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The idea of a fanless PC is usually associated with a rig used for non-gaming tasks, productivity, and some multimedia. Perhaps playing games from the 16-bit generation if you're looking for an interactive fix, but nothing from RTX On era.

Streacom's new stylish-looking SG10 case is looking to change that and has been designed for a fanless gaming system that can dissipate up to 600W of thermal energy. This means you could easily equip this with a decently high-end CPU and a GPU like the new GeForce RTX 4070 or RTX 4070 Ti. Think of it as a massive heatsink and PC case in one.

Streacom plans to showcase this passively-cooled no-fan chassis at Computex 2023 in a few weeks, and as the TweakTown crew will be on the ground reporting from the event, we'll be there to see it in person.

With strict export rules imposed by the United States government in 2021 prohibiting the export of US-based technologies (limiting the total performance of supercomputer hardware to China), we now have some specs and details for NVIDIA's mysterious A800 GPU developed for these constraints.

According to a new article at MyDrivers (via Tom's Hardware), the A800 operates at roughly 70% of the speed of NVIDIA's A100 GPU - which complies with the processing power limits in place for exports.

The NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU is three years old, though still powerful in its own right, with 9.7 TFLOPS of FP64 and 19.5 TFLOPS of FP32 performance for the Ampere-based GPU. There's also the BFLOAT16 and FP16 Tensor Core performance of 624 TFLOPS with sparsity for AI workloads.

Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer reiterates that Activision-Blizzard is not the end goal for Microsoft's gaming ambitions, but a significant boost to its grand plans.

Microsoft has lofty goals for its games business. Specifically, Microsoft wants to expand onto mobile devices with a competing unified storefront that would ideally tap into the existing Xbox cross-platform storefront ecosystem framework and join consoles, PCs, and mobile devices through dedicated gaming and xCloud game streaming.

While Call of Duty was seen as a main motivation for MIcrosoft's proposed $68.7 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard King, that was only part of the formula; indeed the $31 billion+ franchise is a powerhouse, but producing Call of Duty titles is exponentially costly and requires lots of man-hours and investment. King, on the other hand, is able to deliver Candy Crush to millions of people across the globe and generate billions of dollars in revenue every year through the sheer power of its adtech and monetization know-how.

UK regulators at the Competition and Markets Authority have chosen to block the Microsoft-Activision merger on the grounds of anticompetitive effects in cloud gaming. Now some game streaming services providers are weighing in on the decision.

In its final report determination, the CMA lays out its arguments on why it believes the merger should not be allowed. The regulators essentially state that Microsoft already has a strong position in the cloud gaming segment and that its combined infrastructure of powerful server networks, subscription services, and video games content could impede competition. Adding Activision-Blizzard games on top of Microsoft's current position could tip the scales in Microsoft's favor and potentially stifle any innovation in currently-unsuccessful cloud business models like Buy-to-Play (B2P), the model that led to Stadia's ultimate demise.

Predictably, there are some cloud game service providers that oppose the CMA's decision, most notably those that Microsoft had signed 10-year agreements with. Both NVIDIA and Boosteroid have spoken out against the CMA's merger block, and both of these companies had made deals with Microsoft for a full decade of Call of Duty and Activision content. While the CMA has determined that Activision would likely bring its games to cloud in some form eventually, that certainly isn't the case now as Activision depends very strongly on full game sales and monetization of current and new titles.

Jedi: Survivor was created in "record" time with only a three-year development cycle between the first game and its sequel, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports.

The latest Star Wars game, a Jedi power fantasy sequel to 2019's best-selling Jedi Fallen Order, was mostly made during the pandemic. COVID-19 effectively disrupted the entire work and created significant rifts in games development, a process that is largely collaborative and based around in-office work, and some dev teams are still dealing with the fallout from the pandemic.

Respawn, on the other hand, was able to swiftly adapt to work-from-home measures with Jedi: Survivor. According to game director Stig Asmussen, the team had only started early production when the pandemic hit in late 2019. Respawn had been laying out the framework for Jedi: Fallen Order's sequel at the time and was able to more efficiently move its operations to remote work as a result.

Former Dragon Age writer gives insight on how BioWare's previous studio culture had affected the writing department, and also gives a better idea of why Gaider had left in 2016.

David Gaider helped write some of the best RPGs on the market today, including games from the landmark Dragon Age series. The franchise is known for its deep world-building, lore, and distinct characters, but at the tail-end of Gaider's tenure, BioWare seemed to have shifted towards budget cuts instead of carrying forward that pedigree of writing.

In a recent Twitter thread that seems to respond to the ongoing Writers Guild strike, Gaider briefly discussed what it was like to work at BioWare up until his departure in 2016, and advocated that studios and publishers should "pay writers what they're due" and "prioritize and support" good writing in games and other media.

