Qualcomm is gearing up to the launch of its exciting new Snapdragon X Series, and now we're finally getting some more details on the Adreno X1 GPU that's inside of the new SoC.

The new Adreno X1 series is the first generation of integrated graphics fro the X-series SoCs for Windows on ARM, with the "1" denoting the generation, with successors to be named Adreno X2, Adreno X3, and so on. The highest-end configuration -- X1-85 -- includes the "8" for the GPU level, and "5" for the SKU.

Qualcomm's new Adreno X1 GPU features up to 6 shader processors, combining 1536 FP32 ALUs and capable of processing 96 texels per cycle. We have performance of up to 4.6 TFLOPs at its peak, processing up to 72 gigapixels per second. The new Adreno X1 GPU supports major graphics APIs, including DirectX 12.1 (Shader Model 6.7), DirectX 11, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenCL 3.0.

GIGABYTE has just released its fastest-ever AORUS Gen5 14000 SSD and Phison's latest PS5026-E26 SSD controller, with optimized 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash.

The company offers its new AORUS Gen5 14000 SSD in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, each with slight differences in read/write speeds. The new 1TB model will pump out up to 13.6GB/sec sequential reads and up to 10.2GB/sec sequential writes. The 2TB model pumps out the highest speeds of up to 14.5GB/sec reads and up to 12.7GB/sec writes. Lastly, the largest 4TB capacity model has up to 14.1GB/sec reads and up to 12.6GB/sec writes.

Inside, the AORUS Gen5 14000 SSD uses the Phison PS5026-E26 SSD controller, based on the 12nm process node, using 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash with 8 flash channels with 64 CEs and DDR4 caching support. The 1TB Gen5 14000 SSD features 2GB of LPDDR4, the 2TB features 4GB of LPDDR4, while the 4TB model features 8GB of external cache.

ASML has announced more plans for a new lithography tool of the fut ure, something that will extend design limits for the very highest transistor-density chips.

ASML's former president, Martin van den Brink, surprised experts with the announcement of a next-gen "Hyper-NA" EUV lithography technology that is still "in the early stages of development," according to global R&D organization imec, which is working closely with ASML, reports EE Times.

ASML's former president, Martin van den Brink, said in a May presentation at imec's ITF World in Antwerp: "Moving forward long term, we need to improve our illumination system, and we have to go to Hyper-NA. In parallel, we have to drive the productivity on all of our systems to 400 to 500 wafers per hour".

XFX has 'something cool' coming, or more specifically something coming for the cooling solutions on its higher-end AMD Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards - namely replaceable fans.

VideoCardz spotted XFX publicizing this move on X, noting that the graphics card manufacturer has already made swappable fans a reality over in China with its Phoenix Nirvana products (a few weeks back, so not long ago).

It looks like the same idea will be coming to the US (and we'd imagine other regions as well), and if XFX follows in the footsteps of what it did in the Chinese GPU market, we will see RX 7900 XTX, RX 7900 GRE and RX 7800 XT graphics cards that have these swappable fans.

NASA has taken to its official International Space Station X account to confirm it accidentally played panicking audio that made it appear International Space Station (ISS) astronauts were in an emergency.

The space agency admitted in the above post that at 5:28 pm CDT, it accidentally broadcasted audio from an on-ground training simulation on the NASA live stream, and the audio depicted a crew member experiencing effects related to decompression sickness. For those that don't know, decompression sickness happens when dissolved gases form bubbles inside the body's tissue and is commonly known by SCUBA divers.

As for astronauts, particularly the ones aboard the ISS, this emergency could have happened when an astronaut was transferring through an airlock decompression with a suit that wasn't properly sealed. However, all astronauts aboard the ISS are completely fine, and the audio that was heard on the NASA broadcast occurred while they were asleep.

Earlier in the week at the Xbox Game Showcase, Bethesda revealed what it has planned for its June update scheduled for Starfield.

