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More samples of Intel's Core 300 "Wildcat Lake" CPUs are starting to appear on PassMark. Interestingly, the Intel Core 3 304 just pulled off something nobody expected from the bottom of the Wildcat Lake stack. Recently, a third PassMark entry was submitted for the entry-level Wildcat Lake chip, and it shows it matching the Apple A18 Pro in single-threaded performance, both landing at exactly 3,982 points.

That's a notable jump, especially for a chip that sips just 15W of power. The previous best for the Core 3 304 was 3,632 single-thread points, so this third sample pushed it meaningfully higher. With only three samples in the database, the chip's current average sits at 3,676 points, putting it around 8% behind the A18 Pro overall, but the individual peak score tells a different story.

Multi-threaded performance is also competitive, with the 304 sitting at a CPU Mark of around 11,543 versus the A18 Pro's 11,804, which is remarkably close given that the Core 3 304 has one fewer core. On average, the Core 3 304 is about 8% slower than the Apple A18 Pro in single-threaded performance, while being only 2.2% slower in multi-threaded results.

We may have official confirmation of Sony's stance on PC ports, but Sony didn't hold a press conference for this one. The company recently filed its 2026 annual business strategy report, and we noticed that some important bits were missing. The 2025 version of this document explicitly stated that Sony would "continue its efforts to deploy its first-party titles to multiple platforms such as PC." That sentence is completely gone from the 2026 filing, with no replacement.

What took its place is a brand-new section dedicated to AI. Sony now says it is "utilizing AI to unleash the creativity of studios," framing AI-powered tools as a way to boost developer productivity and free up time for building richer game worlds. Now, we have previously known of Sony projects that have at least been assisted by AI, so this stance is not that new, all things considered.

There's more to it than just the development pipeline: Sony also plans to use AI to personalize PlayStation Store recommendations and route transactions more efficiently. This is a big change in tone from Sony's previous public stance, in which its leadership emphasized that AI should support creators rather than replace them. Now, it looks like Sony is using AI across much of its development pipeline, including software development, 3D modeling, and animation.

UPDATE: Halo Studios made the announcement in error. PS Plus is not required to play split-screen co-op on PlayStation 5.

Microsoft, Sony, and/or Halo Studios have kicked off another controversy during a time when absolutely none of them need it.

Unfortunately, it's now been revealed that Halo's 25th anniversary will be marred by what feels like an unnecessary hurdle for gamers. Halo is coming to PlayStation for the first time ever with the new Halo Campaign Evolved remake, but instead of just having a normal release that boosts sales, the game requires some extra steps in order to play with friends on PlayStation.

An enthusiastic RTX 5090 owner attempted to install a second 12V-2x6 power connector on their flagship Blackwell graphics card in a desperate attempt to reduce the chance of the connector melting. Unfortunately, the owner ended up bricking the graphics card as a result of the mod and was forced to send the card to a repair shop to get the GPU fixed. YouTube channel northwestrepair covered the story and showed how the 5090 owner was able to install a second power connector on their card. Luckily for the owner, the card was saved after the technician transplanted the GPU and memory to a new PCB.

The RTX 5090 owner had an air-cooled AORUS variant with a second 12V-2x6 slot on the PCB, making it possible to solder on a second power connector to the card. At first glance, the existence of this slot makes it seem as if the card can support two connectors, but unfortunately, northwestrepair revealed that the card is not wired from the factory to support two connectors simultaneously. Specifically, the card reportedly lacks any shunt resistors wired up to the second power connector slot, making it impossible for the PCB to monitor and regulate power coming from the second connector. As a result, when the owner went to power the card with the secondary plug connected, the card overheated and burned a hole through the PCB.

The unfortunate RTX 5090 owner was likely inspired by existing RTX 5090 graphics cards with dual 16-pin connectors and modders who have successfully installed a second power connector on RTX 5090s. Earlier this year, reports surfaced that a modder had successfully added a second 12V-2x6 power connector to a GIGABYTE AORUS Xtreme Waterforce RTX 5090, which coincidentally has the same PCB layout as the AORUS RTX 5090 repaired in this story. MSI's RTX 5090 Lighting Z and Galax's RTX 5090 HOF are also cards that come equipped with two 16-pin power connectors from the factory.

Activision has an interesting strategy to get past Sony's lack of native PlayStation 3 backwards compatibility on modern PlayStation consoles.