A new Skywind trailer shows what Morrowind could look like on next-gen platforms using Skyrim's games engine.

Skywind, the massively ambitious mod that literally rebuilds the entirety of Morrowind's in-game content, world, quests, and items within the Skyrim engine, just got some new gameplay footage to show how far along the mod is coming. The gameplay was beyond impressive to say the least and completely revitalizes the eastern stronghold town of Molag Mar in such a unique way, breathing new color and life into the traditionally dour, ash-ridden region.

As someone who's played Morrowind for the last 21 years, the sheer vibrancy of Skywind's Molag Mar really stood out to me; the paintings of the saints, including the ones depicting Veloth leading the exodus of the Chimer, and of Almalexia are just so brilliantly defined and colorized that it really does change the entire look and feel of the temples themselves. There's a kind of deeper reverence about them now, not unlike the stained glass windows in real-world churches

Over a decade after release, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is still shattering player records on Steam.

Counter-Strike just broke another peak player record with over 1.8 million gamers jumping in to play the game today. The record was set 7 hours ago and totals out to 1,818,773 million players throughout the day. Right now there are currently around 1.25 million players fragging it out in CS:GO on Steam.

Valve recently turned heads by announcing Counter-Strike 2, the next chapter in the shooter franchise that builds upon the massive success of the original. CS2 is built on Source 2 and features upgraded graphics, visuals, and effects, complete with high-performance servers that eliminate reliance on tick rates for moving, shooting, and throwing.

Microsoft has hired one of the most renowned appeals lawyers to lead its counter-offensive against the CMA's decision to block the Activision merger.

While the CMA has chosen to block the Microsoft-Activision merger, the parties can still file an appeal to the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) in an effort to get the decision overturned and have the merger case cycle back into the CMA's investigations.

Microsoft has hired Monckton Chamber's Daniel Beard KC, a well-known lawyer with experience in defending competition cases against regulators, to lead the company's appeal against the CMA's Microsoft-Activision merger block. The Telegraph reports that Microsoft counsel is expected to file an appeal in the coming days.

Amazon's Luna game streaming service may very well be the largest cloud gaming subscription in the world by virtue of its connection to Amazon Prime.

British regulators at the CMA recently decided to block the Microsoft-Activision merger on the grounds of the combination having anti-competitive effects on the nascent cloud gaming segment. One of the most controversial aspects of this decision seems to be how the CMA categorized these services; using available market research data and information from key companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Sony, the CMA indicated that certain services had a leading share of the cloud gaming segment, most notably with Microsoft's xCloud game streaming offering.

However, Amazon may actually have the largest share in terms of raw numbers. Amazon Luna, the e-commerce giant's game streaming service, is offered free to Prime subscribers, albeit in an extremely limited fashion. Since Prime has over 200 million subscribers as of 2022, it could be technically correct to say Luna is the largest cloud gaming provider by virtue of its convertible Prime subscriber base.

Xbox is great at using disruption and innovation to compete in the video games market, but it may not be able to outsell PlayStation and Nintendo consoles. Luckily, this is less important to Xbox than it is to its competitors.

Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently said a lot of interesting things about Xbox, but the one that stands out the most is concerning the relationship between software and hardware. It's all too easy to make an eye-catching headline that reduces what Spencer said--something along the lines of "Xbox admits defeat, says it cannot beat PlayStation or Nintendo."

The truth is that Spencer's words offer more transparency into the Xbox business and games industry as a whole. To really understand what Phil Spencer meant in this interview, we need to look a bit deeper into how Xbox operates and how its fragmented business serves many platforms outside of consoles. Software is now meant to serve Game Pass and is much more diversified than it has ever been before.

Xbox Series X/S expandable storage SSD memory cards are now significantly cheaper than the were at launch thanks to a permanent price drop across all models.

Today Microsoft and Seagate announced a price reduction in the Xbox Series X/S storage expansion modules across the 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB cards. The prices have dropped by as much as 35% off, and the cut likely happened as a pre-emptive response to other competitors entering the Xbox SSD expansion market.

The Xbox Series X/S memory card prices now look like this:

Bungie has announced it will slightly increase the price of individual season passes starting with Destiny 2's new Season of the Deep (S21).

Destiny 2's season passes are getting a price bump from 1,000 silver ($10) to 1,200 silver ($12). The new price will go into effect with Season of the Deep's (S21) release on May 23. It's worth noting that this 20% increase happened shortly after Sony acquired Bungie, and that Sony reported a significant 40% operating profit drop due in part to hundreds of millions of dollars recognized as expenses from the Bungie acquisition.

Sites are reporting that gamers must buy two separate silver bundles in order to get the required 1,200 silver to buy the passes, however this may not be the case. Bungie currently offers a Destiny 2 Season of Defiance Silver Bundle that includes 1,700 silver for $15, which is a bonus of +200 extra silver compared to the a la carte silver bundle purchases. It's unclear if Bungie will continue offering these bundles for more seasons, including the Season of the Deep.

