Latest News - Page 8

Grok 4.7 is out and Elon Musk has highlighted the game creation capabilities of the new model, boasting that it will be able to make "photo-realistic and physics-precise games", while showing off an early GTA-style offering.

Musk pointed to a post on X from a Grok 4.7 user, X Freeze, who claims to have "built a GTA-style open-world game from a single prompt in Grok Build". It's possible to explore the cityscape, enter cars and drive them around.

An illustrative video is provided, and while the clip makes it clear that the game is very basic - photorealistic it most certainly isn't, not unless you're taking snaps in Legoland - it's nonetheless impressive that this is apparently the work of the AI based off a single prompt.

NZXT's S Series of mid-tower ATX cases is back with the new compact steel S5 RGB and S5 RGB Deluxe. The NZXT S5 RGB ($49.99 USD) and the S5 RGB Deluxe ($59.99 USD) arrive with single-frame 360mm RGB reverse fans on the right-side intake, with the big difference between the two being that the latter includes more pre-installed RGB fans. In addition to the single-frame 360mm RGB reverse fans, the S5 RGB Deluxe includes a pre-installed 120mm RGB reverse fan in the angled bottom mount and a 120mm RGB rear fan.

Elsewhere, the two cases are identical, with solid steel construction for weight and reliability, dual tempered glass panels on the front and side for panoramic views of components, and support for 10 fans in total. At 482 x 210 x 423mm, the steel frames and panels bring the 42.8 Liter chassis weight to 6.14kg for the S5 RGB and 6.44kg for the S5 RGB Deluxe.

With support for 360mm radiator cooling, NZXT notes that the new S Series has been designed for direct airflow to the "hottest component," aka your graphics card. The bottom fan points directly at the GPU, and the angled intake fan is also designed to push airflow in that direction. Both the NZXT S5 RGB and S5 RGB Deluxe are designed for DIY-friendliness with tool-free panel removal and a modern I/O that includes USB-C and dual USB-A ports.

Microsoft confirms layoffs and big organizational changes at Xbox, where divisions like Bethesda and Obsidian will work together to make games.

It's official: Xbox is changing, and today's announcement is a big one. Xbox's Matt Booty outlined what's next, confirming structural and personnel changes. Xbox will lay off 268 people across first-party studios--Halo Studios was mentioned directly--as well as other management groups.

Now on to the paradigm shifts. Activision will develop the next Halo game, and it will not be responsible for, and be an authority over, Rare and World's Edge. Bethesda will do the same for Obsidian (the two teams are currently collaborating on a new Fallout project). Turn10 and Playground Games are joining forces, coming together as one studio. King now includes Microsoft Casual Games.

Those with a GIGABYTE motherboard in their PC should be aware of a fresh vulnerability in the company's Control Center software that requires action now.

PC Gamer noticed the security advisory which was posted warning about vulnerabilities in the drivers relating to the GIGABYTE Control Center app.

There are "multiple security vulnerabilities" in GVCIDrv64.sys and gdrv3.sys, we're told, and you should update to the latest version of the Control Center which has them patched.

Durabook has revealed a new rugged laptop that comes with three displays and tips the scales at 9.8kg.

Thin-and-light the Durabook Z14I-DX3 most certainly isn't, but this hefty workstation (flagged up by VideoCardz) is a sturdy portable which is built to MIL-STD-810H and MIL-STD-461G standards. That means a "fully rugged construction" suitable for industrial or other demanding environments, with the laptop able to work in a temperature range of -29C to 63C.

The Z14I-DX3 runs an Intel Meteor Lake processor - you get the choice of a Core Ultra 5 125U or Core Ultra 7 155U with Intel AI Boost NPU - and for graphics grunt you can optionally equip the Durabook with up to an NVIDIA RTX 5000 GPU.

Microsoft will announce even more restructuring at Xbox today, with layoffs and even the possibility of game studio mergers and consolidations, sources tell both The Verge and The Information.

There will be more dour news from Xbox today as Microsoft is reportedly planning to enact the next phase of its restructuring plan. Reports say that this will take shape in the form of mass layoffs that affect hundreds of people, as well as a business re-orientation that could see studios and teams combined/consolidated into more cohesive and synergistic units.

