Latest News - Page 46

When Valve finally lifted the lid on its long-rumored Steam Machine late last year, hardware skin and accessory maker Dbrand began teasing a Steam Machine Companion Cube skin modeled and inspired by the Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube found in Valve's Portal and Portal 2, with the iconic heart design that doubles as a nod to the not-so-nice AI GLaDOS that messes with players. So yeah, getting a Steam Machine 'Companion Cube' skin feels like a match made in heaven, or Test Chamber 17.

According to Dbrand, over 15,000 people registered their interest in picking up the Steam Machine 'Companion Cube' late last year. And although the recent Steam Machine launch meant that the skin would finally go on sale, it turns out Dbrand forgot to ask Valve for permission to create something based on one of its most recognized properties.

It wasn't too long ago that we began to hear rumblings that NVIDIA was planning to re-release the Ampere-era GeForce RTX 3060 as a response to the current component and memory crisis. The idea is that it would be a more cost-effective mainstream solution due to its use of 12GB of GDDR6 memory compared to the more advanced GDDR7 memory found on the GeForce RTX 50 Series lineup, including the GeForce RTX 5060.

According to a new report from the German outlet hardwareLUXX, the GeForce RTX 3060's return with GDDR6 memory has arrived, with a brand-new ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC V2 popping up in various retail outlets. The report notes that the lowest price of 333.64 EUR (about $380 USD) is notably higher than the RTX 3060's historic price of 245 EUR.

Although the big selling point compared to 8GB cards like the GeForce RTX 5050, RTX 5060, and RTX 5060 Ti 8GB is the increased VRAM capacity, the value proposition compared to the more affordable GeForce RTX 5060 is questionable based on the improved DLSS 4.5 support that includes Dynamic Frame Generation not being available. Even when it comes to raw 1080p and even 1440p gaming performance in titles that aren't VRAM capacity constrained, the GeForce RTX 5060 is still decidedly faster.

Just over a week ago, AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.6.2 Driver was released for Radeon GPUs, and it was something of a surprise drop as it introduced FSR 4.1 Upscaling support to RDNA 3 graphics cards earlier than expected. For many Radeon RX 7000 Series owners, including those with the previous-gen Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagship, it was akin to getting a free double-digit performance upgrade.

However, not long after the driver was released, users began reporting errors when trying to get the new Adrenalin software to fire up on Windows 10. AMD, to its credit, responded in a timely fashion, advising users to roll back as it worked on a solution. And it arrived a few days later as the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.6.3 Hotfix Preview Driver, a non-WHQL release to resolve the problem and get RDNA 3 gamers on board with the FSR 4.1 hype train.

Cut to this week, and we've now got the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.6.4 Driver, an official WHQL release for Radeon RX 7000 Series owners that resolved the Windows 10 issue alongside fixing crashes in "some games" when enabling FSR 4.1 Upscaling.

MetaPCs is launching a new prebuilt gaming PC with SteamOS installed, making it one of, if not the first, pre-built manufacturers to ship a product with the same operating system powering the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. Dubbed the "Steamroller", the SteamOS-powered pre-built starts at $1,299 and comes in a Micro-ATX form factor.

The Steamroller is geared towards Steam Machine buyers as an alternative solution featuring fully upgradable parts. The system features standard PC components including a Ryzen 5 9600X, RX 7600, 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory, B650M/B850M motherboard with onboard WiFi, 240mm AIO liquid cooler, 1TB NVMe SSD and 650W PSU. MetaPCs is also providing the system with an optional warranty costing $180 for two years or $240 for three years.

