Hello Games has gone all out with No Man's Sky, adding what looks to be one of the most hugely addictive updates yet: Simulated alien pet battles, Pokemon-style.

No Man's Sky's latest free Xeno Arena update is a true testament to nerdery. The update allows gamers to find, capture, and train their own xeno alien pets and then have them duke it out in turn-based combat. It very much feels like a Pokemon in space type of experience, and Hello Games has amped up the nerd dial to 11 by replicating the Dejarik alien chess board found in Star Wars.

"Find, train, and battle your pets for the ultimate rewards! Assemble your team and discover new xeno species with rare abilities. Genetically modify your eggs, and battle with friends. Together, your bond can overcome anything."

Anthropic's unreleased Claude Mythos is described as a "general-purpose, unreleased frontier model," but its coding capabilities are so powerful that it poses a real and unprecedented cybersecurity threat. According to the AI company, the Mythos Preview has already "found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities" in every major operating system and web browser.

Its coding capabilities are so strong that, apparently, only the "most skilled humans" could beat it at finding and exploiting these vulnerabilities. "Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely," Anthropic explains. "The fallout - for economies, public safety, and national security - could be severe."

And with that, Claude Mythos won't be getting a public release anytime soon, but it's currently being deployed as part of the new Project Glasswing initiative designed to "secure the world's most critical software."

Corsair is expanding its modular FRAME Series of cases for DIY builders with two new additions designed to appeal to those seeking a specific look or aesthetic. The new Corsair FRAME 4000X RS is all about RGB lighting, featuring a new RGB Flow front panel with 64 built-in, customizable RGB LEDs while maintaining the FRAME Series' impressive airflow.

The lights on the front panel can also be connected to a motherboard's +5V RGB header for syncing. The FRAME 4000X RS also includes four pre-installed 4x RS120 fans to maximize airflow out of the box, and the revamped design features a full-length tempered glass side panel to showcase your hardware. And to maintain a clean look, there's also a power supply shroud.

The next addition presents a very different look with the new Corsair FRAME 4000D WOOD RS, featuring a front panel made from a single piece of FSC-certified wood to maintain a uniform wood-grain pattern. Corsair notes that this FRAM variant is for those who want a more natural-looking case or something for a home office that doesn't scream "gaming."

Reviews for laptops and Copilot+ PCs featuring Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 Elite processor have begun to appear online, and the second-generation Windows on Arm platform is proving to be a winner in areas like battery life and even GPU-accelerated workloads.

However, as the original Snapdragon X Elite struggled to even run games due to the Windows PRISM emulation layer required to play most titles, one of the big questions with this second generation is how gaming performance compares to the latest iGPU offerings from AMD and Intel. Right off the bat, the good news is that game compatibility appears to have dramatically improved.

The review from Hardware Canucks notes that 9 out of 12 games in its benchmark suite run fine on the new Snapdragon X2 Elite processor, with online titles like ARC Raiders, PUBG, and Battlefield 6 failing to load due to anti-cheat technologies. As for performance in games that run, it's mostly positive but also a mixed bag, with inconsistent performance and issues that go beyond FPS numbers.

A new report by industry analyst Tim Culpan confirms what we've previously reported: Apple's affordable new MacBook Neo is a success. So much so that it has apparently surpassed Apple's expectations, and the company now finds itself in a bit of a weird spot about whether to boost production or let it sell out and focus on next year's refresh.

The reason for this comes down to the MacBook Neo's unique design, in that it's powered by the same A18 Pro chip found in the previous generation's iPhone 16 Pro. According to sources close to the MacBook Neo's design, it uses leftover chips from the original A18 Pro production run, including some with defects, which is why it only features a 5-core GPU rather than the 6-core GPU in the iPhone 16 Pro.

And with that, the problem Apple is now facing is that it's going to run out of MacBook Neo laptops long before it can meet demand for the device. Tim Culpan notes that the original plan was to build around 5 to 6 million units, and if Apple wants to make more, it will need to make more A18 Pro chips, which are built on TSMC's 3nm N3E process. And yes, this popular node is basically sold out.