Bethesda unveiled "The Shattered Space" DLC, along with the Starfield Creation Kit, which will enable players to add new content to the game. The Creation Kit will undoubtedly revitalize the Starfield community with an injection of numerous sought-after mods and customizations, which is one of the main reasons Skyrim has retained its consistent popularity over the years. However, that isn't what Starfield players are upset about; it's the DLC, particularly its pricing.

In a June update posted to Bethesda's YouTube channel the publisher explained that players will be able to download new missions for a group called the Track Alliance, but one mission has been locked behind a $7 paywall. GameSpot reports the paywall isn't just $7, but it's actually $10, as players must purchase 1,000 Starfield creation credits to obtain it.

Apple may have accidentally given us a peek at what its plans are with the iPhone 16, which is set to be unveiled by the company very soon.

Earlier this week Apple conducted its WWDC keynote where it unveiled iOS 18, a new update to the operating system powering all of the company's products. Before its official unveiling iOS 18 was described internally by Apple as the biggest update the company has ever done, and the rumors certainly lived up to the hype as iOS 18 ushers in fundamental changes and improvements to how iOS functions on Apple's devices.

One aspect of iOS 18 that has caused some conversation online is the subtle change Apple made to the user-interface (UI), specifically the screen right next to the bezels around the edge of the iPhone. When pressing either of the volume buttons the bezels protrude inwards toward the center of the screen, giving a visual indicator to the user a button is being pressed. While this might seem like an extremely small aesthetic change, it has resurfaced a previous rumor about the iPhone 15 Pro.

Boeing has recently being going through a bit of trouble with its airline fleet after a fuselage panel blew off a 737 Max shortly after takeoff in early January. The event sparked a series of negative revelations about Boeing's manufacturing and quality control.

It appears the company's airline isn't the only aspect of its business experiencing issues, as Boeing's Starliner capsule, which delivered two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, was found to be leaking helium. NASA is currently evaluating the situation and whether the capsule can be used as a transportation method back to Earth. NASA took to its blog and confirmed five helium leaks had been identified and that after the capsule docked with the ISS, any loss from the helium tanks was prevented.

Notably, the number of helium leaks increased from three to five, with two being identified after the capsule launched on June 5. Furthermore, one leak was identified before the launch, but both NASA and Boeing decided to carry out the launch before the problem was fixed. For those who don't know, helium is used by the spacecraft's thrusters to fire.

HPE Discover 2024 is taking place next week in Las Vegas, and it's all about what's next for edge, networking, cloud, and AI computing. In fact, Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, will introduce NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang for a keynote at the Las Vegas Sphere, which is an insane venue for a keynote.

HPE Discover 2024 is going to be a massive event for enterprise solutions, and our friends at KIOXIA will be there to showcase the latest in storage solutions. The company has been collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for years now, covering everything from edge to cloud to AI computing. Plus, 130TB of KIOXIA SSD storage is currently aboard the International Space Station inside the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2.

KIOXIA will be at HPE Discover 2024, showcasing its latest PCIe Gen 5 SSD innovations from KIOXIA CM7 Series Enterprise E3.S NVMe SSDs for Milvus Vector Database AI workloads to KIOXIA CD8P Series Data Center E3.S SSDs for deep learning.

Unreal Engine 5, developed by Epic Games, is renowned as one of the most impressive game engines currently available, providing nearly unmatched visuals in an ever-growing number of titles.

However, the engine isn't capable of running games at native 4K, according to Infuse Studio co-founder Jacob Sutton, who sat down for an interview with Moore's Law is Dead and explained Unreal Engine 5 has a baked-in feature that restricts developers from running games at native 4K. Sutton said that upscaling technologies that are becoming ever more present in games, such as NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS, are being relied upon by developers to fix optimization issues with titles.

Throughout this explanation, Sutton used Unreal Engine 5 as an example, saying that Epic Games' impressive engine in-built default upscaling software called Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), and that developers are almost required to use the upscaling feature to achieve a desired framerate.

NVIDIA has announced the latest round of PC games launching with DLSS, Reflex, and other RTX technologies - kicking off with the release of the Alan Wake 2: Night Springs expansion from Remedy. Like the base game, it supports Full Ray Tracing (or Path Tracing) with the benefit of DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction to improve image fidelity.

