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Microsoft's new Windows 11 24H2 update is ushering in boosts in performance for both Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors from AMD.

The new Windows 11 24H2 update has been tested briefly so far, with fellow Aussie outlet HardwareUnboxed testing the new Windows 11 update with the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7 7700X and Zen 5-based Ryzen 7 9700X processors between 24H2 and 23H2 updates on Windows 11.

AMD's previous-gen Ryzen 7 7700X saw a 10% average performance boost at 1080p across a multitude of games, while the new Zen 5-based Ryzen 7 9700X was 11% faster on average at 1080p with the new Windows 11 24H2 update installed.

SK hynix is aiming to have its HBM4 memory tape-out in Q4 2024, ready for NVIDIA's next-gen Rubin R100 AI GPU coming in 2025.

In a new report from ZDnet, we're learning that SK hynix is nearing the final stage of commercializing its next-generation HBM4 memory, with the design drawings to be transferred to the manufacturing process, or "tape out". According to ZDnet's industry sources, SK hynix plans to complete the tape out of its HBM4 for NVIDIA in October, so we're just weeks away.

HBM4 offers a huge 40% increase in bandwidth, and a reduced power consumption of a rather incredible 70% to HBM3E, the fastest memory in the world. HBM4 density will be 1.3x higher, with all of these advancements combined, the leap in performance and efficiency is a key driver in NVIDIA's continued AI GPU dominance.

We all know it's coming, we all know it'll be here later this year... but Sony hasn't officially announced the PlayStation 5 Pro console, yet. This could happen during a State of Play presentation rumored for late September, says an insider.

During the recent Game Mess Mornings episode, Jeff Grubb said that last he heard the PlayStation 5 Pro was coming out this year, and that an insider had heard that Sony would probably host a State of Play presentation for the end of September.

Sony's new PlayStation 5 Pro console was an "open secret" at Gamescom 2024 last week in Cologne, Germany, and with the Tokyo Game Show 2024 right around the corner, a possible State of Play presentation, and the holidays looming... Sony is going to make quite the splash with the PS5 Pro.

Sony's new PlayStation 5 Pro could cost around $600 or $700 at the higher range, Giant Bomb reporter Jeff Grubb estimates.

How much will Sony's new PS5 Pro be at launch? Given the PS5 Pro's specs, it could be pricey.

The PS5 Pro's GPU will have 60 RDNA 3.0 Compute Units (CUs) and can boost to a whopping 2.35GHz, which indicates a max 36 TFLOPs of compute power (that's a 5.4% increase over the PS5's 2.23GHz max GPU speeds). Sony also developed a proprietary DLSS-like upscaler called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR).

Nintendo has taken to its social media channels to announce its hosting a Nintendo Direct tomorrow with the an Indie World Showcase. The company also touched on a Switch successor.

Nintendo took to its "Nintendo of America" X account to announce an Indie World Showcase will be hosted tomorrow, August 27 at 7am PT, and following that will be a Nintendo Direct that will last for approximately 40 minutes in total. Nintendo finished off its announcement by mentioning the highly anticipated successor to the Nintendo Switch, which the company said wasn't going to be mentioned at all during the Direct. "Please note, there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during either of these presentations."

The highly anticipated console is only rumored at the moment with no officially announced information being available. However, rumors do suggest the presumably Nintendo Switch 2 will have similar performance to the Xbox One and focus on a combination of 1080p and 1440p gaming. 1440p during docked mode, which will redesigned to increase the performance of the console when its plugged in. Other rumors have suggested the successor console will fall short of the Valve Steam Deck in performance.

Apple has sent out invitations to press for an event its holding on September 9, 2024 at 10:00 a.m PT. The event will be livestreamed and will be hosted at the Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park.

Known Apple insider and Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman shared an image of the Apple invitation on his personal X account, writing that this invitation is for Apple's anticipated iPhone event where it will unveil the iPhone 16 line-up. Gurman writes the announcement has come a day earlier than anticipated, which references his previous prediction of a September 10 announcement event.

