Only 20 games have been confirmed to have enhanced PS5 Pro patches, but this list should grow over time and lead to a new wave of game sales for publishers and Sony's first-party game developers.

With new PSSR upscaling, RDNA 3.0 Raytracing tech, and a hefty 67% GPU upgrade, Sony's new PS5 Pro offers thunderous power upgrades over the PS5. Depending on the game, developers no longer have to choose between 60FPS performance modes or 30FPS 4K fidelity modes. The line between the age-old FPS vs graphics trade-off is blurring, and game devs can now scale their games in creative ways with the PS5 Pro.

On a business perspective, one of the biggest reasons to release mid-gen upgrade is to re-sell, or to first-time sell, software to buyers of the new system. We've seen this tactic manifest between actual hardware generations, like with the PS4 -> PS5 re-release upgrades, or "director's cuts," as Sony calls them. Most often, though, the PS4-> PS5 upgrade path is more linear and potentially even free. On a mid-gen level, we've seen developers roll out PS4 Pro enhanced upgrades in specific games for free, which can often lead to boosted sales as more consumers opt for the more powerful system.

The PS5 Pro's new hardware leap is so powerful that it can double FPS in select first-party games, Sony Interactive Entertainment teams have confirmed.

A bit ago, Sony announced its new $700 PS5 Pro console, promising big performance and visual upgrades in the right hands. First-party devs may have the best chance of fully optimizing games on the system because their closeness with Sony's console engineers, and in the Pro's tech demo, architect Mark Cerny said that the system could even double frame rates.

That's apparently the case for Horizon Forbidden West. In a recent PlayStation Blog post, Guerrilla Games' studio director Jan-Bart van Beek revealed that Aloy's sequel will run at 60FPS in Quality Mode on the PlayStation 5 Pro. This mode was originally locked to just 30FPS on the base PlayStation 5. This bodes well for gamers who opt for high-FPS performance gaming especially in an action-oriented experience like the Horizon titles.

Ghost of Tsushima 2 is not happening, and Sucker Punch quickly discusses why the team wanted to make a new game rather than a sequel to Jin Sakai's story.

Yesterday, Sony announced Ghost of Yotei, a new entry in Sucker Punch's newly-established samurai Ghost franchise. The reveal reinforced that Sucker Punch wants to try new things and explore fresh stories in their Feudal Japan-based series, and further clarified that the franchise is Ghost, rather than just Ghost of Tsushima.

Ghost of Yotei introduces a new femme fatale samurai named Atsu whose all-original storyline takes place in the year 1603, over over a quarter of a century before Jin Sakai cut a bloody path across his revenge-fueled adventure. While Jin's arc was based around a more centralized samurai clashes on the island of Tsushima, Atsu's will be more wild and free, with the game's moniker referring to Mount Yotei in the modern day region of Hokkaido.

Ubisoft is addressing recent controversies surrounding its games on a corporate level, and is enacting a new executive review on how its games are made.

Today, Ubisoft announced new downward-adjusted fiscal year targets that were by lower-than-expected sales of Star Wars Outlaws. The controversy surrounding Outlaws has apparently influenced consumers' buying habits. Since Ubisoft, like any games company, relies strongly on full game sales as well as microtransaction earnings, the publisher is taking this very seriously and is preparing a big response.

The first response is that Ubisoft will roll out a series of new patches and updates for Star Wars Outlaws that directly address player concerns and complaints. The second response is much larger in scope, and more long-term. Ubisoft now wants to overhaul how its games are made, focusing more a player- and gameplay-first approach. To achieve this, the company is launching a new executive-level review of its games and teams in a bid to improve efficiency. Based on the language, it's possible that this review could lead to further layoffs at Ubisoft.

Star Wars Outlaws did not meet Ubisoft's internal sales expectations, the publisher today confirmed.

The controversy surrounding Star Wars Outlaws seems to have directly impacted sales of the game. The AAA bounty hunter open-world adventure game had a "softer than expected" sales performance on all platforms, Ubisoft said today in its Q2 report, despite Outlaws routinely being in the PlayStation Store's top 10 best-selling games. Outlaws is also coming to Steam in late November.