The visuals in Alan Wake 2 and the new Night Springs expansion are so impressive and cutting edge that you need DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and Reflex to make it playable. Check out the trailer above, which includes some tasty 4K DLSS 3 footage with Full RT.

Black Myth: Wukong is one of the most anticipated PC games of 2024. The stunning Unreal Engine 5-powered game launches on August 20. There's no new footage of the game with Full Ray Tracing with DLSS 3.5 Reconstruction and Frame Generation this week, but we did get a cool-looking CG Trailer for the game's upcoming launch.

AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT is an entry-level budget option for those looking to get into PC gaming without breaking the bank. The card and model are a few years old now, and with reference specs of 4GB of GDDR6 memory at 18 Gb/s on a 64-bit interface, it's not exactly something we could recommend in 2024.

That is, until now. Sort of. ASRock has launched a brand-new Radeon RX 6500 XT variant with the ASRock Radeon RX 6500 XT Phantom Gaming 8GB OC (RX6500XT PG 8GO). As the name suggests, this variant increases the VRAM capacity to 8GB, making it far more useful for playing modern titles at 1080p with low to medium settings.

Outside of the memory, you've got the same Navi 24 GPU, albeit with a boost to the out-of-the-box Boost Clock to 2825 MHz. Double the memory and an overclocked GPU? It sounds great for a GPU that retails for $169.99 USD (which is substantially lower in price than the entry-level GeForce RTX 3050 from the same generation). However, there is a catch.

Miles Astray entered into a top photo competition with his work titled "F L A M I N G O N E," which received honors from a high-profile jury that included members from the New York Times, Getty Images, Phaidon Press, and more. However, the artist was disqualified after he won the category.

Notably, the competition was under the category of Artificial Intelligence-generated photos, and Astray's real photograph has now been deemed the "first real photo to win an AI award". The reason behind the artist entering a real photograph into the AI category was to demonstrate that people are unable to tell the difference between an AI-generated image and a real photograph and the ethical and societal implications of the emerging technology.

This isn't the first time AI and real photograph has caused a stir in competions, as AI-generated photos have made international headlines for winning photo competitions, which they weren't meant to be competing in Probably the most infamous of these stories is when the Sony World Photography Awards awarded Boris Eldagsen a prize in the Creative category of the 2023 Open competition for his AI-generated image.

AMD is running a new promotion for those who pick up a new MD Radeon RX 7800 XT or Radeon RX 7700 XT graphics card before August 17, 2024. The 'Why We Game' promo offers new Radeon GPU owners their pick of two games from a solid list of blockbuster titles: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Starfield, Lies of P, and Company of Heroes 3.

AMD notable a promotion last year for the launch of Starfield, so being able to pick up two complimentary games with an eligible GPU purchase does add value to both the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT - to the tune of around $100 USD when you factor in the cost of two games.

The promotion kicked off this week, so if you've been on the fence about what mid-range GPU to buy for 1440p gaming, this could make that decision much easier. Several models for both Radeon GPUs are sold at or slightly below MSRP. The Radeon RX 7700 XT probably presents the best value, as it can be picked up for under $400 USD.

You've probably heard of third-party Steam tools like SteamDB, which can access data from the platform to present stats on games. Well, with similar third-party access provided by Epic Games for the Epic Games Store, a third-party tool called EpicDB (naturally) was able to access and scrape a database to reveal several unannounced games from publishers and developers like Sony, Square Enix, Sega, and Bethesda.

Epic has since updated its third-party tools so they can no longer scrape info from unpublished or unreleased titles from the Epic Games Store catalog, but not in time for PC gamers to go through all of the data and post some of the juiciest findings over on ResetEra.

Many of the unannounced projects and potential games are listed with codenames, but fans and internet sleuths were able to decipher a few. One of the more notable listings comes from Square Enix for a game called Momo, which is presumed to be a Final Fantasy 9 Remake thanks to pre-order bonuses like the Tetra Master Starter Pack giving it away.

Alogic, an Australian computing manufacturer, has unveiled a selection of new monitors that are set to hit shelves later this year.