Pricing of MetaPC's Steam Machine competitor is in the same price range as the Steam Machine (the 2TB variant costs $1,349 at the time of writing), but comes with noticeably faster hardware. The Ryzen 9600X in the Steamroller features six standard Zen 4 cores with a clock speed of up to 5.4 GHz and a 65W TDP. By contrast, the Steam Machine's Zen 4 CPU comes with a mixture of Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores, a turbo boost frequency of up to 4.8GHz and a 30W TDP. GPU performance is more similar between the two systems; regardless, the RX 7600 in the Steamroller is beefier than the Steam Deck's GPU with more compute units, higher clock speed, and much higher TDP. The RX 7600 features 32 CUs, a 2.65 GHz boost clock, and a 165W TDP. The custom GPU in the Steam Machine features 28 CUs, 2.45GHz sustained clock speed, and 110W TDP.

Sony management explains what's next for PlayStation, says that profit is now the #1 main goal for the brand as the company navigates the new normal of high-cost hardware production.

The ongoing RAMpocalypse is forcing console-makers to re-think their business strategies. PlayStation, the market-leader by revenue, now says that it will focus more on immediate profits than grand long-term goals. This is an interesting thing to say when PlayStation just reported its best-ever yearly operating profit in history with over $3.10 billion profit made on $31 billion gross sales--a triumphant return to double-digit USD-converted profits with a 10% margin.

In a recent Q&A with investors, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino highlights PlayStation's current business priorities. The group is shifting its focus away from raw monthly active user (MAU) growth and more towards making more profit on a per-user basis--this metric is called LTV, or lifetime value, and represents how much money a PS5 owner spends over a period. Sony says that the typical PS5 customer's LTV was $846 as of March 2025, and the company seeks to increase it.

AMD is actively working on a trimmed-down version of FSR 4 for RDNA 3/3.5 iGPUs, but there is no confirmation of when it will be arriving. In the meantime, a YouTuber has discovered a method of injecting FSR 4 at the driver level that works with RDNA 3/3.5 iGPUs. Channel AncientGameplays published a video showing how to do this using a third-party tool known as RadeonTuner.

RadeonTuner is designed to serve as a lightweight alternative to AMD's Adrenalin software. The application is functionally very similar to Adrenalin, with support for GPU overclocking and fan tuning. The application also allows users to change driver-related graphics settings and display settings. The main feature AncientGameplays was most interested in is the app's built-in overrides for FSR upscaling, frame generation and ray regeneration.

In testing with Spider-Man 2, the YouTuber discovered that RadeonTuner uses the same FSR override method as AMD's Adrenalin software to inject newer iterations of FSR into games. With the FSR override disabled, Spider-Man 2 showed upscaling support for FSR 3.1.5, but turning on the override changed the FSR version in-game to FSR 4.1.1. Spider-Man 2 also showed an asterisk next to the FSR 4.1.1 name, confirming the FSR version was being injected from the GPU driver. The YouTuber also tested several games using this FSR override method using a Strix Halo APU with an RDNA 3.5 iGPU and found it worked almost flawlessly (some issues with shadows and reflections reportedly occur at aggressive upscaling settings).

The shift from physical media to digital libraries and streaming has been a major one for the entertainment industry, whether you're talking about games, movies, or music. Thanks to the convenience of digital media, the era of physical media is ending, or at the very least, becoming a niche market for collectors. However, it's worth remembering that a digital purchase and accessing a digital library are very different things from a shelf full of discs. It's license-based, and it can disappear at any moment.

Case in point: Sony has just informed PlayStation users in Europe that, from September 1, 2026, all previously purchased Studio Canal movies and series will be removed and no longer accessible. It's a long list of titles, including classics like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Highlander, From Dusk Till Dawn, Apocalypse Now, and more.

Basically, Sony's content licensing agreement with Studio Canal is ending, and users who purchased these movies or shows will no longer be able to access them. Sony's communication doesn't mention refunds or any form of compensation either.

Last week, Apple raised prices across its entire hardware line. It was a decision born of the steep increase in component costs, specifically memory and storage, made because the situation had become "untenable" and it was no longer possible to shield its customers from rising manufacturing and procurement costs. The MacBook Pro saw one of the steepest price increases, by $300, specifically because of its advanced processor, memory, and storage configuration.