The sales miss has prompted Ubisoft to make some key changes in Outlaws and teams are "fully mobilized" to deliver updates to the game. It's unknown exactly what these updates will target, however.

Assassin's Creed Shadows has officially been delayed to February 14, 2025, Ubisoft has today announced.

Ubisoft's new Feudal Japan-based action platformer has riled up some controversy lately, but that's not why the publisher is delaying AC Shadows. Or at least that's not the official reason. The game is being pushed back for the usual reasons--so that more polish and refinement can be applied over 3 months of extra work.

The French publisher also recently cancelled all press demos for AC Shadows at the Tokyo Game Show, and now we know why. Ubisoft is also "departing from the traditional season pass model" for AC Shadows, and anyone who pre-orders the game will now get the first expansion for free.

Apple has finally released its iOS 18 update to the public where it has included a slew of new, big features for users, along with some other smaller features the company didn't highlight, or just glazed over during its presentation. 

One of those features is the new charging capabilities, and before you get ahead of yourself, Apple hasn't suddenly increased the speed of which your phone can charge. However, Apple has made charging your phone at maximum speed much easier, as a new feature within iOS 18 will inform the user if the charging cable they are using is providing the maximum charge. 

After updating to iOS 18, a user can open their Settings application and navigate to Battery; an alert will pop up informing the user they are using a slower charging cable. Additionally, a slower charging cable will be displayed in the battery graph as an orange line. Unfortunately, the feature isn't as informative as I would like because it's not immediately clear how slow a charging cable has to be to qualify for an alter or orange line in the graph. 

In June NASA conducted an internal tabletop exercise where it gave a team 14 years to deflect a large asteroid that has a 72% chance of hitting Earth. NASA found it doesn't have clear decision-making processes for such a situation, there is a lack of global coordination infrastructure in place with other space agencies, no asteroid impact disaster management plans in place, and ultimately, a limited readiness to quickly implement needed space missions.

While just being a tabletop exercise and there luckily being no dangerous asteroid on the way, NASA underscored key holes in Earth's planetary defense system, holes that need to be filled with various systems and particularly responses to any potentially threatening asteroids. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission was one such response that proved Earth is capable of changing the orbit, and therefore trajectory, of an asteroid. When the news was confirmed, Earth just unlocked a new planetary defense weapon.

Unfortunately, there are problems with this method of asteroid prevention, and they are the time it takes for a launch to take place and the costs behind it. Another method has been proposed by Nathan Moore, a postdoctoral researcher at New Mexico's Sandia National Laboratories, who proved on a small scale that a powerful X-ray pulse fired at the surface of two different replica asteroids can alter their speed.

Stability AI has just announced that legendary filmmaker, technology innovator, and visual effects pioneer James Cameron has joined its Board of Directors.

Stability AI is the team behind the infamous Stable Diffusion AI model, with Cameron stepping up into the board of Stability AI as a driving force in cutting-edge technology with visionary storytelling, said the AI startup in its press release.

Cameron joining the Stability AI team represents a "represents a significant step forward in Stability AI's mission to transform visual media. Both Cameron and Stability AI operate at the intersection of emerging technology and creativity. Cameron's artist-centric perspective, paired with his business and technical acumen, will support Stability AI in continuing to unlock new opportunities to empower creators to tell stories in ways once unimaginable".

SpaceX is continuing to battle with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and in a new set of events, the Elon Musk-led company has posted a letter outlining what it claims to be "incorrect statements" made by FAA administrator Michael Whitaker.

On September 17, the FAA issued a proposal for a fine of $633,009 for a set of safety violations it claims SpaceX carried out during rocket launches in 2023. The proposal claimed the regulator didn't approve of two requests from SpaceX for a June 2023 launch of a Falcon rocket. According to the regulator SpaceX proceeded with the launch anyway. This violation amounted to $350,000, and the remainder was for a third violation with the Falcon Heavy launch that occurred in July 2023.

According to the FAA, SpaceX used an unapproved fuel farm as the source of the rocket's propellant, adding $283,009 to the total. SpaceX has now responded to these claims, writing it "rejects any allegations from FAA that SpaceX violated any laws." More specifically, SpaceX said it is false that it has launched without a permit, and all the Falcon missions outlined by the FAA the company received did receive licenses for.