At the InfoComm 2024 in Las Vegas, Alogic unveiled its new line-up of monitors that most of which come with touch capabilities. Starting off, we have the Clarity 5K Touch, a 27-inch, 60Hz, 5120 x 2880 resolution monitor that's focus is on color accuracy, a USB-C port capable of 65W power delivery, 2x HDMI 2.1 ports, 2x DisplayPort 1.4, 2x USB-A, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Additionally, the Clarity 5K Touch has 10 point multitouch and is an IPS panel that has QD backlight.

Next is the display I'm definitely the most interested in, and that's the Horizon 34 ultrawide monitor, which also comes with touch capabilities. These specifications caught my eye, and are as follows; 3440 x 1440 resolution, 165Hz refresh rate, IPS panel monitor that's focus is also color accuracy. As for connectivity, the Horizon features 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x USB-A, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Valve is being sued in the UK and accused of using its market dominance with Steam to overcharge 14 million gamers. The claim, filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London, says Valve is shutting out competition in the digital PC gaming market through its business practices.

"Valve is rigging the market and taking advantage of UK gamers," says children's digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt, the person behind the claim with the support of law firm Milberg London LLP. There's even a website up for the suit, steamyouoweus.co.uk, which says that if the claim is successful, UK PC gamers could be eligible to take their share of the £656 million ($840 million USD) suit - around £44 each in compensation (or $56 USD).

Okay, so you're probably aware there's no shortage of digital platforms to buy and play PC games. There's the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, Ubisoft Connect, Xbox and the Microsoft Store, GOG.com, and more. And with that, you might be wondering what the lawsuit is carrying on about. Let's break it down.

AMD formally announced its next-generation Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPUs at Computex 2024 earlier this month, and the company is already optimizing and tweaking its 3D V-Cache driver.

This is getting us all excited about Ryzen 9000X3D processors, which will fight Intel directly with its upcoming Arrow Lake-S CPUs as the best gaming CPU on the market. In a post on X, leaker "harukaze5719" discovered AMD's new 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer driver.

AMD last updated the 3D V-Cache driver when it launched the Ryzen 7000X3D processors, and there's not much information on what the 3D V-Cache driver actually does. It was first released as a Windows 10 exclusive driver for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor, but it's also available with AMD's bigger Ryzen 7000X3D family of processors and works in Windows 11 with the 7000X3D series chips.

Project G-Assist was a surprise announcement from NVIDIA at Computex 2024. It is a new AI-powered digital assistant designed for PC gaming with a GeForce RTX graphics card - or what the company now calls an RTX AI PC. Like DLSS, it's a general LLM or AI model trained on a broad range of titles, and Project G-Assist is ready to be plugged into any existing or upcoming release.

Project G-Assist's capabilities and features blew us away when we got to participate in a live demo of the technology integrated into the popular survival game Ark: Survival Ascended with help from its developer, Studio Wildcard. One of Project G-Assist's key features is that it can analyze and see what's happening on the screen. Plus, it has real-time access to game-specific data.

Ark is a game full of dinosaurs, so a few of the first questions we asked were simple things like, "What's that dinosaur on the left there?" "What's the best weapon to take out that enemy, and where do I find it?" As a general model, Project G-Assist, as seen in this example, has access to up-to-date lore and various Ark knowledgebases and Wikis.

Game tech demos are usually created to showcase new rendering techniques, advanced animation, or stuff like real-time ray tracing. Even though NVIDIA and Inworld AI's Covert Protocol tech demo features an impressive-looking and lavish hotel lobby with detailed environments, ray tracing, and highly detailed character models, the visual fidelity is simply here to showcase a groundbreaking new bit of tech - digital humans that you can interact with.

NVIDIA first showcased Covert Protocol at GTX a few months ago. At Computex 2024 in Taipei, the company presented the same tech demo with AI digital humans powered by NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technologies running locally on a high-end GeForce RTX 4090 powered rig.

At the show, I had the chance to go hands-on with NVIDIA's impressive RTX AI technologies, and when it came to Covert Protocol, I was quietly blown away by the depth and breadth of its digital humans.