In an unprecedented move that's rarely seen in the video games industry, Activision has announced it will re-release Black Ops and Black Ops II on PS4 and PS5. The publisher confirms that these will just be ports, not remasters, and will have campaign, multiplayer, and zombies. Black Ops II remains the fastest-earning Call of Duty game in history with $500 million made in just 1 day of sales.

The strategy here feels obvious; Xbox is bleeding profits with a paltry 3% margin and needs more higher-margin earnings. These gen 7 Call of Duty games are still popular and Microsoft/Activision hope to capitalize on nostalgia as well as pent-up demand for these classics, as Sony has underserved PS3 games to its PS4 and PS5 generations because there's no direct PS3 software compatibility for today's PS consoles.

It looks like GPU prices just will not catch a break in 2026. NAND and DRAM prices have already gone through the roof thanks to the AI boom, and now GPUs are not far behind. According to Gazlog, which picked up the report from Chinese board channel sources, AMD is gearing up for another Radeon RX 9000 price increase of around 10-15%, expected to kick in during Q3 2026, possibly as early as July.

The reason behind the price hike is thought to be the rising GDDR6 VRAM costs. Since AMD bundles GPU dies with VRAM before shipping kits to its AIB partners, any jump in memory procurement costs gets passed straight down the chain. The spot price of GDDR6 has ballooned since late 2025, and AI data center demand shows no sign of letting up. As memory gets more expensive, graphics cards get more expensive too.

We've been covering this trend for a while. TweakTown reported the first confirmed RX 9000 price bump back in December 2025, followed shortly by AMD's broader price-hike announcement. Even AMD's own VP David McAfee, when we interviewed him at CES 2026, wouldn't rule out further increases. So the pattern here is pretty well established.

Black Myth Wukong has now sold more than 30 million copies, beating out entire video game franchises--a feat that few video games can pull off except for Minecraft, Call of Duty, or maybe Grand Theft Auto V.

A new document published by China's Belt and Road initiative--an infrastructure strategy focused on bolstering economic trade--has revealed some surprising sales figures for Black Myth Wukong. According to the figures, Game Science's myth-infused action game has sold an astounding 30 million copies in less than 2 years on the market.

To put those numbers into perspective, Call of Duty games used to sell tens of millions of copies upon release, and Vanguard, which was largely believed to have missed expectations, still sold 30 million copies in a similar timeframe. Other titles like Grand Theft Auto V typically ship 5 million or so units per quarter, leading to roughly 20 million copies shipped per year.

The new Steam Controller launched on May 4 at $99 and was gone in under 30 minutes. Valve's payment systems buckled under the load almost immediately, and before the dust settled, scalpers had already flooded eBay with units priced at $300 or more, with some listings climbing past $550. It was a chaotic launch by any measure, and Valve acknowledged the frustration pretty quickly.

The company moved fast and introduced a reservation queue shortly after, modeled on the system it used for the Steam Deck. To keep scalpers out, Valve capped purchases at one per account and locked out any account created after April 27, 2026, or accounts with payment disputes or bans. It was a reasonable fix for the chaos, but, as it turns out, the queue itself has become a much bigger problem.

Valve has now updated the Steam Controller page with three estimated delivery windows: by September 2026, by December 2026, or in 2027. New reservations placed today land squarely in that last bucket. The company says demand exceeded expectations when the controller launched last month. While reservations remain open, the current queue already exceeds Valve's production capacity for the rest of the year.

The rumors are coming thick and fast about the Steam Machine now, and it seems that Valve really could be shaping up to launch the PC before June is out.

The Steam Hardware Updates account on X has just posted what appears to be shipment details of Steam Machine units (and the Steam Frame, too) sent to Valve's warehouses in the US.

This is another hint (assuming it's genuine) that Valve is preparing the ground for the Steam Machine to hit the shelves very soon.

HDMI 2.2 was finalized as a specification in June 2025, but actual products have been slow to follow. That is now changing, with HDMI Licensing Administrator CEO and President Rob Tobias confirming at Computex 2026 that chip manufacturers are expected to begin sampling FRL2 silicon this year, putting the first HDMI 2.2 products on track for 2027.

"We're hearing chip manufacturers will start to sample their FRL2 chips this year. And so we should start to see some 96 or up to 96 gigabit HDMI 2.2 products next year," Tobias told ARMdevices.