Insider NateTheHate, who has proven to be accurate in the past, says that Halo could even be moved under Activision Blizzard's purview. Years ago, Sony wrote in court testimony that Xbox would become a "one stop shop for shooters" if the ABK merger went through. To illustrate the point, I made an infographic (see below).

Final Fantasy VII Revelation will provide PlayStation 5 Pro owners with a smooth 4K gaming experience at 60 FPS when it arrives next year.

Naturally enough, the game will manage this feat using PSSR upscaling, and as Wccftech reports we've got this info from game director Naoki Hamaguchi, who confirmed a 4K and 60 FPS mode for PS5 Pro.

As you can see above, Hamaguchi posted on X:

Some PC gamers have been hearing a mysterious "ba bing" notification sound seemingly at random while using their PC. It now appears that the sound has been the Epic Games launcher all along.

Fortnite news account FireMonkey traced the noises to six audio files used by the launcher's social and party features. The chimes play when a party member joins or leaves, receives a party message, changes party joinability, or enables or disables push-to-talk.

Because an Epic party can remain active while the launcher runs in the background, the sounds may play while the user is in another application, sometimes without an obvious corresponding notification, such as a pop-up text notification appearing in the bottom right-hand corner of Windows 11.

A 1TB iPhone 18 Pro Max equipped with QLC NAND briefly saw its write throughput collapse to 1.1 MB/s after its caches were exhausted in a storage benchmark. The handset also trailed a TLC-equipped 512GB iPhone 18 Pro in HOMOLAB's random and mixed storage tests.

Storage-testing channel HOMOLAB used FIO to compare the two devices. During 128K sequential writes beginning with the nearly empty 1TB handset, its dynamic SLC cache delivered more than 3,000 MB/s and covered approximately 250GB. Performance then fell to an average of 578 MB/s in a pseudo-TLC stage before the QLC write-back phase averaged 79.4 MB/s, with a minimum of 25.6 MB/s.

HOMOLAB repeated the benchmark after filling 60% of the phone's storage. Its SLC cache then shrank to 58GB, pseudo-TLC performance averaged 396 MB/s, and the QLC write-back stage averaged 45 MB/s while briefly reaching the widely cited 1.1 MB/s minimum.

Sapphire Technology is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year as the creator of high-performance computing hardware. For PC gamers, Sapphire is synonymous with AMD's Radeon lineup, which makes sense, as the company began as a graphics card maker before expanding into motherboards, Mini PC systems, and pro-grade Radeon graphics for AI, robotics, and automotive.

At TweakTown, Sapphire has always been on our radar for PC gaming hardware, and over the years we've tested several Sapphire GPUs. Back in 2006, we reviewed the water-cooled Sapphire TOXIC Radeon X1900 XTX card back when everything Radeon fell under the ATI banner. Cut to 2016, and in our review of the Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 480 8GB, we praised its 1080p gaming performance, cooling, and build quality.

More recently, we reviewed the premium Radeon RX 9070 XT NITRO+ PhantomLink GPU and NITRO+ X870EA PhantomLink Polar Edition motherboard, a combination built for flagship RDNA 4 performance with no visible cables. Looking back at the past two decades of our GPU coverage, it's clear that Sapphire has been a key partner for AMD and Radeon, and one of the most recognized and trusted options for PC gamers.

Eight years ago this week, NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 2080, its first GPU in its new Turing lineup of PC gaming graphics cards, followed by the flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti on September 27, 2018. As the follow-up to the iconic 10-Series and the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti combo, NVIDIA made a major architectural shift with the first RTX generation, ushering in real-time ray tracing and DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, with brand-new RT and Tensor Cores.

Now, looking back at PC and console gaming in 2026, both ray tracing and AI-powered neural rendering technologies are commonplace - thanks in part to NVIDIA leading the charge. In fact, major game releases in 2026 are expected to launch with support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS to boost performance, with ray tracing maturing to the point where it's baked into the core technology and rendering pipelines of games like DOOM: The Dark Ages.

Of course, as with any new groundbreaking technology, there were teething issues. For the GeForce RTX 20 Series, that meant no real ray-tracing or even DLSS support on day one. When Battlefield V arrived with ray-traced reflections in November 2018, the performance impact and DLSS image quality made it feel more like a tech demo than a glimpse of the future.

