Rest easy: GTA 6 won't be delayed because of the recent game actors' strike, a spokesperson has confirmed to Kotaku.

Last night, the SAG-AFTRA union advised all game actors to go on strike due to concerns with AI. Unionized performers across all disciplines--motion capture, stunt people, and voice-over artists--are now on strike until proper resolutions can be made with billion-dollar publishers like Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Take-Two Interactive. This will have an immediate effect on in-production games and could lead to heavy delays at a time when the industry is already struggling.

Luckily, Grand Theft Auto 6 is not among the impacted projects. That's despite Take-Two, the parent company of GTA 6 developer Rockstar Games, being involved in the ongoing negotiations. "I can confirm GTA VI is exempt," Audrey Cooling, a spokesperson representing the game producers, told Kotaku.

TEAMGROUP has just launched its new T-FORCE GC PRO Gen5 SSD, powered by the InnoGrit "Tacoma" IG5666 controller with slower speeds than the T-FORCE GE PRO that the company launched back in January 2024.

The new TEAMGROUP T-FORCE GC PRO Gen5 SSD comes in both 2TB and 4TB capacities, with maximum sequential reads of up to 12.5GB/sec (12,500MB/sec) and sequential writes of up to 11GB/sec (11,000MB/sec). The new GC PRO Gen5 SSD is aimed at the lower price points, with the 2TB Gen5 SSD featuring 1200 TBW (terabytes written) and the 4TB Gen5 SSD with 2400 TBW.

TEAMGROUP doesn't have the fastest Gen5 SSD on the market, Sabrent takes the position there, but it's yet another Gen5 SSD on the market. The more, the better... slowly giving us more options, different price points, and a fleet of super-fast Gen5-ready SSDs for AMD Ryzen 9000 series and Intel Core Ultra 200 series CPU owners of the new future.

ASRock has just unveiled its latest passively-cooled graphics cards, with the new ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX Passive 24GB and RX 7900 XT Passive 20GB graphics cards.

The new ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT Passive series graphics cards have been designed for multi-card parallel computing for better performance. ASRock uses a vapor chamber heatsink, efficient aluminum cooling devices, and V-shaped cutting.

Interstingly, ASRock has used a single horizontal 12V-2x6 power connector, so that you can install multiple ASRock Radeon RX 7900 Passive series graphics cards without as many cables running to (multiple) graphics cards.

The CrowStrike Windows outage will go down in history as one of the biggest ever seen, as millions of PCs tied to industries like travel, healthcare, and government services experienced the dreaded Blue Screen of Death or BSOD last week.

Still fresh in everyone's minds, Jak and Kosta spend a big chunk of this week's episode of The TT Show talking about the CrowdStrike Windows outage, what caused it, and how the simple fix of manually booting into Windows Recovery turned out to be a massive undertaking when you're looking at millions of computers and a finite number of tech support specialists.

In this week's massive episode, it's not all CrowdStrike. Jak and Kosta also discuss Intel's ongoing CPU troubles and the controversy surrounding the flagship Core i9 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors. Intel has released an official statement, but is it enough?

SK hynix announced that its board has approved its Yongin Semiconductor Cluster investment plan, which will be home to the "world's largest mega fab complex". Check it out:

The South Korean memory giant has approved 9.4 trillion won in building the first fab and business facilities at its new Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, with SK hynix designs to start construction of its first fab to be built in the Yongin cluster in March 2025, and have it complete by May 2027.

SK hynix says it will make every effort to build the fab to lay the foundation for the company's future growth and respond to the rapidly increasing demand for AI memory semiconductors. The new Yongin Semiconductor Cluster will be built on a huge 4.15 million square meter site in Wonsam-myeon, Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, and is currently under site preparation and infrastructure construction.

Earlier this year Reddit announced it was making changes to its API that prohibited any scraping of its data without payment. The change resulted in an uproar on the social media platform and then total darkness as subreddits were abandoned to stand in solidarity with third-party app designers who could no longer access Reddit's data unless they paid for it.