Apple Intelligence will be a key part of the overall sales pitch in Apple stores to customers, as the new AI-powered software is a main selling point of this next-generation of devices. The Bloomberg reporter wrote on August 25 employees at Apple retail stores have already started receiving training on the Apple Intelligence features. Apple Intelligence will debut with the release of iOS 18, and we can expect some further examples of Apple Intelligence being used on the iPhone 16 line-up.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft transported two NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station (ISS) on June 5 with the goal of returning them a week later. However, that didn't go to plan.

Prior to launch and upon arrival NASA and Boeing detected helium leaks on the Starliner spacecraft. Some leaks were detected before launch but were cleared by both NASA and Boeing, while additional leaks were detected throughout the journey and confirmed upon arrival. Since then NASA and Boeing have been gathering data on the Starliner situation and determining an attack plan to return Wilmore and Williams back to Earth.

After a lengthy analysis period NASA has determined there isn't enough concrete evidence to give the agency enough confidence to sign off on Starliner meeting all of the agency's rigorous safety and performance requirements that are designed to make astronauts as safe as possible during flight. Essentially, Starliner is too broken to fly and isn't a safe transportation method for the NASA astronauts.

Nintendo fans have been waiting for quite some time for the official announcement of the Nintendo Switch successor, presumably called the Nintendo Switch 2 given the incredible success of the Switch.

But until that day comes fans will have to quench their thirst with a new rumor, which specifically mentions improvements to the successor's controllers. In a recent episode of the Bonuslevel podcast from the Power Unlimted website, and reported on by UniversoNintendo, the conversation with a reported manufacturer that is a "long-time partner of Nintendo" and involved in the "production and distribution of liscensed controllers".

The manufacturer, which didn't reveal his identity for obvious reasons, revealed Nintendo has issued a mandate for its next-generation console controllers to have motion sensor hardware, specifically gyroscopic. Notably, this feature is already present on the Nintendo Switch but only available in a select variety of games, albeit the list is quite long. The manufacturer claims this is the first time Nintendo has requested this level of requirement for its new licensed accessories.

NVIDIA quietly announced the release of a new GeForce RTX 4070 variant that features the slower and cheaper GDDR6 memory. NVIDIA states the RTX 4070 GDDR6 variant will offer "similar" performance to its GDDR6X cousin.

Unfortunately, NVIDIA hasn't mandated any clear packaging guidelines for AIBs to inform buyers of the new card has the slower memory, as name "GeForce RTX 4070" features the exact same name as the GDDR6X variant. The lack of packaging change makes it extremely difficult for buyers that aren't familiar with technological terminologies to make informed purchasing decisions, especially considering NVIDIA's decision to price the GDDR6 variant at the same price point as the GDDR6X variant.

NVIDIA stating the new card will have "similar" performance means it won't be identical performance to the GDDR6X variant, which means it will likely fall within less than 5% on average of the GDDR6X card. Moreover, the GDDR6 variant doesn't have any special naming such as "GDDR6" on the box, or feature any monkier title such as "SUPER" or "Ti" to distinguish it from the original RTX 4070.

NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPU is rumored to have gaming performance at levels of the RTX 4070, while using less power.

In some new details from leaker Golden Pig Upgrade, who attended an event held recently by Chinese laptop and PC manufacturer, Shenzhen Hasee Compute Co. where during the event, the chairman of the company, Wu Haijun, talked about next-gen PCs.

During that chat, he talked about some details about NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" GPUs. The Hasee chairman said that NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 50 series Laptop GPUs will use GDDR7 memory, and power consumption of the 60-level cards will be "greatly reduced" from 140W to 115W.

TSMC is expected to make over NT $1 trillion (around $31 billion USD or so) in revenue from its 3nm and 5nm process nodes, in just a span of 9 months.