As spotted by VideoCardz, it looks like ASUS has just increased the prices of its flagship RDNA 4 offerings in the US: the ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition and the ASUS TUF GAMING Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition. Although there has been no official word from ASUS of the increase, the new prices are already up on the official store and have even made their way to retailers like Amazon and B&H.

Based on the double-digit percentage increase, this appears to be a direct response to AMD raising prices on its 16GB GPUs amid the current memory crisis affecting the wider industry. The ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT has seen its price increase from $799.99 to $939.99, a 17.5% increase, which is reflected on the aggregate site PCPartPicker.

As for the flagship ASUS TUF GAMING Radeon RX 9070 XT, its price has risen from $849.99 to $989.99, a 16.5% increase. Although the $599 MSRP set by AMD for the Radeon RX 9070 XT has never really been a reality for most Radeon RX 9070 XT models, this new price for the TUF GAMING variant represents a massive 65% increase over what some gamers were able to spend to pick up a Radeon RX 9070 XT at launch.

UPDATE: As of this morning, April 8, Starfield is currently the #9 best-selling game on the US PlayStation Store.

Starfield came out today on the PlayStation 5, but Bethesda's new RPG faces strong-selling rivals on the US PlayStation Store.

Today, Bethesda's latest game Starfield came out on PS5. This is yet another marquee PS5 release for Xbox as the company continues moving away from platform-exclusive content. Current standings on the US PlayStation store show that Starfield is facing some pretty steep competition, with the game not breaking into the top 10 best-selling games on the US-based store.

Overclocking wizard and PC enthusiast Der8auer delidded Intel's latest Core Ultra 7 270K Plus to see how far he could push the CPU. He found his specific sample was capable of achieving 5.8GHz on the P-cores and 5.3GHz on the E-cores after delidding the chip. With this configuration, he was able to achieve a Cinebench R23 score 11% better than stock speed and outperform his own previous R23 runs with a delidded and overclocked Core Ultra 9 285K.

Der8auer showed his overclocking process and how to delid the 270K Plus with special tools. The YouTuber revealed that delidding LGA 1851 CPUs is more difficult compared to AMD Ryzen and previous-generation Intel CPUs. Delidding the CPU the usual way by prying the IHS away from the die could damage the chip.

To remedy this, Der8auer built a heating solution when the Core Ultra 9 285K first came out to address this problem on Arrow Lake-S processors. The heating process involves running the chip up to almost 170C to melt the indium metal connecting the die to the IHS, moving the IHS in one direction, then heating the CPU a second time to remove the IHS. Der8auer successfully used this method to delid his Core Ultra 7 270K Plus.

Someone at Intel seems to be hard at work updating the product pages recently, and in the process, announcing new CPUs. We recently reported on the Core Ultra 7 251HX, a mobile chip in the Arrow Lake-HX lineup, which was quietly made official when its product page went live without any announcement. Now, another CPU is following the same trend, this time from the Panther Lake lineup.

The Core Ultra X9 378H is a new CPU that is part of Intel's high-end Core Ultra 300 lineup. It features a 16-core/16-thread configuration with 4 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and 4 LPE cores. Its P-core boost clock is 5.0 GHz, while the E-cores can boost up to 3.8 GHz. The chip's base TDP is 25W, with a maximum turbo power rating of 80W. None of these specs are exactly groundbreaking, but the Core Ultra X9 378H still has its place in the lineup for one reason.

On closer inspection, it's apparent that the Core Ultra X9 378H is identical to the already existing Core Ultra X7 368H. Both CPUs have the same 16-core/16-thread layouts, and even the underlying core clocks, TDP, and iGPU specs are the same. It even has the same 18MB of L3 cache and supports LPDDR5X at 9600 MT/s. So why did Intel bother releasing the same CPU with just a different name?

State of Decay 3 was first revealed back in 2020 ahead of the Xbox Series X and S launch, with a cinematic trailer and no gameplay. The teaser showcased ambitious elements for the zombie sandbox series, with zombie deer as the highlight. But the truth is, outside the broad outlines and early prototyping, the game barely existed beyond a Word document at the time.