Intel has officially launched its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, with the new AI chip coming in slower than NVIDIA's dominant H100 and its new HBM3E-fueled H200 AI GPUs, meaning Intel is aiming its Gaudi 3 by pushing that it's cheaper, and has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Inside, the new Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerator features two chiplets with 64 tensor processor cores (TPCs, 256x256 MAC structure with FP32 accumulators), eight matrix multiplication engines (MMEs, 256-bit wide vector processor), and 96MB of on-die SRAM cache with a 19.2TB/s bandwidth.

Gaudi 3 also features 24 x 200GbE networking interfaces and 14 media engines, with the media engines capable of handling H.265, H.264, and VP9 to support vision processing. Intel's new Gaudi 3 AI accelerator features 128GB of HBM2E memory with up to 3.67TB/sec of memory bandwidth.

One of the most amazing things that human civilization has created is the silicon chip, with semiconductor technology not just about the 'CPU' or the 'GPU' anymore... but rather advanced packaging technology is absolutely bleeding-edge, and now there's an awesome way to visualize just how amazing it is. Check this out:

ASE showed off a rather awesome model in Taiwan recently, which demonstrates the various components of advanced packaging, and how it is bound together through CoWoS (Chip On Wafer On Silicon). The center piece is the XPU or GPU logic die (this does the calculations) while surrounding that chip are multiple layers of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) which is made by SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron.

All of this delicious semiconductor tech is packaged together with microbumps onto the copper colored RDL, while underneath the silver-colored component is the silicon interposer. After that, everything is placed onto the substrate itself, which the likes of TSMC and Samsung working towards "radically new" semiconductor packaging technology called panel-level packaging, you can read more about that in the links below:

Concord was one of the biggest gaming release fails in recent memory, with the title attracting almost no attention during its first weekend on Steam (697 concurrent players), and ultimately Sony choosing to refund all gamers who purchased the $40 due to the title failing to reach critical mass for it to be viable.

Now, new information in the form of rumors has popped up, and if the rumors are true, the situation at Concord's developers Firewalk Studios will be much worse than initially anticipated. According to Colin Moriarty, a former video game journalist at IGN and now owner of Last Stand Media, sources have informed him Sony spent an astonishing $400 million on developing the game, with $200 million spent to get the game to an alpha in 2023, and another $200 million on outside developers to finish it off by its release.

Moriarty said Sony paid for most of Concord's budget and that it's the biggest budget of any game Sony has released, making the release of Concord Sony's biggest loss ever on a single game. Moriarty said internally Concord was referred to as "The Future of PlayStation" and that Sony believed it was a Star Wars-like project that would generate money for many years to come. An example of this would be episodic releases of the Concord cutscenes.

The new VisionMaster Pro 2 4K Projector is described as a movie theater in a box. That term could describe a range of projectors, including the JMGO N1S Ultra 4K Laser Projector we recently reviewed. However, the VisionMaster Pro 2 from Valerian promises to project a clear image up to 300 inches, which would rival a movie theater.

With IMAX-Enhanced and Filmmaker Modes for watching movies, it also sports gaming. Typically, input lag of latency sits way down the list of a projector's features, but the VisionMaster Pro 2 4K Projector sounds like it's as much for gaming as it is watching movies.

At 1080p with a 240 Hz refresh rate, you're looking at 4ms, which doubles to 8ms at 120 Hz. For 4K 60 FPS gaming, the input latency sits at a respectable 15ms. It is a far cry from OLED, but it is impressive for playing PlayStation 5 on a 100 or 300-inch screen.

The PC hardware market is experiencing what can only be considered a tumultuous time, which is resulting in price increases and a lack of consumer trust.

To put it in a nutshell, consumers are battling the woes and victories of the big three of PC hardware - NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. Firstly, Intel suffered a massive brand hit as consumers lost trust in the company's products following the debacle of 13th and 14th-generation CPUs and their power-related problems. On the other side of the CPU fence, AMD's latest Ryzen 9000 series CPUs were only just released and have fallen on deaf ears due to their disappointing gaming performance uplift compared to the uplifts seen in previous generations, particularly the jump from Zen 2 to Zen 3.