The headline number for HDMI 2.2 is 96 Gbps, double the 48 Gbps maximum of HDMI 2.1. That additional bandwidth enables genuinely impressive display configurations without relying on Display Stream Compression. Uncompressed 4K at 240Hz, 8K at 60Hz with full chroma, 12K at 120Hz, and 16K at 60Hz are all within scope. With DSC, 1440p at over 1,000Hz becomes theoretically possible.

Thirteen years is a long time to wait for a video game. Apparently, it's long enough for someone just to say, "Fine, I'll do it myself."

Ziwen Xu, a 25-year-old founder of AI agent startup Hyperecho, kicked off the project with a post on X. "Day 1 of building GTA 6. Still feels fake typing that out," he wrote, and upgraded to Claude Max 20x specifically for the project. The first footage was exactly what you'd expect: a blue box wandering around an empty 3D plane. Not much, but every game starts somewhere.

He spent a week ignoring everyone who told him to switch engines before finally caving on day seven and migrating from Godot to Unreal Engine. The project, dubbed GT-Caliber, runs on daily public updates and an open GitHub repo, with AI agents continuously looping, taking community feature requests, and generating pull requests in real time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's no publisher, and no studio budget. Ziwen seems to be relying on whoever shows up for the project.

AMD has worked with the HandBrake development team to fix two threading bottlenecks that were affecting transcoding performance on high-core-count Threadripper CPUs. The fixes are included in HandBrake 1.11.0 and later, and the results are significant enough that owners of existing Threadripper hardware can expect a substantial free performance boost simply by updating the software.

According to AMD, video transcoding workloads generally benefit from higher core counts. However, that was not always the case with its Threadripper lineup, where performance sometimes scaled in the opposite direction, particularly at lower resolutions, resulting in longer transcode times. AMD says it identified two key causes behind the issue.

First, HandBrake wasn't built to manage systems with more than 64 logical processors. On chips like Threadripper, which have far more than 64 threads, the application left compute resources idle rather than distributing work across all available cores.

RTX 4090 scams on Chinese second-hand markets are nothing new, but a repair channel on Bilibili has uncovered one that is a little too "plastic." Chinese repair channel Brother Zhang purchased a broken ASUS GeForce RTX 4090 for 1,500 RMB and tore it down to discover, unlike some previous scams using older GPU dies, this one used a piece of plastic made to resemble the GPU core.

The graphics card carried markings meant to resemble an NVIDIA AD102-300-A1 GPU, and it looks real for the most part, unless you start tearing it apart. UNIKO's Hardware on X noted that the markings did not follow NVIDIA's actual nomenclature, and the date code on the die suggested the chip was manufactured in 2030, which is obviously impossible for a retail RTX 4090. The substrate also lacked the usual QR code in the bottom-left corner, and the surrounding capacitors were in the wrong positions compared to a real AD102 layout.

When Brother Zhang physically touched the die and cleaned off the thermal paste, the difference in texture was immediately apparent. What looked like a GPU was a plastic piece with fake markings etched onto the surface. There was no silicon underneath at all, meaning the card had zero functional compute capability and could not even output a display signal.

Epic Games kicked off controversy among game developers when it revealed gen AI tools for Fortnite concept creation, and now some partners might actually be pulling out of future collaborations because of it.

Before the big State of Unreal event kicked off, Epic Games shared a brief video that showed how its artists are using generative AI tools to help design concept assets for Fortnite. Epic further revealed that Unreal Engine 6 would have native support for AI tools like Claude Code and Gemini, only worsening Epic's position to specific groups.

The reveal caused a stir in the game dev community--gen AI is usually vilified for helping lay off thousands of video game workers--to the point where Epic might lose out on a collaboration with one of the most popular indie game developers of our era: Poncle, the team behind Vampire Survivors. Epic had just announced a Vampire Survivors crossover in Fortnite, but now that Poncle has learned about gen AI being used, it looks like Vampire Survivors x Fortnite may not happen after all.

Sony may have confirmed that its new first-party singleplayer games will be exclusive to PlayStation consoles moving forward, and Bloomberg's Jason Schreier says this policy won't be a 'case-by-case basis' like Xbox's exclusivity plans.

PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino recently spoke to Famitsu to celebrate the magazine's big 40th anniversary, and his comments lend strong credence to the reports that all future first-party singleplayer games from PlayStation Studios will be exclusive to Sony's consoles.

Nishino's response isn't a direct one and is laden with PR-speak, but the gist is that singleplayer games are meant to boost the value of PlayStation, and online live service games are meant to reach as many people as possible and will continue launching on PC.