In an interview with Sunny Games, Undead Labs studio head Philip Holt confirmed, following the reveal of State of Decay 3's May 2026 alpha playtest, that the 2020 trailer was based entirely on a concept.

"So that trailer, there really wasn't a game or game team when we were working on that trailer, like, it was so early," he said, adding that the core team at the time consisted of just four to five people. When asked about the zombified animals featured in the trailer, Holt said, "No zombie deer!"

The fourth Call of Duty game will soon be available on the middle tier of Xbox Game Pass, indicating more parts of Microsoft's multi-faceted plan for the franchise.

Microsoft's main goal with Call of Duty is conversion. The company isn't trying to replicate Activision's success, but adapt the $35 billion+ mega-hit franchise into a more flexible ecosystem of long-term spending. By adding something like Call of Duty to a subscription like Game Pass, Microsoft has turned the property into a kind of perpetual, living entity that drives significant value for its service, with the aim of capturing recurring subscription revenues and microtransaction spending.

Given what we know about Microsoft's business model, it then seems noteworthy when a new Call of Duty game is added to Game Pass, especially when it's included in the middle-grade, $14.99/month Game Pass Premium tier. It's been revealed that Modern Warfare (2019) is being added to the Premium tier, making it the fourth AAA mainline Call of Duty game being added.

Time to go back to the past: OG YouTuber The Angry Video Game Nerd recently turned 20, and the nerd himself James Rolfe has released previously-unseen footage that was left on the cutting room floor.

AVGN just hit a milestone that feels like something out of a time-traveling episode of a sci-fi TV show: The old-school Cinemassacre YouTube channel just celebrated its 20th anniversary--feel old yet?--by releasing a never-before-seen clip of unused footage for a lost AVGN episode. The video took a closer look at the odd Miracle Piano teaching game on the NES, which came with a fully-fledged piano keyboard.

The footage itself gives a rare glimpse at behind-the-scenes AVGN footage, and since it's incomplete and not finalized, things are janky and Rolfe himself is practicing script runs with somewhat dry execution (which fits the old episodes). The jokes also don't hit as hard, but that's to be expected because no audio or visual effects were put in.

The 2013 Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is, without a doubt, one of the best games in the Assassin's Creed franchise. It was genre-defining at the time, bringing an open-world Caribbean setting, naval combat, a compelling redemption story, and world design and art direction that still hold up today. So when Ubisoft confirmed in a blog post dedicated to the series' future that a remake titled Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced was in development, you could probably guess how gamers felt.

Now a reliable insider hints that the release is closer than expected. According to this source, the remake could be announced next week in mid-April, with a release expected sometime this summer. Rumors initially pointed to a first-quarter 2026 release, but that didn't happen. With Ubisoft's recent layoffs, things were starting to look bleak for the remake, but it seems the project is very much alive.

This comes from Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming, who claims, "from what I understand, it's going to be announced in mid-April and then released in the summer." Previously, a PEGI rating suggested an earlier announcement, but with that window now closed, hopes are pinned on mid-April for official confirmation.

If one of the reasons that you're not so keen on the idea of streaming your games via GeForce Now is some of the downsides to NVIDIA's service in terms of privacy, then you might want to check out a new open-source project.

Tom's Hardware spotted OpenNow, which is a project on GitHub that provides a different version of the GeForce Now client - and it is, in fact, entirely different.

As the developer of the app made clear on Reddit: "I built OpenNow, a fully reverse-engineered open-source GeForce Now client. It is not a wrapper around the official client. It directly implements the required protocols and streaming logic."

Tesla's TeraFab project is a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, dubbed by Elon Musk as "the most epic chip-building exercise in history." Tesla claims its $25 billion Austin chip factory would roughly match 70% of TSMC's current global output. This would allow Tesla to reduce its reliance on foundries like TSMC and Samsung by building domestic semiconductor production lines capable of producing chips at volumes significantly larger than those of any other foundry.

However, given that Tesla has no node IP or semiconductor industry experience, many were skeptical about how a car company, a rocket company, and an AI startup could develop 2nm-class process technology from scratch and scale it to 1 million. The most likely path forward was always a partnership with an existing foundry, and it appears Intel has now been chosen for that role.