NVIDIA has developed a new compression algorithm for textures that looks very impressive.

VideoCardz spotted the paper from NVIDIA, which is called 'Random-Access Neural Compression of Material Textures,' and was also shared on Twitter by Bart Wronski, a researcher at Team Green who's part of the project.

The Neural Texture Compression (NTC) aims to tackle the spiraling requirements for high-res textures, allowing them to better fit into the available RAM. We're told that it delivers 16x more texels than Block Compression or BC (standard GPU-based texture compression).

WB Games shares some impressive figures for their breakout new hit Hogwarts Legacy, confirming eye-opening revenues and sales performance.

Hogwarts Legacy has now sold 15 million copies and generated over $1 billion in revenue, WB Games today announced. That number is set to go even higher as the publisher also launched Hogwarts on PS4 and Xbox One, with the upcoming Switch version coming next month.

WB Discovery management had commented on the success of the video games unit in an earnings call today, with CEO David Zaslav seemingly hinting at a possible new Superman game to help capitalize on the new Superman: Legacy film from James Gunn. Also in the call, WB Games CEO Jean-Briac Perrette says that the company expects Hogwarts Legacy on Switch to deliver a meaningful uptick in performance thanks to the system's more age appropriate audience.

If you still weren't convinced that a new RDNA 3 graphics card is about to pop onto the scene, here's another sighting of RX 7600 models, this time from ASRock.

As highlighted by hardware leaker Harukaze5719 on Twitter, ASRock has just filed a trio of RX 7600 graphics cards with the EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission).

Typically, such regulatory filings will be put in place just ahead of the launch of a product, but they don't necessarily mean that launch will happen - sometimes, manufacturers make filings of a speculative nature, or planned releases fall through.

Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav teases new games that could release alongside DC feature films, including a new Superman interactive experience.

In a recent Q1'23 earnings call, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav spoke about the power and flexibility of the company's video games profile. More specifically, Zaslav discussed how its wealth of wholly-owned intellectual property franchises could encompass all forms of interactive entertainment, from feature-length films to games. Zaslav points to Hogwarts Legacy's significant billion-dollar overperformance as a key example on how the company's IP could blend across movies and games moving forward, while directly mentioning the new Superman: Legacy film from James Gunn.

Below we have a full transcription of what Zaslav said during the earnings call, and while he did not specifically say that a new Superman game was coming, it's easy to infer that the CEO was trying to express that it could happen.

Recently we reported on a new and mandatory AMD AGESA 1.0.0.7 BIOS Firmware for all AM5 motherboards built for the new Ryzen 7000 CPUs. This a direct response to the burnout issues found on some Ryzen 7000X3D chips that were damaging both the chip and motherboard.

AMD's root cause for the issue was around voltage. The new firmware limits the SoC voltage to 1.3V. It adds other measures/fixes to ensure processors don't exceed their temperature specifications - while not affecting memory overclocking via AMD EXPO profiles.

With potentially damaged hardware on the line, no doubt there's a rush to get this out to as many customers (and board partners) as possible, but with ASUS using a BETA release of the new AGESA 1.0.0.7 BIOS firmware, it looks like there are still issues to work out, which could delay the proper and final rollout of firmware to fix the burnout issue by weeks.

There's a consensus that GPUs like the GeForce RTX 3070, or anything with 8GB of VRAM, are entering an "end of life" phase when it comes to playing newly released PC games at 1080p and 1440p with detail settings cranked up.

A few weeks ago, we reported on a new video from YouTuber Paulo Gomes that saw him successfully modding an RTX 3070, upping the VRAM to 16GB - and it worked. For VRAM-intensive titles like the recent Resident Evil 4 Remake, it increased the 1% lows by a whopping factor of 9X, showcasing that VRAM capacity can make a difference.

Today comes a new video from modder Paulo Gomes detailing how he upgraded the memory of AMD Power Color Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Dragon - taking its 6GB capacity up to 12GB. Not only that, but the memory was replaced with faster 16Gbps chips.

Regarding non-memory chip manufacturing, Samsung has been trailing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in terms of cutting-edge process nodes and yields for some time. Even so, the company believes that when it comes to rolling out a 2-nanometer semiconductor manufacturing process, it will catch up to TSMC and even surpass it.

Samsung's president and manager of the company's foundry business, Dr. Siyoung Choi, made these remarks during a keynote at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology in South Korea (via Wccftech) where he put a timeline of five years for Samsung to catch up to TSMC.

Dr. Siyoung Choi did note that TSMC is currently ahead of Samsung when it comes to chip production. However, he cites Samsung's use of GAA technologies for current 3nm production as a step ahead of TSMC, which still utilizes the tried and true FinFET.