Modders have figured out how to double the memory capacity of NVIDIA's six-year-old entry-level GTX 1650 from 4GB to 8GB. YouTube channel Paulo Gomes published a video showing off their work modding the entry-level Turing GPU with 8GB of GDDR6, and showed off impressive performance results from the card due to the extra memory capacity. For instance, in Unigine Superposition, the GTX 1650's benchmarking score doubled from 624 points to 1245 points moving from 4GB to 8GB of VRAM.

Upgrading the memory on the GTX 1650 was straightforward and required no extra firmware modifications. The modders swapped out the GTX 1650's existing 1GB GDDR6 modules with 2GB Samsung HC16 GDDR6 modules by desoldering the old modules and soldering the new modules on the PCB. Their first attempt at booting the card failed as a result of installing two faulty HC16 modules, but after swapping out the faulty modules with working counterparts, their second attempt was successful.

One major caveat the modding team noted was that their 8GB mod requires a very specific variant of the GTX 1650 to work - the TU106 version of the GTX 1650 with GDDR6 memory. For the uninitiated, NVIDIA has four different variants of the GTX 1650 (not even counting the GTX 1650 Super), featuring TU117, TU116, and TU106 dies paired to either GDDR5 or GDDR6 memory. The TU106 version was one of the later trim models NVIDIA launched to use up defective TU106 silicon. TU106 was one of NVIDIA's most popular Turing dies and was used to make nearly all of NVIDIA's mid-range RTX 20 series GPUs, such as the RTX 2060, RTX 2060 Super, and RTX 2070. The modders did not fully explain why only the TU106 version is compatible, but likely memory controller and/or firmware limitations are the culprit on other variants of the GTX 1650.

U.S. President Donald Trump dropped a late-night Truth Social post on June 18, confirming that Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its chips in America.

There's just one small detail he left out: Intel didn't know the announcement was coming.

GTA 6 pre-orders will begin next week on June 25, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, Rockstar Games today confirmed.

Today Rockstar announced the pre-order dates for the most anticipated game in the last 10 years, GTA 6, while also unveiling the game's official cover art. The biggest question everyone has is how much the game will cost, and that hasn't been revealed yet. There's speculation that Rockstar could charge a $79.99 base price for the game, or potentially even a $99.99 version with GTA Online extras.

"Pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI will officially begin on June 25 on digital storefronts and at other select retailers," Rockstar writes.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has sat down for an interview with Bloomberg Originals, where he discussed several topics surrounding AI and AI development, along with geopolitical impacts and Anthropic's internal governance system intended to maintain checks and balances during the quest to ethically develop artificial intelligence.

Amodei was asked, given the power of artificial intelligence and how Anthropic is one of the leading companies in the space with Claude, Claude Code, and its now-banned Mythos-class AI models, why the US government wouldn't take over the company to ensure its tools are used safely. Amodei responded by saying that almost every major technology was built by or with the involvement of the government, and that AI is the first revolutionary-level technology that is predominantly being built by the private sector, and that isn't something Amodei agrees with, nor would it be what he would have chosen if he were given a choice.

Although Amodei believes the government shouldn't completely take over Anthropic, he is scared of both companies having "this technology" and the government having it. So, the middle ground is public governance tactics, which Amodei says is slowly being introduced to Anthropic. For example, Amodei says Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust can appoint and remove a majority of board members and, through that authority, can even remove him as CEO. The idea behind this structure is to prevent the company from being blown ethically off course through a cabal of upper leadership.

No Law is a new first-person shooter set in a cyberpunk world from the relatively small team at Neon Giant, the developers behind The Ascent. Although it's not a massive open-world game along the lines of CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077, the densely packed and detailed world of the game's Port Desire setting is reminiscent of how impressive CDPR's game was during its first big gameplay reveal.

At the State of Unreal 2026 event, developer Neon Giant took to the stage to talk about No Law and how it used Unreal Engine 5 to create some of the densest and most detailed environments ever seen in a game. Tor Frick, the creative director on the game, says that he and the small team wanted "extreme detail" everywhere you look, from messy apartments to alleyways and little things like stickers on electrical appliances.

The impressive thing is that it's all hand-crafted, with Neon Giant saying that Unreal Engine 5's Nanite technology is one of the key reasons the team was able to make No Law look the way that it does. And when it comes to density, it's next level, with the team using Mass Framework and Meta Human to simulate crowds of over 3,000 NPCs at once to deliver streets and locations teeming with life.