The situation has reached the point where Apple is reportedly lobbying the US government and the Trump administration to allow it to buy memory chips from the Chinese company CXMT without ramifications. As for why it's lobbying the government, well, CXMT is currently on a list of companies that US-based tech giants like Apple shouldn't engage with due to alleged ties to the Chinese military.

Apparently, this Pentagon list doesn't have any legal ramifications: companies aren't explicitly banned or in legal trouble for procuring memory from a company like CXMT. However, CXMT is apparently also on another US Commerce Department list for a trade blacklist, which would certainly prohibit any such agreement with Apple for memory.

Although this is an issue that has been developing for over a year, the current memory crisis feels like it's accelerating (in the wrong direction) on account of existing stockpiles drying up and the fact that every consumer tech company, big or small, is now paying exponentially more than they were a year ago. This is why we've been seeing a string of recent price increase announcements from companies like Apple and Microsoft, and will probably see several more as the months roll on.

Throw in comments from big players like Lenovo saying that there's basically no end in sight, and we've now got even more bad news to throw into the mix. A new report from Jefferies Equity Research reinforces the bleak outlook, stating that memory prices will increase by another 40-50% in Q3 2026. And that's 40-50% on top of the current inflated prices.

Of course, it doesn't stop there. The research and analyst firm is also predicting that in Q4 2026, pricing will increase by another 30-40%. And with that, it's not hard to see why Apple's MacBook Pro is getting a $300 price increase, and the almost six-year-old Xbox Series X console is getting its price increased by $150. And to make the situation feel that extra bit existential, 2027 will also see price increases of around 40-45%.

Sony's foray into first- and third-party "live service" games for the PlayStation 5 generation has been widely reported on and criticized by fans for its impact on cinematic single-player games. Case in point: the studio behind Uncharted and The Last of Us, Naughty Dog, spent several years working on a Last of Us live-service multiplayer game that was subsequently canceled. The thinking here is that it could have invested that time into a third single-player game or something else.

Throw in recent high-profile failures like Concord, the lukewarm response to Horizon Zero Dawn spin-off Horizon Hunters Gathering, and the 'competitive heist game' Fairgame$ being missing-in-action, and you get the impression that Sony is probably looking to adjust its approach to focusing on massive live-service games. Or, at the very least, realize how difficult it is to create a live service smash hit, as Bungie's Marathon (pictured above) continues to draw a small but passionate fanbase.

In a recent interview with Japanese publication Famitsu (translated), Hideaki Nishino, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), was asked about the company's live-service game strategy with the context of Concord and Marathon failing to make an impact or meet expectations.

According to analysts, Grand Theft Auto 6 is on track to deliver the biggest gaming and entertainment launch of all time in terms of revenue when it launches on November 19, 2026. And without a PC version on day one, gamers and fans have two options: pick up the game on PlayStation 5 or PlayStation 5 Pro, or buy it for Xbox Series X|S.

Starting from $80 US, pre-orders for the game went live last week. And according to a post from IGN's social media account, per data from its affiliate linking program, PlayStation 5 pre-orders for GTA 6 are outperforming Xbox Series X|S pre-orders by a factor of 8X. Which means for every eight PS5 pre-orders, there's one for Xbox.

Now, when you factor in that there are exponentially more PS5 consoles out there than current-gen Xbox hardware, and that Grand Theft Auto 6's marketing deal with Sony has seen this pre-order announcement paired with "plays best on PlayStation 5" style taglines, it's not unsurprising. However, in a follow-up statement provided to Windows Central, an Xbox representative has said that this 8-to-1 figure "doesn't represent pre-order data."

I stopped playing Valorant a while back, but Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat has been running at boot ever since, whether I play or not. That is finally changing. Riot Games has announced Vanguard On-Demand, an update that stops the Vanguard driver from loading at Windows startup. With Vanguard On-Demand, the anti-cheat runs only when you launch a Riot title like Valorant or League of Legends. Once you close the game, Vanguard shuts down automatically. But there is a catch.