Reddit took the same stance against third-party apps with search engines and any other company that was looking to acquire its wealth of data to improve proprietary products. Reports then surfaced about a $60 million annual deal being struck with Google for direct access to Reddit data, along with a similar deal being struck with OpenAI for Reddit posts to appear in responses by the company's chatbots such as ChatGPT.

But now the boot has finally come down as a new report from The Verge reveals Reddit has rolled out an update that prohibits all web crawling, or data gathering, on its website. The change has banned search engines such as Microsoft's Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others from crawling Reddit, meaning Reddit posts will no longer appear as search results within the now banned search engines.

On July 11, SpaceX encountered a critical failure problem on one of its Falcon 9 rockets. The problem resulted in a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) protocol to be initiated, or boom.

SpaceX has taken to its website and X account to share an update on the review process following the failure of a Falcon 9 rocket. Notably, SpaceX's Falcon 9 is the company's workhorse rocket, having already launched 24 times this year and more than 350 times since its debut in 2010. During that time it has only experienced one catastrophic in-flight failure.

However, on July 11, a critical failure occurred during the first burn of Falcon 9's second-stage engine. SpaceX explains a liquid oxygen leak developed within the simulation around the upper stage engine, with engineers later discovering the cause of the leak was a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor that's attached to the vehicle's oxygen system. The sense line cracked due to "high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line."

NASA has taken to its website to detail newly snapped images of an exoplanet called Epsilon Indi Ab, which the space agency says is one of coldest exoplanets it has observed to date.

An international team of astronomers pointed Webb's extremely powerful infrared instruments at the exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab, which is approximately 12 light-years away from Earth and within the constellation of Indus. The planet orbits the K-type star known as Epsilon Indi A, which is approximately the same age as our Sun, only slightly cooler. The team used Webb's MIRI instrument, which stands for Mid-Infrared Instrument, to directly image the exoplanet and reveal its interesting properties.

The space agency explains Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest exoplanets to be directly detected, measuring an extremely freezing temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius. Notably, Epsilon Indi Ab is the closest planet to Earth that is more massive than Jupiter, and is the twelfth closest exoplanet to Earth known to date.

The average household in the United States enjoys a reasonably fast internet speed of 245 Mbps, which translates to 30 megabytes per second. This kind of internet speed makes light work of new games that weigh 100GB, but what about the internet speeds in space? Or specifically the ISS? How long would it take for astronauts aboard the ISS to download Call of Duty: Modern Warfare?

NASA has recently put its network to the test under the HDTN project, which has successfully streamed 4K UHD video between NASA's PC-12 aircraft, optical ground stations, a satellite, and finally, the International Space Station (ISS). During the test, NASA recorded speeds of more than 900 Mbps or 112.5 megabytes per second.

So, what happened? NASA began testing its network in May by firing lasers from a small single-engine aircraft while it flew over Lake Erie. The target was a ground station in Cleveland, Ohio, which then relayed the 4K video to NASA's White Sands Test Facility. From there, the 4K video was blasted to NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) satellite, which was then sent to the ISS.

AMD's new Zen 5-based Ryzen 9 9950X processor has been overclocked to nearly 6.0GHz and benchmarked, showing some mighty fine performance that beats the Core i9-14900KS processor.

The new AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor is based on the new Zen 5 architecture featuring 16 cores and 32 threads, with a max CPU boost of up to 5.7GHz and a 170W TDP. Installed and ready to overclock, the Ryzen 9 9950X was pushed up to 5963MHz (5.9GHz).

AMD's new Ryzen 9 9950X processor was installed into an ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E motherboard with DDR5-6000 memory, but we don't know what cooling the 9950X at the time. AMD's own XOC team overclocked the Ryzen 9 9950X processor with LN2 cooling, pushing it to 6.6GHz recently.

Artificial intelligence-powered tools and applications are certainly impressive in what they can generate, but where these AI companies get the data to train these impressive models remains ambiguous or completely closed off from public knowledge.