Intel confirmed its involvement in the TeraFab project on its official X page, stating that it aims to help TeraFab reach 1 trillion watts of compute per year for future AI and robotics workloads.

You might well be considering cost-cutting measures if you are in the market for a new PC right now, but odds are you won't be doing anything as drastic as switching back to use DDR3 RAM.

However, there is apparently some demand for the older memory standard now - thanks to the RAM crisis - to the point where Colorful could be set to produce old motherboards that are built for DDR3.

Or so a post on Channel Gate claims (as highlighted by VideoCardz), although given the source, I'd load this up with more than the usual amount of skepticism.

Sony will scan gamers and put them into PlayStation games as part of a new initiative, The Playerbase.

PlayStation fans will soon have the chance to appear in actual games. It's part of Sony's new program, The Playerbase, which uses advanced Sony capture technology to take the likenesses of real-life fans and put them into digital games. How this works will be different for each game, and the first title to use it, Gran Turismo 7, will have a more limited use of a player's likeness--instead of a full 3D scan, the selected fan will be shown as an in-game portrait with other customization options.

"We're introducing The Playerbase, a unique opportunity for PlayStation's biggest fans to step into some of the biggest game worlds by having their likeness scanned and appear within a PlayStation game," Sony said on the PlayStation Blog.

We've all seen the fancy tech that some graphics card makers have implemented to help save owners from melting cable disasters, but there's a new way to protect your GPU apparently - namely to get yourself a tech-savvy cat.

As reported on the PTT Bulletin Board System (BBS) in Taiwan - which is regarded as the equivalent of Reddit for the country - the owner of an RTX 4090 was saved by the call of their cat.

The tale, spotted by VideoCardz, goes like this: the PC enthusiast went to the toilet, only to hear the meowing of the cat, so they rushed back to notice smoke emanating from the computer and a burning smell.

NVIDIA formally announced and unveiled its Pascal architecture during the launch of the Tesla P100 accelerator a decade ago. Ten years to the day, basically, and although it would take a few weeks for the first Pascal-powered desktop gaming GPU to hit the market, the architecture led to the arrival of some of the most iconic PC gaming graphics cards - including the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and the GeForce GTX 1060.

So iconic that the mainstream GeForce GTX 1060 is still one of the most popular PC gaming GPUs according to the latest data from Steam, which shows us that as of March 2026, there are more 1060s out there than any single Radeon GPU. Although the flagship GeForce GTX 1080 Ti didn't arrive until 2017, it offered such a massive performance increase over anything else that it only recently began to feel obsolete due to its lack of dedicated AI hardware and DLSS support.

The Pascal architecture was a game-changer in the data center space, especially for AI and other applications, but for gamers, its debut arrived with the GeForce GTX 1080 on May 17, 2016, built on Pascal's efficient 16nm FinFET process with 8GB of GDDR5X memory. It was the first GPU to power 4K 120 Hz gaming via DisplayPort 1.4, while also leveraging architectural improvements to elevate VR and 3D gaming. Yes, 2017 was a very different time.

TVs have been getting bigger and bigger, a trend that has held true for decades. In 2026, a 65-inch widescreen TV is considered the 'big screen' standard in several markets, but stroll through any home entertainment section in a big-box electronics store today, and a 65-inch TV will look relatively small or even unimpressive compared to the increasingly prevalent 75-inch and larger models.

Which begs the question, at what point do panels become so large that big-screen TVs are no longer practical or even feasible to install in a modern household or apartment? As in, you've got no choice but to design, build, and furnish a room around the idea of a massive TV.

Well, according to LG's 2026 QNED evo Mini LED TV Lineup, we might have the answer. In addition to the more standard sizes, LG is launching a pair of "ultra-large" models: 115-inch and 100-inch. Yes, a 115-inch TV is massive and would fill up an entire wall in most living rooms, and even though it's probably "too big" for a lot of living room spaces, it's hard not to be impressed by the fact that we've now reached a point where an impressive and readily available 115-inch TV is a reality.