The catch is a security checklist Riot calls Vanguard Pre-Check. To switch to on-demand mode, your PC needs to be running at least Windows 11 25H2 with Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, Virtualization-Based Security, Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity, and IOMMU all enabled.

What makes On-Demand possible is the work Riot did with Microsoft's Xbox OS Security Team on a Windows feature called Runtime Driver Attestation Report, which keeps a record of every driver loaded since startup. From there, Vanguard can check at launch whether anything suspicious was loaded while it was inactive.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a way to restore old lithium-ion batteries to up to 95% of their original power. The method, called Direct Electrode-to-Electrode Regeneration, or DEER, does so without shredding, without complicated chemical processes, and at much lower cost than conventional recycling.

As lithium-ion batteries get older, a layer called the solid electrolyte interphase, or SEI, slowly forms on the electrodes. A thin SEI layer is actually needed for the battery to work, but after many charge cycles, it thickens, increasing resistance and reducing capacity. This buildup is the main reason electric vehicle batteries and energy storage systems are replaced, even when the rest of the battery is still in good condition.

Conventional recycling addresses this by shredding strong electrodes into a black, powdery material called black mass, then using energy-intensive chemical processes to extract important minerals to make new electrodes. DEER uses a completely different method. The electrodes are removed intact, soaked in an electrochemical bath that cleanly removes the SEI layer, and then returned to a new battery. This process also leaves a thin layer of lithium fluoride that helps keep the electrode stable and slows down future wear.

Power-related issues have been a running theme with NVIDIA's RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 cards. Despite newer 16-pin standards that were meant to be safer, repair shops and media outlets have become familiar with these cards ending up on their benches. The latest case out of Vietnam shows some of the worst power-related damage we have seen yet, severe enough to completely destroy a GPU and its VRAM.

The report comes from Vietnamese GPU repair outlet quyle.gpufix, which received two RTX 5090 cards for repair. The first had already been tampered with before arrival, arriving with no power, no GPU detection, and a missing A1 VRAM package. That card was repaired and returned the same day. The second was a different story entirely.

The second RTX 5090 had its 16-pin connector blown out completely, leaving no physical trace. The burn damage was severe enough to expose the copper layers of the PCB, and the destruction extended to both the GPU die and the VRAM, rendering them dead. Out of two cards, only one made it out.

A post in r/steammachine this week flagged what appears to be a white mini PC styled after Valve's Steam Machine, apparently available in China for around 4,680 RMB, or roughly $688. That appears to be an unbelievable value by comparison, since Valve's Gabe-cube starts at $1,049, and that's without a Steam Controller.

The listing claims that the higher-end configuration comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 processor, an RX 6750 GRE 10GB GPU, 16GB of DDR5 memory, a JGINYUE B350I-PLUS motherboard, and a whopping 2TB of M.2 NVMe storage. We inspected the listing further and immediately spotted problems.

First, the Ryzen 5 5500 is an AM4 desktop processor, and AM4 does not support DDR5 memory. That's a basic compatibility error, and it's one of the first things anyone who knows the platform would catch. The B350I-PLUS is also an AM4 board, which only supports DDR4. So the DDR5 claim in the listing is simply wrong.

Windows 11 has some pretty strict hardware requirements that have made it difficult for many to upgrade from Windows 10. TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and a relatively modern CPU are among them, and Microsoft has been firm about them. But a modder going by "Omores" has now decided to call that bluff, getting Windows 11 running on a platform from the early 2000s powered by DDR1 memory.

The system is built around an ASRock ConRoe865PE motherboard with an Intel i865PE chipset, a board regarded as something of a legend among hardware collectors for bridging generations. It allowed users to run Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors while keeping DDR1 memory and AGP graphics. Omores took advantage of exactly that flexibility, pairing the board with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, a 65nm quad-core CPU that gives the platform enough grunt to be genuinely usable.

