channel, Wylsacom, "looks fairly legitimate" and, if it is real, would mark the first time a full retail Apple device has leaked weeks in advance.

14-inch MacBook Pro specifications: According to the video, the M4 chip will increase performance by 25%, and according to the alleged Geekbench result, the M4 chip features 10 CPU cores, which is an increase of two compared to the M3's 8-core CPU. To further back this specification up is the release of the M4 chip within the new iPad Pro that was released in May, as that chip is confirmed to have a 10-core CPU. As for RAM, the 14-inch MacBook Pro comes with 16GB of memory.

The season two finale of Amazon's The Rings of Power has just wrapped up, and now we are beginning to hear the rumblings of the third season being greenlit.

The first season of The Rings of Power wasn't particularly well received by Middle-Earth fans, who cited many problems with the story, particularly the differences between the adaptation and the book lore. Despite the criticisms, the first season generated more than 150 million viewers, and according to studio head Jennifer Salke, season two has generated 55 million and is expected to catch up to season one's numbers. Amazon declined to comment on what constitutes a "view" but did say that The Rings of Power is still within its streaming platforms' top five shows.

Will season three get greenlit? The Hollywood Reporter states Amazon is on the verge of officially approving the third season for the show, with the studio expected to make a decision and an announcement by the end of the month. An indicator that a third season is on the way is that Amazon MGM Studios touted The Rings of Power content to advertisers at the Prime Video UK Upfront presentation in London, which typically only happens when a studio is confident in continuing development on that project.

Halo has changed forever, and 343 Industries is no more as the franchise moves into Unreal Engine 5 with incredible next-gen visuals.

Today, one of Xbox's biggest studios made a surprise announcement; 343 Industries has changed its name to Halo Studios, and Halo is now moving to Unreal Engine 5. There's also multiple new Halo games in development, potentially hinting at a mainline sequel and perhaps some sort of cross-platform F2P multiplayer release that could bridge PC, Xbox, and maybe even PlayStation.

While the Tatanka battle royale mode has been cancelled, Halo Studios did just announce a third-person mode for Halo Infinite, and we have to wonder if Certain Affinity is helping Halo Studios on their new UE5 projects.

Today one of Microsoft's biggest game studios made a big announcement: 343 Industries is no more, and has been replaced by Halo Studios.

Armed with a bold new vision for the future, 343 Industries has changed its name to Halo Studios. This swap comes at a pivotal point for the group, as the team has now become a game studio first and foremost, shedding its focus on the archaic and difficult proprietary Slipspace Engine that powered Halo Infinite.

Halo Studios made one thing very clear in its announcement video: a new era of Halo is here...and gone are the days of old. Things have changed for the Halo series and the people that make it.

GeForce RTX 4090 stock is dwindling, which has caused prices to rise for NVIDIA flagship graphics card. This does not require insider knowledge; it can be seen with retailers listing fewer and fewer cards with increasingly higher prices. Last month, we reported that the RTX 4090 was sold out in many locations across Germany and Austria.

Switching to rumor and insider knowledge that arrives via the Chinese Board Channels forum, it's been reported that NVIDIA has communicated to its partners that GeForce RTX 4090 production will cease by October 2024. The stock will run out by the end of October or sometime in November, so there won't be any left for NVIDIA's partners looking to sell more RTX 4090s.

In addition, a more recent Board Channels post indicates that GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER production will also cease at the end of this month, which means all flagship GeForce RTX 40 Series hardware will become scarce by the end of 2024.

Patriot's Viper Gaming brand has been steadily impressing us in recent years with a string of high-performance SSDs and RAM options that also hit that price-to-performance sweet spot. Its latest release is slightly different; the new Viper Gaming Series V30 A2 is a microSD card designed for portable gaming handhelds like Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch.

microSD storage is the easiest way to expand the storage capabilities of a gaming handheld. All you need to do is put a microSD card into the relevant slot and immediately double or triple the available room to store games, media files, screenshots, and video recordings. The only problem is no two microSD cards are the same, and everything from speed to overall reliability can vary wildly from product to product.

The Viper Gaming Series V30 A2 microSD card sports some impressive specs as a gaming-focused product. It's built with U3, Class 10, A2, V30, and UHS-I technology standards, offering read speeds of up to 100MB/s and write speeds of up to 90MB/s.

Sony's recent Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered announcement surprised many because it's still a good-looking game in 2024. As one of the first major first-party PlayStation titles to get a PC port, Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition ramped up the visual fidelity and detail over the PS4 original - so this new remastered version feels even more out of step.