DigiTimes reports that TSMC will generate around $31 billion from just two of its high-end semiconductor nodes, thanks to their unstoppable demand -- customers like Apple, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, MediaTek -- with TSMC seeing huge revenue increases for Q2 2024 to NT$336.7 billion, or around 40% of their total revenue in Q1 2023.

TSMC estimates it will generate NT $754 billion (around $23 billion USD or so) from its 3nm and 5nm process nodes in Q3 2024, with major customers in Apple and NVIDIA.

A new leak has revealed that a Cars world was considered for Kingdom Hearts III during its development, but didn't make it to the final release and was left on the cutting room floor.

Five years after the release of Kingdom Hearts III the title's Premium Showcase files have been datamined, which are files that essentially show off behind-the-scenes development of cutscenes, mechanics, and other content. This isn't the first time a Kingdom Hearts game has been datamined to discover what fans didn't get to experience in the final release, as the same treatment was applied to previous mainline Kingdom Hearts games. However, this is the first time it has been applied to Kingdom Hearts III.

It appears developers were considering a Cars world for the 2019 game, as X user @ligero_miguel highlighted the word, "カーズ（仮)" which translates to "Cars (Tentative)". Unfortunately, the dataminer was unable to find any files related to Cars, which leads me to believe that it only existed as a potential idea for Kingdom Hearts III, and perhaps didn't even make it to the conceptual phase of development where rough sketches or assets were created.

AMD's next-generation RDNA 4 GPU architecture has been teased again, with an RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 8000 series graphics card turning up on Geekbench.

The new graphics card in question is an RDNA 4-based GPU with 56 CUs (Compute Units) and 16GB of VRAM (which should be GDDR6 still, but faster 18Gbps GDDR6 memory chips). The GPU has a "GFX1201" device ID, which means we're looking at the Navi 48 SKU.

AMD's new Navi 48 "GFX1201" GPU is listed as 28 compute units, which results in 56 compute untis as the new RDNA 4 GPU architecture does things the same as RDNA 3: each GPU has a shader engine that features dual compute units, so we should see a doubling of the listed compute units (28 x 2 = 56).

Each year, the Gamescom Awards honor the best games at the show, from new trailers to announcements to playable demos, walkthroughs, and deep dives. This year was no different; however, two titles dominated the winners across various categories - one that makes a lot of sense and one that is a welcome surprise.

Capcom's highly anticipated and fantastic-looking Monster Hunter Wilds took home several awards thanks to its Gamescom showing - including the 'Most Entertaining' award for how the game was presented, plus awards for 'Most Epic' showing, having the 'Best Trailer,' and the 'Best Sony PlayStation Game' at the conference.

The other title that wowed Gamescom attendees and the jury was BANDAI NAMCO's Little Nightmare 3, which won the award for 'Best Visuals,' 'Best Audio,' and 'Best Microsoft Xbox Game.'

It was only last week Microsoft confirmed that Black Myth Wukong was still on its way to Xbox, following the removal of the Xbox logo from the title's marketing material back in June that spurred speculation Wukong was never heading to Microsoft's console.

Black Myth Wukong has already sold more than 10 million copies worldwide as of August 23, which was only three days after its release, along with it shattering the Steam record for the most-played single-player game in the platform's history with 2.3 million concurrent players. With the extreme popularity of Black Myth Wukong Xbox gamers are undoubtedly chomping at the bit to find out when the title is releasing on their console, and why it has been delayed.

Officially, neither Game Science or Microsoft has revealed why Wukong wasn't released on Xbox at the same time as PlayStation and PC. Forbes speculated in a recent article that Wukong was suffering from a similar fate as Baldur's Gate 3, which had development issues related to the low-end Xbox console variant, the Xbox Series X. In summarization, Black Myth Wukong is still being optimized for lower-end hardware as Microsoft requires developers to launch a game on all of its console variants and not selectively.

The upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Beta timings have yet to be confirmed, but it's expected sometime soon. The full game is out on October 25 for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox - so we can expect that multiplayer first look soon. It could be here in a matter of days as the latest Intel Graphics Driver 32.0.101.5972 (WHQL Certified) has added support for the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Beta for Intel Arc graphics owners across mobile and PC.