LG's latest OLED gaming panel is designed specifically for esports and competitive gaming. The 24-inch Full HD OLED panel is described as a mainstream display, aiming to bring OLED technology to a wider gaming community, especially those who play competitive titles and esports at 1080p and high refresh rates.

And on that front, even though the 24-inch size and Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution might not sound all that impressive, this new OLED panel supports a 720Hz refresh rate driven by a "proprietary algorithm" and custom solution to ensure stable performance. It also supports a fast 0.02ms response time, making it one of the fastest OLED panels for latency and overall gaming performance.

With its 720Hz refresh rate, 0.02ms response time, and OLED technology for deep blacks, near-infinite contrast, and vibrant colors, it improves motion clarity. It reduces unwanted effects like ghosting while maintaining image quality that far exceeds non-OLED esports displays.

With Google's new Googlebook laptops now available to pre-order ahead of their October 4 debut, these premium laptops from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo will add a new option for Android and PC users. With seamless Android phone integration, ChromeOS, dedicated NPUs capable of at least 45 TOPS of AI performance, a Linux kernel, and support for x86 and Arm-based processors, these devices are also built around Google's new Gemini Intelligence experience.

One of the first Googlebooks to arrive is the new ASUS Googlebook 14, an ultraportable, ultralight 14-inch laptop with a premium design. Measuring just 10.9mm thick and weighing under a kilogram (0.99kg to be exact), the CNC-machined magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis is also built to last. Under the hood, it's powered by up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 3 355 processor, an efficient 8-core chip in the company's Panther Lake lineup.

Like all first-wave Googlebooks, it comes with 16GB of LPDDR5X memory and a 512GB SSD. Rounding out the physical design is an impressive 14-inch 16:10 3K OLED HDR touchscreen that supports a vibrant 1000-nits peak HDR brightness, a 120Hz refresh rate, Corning Gorilla Glass Victus, and a Corning Gorilla Matte anti-glare finish.

Blizzard has revealed that World of Warcraft Forever, aka Classic+, will have four rulesets as part of its new realmless design.

The WoW Forever beta is the talk of the town right now--its popularity has even surprised Blizzard. The devs have prepped MMO adventurers for the big Nov. 4 launch with news and clarifications on social systems. Blizzard previously confirmed that WoW Forever won't have realms, opting instead for rulesets, and now those have been revealed.

WoW Forever will have four rulesets: Normal, PVP, Roleplay, and Hardcore (this mode is coming post-launch). Blizzard also confirms that characters that die in Hardcore can transfer to other rulesets, including PVP. One key restriction with the PVP ruleset--you can only pledge to Alliance or Horde, not both.

Sony has filed a patent describing a system that would let its consoles diagnose and patch their own software problems without a single trip to customer support. As reported by patent aggregator site Patentlyze, the filing describes an AI server that regularly monitors connected devices, writes custom diagnostic firmware on the spot when it identifies an issue, and submits that code directly to the affected console.

The stated goal is to cut back on warranty claims, support tickets, and the back-and-forth troubleshooting steps players usually have to go through when a problem occurs. Rather than following a pre-written repair script, the AI model would generate a distinct fix tailored to the problem it detects, then decide whether the issue requires human intervention or can be handled automatically.

Large language models are prone to hallucination even in low-stakes writing tasks, and asking one to generate functional firmware for consumer hardware seems like a big risk. A flawed patch pushed to a PS5 wouldn't just fail to fix the issue, but could potentially brick the console entirely, turning a minor bug into a warranty replacement anyway. There's also a security concern. Putting this kind of code generation and deployment pipeline on a single cloud server creates one valuable target for attackers.

Sony announced it would end disc production for new PlayStation games starting in 2028, drawing backlash that led to a full-scale planned boycott and a "Don't Kill the Disc" petition that hit 120,000 signatures in four days. Microsoft appears to be taking notes and doing things differently.

According to images Power Up Gaming obtained from a since-deleted X post by @XBOXTIMDOG, Microsoft is running a survey through the Xbox Insider Hub app asking fans what features they want in Project Helix, the codename for the next-generation Xbox. Among the features listed is a question about whether users want the console to let them install games from a physical disc. Participants can rate each feature as Not Necessary, Nice to Have, or Must Have, with the latter effectively meaning they would not buy the console if that feature were absent.