Especially when Sony is already delisting Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition on Steam and the Epic Games Store in favor of the newer and more expensive remaster. This is not to say there's no difference between the two versions. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered brings the visuals in line with the sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, including over 10 hours of re-recorded voices and motion capture, revamped character models and animation, and "countless graphical improvements."

The upgraded visuals and presentation can be seen in the announcement trailer and in official screenshots. However, one aspect of the release is making PC gamers shake their heads - well, two, if you count the fact that Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition is no longer available to purchase.

We've covered NVIDIA ACE technologies a few times at TweakTown, a toolset and set of AI-powered technologies that can bring digital humans to life. As seen in the Covert Protocol tech demo, AI creates and generates personalities and dialogue, converts text-to-speech, generates facial animations, and more. For game developers and gamers, it's a potential game changer for player interaction and immersion in a digital world.

However, when it comes to NVIDIA ACE, the generative AI tools available to developers aren't merely there to add AI-generated characters into a game powered by the Nemotron Mini 4B model that can run locally on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU.

Audio2Face-3D is a brilliant tool in its own right. It is a plugin that uses audio to generate accurate lip-synching and facial animation for characters.

Tech channel Gear Seekers has reviewed PC cases and other hardware for over seven years. Over that time, the channel has put together countless great-looking builds while offering expert advice to consumers and case makers on what works and doesn't. The channel's latest isn't another detailed look at a new chassis or GPU. Instead, it's presenting its first collaboration - the Montech x Gear Seekers KING 95 ULTRA.

In May of this year, we reviewed Montech's King 95 Pro, which earned an award for its affordable price point, thermal performance, support for two PSUs simultaneously, and excellent cable management. The philosophy behind the KING 95 ULTRA was to take the initial design and ramp up the style and aesthetics with premium components, including aluminum for the front panel.

It also comes equipped with six pre-installed fans and an RGB controller to make the installation and build process as simple as possible. According to Gear Seekers, once the motherboard, cooler, and power supply are all installed - you're essentially good to go. And it's a Limited Edition release with only 2,024 units worldwide.

PC gaming is accelerating rapidly in Japan, offering Microsoft a unique opportunity to swoop in and capture more of this uptick with its PC Game Pass subscription service.

According to new data from Japanese trade organization CESA, the PC games market is growing at a substantial rate in the overseas region. As per analyst Dr. Serkan Toto of Kantan Games, the data shows that PC game software sales revenues have nearly tripled from 2019 - 2023, ranging from 82 billion yen ($551 million) in 2019 to 236.4 million yen ($1.589 billion) in 2023.

This represents an increase of 187% in revenues, and a CAGR of 23.5% across the five-year period. Comparatively, PC game sales revenues went from 5% of total software earnings in 2019 to a whopping 13% of the total in 2023--a big jump for Japan.

The Halo franchise is breaking the FPS barrier for the first time with a new dedicated third-person mode.

Halo has always been a first-person shooter first and foremost. Sure the series has toe-dipped with third-person views, namely when operating vehicles or picking up huge turrets, but you're still playing most of the game in that eyes-on view. That is until now.

343 Industries recently announced Halo Infinite is getting its own third-person mode sometime in November 2024. The new view fundamentally changes gameplay by giving players more optics on their environments. Halo senior community manager John Junyszek has a quick explanation: "You have more awareness, you get to see your Spartan." That last part is important for 343 because the studio continues to sell cosmetic microtransactions for Halo Infinite's free-to-play multiplayer.

Electronic Arts is leaning harder into user-generated content economies a la Minecraft and Roblox, and soon Sims players will be able to buy new content bundles.

EA's recent investor's day had a lot to say about AI and user-generated content. The billion-dollar publisher intends to use generative AI to supercharge the production of UGC (or what it calls UGX--User Generated Experiences). The idea is that AI tools could help accelerate the creation of these custom in-game levels, characters, and modes, thereby having more content on a digital market at a quicker rate.

It's unclear on whether or not this AI-driven UGX platform is coming to The Sims 4, but EA did confirm that it will not be making a traditional sequel to the franchise. The Sims 5 isn't happening, and instead, EA will elongate The Sims 4 to ensures gamers can continue their decade's worth of stories and adventures for even longer. EA is also adding a new Creator Kit economy which will allow The Sims 4 players to buy bundles of user-generated content. Think of this as a little bit like Bethesda's controversial Creation Club (aka paid mods)