The GPU situation required the most work. The system uses an ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card, and getting AGP acceleration working on Windows 11 meant hunting down Windows 7 64-bit ATI drivers from 2012 and forcing them onto the system with a custom INF file. The effort paid off, with AGP 8X fully functional and H.264 hardware decoding active. The system also boots from a Toshiba SATA SSD.

Hardware insider Kepler_L2, who has a solid track record of leaking GPU architecture details, has posted an updated PlayStation 6 bill-of-materials estimate on NeoGAF. According to the update, the BOM now sits at around $960. In March, he had the figure at $760, with a $699 retail price still on the table, with a reasonable subsidy. That window is looking a lot narrower now.

The BOM (or bill of materials) is simply the cost of components needed to build a single unit. It doesn't include labor, R&D, marketing, or logistics. It is basically the sum total of the hardware cost, and that's not all it takes to build a console. That means $760, or now $960, would just be the starting point for Sony's costs, not the final number.

Sony has almost always sold consoles below cost at launch, making back the margin through game sales and PlayStation Network. That math gets harder as the BOM climbs. Consoles have traditionally been subsidized by only around $100 to $200, which means a $999 launch price is still plausible, but a higher one isn't impossible if costs keep rising before 2027.

With Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced just under two weeks from launch, someone posted the game's full opening half-hour on Chinese video platform Bilibili. The footage surfaced barely 24 hours after Ubisoft sent the game out to creators and media. Video quality is rough, apparently captured off a review build, but it's enough to confirm quite a bit about what Ubisoft has built.

The opening plays out largely as you'd expect, with the remake looking like a faithful reimagining of the 2013 original. That said, a few things have changed. New scenes have been added before the Duncan Walpole boss fight, and viewers who watched the footage noted the extended intro makes Duncan look considerably more incompetent than he did in the original. Whether that's an improvement is going to be subjective, but it's a clear creative choice to flesh out his backstory before Edward deals with him.

The other notable change is a fix Ubisoft apparently made after fan feedback. In the original reveal trailer, Edward's leap of faith was performed awkwardly, drawing comparisons to how Eivor handled it in Valhalla before the tutorial. In the final game, it's been corrected. That one quietly slipped through, but players caught it immediately during the showcase months ago, and it seems like Ubisoft has listened.

The console sales numbers for May are in, and they're bad. Market research firm Circana has published its US video game hardware data for May 2026, and the console market just had one of its worst months in living memory. Xbox hardware unit sales in May 2026 were the lowest ever recorded for any May month. PlayStation didn't do much better, posting its worst May unit sales since 2000. That's not a typo; we're talking pre-PS2 territory for Sony.

The culprit, to no one's surprise, is the usual suspect: memory shortage. The average price paid for new video game hardware hit $502 in May, up 14% from $440 a year ago. The average PS5 was selling for $672, a 33% jump year-on-year, while the average Xbox Series unit sat at $524, up 22%. Those aren't small jumps either.

Sony took by far the worst of it. PlayStation spending dropped 43% year-on-year, with unit sales collapsing 58%. That's a freefall if I've ever seen one. When a PS5 disc edition costs $650, and the PS5 Pro has ballooned to $900, people start holding on to their wallets.

At the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Lenovo executive director Martin Hiegl delivered what was intended as a joke but landed like a gut punch. When asked about the memory price outlook, he told the room that prices will "never" come back down to where they were before the crisis. The laughter that followed from the audience was probably nervous.

To be fair, Lenovo and ComputerBase (who first reported the comments) were clear that "never" is relative. Hiegl was really talking about the next five or more years, with prices expected to remain structurally higher through 2030 and beyond. Still, the underlying analysis is dead serious, and that leaves us worried.

According to Lenovo's presentation, DRAM and NAND began their rapid climb in late Q3 2025, and have since hit levels the industry itself did not see coming. Even with continued capacity expansion by major manufacturers, prices are highly unlikely to return to early-2025 levels.