The survey also touches on other ideas, including console lighting that changes to match the game being played and a system that automatically identifies and saves gameplay highlights. One Reddit user who took the survey noted that the disc question was framed as a priority choice between five features rather than a standalone yes or no. The other options included YouTube during gaming, cloud streaming, TikTok access, and keyboard-and-mouse support.

User reports are cropping up claiming that NVIDIA's DLSS 5 technology is causing RTX GPUs to die. This latest report, spotted by VideoCardz, comes from Wax469 on the r/RTX5080 subreddit, whose RTX 5080 reportedly died from running DLSS 5 mods in games.

The user reported that after upgrading to an MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Ventus 3X, the computer all of a sudden began producing artifacting and flashing on the user's two displays after running DLSS 5 mods. Specifically, the crashing occurred five minutes after playing GTA 5 with DLSS 5 at around 80 FPS on the second day of using DLSS 5 mods. The crash happened a month after the RTX 5080 owner began using their card and playing games without DLSS 5 for that whole month.

The user describes the failure as happening without warning, where the entire screen froze and began flashing violently, and the computer was completely unresponsive. Since the incident, the user has replaced the RTX 5080 with a working one and stopped using DLSS 5 mods since, noting that they'll wait until more games feature DLSS 5 support officially before running it.

AMD crossed $1 trillion in market capitalization for the first time, with shares hitting an intraday high of $615.52 before settling around $613. The milestone makes AMD only the fourth US chipmaker to reach the mark, joining NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Micron. Saša Marinković, AMD's senior marketing director, shared the milestone on X.

The stock is up more than 180% this year, riding a five-day winning streak that added roughly 25% on its own. AMD's Q2 2026 revenue came in at $11.54 billion, up 50% year over year, with Data Center revenue hitting $6.7 billion, a 107% increase that now represents 58% of AMD's total quarterly revenue. Client and Gaming combined for $3.8 billion. AMD CEO Lisa Su said last month the company expects to double data center sales in 2027.

For PC builders and GPU buyers, though, AMD's 2026 has looked quieter than expected. The company has not launched Zen 6 Ryzen processors or a new Radeon architecture this year. Instead, its Computex announcements leaned on existing architectures, including the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7 7700X3D, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D anniversary edition, and the wider release of the RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9070 GRE.

Apple's new flagship releases just went under iFixit's knife, and the results are not what anyone looking for meaningfully easier repairs this generation would have liked to see. The headline number is a conditional 7 out of 10 repairability score, but that figure appears to hide some real benefits alongside one repetitive, unresolved problem.

Starting with the good news. The battery tray is held in place with 13 screws rather than adhesive, meaning technicians will have an easier time lifting the tray and cell out together without fighting glue. Although the cell is still bonded to the tray, iFixit found that an electrically releasable adhesive lets it separate with no trouble in about 90 seconds. The main camera assembly is also quite cooperative, sliding out without screws or glue once you're past the display.

That's the sticking point, though: getting to either component still requires opening the glued-down screen first, and that step went worse more often than not this time around. Across four teardown units, the white plastic frame surrounding the display broke or pulled away on three of them. iFixit couldn't identify the real problem and admitted the sample is too small to call it a recurring issue, but flagged it as the biggest open mystery behind this year's repairability score.

Project Diablo 2's upcoming Season 14 will make a big change to how hammerdins are played while also adding in new features like a revamped stash.

The latest PD2 Season 14 stream takes the liberty in retooling the paladin's most famous build--the hammerdin. For the first time in Diablo 2, the paladin's blessed hammer skill can now pass through walls. The collision mechanic has been in the game since D2 launched 26 years ago and is one of the trade-offs of choosing the build. Now gamers won't have to worry about their hammers fizzling when trying to fight in tight spaces.

The other big new change is PD2's new stash system, which does remove the beloved materials stash, but replaces it with something new. This stash system effectively turns your war chest into a museum collection. PD2 is getting its own form of the Chronicle that's actually interactive; there's now a section on the stash with tabs that have all the item types listed. The tabs open up pages that show where the item sits, and the system is query-able, allowing gamers to quickly search the item, find the listing, and even remove the item from the page itself.