A new report revealed only last week that Apple, NVIDIA, Anthropic, and others used a public dataset containing hundreds of thousands of YouTube video transcripts to train their AI models. While Apple, NVIDIA, and others weren't the ones to download the transcripts, the data was still used to train AI models, which strictly violates YouTube's Terms of Service (ToS). Earlier in the year, YouTube's CEO stated that any data downloaded from its platform is a violation of its ToS.

Now, a new report from 404 Media states that the popular AI video generator company Runway trained its Gen-3 Alpha model on thousands of YouTube videos without obtaining permission from the creator or YouTube. The report also states the company used pirated content for AI model training. 404 Media was sent a spreadsheet that lists how many videos were taken from a specific source, and judging from the list, the sources are extensive and cover a large variety of channels.

Yesterday, we learned that AMD was delaying the launch of its new Zen 5-powered Ryzen 9000 Series CPUs from July to August due to an unspecified quality issue with the initial production run. "Out of an abundance of caution and to maintain the highest quality experiences for every Ryzen user, we are working with our channel partners to replace the initial production units with fresh units," AMD said.

With that, we've got new release and launch dates for the Ryzen 9000 Series, with the launch now spread out over two weeks. The Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X will launch on August 8. The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X will follow on August 15.

In the lead-up to the new Ryzen CPU generation launch, we've seen several leaked benchmark results, alongside the Ryzen 9 9950X pushed to 6.6 GHz with LN2 cooling - the anticipation is real. And now, thanks to Hardware Unboxed, we know when we can expect official reviews to appear online.

A week ago, CrowdStrike rolled out an update that caused approximately 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide to enter infinite boot loops.

The global IT outage has been described as the largest in history and is being directly compared to the historic Y2K scare. The CrowdStrike outage was a result of a faulty kernel driver update being rolled out CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor security software, and, unfortunately, the faulty update caused a kernel-level malfunction that required physical intervention for remediation.

The outage affected numerous industries around the globe, such as airlines, supermarkets, telecommunications systems, point-of-sale systems, emergency services, and various other businesses. Now, we are starting to hear the first estimations of the amount of money lost due to Windows machines being down, with cloud monitoring and insurance company Parametrix estimating a fourth of the Fortune 500 companies were affected by the outage.

Yes, there is another. According to sources, NVIDIA isn't entirely done with the GeForce RTX 30 Series, and the company plans to release a new version of the GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU. What makes this interesting is that this will be an Ampere 8nm generation GPU built with current-gen Ada Lovelace architecture and advanced node technology.

There is a GeForce RTX 4050 in the laptop space (we've yet to see one for the desktop graphics card market), so there's a valid reason for NVIDIA to revamp the GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU with Ada tech - as it would lead to a more efficient and compact GPU.

The news of this new GeForce RTX 3050 arrives via The PC ID Repository, which lists a new entry in the form of the AD106M[GeForce RTX 3050 A Laptop GPU]. Per NVIDIA's GPU naming, AD refers to Ada Lovelace architecture. The existing GeForce RTX 3050 uses the Ampere-based GA107 chip.

Although sales for Sony's next-gen PlayStation VR2 headset for PlayStation 5 haven't set the virtual world on fire, and reports indicating that Sony is pulling the plug on VR game development, there is some good news.

Yes, you'll be able to play Valve's killer VR app Half-Life: Alyx on PlayStation VR2, thanks to the arrival of full PC support and the PS VR2 App. Although Sony hasn't formally announced the launch, the Steam page for the PS VR2 App is now live with a release date of August 6 listed. We've also got screenshots of the PS VR2 App's interface, which looks similar to how it's set up on the PS5.

The listing states, "Play VR games and apps on Steam using your PlayStation VR2 headset and PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers." This confirms that the motion controllers will work (via Bluetooth) and that the headset will be integrated into SteamVR. However, there is one catch.

Micron has just announced its new Micron 9550 PCIe Gen5 SSD which is the world's fastest data center SSD and industry leader in AI workload performance and power efficiency.