Intel's latest driver also adds day-one support and optimizations for SMITE 2, Star Wars Outlaws, and Visions of Mana. The company added support for Black Myth: Wukong to its most recent non-WHQL driver release. Weighing in at 884.4 MB, Intel Graphics Driver 32.0.101.5972 is available now for Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems with discrete Intel Arc graphics cards and Intel Core Ultra devices with built-in Arc graphics.

Support for these new PC games looks to be the extent of the latest driver release, with several 'Known Issues' remaining unresolved. Here are the full release notes.

Intel has just published the first public driver for Xe2 graphics, with the release of this driver important because its next-gen Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" processors are launching next month.

We've heard through leaks that the Xe2 codename "Battlemage" GPUs would be called Arc 140V and Arc 130V, and it looks like the leaks were right, as Intel's own information lists support with the new Arc Graphics 32.0.101.5972 drivers that "Arc 140V" and "Arc 130V" GPUs are supported.

According to the last leaks, Intel's new Core Ultra 9 and Core Ultra 7 "Lunar Lake" processors will get Arc 140V with 8 Xe2-Cores, while the Core Ultra 5 SKUs will get Arc 130V with 7 Xe2-Cores. The highest-end Core Ultra 9 288V will have its Arc 140V GPU boosting up to 2.05GHz, while the lowest-end Lunar Lake chip will have its Arc 130V integrated GPU boosting at up to 1.85GHz.

In a recently shared data center AI chip roadmap posted on X, we get a good look at what companies have on the market already, and what's in the AI chip pipeline through to 2027. Check it out:

The list includes chip makers NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, ByteDance, and Huawei. You can see the list of NVIDIA AI GPUs includes the Ampere A100 through to the Hopper H100, GH200, H200 AI GPUs, and into the Blackwell B200A, B200 Ultra, GB200 Ultra and GB200A. But after that -- which we all know is coming -- is Rubin and Rubin Ultra, both rocking next-gen HBM4 memory.

We also have AMD's growing line of Instinct MI series AI accelerators, with the MI250X through to the new MI350 and the upcoming MI400 listed in there for 2026 and beyond.

In the early 1990s, Nintendo announced that it was partnering with Sony to develop and create a new PlayStation console that would play Nintendo cartridges and Sony CDs. At the time, the CD-ROM was considered a cutting-edge game changer as it offered over 100 times the storage space compared to a traditional game cartridge or floppy disk.

Nintendo ultimately withdrew from the deal and partnered with Philips for the doomed-to-fail Philips CD-i system. Sony went on to develop the PlayStation as a standalone console. The rest is history. However, the Nintendo PlayStation or Nintendo-backed version of the Sony PlayStation made it to the prototype phase. Over the years, it has become an extremely rare collectible and a fascinating historical artifact.

A prototype Nintendo PlayStation sold for $360,000 at an auction back in 2020, and now Heritage Auctions has sold a Nintendo PlayStation controller prototype for a cool $35,000. This is an eye-watering amount for what looks like a Super Nintendo controller with a Sony and PlayStation logo on it.

Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B is a "miniaturized version" of the new highly accurate Mistral NeMo 12B AI model. It is tailor-made for GPU-accelerated data centers, the cloud, and high-end workstations with NVIDIA RTX hardware. Accuracy is often sacrificed to ensure performance regarding scalable AI models; Mistral AI and NVIDIA's new Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B deliver the best of both worlds.

Small enough to run in real-time on a workstation or desktop rig with a high-end GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics card, with NVIDIA, noting that the 8B or 8 billion variant excels when it comes to benchmarks for AI chatbots, virtual assistant, content generation, and educational tools.

Available and packaged as an NVIDIA NIM microservice (downloadable via Hugging Face), Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B is currently outperforming Llama 3.1 8B and Gemma 7B in the all-important accuracy category in at least nine popular benchmarks for AI language models.