As for NVIDIA, the company is an example of how too much winning can eventually hurt consumers, as NVIDIA's incredible graphics card performance has led the company to absolutely dominate the discrete GPU space with more than 80% market share as of 2022. This domination and AMD's official withdrawal from producing high-end GPUs have resulted in NVIDIA being able to charge what it likes for its products, especially at the higher end of its product stack (RTX 4070 Super and above).

Logitech has launched the new MX Creative Console for digital creators and those who spend a lot of time inside Adobe apps. Designed to streamline workflows with instant access to essential controls, it looks like the Elgato Stream Deck. However, this isn't primarily aimed at PC gamers and streamers.

It comes equipped with tailored plugins for Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom Classic, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, and Adobe Illustrator, which makes it a highly sought-after tool for digital creators. OF course, it supports full customization to support a broader range of apps.

The MX Creative Console comprises two units: a keypad with dynamic display keys or buttons and a large dial-pad optimized for navigation. Video editors will immediately see how the MX Creative Console's design could streamline productivity just by looking at it.

The new Alienware Pro Headset, designed in collaboration with over 100 esports pros, including Team Liquid, blurs the lines between minimal stylish ANC streetwear and premium wireless PC gaming audio. In the works for over 18 months, the Alienware Pro Headset is the company's most advanced gaming headset.

At the heart of the new headset are the 50mm Graphene Coated Drivers designed to support and enhance directional audio, crucial for competitive games that rely on intricate sound design in shooters like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike 2. In addition, you've got Two-mic Noise Cancellation that will only pick up your voice while disregarding background audio.

In addition, it features Hybrid ANC for active noise cancellation, comfortable memory foam leatherette earcups, and a stylish design reminiscent of premium over-ear headphones.

The Federal Beureua of Investigations (FBI) has said that it's pursuit of a China-based botnet resulted in Chinese operators of the botnet "burning down" their network once they figured out the FBI was on to them.

The botnet consisted of 260,000 various internet-connected devices that were used to gather intelligence on critical US infrastructure, government operations, academics, and more. Notably, the botnet was operated by the "Integrity Technology Group," who FBI director Christopher Wray said is linked to the People's Republic of China.

More than half of the total devices within the botnet were located in the United States, and following its discovery, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI were called in to intervene. Wray said it was "all hands on deck" and after gaining court authorization, US officials took control of the botnet servers, which prompted a response by the People's Republic of China-linked group.

The new Turtle Beach Stealth 700 series is here, and they represent the company's latest premium wireless gaming headsets for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam Deck, and Switch. The hardware maker touts "massive upgrades" with the updated line-up, which includes the brand-new CrossPlay dual wireless transmitters.

As the name suggests, CrossPlay includes two wireless USB transmitters that allow games to switch between different audio sources with a button press. It's a very welcome quality-of-life upgrade for those who jump from PC to PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X when gaming. No more plugging and unplugging and then plugging in again - that's very cool.

The Turtle Beach Stealth 700 (Gen 3) also supports simultaneous low-latency 2.4 GHz wireless with Bluetooth 5.2, so players can stay connected to their smartphone while gaming.

SteelSeries has announced and launched its new Apex Pro Gen 3 keyboards for PC gamers. These keyboards are packed with cutting-edge features, including an industry-first. Described as the "World's Fastest Keyboard," the new OmniPoint 3.0 switches include the industry's first Hall Effect Gen 3 sensor.

For those who have heard about the 'Hall Effect,' these new switches include the technology to deliver a fast and more accurate response. As the latest version of the company's magnetic switch technology with 40 levels of adjustable actuation from 0.1mm up to 4.0mm, adding the 'Hall Effect' delivers "20x faster actuation and 11x quicker response time," according to SteelSeries.

This is compared to standard mechanical switches, which deliver a response time of just 0.54 ms. The competitive advantage extends to the company's GG software, which fully uses the new switches to offer gamers a suite of options and keyboard profiles.