The company has combined its in-house Gen5 SSD controller, NAND, DRAM and firmware into "one world-class product" with the new Micron 9550 Gen5 SSD. This new integrated solution provides class-leading performance, power efficiency, and security features for data center operators.

Micron's new 9550 SSD offers 14GB/sec sequential reads and 10GB/sec sequential writes, which the company says provides up to 67% better performance over similar competitive SSDs, and enables industry-leading performance for demanding workloads like AI.

Another place to play Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim? Skyrim has made its way to another platform with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (and the Special Edition of the game), now playable on NVIDIA's cloud gaming GeForce NOW service. It joins the PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Alexa as the latest digital location where you can fire up the iconic RPG.

NVIDIA notes that GeForce NOW Ultimate members can stream and experience Skyrim at up to 4K and 120 frames per second, running on a GeForce RTX 4080-powered rig in the cloud. For those looking toward cloud gaming who haven't signed up for GeForce NOW, you can save 50% off Ultimate and Priority subscriptions as part of the GeForce NOW Summer Sale.

Seven more games, including a few notable new releases, have been added to GeForce NOW this week, including The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Interestingly, GeForce NOW subscribers can stream Skyrim via Steam and Xbox (PC Game Pass).

AMD's next-generation Zen 5-based "HX" laptop "Fire Range" CPUs will arrive on the same FL1 package, meaning that laptop makers won't have to redesign motherboards from current "Dragon Range" systems.

We first learned about AMD's new Zen 5-based "Fire Range" CPU in leaks from Moore's Law is Dead back in October 2023. But In a new post by hardware reviewer and leaker "Golden Pig Upgrade" we're hearing that next-gen Ryzen HX mobile processors based on the Zen 5 architecture codenamed "Fire Range" will use the same FP1 socket as the Zen 4-based "Dragon Range" CPUs we have now. This includes up to the flagship Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor with the Zen 4 architecture and X3D V-Cache technology.

AMD using the same FL1 package with its new Fire Range processors as its Dragon Range processors is a great thing for laptop manufacturers, as they won't need to redesign the motherboard. However, CPU competitor Intel is changing things up from its 14th Gen Core CPUs and its new Core Ultra 200 CPUs which forces laptop manufacturers to redesign their laptop motherboards.

NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" gaming GPUs are not too far away now, with the flagship GeForce RTX 5090 being reportedly up to 48% faster than the current-gen gaming GPU champ, the RTX 4090.

We knew that NVIDIA would be shooting high with performance with the new GeForce RTX 5090, with its new process node, upgraded Blackwell architecture, next-gen GDDR7 memory, when compared to the RTX 4090. NVIDIA would've been fine launching the RTX 4080 on its own at the time, which kept up and beat AMD's flagship RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

But they didn't, NVIDIA instead unleashed the beefier GeForce RTX 4090 with more VRAM (24GB versus 16GB) and even more gaming performance. The same goes with the RTX 5090, which is reportedly a monstrous 48% faster than the RTX 4090 according to 'RTX 50 performance targets' from NVIDIA in leaks by RedTechGaming.

NVIDIA AI Foundry is a new enterprise service where NVIDIA will help companies build AI 'Supermodels' - custom Llama 3.1 generative AI models built with NVIDIA software and expertise. These AI 'Supermodels' are custom-trained for specific industry use cases using proprietary and synthetic data from Llama 3.1 405B and the NVIDIA Nemotron Reward model.

Hardware-wise, it's powered by the NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI platform, which allows it to access the most advanced AI hardware, architecture, and technologies. It's an NVIDIA AI Foundry, so that's to be expected. Meta's open-source Llama 3.1 405B model was announced earlier this week, offering capabilities and power previously limited to closed-source models. This new partnership between NVIDIA and Meta is a big deal for companies everywhere.

"Meta's openly available Llama 3.1 models mark a pivotal moment for the adoption of generative AI within the world's enterprises," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.